Collective opinion would likely conclude that few writers are contributing as prolific and original an oeuvre to contemporary poetics as Ryan Skrabalak. Skrabalak, who also operates the preeminent small-press Spiral Editions in Kingston, NY, has produced an invaluable torrent of chapbooks in the past few years such as Autoerotic Swirlys, Wonders of Nature, Donna, Levitating Scum, and his most recent The Technicolor Sycamore 10,000 Afternoon Family Earth Band Revue. In his “debut” collection, National Lube, Skrabalak’s voice of sprawling paratactical delights is vibrant. His poems both elude the reader with a kind of fugitive anxiety of interpretation-as-capture, but punctuate our exigent realities. We’re thinking: “we all knew in certain ways // the water was getting warmer,” and “Who wouldn’t notice a few flowers missing?” and “There’s no good time for the moon to rise, it just / happens,” and “I needed money but didn’t want it.” As if standing in front of one of those posters, where the close unfocusing of the eyes is supposed to reveal something clear and three dimensional, we see the concerns of Skrabalak emerging from the din of highways, liaisons, and expanses both pastoral and metropolitan. 

There is a calm to National Lube. Skrabalak addresses the proximity of terror “in a country constantly at war,” but there is a wry removal in the speaker, a safety in the stanzas, a vital sanctuary. “Experiences, realities, objects, and people,” says Stacy Szymaszek in her praise for the book, “are perceived and represented with equal import, like an ancient nonhierarchical world.” We find this particularly apt, as Skrabalak’s verse opens like one extended communist abrazo but without prescription, nearly agnostic, a transcendental “self” moving in between waves of pleasure, shame, trepidation, and confusion, one with a beating, blooming, pissing, and putrescent landscape. The erotics of Skrabalak’s work is consistent with its politics, a semiotics of cruising wherein the sexual encounter is edified by a patient egalitarianism; sex disembodied then reified to its constituent parts: 

Encountered him pigeon pose

Heart forward “in space”

Long poem (unseeming)

  Is hung and beautiful hole

The sexual body delineates the subject of its encounter. The poem can’t avoid participation in the mimesis of cock and ass and why would we want it to? There is, perhaps, no subject more ancient and integral to artistic representation than cock and ass (which we will use synecdochally here to also include the multifarious and gendered subjects of eros, fertility, and sex work). The reality of this subject is often sanitized, either by the institution that houses the work or by the appeal to whatever “social mores” are commodified at the time. Look no further than the petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, terracotta amphoras, paleolithic Venuses, cycladic figurines, Hellenistic marble, etc to instantly lose count on our human history of mimetic cock and ass, “and endless balls” (added Ginsberg in his utopian Howl). 

This might be the “collective objection” that Cassandra Gillig refers to in her afterward, “the suggestion that bodies alone can rearrange the landscape, camouflage the collapse.” This is a beautiful notion, but what would it look like as praxis? So much of a poetic practice, even if aimed towards the revolutionary, is a dispensation of rhetorical tools, not materialist. “It isn’t revolutionary or materialist to disconnect things,” George Jackson says in Blood In My Eye. “To disconnect revolutionary consciousness from revolutionary activity, to build consciousness with political agitation and educational issue-making alone is idealistic rather than materialist.” Jackson’s strategies of materialist action mainly involved a Fanonian violence of retribution against the state, to kill cops, etc. A good plan, but costly. If these materialist strategies are present in Skrabalak’s Lube we find them in protestations such as, “I practice a warrant for deviance. A saturated shape / of we. These are expensive sentences. We relax the throat.” This might be a departure from Jackson’s idea of revolutionary materialism, but there is a body politic ostensibly converging in this material of language. Skrabalak’s poem might just be the preliminary organization that must precede direct action. To practice a conscious deviance must also presuppose an awareness of the status quo it is deviating from, implying a material reaction against a standard. The lyrical I merges into a collective we, as it finds further shape and color. The price of language is addressed which infers the price of labor. The poem is an escalation moving closer and closer towards the brick. 

Another such convergence: 

Is it Oklahoma

Are you Oklahoma

We’re all Oklahoma

Everyone’s Oklahoma

Regardless of what your individual connotations of “Oklahoma” might be, the state becomes a placeholder of mutual solidarity. Fred Hampton became an undeniable threat to the status quo of neoliberal hegemony when he formed the Rainbow Coalition with the Young Patriots and the Young Lords. Hampton, wise beyond his twenty-one years, knew that true political power existed in class solidarity and that culture war was a divisive strategy that only empowered a ruling class. The effect of this coalition likely lead directly to the assassination of Hampton only a mere eight months later in December of 1969. The point here is not to make a false equivalency, but to read Skrabalak’s “Oklahoma” as a similar intersectional modality. It is a language of protest, this collective engagement. There is no location of injustice that is not also a greater injustice against the people, be it in Oklahoma or in Gaza. Skrabalak’s “Oklahoma” is less a place and more a liberated signifier, a space to house a larger collective concern, if only for a moment. 

Whether poetry can ever be praxis is a longer discussion, and certainly not an answer that can be arrived at through this particular (largely myopic) venture. However, National Lube tickles the interior of such aporia and delights us no less. From the fourth and final section of the book, Skrabalak asserts:

    The poem is not a police report

with removed expression, the distance the world’s 

largesse actually throbbing. Laid me on

the four way   stop of the grave To check for ticks 

to suck it for a little bit The men looked 

so beautiful tonight in their orange reverb

And we agree, dear reader. Need we say more? Need we justify either our love or our anger? The goal of the poem should always be to avoid commodification, which has become alarmingly ubiquitous in modern times. National Lube, we think, does exactly this and takes aim against the slippery tentacles of enterprise. We must, more than ever, refuse fungibility.