Place-Discipline

Author: Jose-Luis Moctezuma

Publisher: Omnidawn Publishing (2018)

A psycho-geography and metahistory of the formation of Chicago, taking its title from Sun Ra’s 1972 album, Discipline 27-II, Place-Discipline explores hybridity, hyphenation, and heliocentric bordercrossing as possible alternatives to the darkening “white magic” of cognitive capitalism and cultural gentrification.

"Place-Discipline culls, cleaves, and retextures language in the service of non-totalizing modes of formal and prosodical attentions that powerfully intensify the stakes and commitments of poetry. Jose-Luis Moctezuma tends the striations, variegations, and substrata of translingual, transcultural, and transhistorical materiality. Moctezuma activates the sonic, the polymetric, and the haptic not as a palliative to the incessant, coercive logics of empire, but to potentiate futural past present temporalities that mobilize the unterritorialized in oneself, in perception itself."

–Myung Mi Kim

"Too many contemporary poets are stuck to the tones of the prefabbed social, piping up and down the scales of shared “national” definition. So it’s rare and exciting to encounter a poet who deftly dials into cross-cultural microtonalities that make visible the spectral historicities of Imperium’s time-&-space trickery. Jose-Luis Moctezuma aims his political scope at the psychic rootwork of our past-present moment, finding pathways out into sun-dappled new vistas and desires. The hard won futurism implicit there bespeaks of a new cartography where syncretism has become autochthony. Strange to even utter it, but Place-Discipline is the latest mutation of the Whitman-Marti-Cesaire complex, and the democratic entanglements are still us."

–Rodrigo Toscano

"Jose-Luis Moctezuma joins a great tradition of fabricators of America, from Melville to Pound to Charles Olson; Place-Discipline resonates prosodically and in its knowledge-clusters with the assurance of The Maximus Poems. This is an establishing work. How can a Latino poet re-fabricate America and fabricate his own multiple heritages in the white world and in English? First, through a practice of dérive in the down and dirty hyperpolis. As Moctezuma’s verse moves between urban zones in Chicago, a city of multiple denied, superimposed and circumscribed worlds, its rhythms shift within and against their rhythms, poised in encounter, whether stalking in reactive isolation or dancing in unison. Second, Moctezuma reverse-engineers America from the globally dispersed world city, an exploded Chicago, weaving the Hispanic and indigenous threads back in its fabric assertively. Third, he fabricates himself as an American through the cants of English from Shakespeare to Bhanu Kapil and a myriad of points between. Every page is as rich in echoes as Caliban might wish. There is wild and shocking humour in this book (I Gather the Limbs of ISIS) as well as instruction, there is rage and there is beauty. No snippets here: Place-Discipline must be read through, not raided or sailed around. What an astonishing first book."

–John Wilkinson