The Deep Engine of Witness

Ryan McIlvain finds the truth worth telling in Rickey Laurentiis’s “Death of the First Idea” and Geoff Bouvier’s “Us from Nothing: A Poetic History.”

By Ryan McIlvainOctober 4, 2025

• Poetry

FROM A CRITIC’S PERSPECTIVE, it’s hard to know how to write about poetry right now. We’re not in that black hole moment that prompted Theodor Adorno more or less to forbid poetry after Auschwitz, but we’re not light years off it either. In any case, we’re closer to the abyss than any honest, conscientious observer, with the tools and the protest movement of language in their hands, ought to countenance.

Away from poetry, then, and almost instantly back to it—poetry as truth-telling, poetry as a space for observation where, frankly, the cultural smallness of modern poetry liberates the poet to observe and to witness.

At a crucial moment in Rickey Laurentiis’s second collection of poems, Death of the First Idea (2025)—a wild, beautiful, raging, ranging collection, a decade in the making and worth the wait—we see the poet in Palestine. The poem’s speaker has gone there to give a reading and attend a literary festival. In the poem, we hear a Voice of Officialdom— 

[…] What is
the business for where you are going?
Give me your Passport. American, say
your name. Why you say this Black
American? What this mean, you give a
reading? You are an author? You come
here by yourself? Show me your book.
Spell your name. Have you any politics or
recent activity that would concern Israel’s
citizens?

Of course, the poet has brought her book and also her ears with her to Palestine—natural, inevitable luggage. Her eyes too, and her mind and her fierce attention, a poet’s watching:

This is my slop attempt at reportage,
message as it is, my tall ambition & what
I witnessed, what all I’ve been at labor to
say, respecting Power. […]

Hebron again where I saw everything
I needed to see in the labored chainwork
of the overhanging canopy that keeps
rocks, heavy stones, from falling on the
shopkeepers’ heads: took a video of the
Palestinian man who said, “Go back.
Tell it.”

For Laurentiis, here and throughout her book, self-consciousness isn’t a stumbling block but a sort of platform from which the poet can see more—from higher, farther out, including a look back at herself, observing. More than once, reading Laurentiis’s lines, I thought of José Saramago’s notion that you have to leave the island to see the island. That self-consciousness—or, if I may, outside-oneself-looking-back-ness—is also a part of the poet’s essential equipment, and carry-on luggage at that.

“I told myself not to collide our pains,” Laurentiis writes, about the temptation she feels in Palestine to draw on her own intimate experience of pain. A Black trans woman, a native of New Orleans, Laurentiis is acquainted with grief. (“Is it my fault the World brutalize / A change? the body’s Elect?” she writes elsewhere. “Me, who kept getting hit?”) There’s plenty of platform to empathize from, in other words, but Laurentiis and her tall poem aspire to resist empathy, at least at first. Away from empathy and back to it, then, perhaps inevitably:

So my Soul found out it wasn’t all alone
in pain. Right when Whiteness formed
the expensive shadow of a Boy called
White Phosphorus? called maybe Reckless
Freedom? called Denied Re-entry, Water
Shortages, Stolen Homes, Gaza … This is
what I saw.

There’s an almost childlike faith in witness, a childlike trust in it, in Laurentiis’s book—not naive, I don’t mean that at all, only disarming and straightforward, and rare. It’s remarkable too, since these expressions of trust sit comfortably in a book of extreme range, erudition, allusiveness, and playfulness. A scan of the titles alone is exciting and bracing, a little intimidating at times: “Hermaphrodite! (or, Sacred Paeon),” “Tiresiad: The Punishment of Tiresias, IV,” “Sometimes Tropic of New Orleans, II.”

I didn’t “understand” everything in Laurentiis’s book, but then the overwhelming sense of welcome in it, of play, instructive rage, prophecy, all of it raises the question: does it matter what a reader knows? “It is sometimes the point of the Poem not to make sense,” per another poem in the collection. And, after all, I did pick up as much as I let drop.

In one of the poems that showcase Laurentiis’s political range (as I think of it), the speaker’s in the bedroom, or maybe just contemplating the erotic platonically: “I like a dick that stands right up at attention / And points its mention, its being-hard.” From another poem, and another register of earnestness: 

        To be touched
             Like a finger, to be held:
        —I’m lonely.
             My waist cinched
        Inward like some vintage
        Japanese fan, the clever

        Blade of my back,
             Working inch by inch
        Toward a pleasure
             Half mine.

Here and throughout Death of the First Idea, Laurentiis the political poet moves effortlessly, liberatingly, from the personal to the global and back again, with never a suggestion that one sphere of action is everything, the other nothing. There’s no direction of travel here except away from false binaries, and just as well.

¤

One of the reasons Laurentiis’s book feels so much like a breath of detoxified air is that it never pretends, not really, that the pen is mightier. Poetry is a habit of thought, a way of seeing, a temperament perhaps, but it isn’t a sword. Nor are poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world—or if they are, they’re very, very, very unacknowledged, forming such a deep-state hidden force that they’re compelled to sit back and watch the hideous operation of what the poet Geoff Bouvier calls, in another marvel of a recent collection, the “philosopher’s stone” of weaponry. Gunpowder, in other words. It’s the thing that unlocked everything else, all of modern bloodshed.

Gunpowder was invented, we learn in Us from Nothing: A Poetic History (2024), around 850 CE. Bouvier, thoroughly secular, discards the Anno Domini designation. He doesn’t have time for that kind of partisanship; he’s too busy reading history books, swallowing them whole, seemingly, and transforming them into sinuous, always surprising prose poems.

None of these poems pretend that the poet with his pen could outduel the gunslinger, much less his modern descendants in F-15s, 25-year-olds dropping tons of explosives with the click of a joystick button. Bouvier tells us instead how, in Chang’an, China, more than 1,000 years ago during the Tang dynasty, Taoist monks sought the secrets of alchemical power. One day, one month or year (who really knows?), they happen upon what they call “xiao shi.” Later, the British will call it “saltpeter”:

With charcoal and sulfur, xiao shi completes a compound that flies into dancing sparks, ignites the beards of the discoverers, throws alchemists onto their backs, burns down labs, changes the Tang arrows into flying fires that will terrify invading Mongols, and travels the Silk Road to the Arab lands, where gunpowder propels heavy rounds of iron into warring Europeans who survive to render the technology central to future weaponry.

We’re in the past for most of Bouvier’s book, often the deep past, at first the cosmic past. In one of the most gorgeous, subtle lines in the book, an opening line of almost biblical depth and cadence (Bouvier’s no believer, but he clearly knows his wisdom literature—Laurentiis too), the poet sees, here at the outset, before the beginning, when “there was nothing—no size, no weight, no color, no shape—but the nothing was changing.”

There’s a universe of constant, terrifying, thrilling flux at the center of Bouvier’s poetic history. And there’s plenty of taut, elegant line-making here too. There’s plenty of research that the poems wear lightly on their sleeves—but there’s no steady, upward trend line of progress, not in moral terms anyway. What Ta-Nehisi Coates has called the lure of “solutionism,” a particularly American habit of seeing history in didactic terms, there to teach us never to repeat it, there to teach us some great solution, as if by magic—none of that weighs much with Bouvier, apparently. He’s too interested in the world of people and things on their own terms.

From a poem called “1879: Light Bulbs,” about the moment when Edison had “an idea so bright it becomes the symbol for having an idea”: 

In the two years since Edison immortalized voices and became a household name, his invention factory has expanded to include a carpenter shed, a forge, a library, a hot glass shop, and a shack for harvesting lampblack from the chimneys of a hundred ever-burning kerosene lamps. Nothing to solve the world’s mounting troubles, but plenty to enhance the leisure of the relatively rich.

And what poetry in that list! Forge, library, hot glass shop, harvested lampblack … all of it gone or going but here recovered, with poetry’s help.

Bouvier is in earnest, I’m sure of it, when he lashes a Marxist critique at an early luxury good like the light bulb—but then he’s also kid-in-the-candy-shop earnest, aglow with wonder, at the light bulb itself: “A single carbonized cotton strand, lighted at midnight, glows inside its bulb till well past noon the next day. […] And from now on, we’ll always be able to see in the dark.”

Perhaps most movingly, Us from Nothing illuminates, in its attention to time and space, just how related and relative we are. And how, whatever notions of “us” we hold sacred today, they’re not inherent, not fixed. None of it’s inherent. We watch the “us” of the book change and narrow from the “us” of gaseousness to the “us” of single-celled life, then more complex ancient family members slithering up out of the ancient, life-giving slime, and so on. Then “us” is suddenly, drastically human. Then tribes, nation-states, races, and so on. These organizations and categories aren’t quite fictional, Bouvier’s book suggests, but none of them are fixed, certainly. That much is true and that much truth is worth telling, no matter who’s listening or who’s open to changing their minds, now or ever.

If the poet’s truth instinct is the animating force in Bouvier’s wonderful, weird, ambitious book of history as much as it is in Laurentiis’s ranging, stunning testament, it’s a self-employed truth. It has to be. This is what I saw in the history books, in years of reading … This is what I saw. Truth begins as an urge, perhaps an instinct, certainly an artistic instinct: la vérité pour la vérité, sure, why not? Truth would struggle mightily right now to justify itself in instrumental terms: I tell the truth to make justice work, I put the truth in like batteries and on turns justice … We just know it doesn’t work like that, it isn’t working like that—it’s agony to know it, but we know it again and again.

Perhaps the political poet is that figure with more endurance than most, more willingness to tell the truth when the truth is unwelcome, or inconvenient to power, or a fireable offense, or a potential death sentence. Perhaps, too, poets look to truth as a prime material the way they look to language—inevitably, I mean, definitionally since without language, without truth, there is no poetry.

The leftover religionist in me thought of a Bible verse as I read these books. Actually, let’s just say it’s the secularist in me who still loves the Bible’s poetry, lest I perpetuate another dopey, too-neat binary: secularist versus religionist … What the Psalmist calls “deep speaking to deep” is what I felt when the deep engine of witness started up in these books. This is what I saw … and this is what I saw.