Vincent Toro’s collection Hivestruck is engaging and inventive, a book that explores the boundaries of poetry then boldly expands them.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“The expansive third collection from puertoriqueño poet and performer Toro (Tertulia, 2020) scrutinizes and satirizes tech-obsessed contemporary life with gigapixel resolution. Vocally, stylistically, and typographically inventive, Toro’s maximalist lyrics touch on connectivity, politics, consumerism, and aesthetics in electric language . . . Brilliant and buzzing, Toro’s latest underscores his place as one of the preeminent poet-prophets of the Anthropocene.”
In his own words, here is Vincent Toro’s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection Hivestruck:
It is my view that all poetry is song and action. As such, please consider Hivestruck to be a Brown cyborg libretto, an anthem for Latinerds like myself who were lying on the basketball court bleachers while dreaming of the stars, who imagined the fire hydrants were rocket ships and the subway a wormhole that could blast us into a dimension devoid of smog and bullies. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and 2001: A Space Odyssey were as crucial to my bildungsroman as Freddie Prinze and the 1986 Mets. The poems in this collection are lyrical attempts to capture this fusion, to construct a world where, as Richard Brautigan put it, “mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony.” The music that I was listening to as part of the process of writing this book served as building blocks for the Latinxfuturist universe I was working to conceive.
The Robots – Kraftwerk
Over the course of the 10 or so years that I was working on Hivestruck, Kraftwerk’s Man Machine record was on regular rotation. “The Robots” became a (welcome) earworm in my head that would visit me every time I took some time to plug away at the poems in this collection. Considered to be among the earliest innovators of electronic music, Kraftwerk were actually a huge influence on hip hop. Their music was sampled in some of the first tracks laid down by the original turntable scientists from the Boogie Down Bronx. The mechanical chorus of the song that repeats “we are the robots” somehow feels both like an incantation summoning a cyborg utopia and a warning that merging with technology might cost us a bit of our soul.
Digital Witness – St. Vincent
Hivestruck opens with poems that introduce some of the conflicts that arise for people of the technopoly (which Neil Postman defines as the age when humans moved beyond merely seeing technology as useful to sustaining human life and into technology being the thing which gives our lives meaning). Principal among these conflicts is how our obsessions with screens has altered our relationships. St. Vincent’s “Digital Witness” exudes the neurotic feelings born from relying on screens to validate and value ourselves with lines like “If I can’t show it, you can’t see me,” and “won’t somebody sell me back to me?” St. Vincent’s squealing guitar and angular melodies are an electric exorcism to expel our tech demons.
Computer Age (Push the Button) – Newcleus
30 years before St. Vincent’s hymn to digital ennui, Newcleus gave us this robo manifesto professing concern that if we are not careful, our technology will make us its servants. “For here we sit in our easy chairs / as our machines decide how we’ll fare.” Newcleus were famous for “Jam on it,” a track that every budding b-boy (including yours truly) was pop locking to back in the 80s. This Brooklyn DJ collective had a sound that blended funk, disco, and early electronic music (a la Kraftwerk) into space age dance music with a message. They had us suiting up in our wristbands and Converses to uprock on every avenue while also warning us about the dangers of turning our computers into gods. It’s like The Matrix before The Matrix for those of us who came of age watching Wild Style and Breakin’ 2 Electric Boogaloo.
Cyborg – M83
There’s copious references to cyborgs in Hivestruck, which I use as an extended metaphor to explore how humans grapple with our relationship to technology, and the tensions that arise from this. How much of our humanity is lost as we fuse ourselves with technology? What is gained from this synthesis? Films like Robocop depict a dystopian vision of this merger, where man is forced against their will to become part machine, only to be made to defend the same people who turned us into a silicon and steel version of Frankenstein’s monster. But scientists like Donna Haraway speak of the cyborg as a version of life goals. In her “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway professes “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” She sees embracing the cyborg within us a means of empowering ourselves to be the hybrid beings that we already are, as a way of transcending the oppressive “reproductive matrix” of birth and death humans find ourselves trapped inside, with the potential to elevate, if not liberate, othered beings, particularly women and people of color. You see, there’s something quite epic about the cyborg, and no one does epic like M83. Named for a galaxy in the Hydra constellation, M83 compose wildly imaginative sci-fi synth opuses that feel all at once ethereal, earthy, and industrial. Their sound is breathtakingly cinematic. I have no idea why they haven’t yet been tapped to score a science fiction movie. This aptly titled song from their second album captures all the allegorical essence of the cyborg.
I Dream of Wires – Gary Numan
If Kraftwerk are M83’s synthwave grandfathers, then Gary Numan is their eccentric and brilliant uncle. Numan began his career in the new wave band Tubeway Army, and is now well into his 5th decade making electronic pop that is chilling, cerebral, and sometimes hilarious. I recall watching the concert documentary Urgh! A Music War a few years ago with my partner. Of the more than 30 musical acts caught on tape in the film, it is Numan’s performance that has stuck with me. Performing his song, “Down in the Park,” Numan sings atop a robotic looking car (that prophetically – and now satirically – looks similar to a Tesla cybertruck) that is awkwardly throttling around the stage like a renegade roomba vacuum. His anxiety-ridden nerdcore vocals are juxtaposed with hauntingly beautiful musical arrangements, while the opulence of the futuristic production design is underscored by a gloriously silly level of camp. I appreciate how Numan’s work dreams big about technology, space, and the future while also reminding us not to take it all too seriously, which is evident in this particular track from his album Telekon, a song that sarcastically tells the story of an electrician lamenting the days when the world still had wires for him to fix.
Beat Bop – Rammellzee
There’s so much I can say (and want to) about Rammellzee, and so little space to do it. A contemporary – and friendly rival – of one Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rammellzee was an Afro Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist from Queens. His art articulated his theory of Goth Futurism, a manifesto about letters liberating themselves from society’s stringent standards for language usage. He also believed in both anonymity and multiplicity with regards to artistic identity, which he executed by inventing “avatars” (long before this became a thing in the online world) with masks and costumes he would make for himself from scavenged items such as legos. Rammellzee wielded eccentricity like a superpower, pronounced himself to be a “mathematical equation” designed to dismantle conservatism and complacency, his art work a form of three dimensional IRL hacking. While I was working on this book, I imagined Rammellzee to be an invisible mentor pacing behind me as I wrote, pushing me to further “eccentricate” the poetry, to “cultiplicate” through lyricism, to make magic from the matmos and remember that poetry doesn’t just have to articulate the world we are currently swishing around in. It can also help to birth entirely new ones.
Technologie – Wax Poetic
And still…the aim of Hivestruck was not merely to get lost inside the fluffy little clouds of my cybernetic dreams. There is a focused critical dimension to the book. In fact, the project was born from an itch, an uneasy feeling about the ways in which technology has been historically used to control and dominate populations of people. While technological advances have made life better for people in countless ways, Power has also used science and technology to create a global surveillance state, take the fangs out of the labor movement, and to profile and sequester people of color and poor folks. This gorgeous downtempo track from Turkish musician/producer İlhan Erşahin’s collective project Wax Poetic is a meditation on the disquietude that emerges when living with technology is woven into every aspect of one’s environment, including the air we breathe.
Virus – Deltron 3030
What starts as techno-ennui can fester and induce techno-enmity. Now Audre Lorde famously said “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” but if the master’s tools are all you got lying around, maybe you can at least use them to do some serious damage to that sucker’s abode. The ultimate rebel hacker manifesto, “Virus” promises to “crush your corporations with a mild touch / trash your whole computer system / and revert you to papyrus.” Where “Technologie” wallows in the melancholy of being stuck in a prison of circuitry, this rap anthem by Del the Funky Homosapien and Dan the Automotor is a call to action for everyone to “hack” their way out of this cyber-labyrinth.
Burundi – Saul Williams (w/ Emily Kokal)
Speaking of hacking… Deltron deals the call to digital arms, while Saul Williams levels up with “Burundi,” a track from his album “MartyrLoserKing” and his Afrofuturist filmpoem Neptune Frost where he declares “I’m a hacker in your hard drive.” Imagine that Del’s solo cyberpunk has multiplied into a bevy of Robo-Bolívars, Android Assatas, and Mecha-Malalas all singing in unison William’s chorus, “I’m a candle, I’m a candle / Chop my neck a million times, I still burn bright and stand, yo!” (once you hear this, you won’t stop cantillating it too!) With MartyrLoserKing and Neptune Frost, we are not only provoked to resist, we are offered a vision for a new path, one where whiteness is evaporated, queer and trans people are empowered, machines are used to build rather than tear apart communities, and nature is reclaimed.
Do the Astral Plane – Flying Lotus
So, Deltron and Saul Williams are the sound of the cyberevolution. Perolike Flying Lotus is what will be played at the victory after-party. My partner and I got to witness the force that is Flying Lotus at Sónar in Barcelona back in 2015. He performed his set from inside a 3D holographic cube projecting psychedelic-cybernetic-kaleidoscopic images at a hyperkinetic speed while playing a surrealistic set of experimental electronica fusing jazz, hip hop, soul, new wave, funk, avant garde, and everything else under the sonic sun. I know that was an excess of adjectives and references I just used to describe Flying Lotus’s music, but that is because there really is no way to accurately capture his sound and vibe in written prose. It is not that the man has no equals, it is that no musicians sound anything like him. He is a sonic unicorn. It’s like el hombre is broadcasting from 1000 years into the future and our brains are trying to develop more dendrites as fast as they can just so we can catch up.
Science Fiction – Christine and the Queens
As I am also theater trained, Hivestruck wound up instinctively being shaped with a 3 act structure. In the first act, the conflict is presented in the form of technology’s maladies. In the 2nd act, “the hacking” begins in an attempt to resist those machine maladies, and to reimagine the self and the planet. In the final act, the transformed synthesized cyborg self is unleashed, launching into space to invent and explore other possible futures and worlds. I constructed this playlist to somewhat mirror that arc. “Science Fiction” kicks off our third act, and we begin our ascent out beyond the exosphere and into the infinite. Penned and performed by French trans musico Christine and the Queens, the song makes space into a metaphor for declaring the singer’s desire for a love that is outside anything humanity can currently offer. This longing for something beyond this world is palpable in the track’s dreamy instrumentation and seraphic crooning yearning to “squeeze the heart of a dying star.” Listening to “Science Fiction” you can feel yourself slowly drifting above the Kármán line where you learn that there is no such thing as up and down.
KLK – Arca with Rosalía
2001: A Space Odyssey was a huge influence on this poetry collection. I have been obsessed with this film ever since my father showed it to me when I was about 10 years old. It holds a prominent place in my imagination, so it only makes sense that Hivestruck is littered with ideas, symbols, and references to this 1969 space opera. If you haven’t seen it, in the third act of the film the astronaut Dave dives into Jupiter’s atmosphere and is pulled into a galactic portal where he experiences dimensions that human senses cannot physically comprehend. When Dave comes out the other end of the portal he is no longer Dave, no longer human. His transformation into an otherworldly celestial being is complete. In the final shot of the film, the astronaut formerly known as Dave has returned to Earth possibly to induce a similar transformation of the entire planet. During the scene, classical music is played, which feels counter to the journey that director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke took us on, as classical music marks a going backward rather than hyperspeed transformation forward. If I could rescore the film, that scene would be overdubbed with the music of Arca, a trans music producer from Venezuela who epitomizes Latinxfuturism. Latinxfuturist art, which stretches back to the mid-19th century, employs sci-fi tropes, space age iconography, and science and technology references to grapple with Latinx issues such as colonialism, racial hybridity, gender nonconformity, migration, and indigeneity. Arca would be the house DJ for Donna Haraway’s rebel cyborgs victory rave. Her musica evaporates the tentative anxiety felt by those who exist outside human society’s oppressive identity borders. Arcas cyberbeats slay and taunt, flaunt the beauty of being uncategorizable and opaque. Here with Catalonian chanteuse Rosalía, she provides the aural expanse for us to be feeling ourselves in all our martian android freak grandeur. This is music that makes a festival of the future as we arrive from a Jupiterian portal to transmogrify todo el mundo. Pero esperate porque you’re gonna love it!
Rockit – Herbie Hancock
Bueno, because I am a Boricua poet I am compelled to live, create, and move cyclically in the fashion of the repeating island theory of Antonio Benítez-Rojo. And since the universe also moves in cycles and spirals, it seems fitting to spin back around toward the beginning(s). I was 8 or 9 years old the first time I “heard” the future in the form of Herbie Hancock’s hit record “Rockit” blasting from some older kid’s boombox (when that was still a thing) somewhere off Dyckman in upper Washington Heights where I was born. I didn’t have the language for it then, but hearing Hancock’s frenetic machine drums, rhythmic squelches, and turntable scratches bursting from the speakers ignited something in me. I am sure that my dual obsessions of hip hop and science fiction were seeded here, birthing my fantasies to become some kind of star hopping B-Boy Bori ninja. To some, Hancock’s experiments with jazz and hip hop during this time now sound dated, but I think they are timeless, that is, completely outside of time. There is a reason that Herbie’s music career has thrived for an astounding 7 decades. He could see then, along with Kraftwerk, that we are more man-machine than human and the future is where it’s at.
Space is the Place – Sun Ra
But if we are going to really spiral back to our comet riding, extraterrestrial beginnings, we have to visit planet Sun Ra. Sun Ra is considered the father of Afrofuturism, a visionary jazz artist whose music was not merely a sound, it was an entire way of seeing and being (the musicians in his band essentially gave up living in the regular world to commit themselves to Ra’s Arkestra 24/7. La verdad!). Central to Sun Ra’s belief system is the idea that he and all Black people were from another planet, stranded on this primitive planet called Earth. He envisioned his music as a transmission to their home planet calling for them to send a ship to rescue them. The artwork for his records were stuffed with surrealistic and campy space age images, the liner notes were scrawled poems mixed with Egyptian symbology, and the music itself experimented with tone, tempo, and harmony in ways that were far ahead anything his peers (who weren’t named Ornette Coleman) were doing at the time. This tune, from his Afrofuturist movie of the same name, embodies the search for a better tomorrow in the realms of the unknown. What I love about this song, and all of Sun Ra’s music, is that weirdness is embraced as a source of joy, a concept I would personally love for more people to adopt. As Sun Ra’s Arkestra swings and wails in warped, detuned splendor, June Tyson gleefully exhorts, “there is no limit / to the things that you can do!” By the end of the song (and/or the movie) we too have been made staunch believers.
Photonic Dance – Pauline Oliveros w/ Triple Point
We have reached point zero. Let us end/begin our musical journey through Hivestruck with the acoustic marvel of electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. As Sun Ra is considered the father of Afrofuturism in the world of music, I consider maestra Oliveros to be the music world’s la madre of Latinxfuturism. A Chicana from Houston, Texas, Oliveros was trained on the accordion as a young child, went on to learn to play four other traditional instruments, and by the age of 21 – in the mid-1950s mind you – she took up experimenting with electronic music. Oliveros’s work is an expansive synthesis of computer based compositions, field recordings, free jazz and classically inspired improvisation pieces, and traditional Tejano and Mexican music, and she coined the term – and theory of – “deep listening.” Though she is rarely name checked or cited in the mainstream, Oliveros has influenced countless music producers, composers, and sound theorists. Recently however, her work was given some attention via the film “Sisters with Transistors,” a documentary about the women who contributed to the evolution of electronic music. Listening to Oliveros music, such as this track performed with her improvisation trio Triple Point, evokes the strange sensation of traveling simultaneously a million years into the past and a million years in the future. Her compositions feel concurrently of the Earth and from some distant undiscovered nebula, paradoxically peaceful and contemplative yet also raucous and unsettling. Among the many sources from which I drew inspiration for this book was the traveling museum exhibit Mundos Alternos: Arts and Science Fiction in the Americas. This collection of Latinxfuturist visual art had an installation piece by Rigo 23 that tagged the phrase “a world where all worlds fit.” This might very well be the misión central of Pauline Oliveros soundscapes, of all Latinxfuturist artists. It certainly conveys my own intentions in writing Hivestruck: to help build, at least in some small way, a world where all other(ed) worlds past, present, and future are welcome and revered.
Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, and professor. He is the author of two poetry collections: Tertulia and Stereo.Island.Mosaic., which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Vincent is a recipient of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award, a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a New Jersey State Council for the Arts Writer’s Fellowship. His poetry and prose have been published in dozens of magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Saul Williams’ CHORUS, Puerto Rico En Mi Corazon, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Misrepresented People, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Rider University, is a Dodge Foundation Poet, and is a contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal.