A Poetry of Experience

Mark points out that everybody has an ideology, by which he means a consistent set of assumptions and ideas that add up to a "limited point of view": nobody can get beyond their own point of view, exit the hermeneutic circle, occupy Rawls' original position, etc. And Mark is correct—although I suspect that we differ about the value of experience, of implicit as against explicit principles, of inductive, as it were, reasoning (rather than the deductive reasoning that comes from applied manifestos) as a producer of what we see in what we read. (See, here, Christopher Ricks's "Literary Principles as Against Theory," and then see almost anything by William Carlos Williams written between 1920 and 1950-- on this point, and on few others, Williams and Ricks seem to me to be on the same side.)

SB

...Poetry that used to go hand in hand with life, poetry that interpreted our deepest promptings, poetry that inspired, that led us forward to new discoveries, new depths of tolerance, new heights of exaltation. You moderns! it is the death of poetry that you are accomplishing. No, I cannot understand this work. You have not yet suffered a cruel blow from life. When you have suffered you will write differently?’”
Perhaps this noble apostrophe means something terrible for me, I am not certain, but for the moment I interpret it to say, “You have robbed me. God, I am naked. What shall I do”— By it they mean that when I have suffered (provided I have not done so as yet) I too shall run for cover; that I too shall seek refuge in fantasy. And mind you, I do not say that I will not. To decorate my age.
But today it is different.

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All



A poet has nothing but experience to go on. To live and to experience living are essentially the same. Even our speculations, as obscure or hopeful as they may be, are connected to our experiences, however different from those experiences they are. When our speculations are profoundly different from our experiences, that shows how profoundly they are connected.

When somebody writes that they disagree with me about the value of experience in poetry, I wonder what it is that they imagine that I think about experience or how they know so easily how experience shapes anybody’s poetry.

Williams, in Spring and All from 1923, imagines himself being lectured by an anti-Modernist writer in the passage above, a moment of imagination clearly connected to many actual reactions to Modernist experimentation. And it’s a lack of experience—specifically the experience of suffering, the central crucible of experience in the Christian tradition—that the anti-Modernist accuses him of having. According to the anti-Modernist, it’s Williams lack of experience that causes him to write his anti-life anti-poetry.

As it turns out, accusing experimental approaches of lacking a grounding in experience dates back at least to the beginnings of modernism.

Many years later, that’s still a common criticism made by those who distrust any poetry that seems to them too experimental. That it plays with words (or any other materials) more than it values experiences. Once writers come to value experience properly, they will be more cautious in the games they play.

Therefore, a writer who really understood what it was like to live in the world—had suffered as others have suffered—would not write in this newfangled way.

What that argument suggests is that experience is not being addressed properly if it is addressed in certain ways.

Admittedly, and thankfully, since there would be nothing for writing to do otherwise, there are different ways of addressing experiences. Conventional representation—images mean to give us a direct picture of a thing in the world—are one way, often a powerful way, of doing that. And sometimes when events are particularly unspeakable, having conventional representational images of them might help many other people understand those events.

One danger though is that such images only seem to give understanding to readers; they can never actually do it. Readers may gain understanding from a poem, but the poem cannot do that work. Readers have to. Further, a poem might itself appear to embody understanding in a way that suggests that there’s nothing further to understand, when in fact any given poem is almost certainly no more than one possible way of approaching understanding.

It’s not clear that any kind of writing automatically leads a reader to be more likely to understand anything. It’s not clear that any kind of writing automatically embodies experience. To claim so is to misunderstand experience while claiming to understand it. Much more than people who realize that they don’t understand, it’s important to distrust people who feel they understand experience when their claims in fact show that they don’t.

I distrust someone who claims that the problem with experimental or extreme approaches writing is that too much of it is done by writers who don’t understand the significance of experience. And I say this from experience.

SB suggests, above, that valuing experience in a poem may be considered an act of inductive reasoning: one writes in a certain way about a certain experience because the experience itself leads to a conclusion about how best to write about it.

But inductive reasoning never offers certainty, only probability. The conclusions of induction can never be more than the most likely conclusion. Writing on the basis of inductions about experience can in fact never lead to the conclusion that there is one best way to write about an experience. At best it can lead us to the conclusion that given some particular experience, some particular way of writing about it is likely to feel most compelling.

In fact, the idea that writers who write about experience should make their decisions on how to write based on inductive conclusions from their experiences actually comes from deductive reasoning. It assumes a conclusion based on a prior principle: that experiences inevitably lead to certain ways of writing. And therefore it’s not simply deductive reasoning. It’s flawed deductive reasoning:

1) All good writing writes from and about experience.
2) Experiences require (or are likely to most commonly suggest) a specific way of writing about them.
3) This particular experience, since I have experienced it and want to express my relationship to it, will lead me to write in a particular way.
4) I have experienced this experience and therefore I will write in this way.

Almost every deduction in the above chain is flawed in some or many ways, of which these are only the most obvious:

1) There is nothing other than experience for writing to come from or be about, so this claim has no actual content.
2) It’s not proved that, in general, experiences require a specific way of writing or are even most likely to suggest one.
3) Although this claims has moved from the general to the specific, it contains the same unproved assumption as #2.
4) The writer is rendered passive in relationship to the situation. Writing becomes not an active process but one in which experiences, if understood properly, will lead to a loss of choice: how to write about them becomes inevitable or at least close to it.

I suspect therefore that I do not disagree with SB about the value of experience, as SB suggests I do. Instead I’m at odds with his implication about what experience leads to in poetry.

All that said, I don’t disagree that it’s possible to write poetry too controlled by its own guiding theoretical principles. It’s just that the idea that experience offers some more practical solution to that problem is itself an overly controlling and faulty principle. In fact a lot of conventional poetry that describes experiences in the world is constrained by an overly controlling perception about how poems should be written.

Of course, much of this problem ties back into my earlier blog post about ideologues. Implicit in SB’s claim is that I am (and perhaps, anyone with excessive experimental leanings?) likely to believe that what I should write about has been dictated entirely to me by principles that I have decided upon in advance. In this view, apparently I’m not willing to test my literary beliefs relative to actual experience. Instead, in my writing I shove my principles forward without understanding what’s happening around me, oblivious to all nuance.

Which strikes me as not a very inductive conclusion.

One last thing that interests me about this issue: We are living in an era—and it’s not the first and won’t be the last—when people often claim to have absorbed a tradition of experimental art or writing, found it wanting and moved beyond it.

Then they show, through their response to it, that far from moving beyond it they haven’t yet absorbed what it has to tell them.

Post-Millenial Feminist Poetry

I read with enjoyment and interest the forum on feminist poets (curated by Danielle Pafunda) that went up in segments over at Delirious Hem last week, including work from the following writers:

Mary Biddinger
Anne Boyer
Brandi Homan
Megan Kaminski
Becca Klaver
Majena Mafe
Gina Myers
Martha Silano
Leah Souffrant
K. Lorraine Graham
Elizabeth Treadwell
Sarah Vap
Teresa Carmody
Kim Rosenfield
Vanessa Place
Christine Wertheim

While the writers featured are at different stages in their careers, there was certainly emphasis in the forum on a new generation of feminist poets, especially if one means by generation not age as such but sharing a time period in which one is beginning to publish and have one’s work become more known, a period in which some level of shared problems is inevitable. The poems and essays and poem-essays raised many interesting questions for me, of which I’m mentioning here only the most obvious:

1) The problem of theory and practice. Theory, while at its best always related to the rest of the world, also develops as its own semi-autonomous discourse and often requires (even demands) that the world catch up. Feminist theory, like other theoretical discourses, builds and changes based on contemporary responses to its own past.

Practice, on the other hand, can move only in relation to the world’s pace. While some things about the social condition of women (which?) have changed since earlier generations of feminist discourse, other things have changed more slowly if it all (which?). I was intrigued by the different ways these writers highlighted tensions between theory and practice and how those affect both attempts to move forward as well as respond to the present.

2) The arriving at (feminist) consciousness narrative. A fact of being human: nobody’s born knowing anything. So learning to be a feminist requires those moments of experience and recognition when one discovers why it matters, and every writer who becomes invested in feminism has to have such moments.

And yet, of course, the fact that everyone has to have them means that there’s now quite a history of narratives regarding the arrival at feminist consciousness. Intriguing to see these writers consider their own individual stories and what those stories do or don’t add to the history of such stories. My story is never just mine, of course, since it’s always about an encounter between me and the world I’m living in at that time, and the world I’m living in at that time is always different (but also similar) to other worlds at other places and times.

3) The role of articulating a poetics as such. Feminism is of course fundamentally a cultural practice. It’s possible to be a feminist without being a poet or an artist at all, obviously. So is there a specific relation between feminism and the actual practice of writing lines of poetry (or other kinds of writing) in this or that way? If feminism can be not simply a cultural theory but also a poetics, how does that poetics look as an actual practice of how to write? And how are the questions of how to write and what to write about connected?

4) Feminism as interconnectivity, as a focal point for multiple commitments, convictions, and explorations. Artistic ones: poetry, fiction, visual art, dance, music. Social and activist ones: environmental concerns and animal rights; lesbian, gay, and transgender politics; local activism and global perspectives. Even, as Gina Myers asserts, humanism: not the outdated white guy universalist rationalist humanism that helped get us into this mess but an attempt to re-imagine and re-work our involvements with others of all sorts.

Finally, though, and with no criticism of the forum intended (one can only do so much at once, obviously), what the discussion made me think also of was all the women writers informed by feminism whose work I’ve come to know in recent years and who might have been part of a larger gathering. Although generational lines are always worth blurring, I’m thinking mainly here of writers who were first significantly publishing poetry in this current decade and who are adding new elements to the history of feminism. Some of these writers have published several books in recent years, or just one, or should have published one by now but haven’t, for whatever reason. Some of them haven’t been publishing long at all. Some are more aesthetically challenging than others—obviously, since my bias runs in those directions, those are the writers I’m more likely to know about.

The list, of course, is also marked by the limits of my own experience and knowledge. Some of these writers you might know well, and some you might not know at all. And obviously you can mention some that I don’t know about (and ones that I did but am just forgetting to mention, an inevitable problem of list-making), so please help me add to the list.

Andrea Actis
Jen Benka
Lindsey Boldt
Leslie Bumstead
Allison Cobb
Jen Coleman
Katie Degentesh
Michelle Detorie
Latasha Nevada Diggs
Jennifer K. Dick
Sandra Doller
Jean Donnelly
Laura Elrick
Jeanine Hall Gailey
Elisa Gabbert
Susana Gardner
Lara Glenum
Judith Goldman
Arielle Greenberg
Kate Greenstreet
Sue Landers
Maryrose Larkin
Reb Livingston
Joyelle McSweeney
Chelsey Minnis
Carol Mirakove
Hoa Nguyen
Mel Nichols
Michelle Noteboom
Sina Queryas
Ariana Reines
Barbara Jane Reyes
Kathleen Rooney
Stephanie Rioux
Linda Russo
Carly Sachs
Kaia Sand
Sandra Simonds
Erika Staiti
Laura Sims
Jessica Smith
Maureen Thorson
Catherine Wagner
Rebecca Wolff
Stephanie Young
Rachel Zolf

Does a list like this really have much value? Who knows. Nonetheless, it has been fascinating for me to think again about how alive and well feminist poetry still is as it brings new concerns into relationship with many of its ongoing ones. A conference featuring many of these writers, or an anthology that published pieces by them, might very well give a large-scale picture of how feminist poetry has been changing in the first decade of this century, what problems it has been taking up and what new directions it has been exploring.

Poetry Pundits Speak: The State of Poetry Book Reviews

What’s the value of poetry book reviews, to readers or writers or reviewers? And what’s the current condition of poetry book reviews? Good? Bad? Helpful? A joke? Same as it ever was? Worse than ever before? Who cares?

The first issue of Mayday Magazine has a roundtable on the issue of the poetry review, organized and headlined by the inimitable Kent Johnson and featuring a cast of poetry pundits and talking heads, myself included. No plans for our own Sunday morning television show just yet though.

Leaving aside the transparent ironies and decidedly small-c chuckles to be found in the idea of reviewing the reviewers (although “critiquing the reviewers” is perhaps more accurate), with luck the discussion will highlight concerns about the current state of discussion about poetry that are worth considering.

For the moment I’ve said what I have to on the subject in my response to the open letter with which Kent begins the discussion, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on the issue. Why do you read poetry reviews, if you do, and what do you want out of them? And do you like what you're currently getting out of them?

Gertrude Stein is Overrated Because of Men

In an interview done by Karen Winkler for the publication of Elaine Showalter’s new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Knopf), described as a “600-page survey of known and not-so-known authors,” Showalter answers one question in a way that really surprised me:

Q. You say a literary history has to make judgments. Give us an example of whom you see as overrated, whom underrated?

Overrated: Gertrude Stein. She played an important role in the development of modernism, but she played it for men. And she is just not readable. She became viewed as a "sister": That doesn't sanctify her work. We can criticize it.

The idea that Stein is unreadable is hardly new, although I’m a little disappointed that such a well-known scholar as Showalter finds work unreadable that not only I have read with pleasure, but many of my undergraduates as well—Stein often ended up being the favorite writer of many students who took a class I used to teach on Modern American Poetry at George Washington University. Still, the unreadability charge, no matter how transparently incorrect, is one I’ve heard many times. Beyond a bit of bored bemusement, it doesn’t get much of a rise out of me anymore.

The point that surprised me though was the idea that Stein played an important role in modernism but only, apparently, for men.

My goal here isn’t primarily to criticize that idea, although I will a bit. Instead, I simply don’t understand it. What does it even mean to play a role in modernism only for men? Can someone explain that?

For instance, I hope Showalter doesn’t mean that Stein wrote on subjects only of importance to men. Leaving aside the problem that if she’s unreadable, it wouldn’t be possible to know what subject she was writing on, there’s nothing inherently masculine that I can identify in the subjects that she writes on: reconsidering of the value of the domestic in Tender Buttons or exploring lesbian sexuality in “Lifting Belly” are only two examples of subject matter that hardly strike me as masculine.

(Note: by unreadable, I know that Showalter probably means "no fun to read," but still...)

Does Showalter mean that the way Stein wrote was only of interest to men? That her concerns with the nature of language and representation are theoretical concerns that only men care about? That one seems wrong also, given the significant influence Stein has had on many women writers since, whether Lyn Hejinian, Joan Retallack, Harryette Mullen or many others.

Does it mean that, politically and socially, Stein’s writing, and perhaps her behavior (“played a role for men” doesn’t automatically suggest that it’s Stein’s writing under consideration here) played no role in the development of feminism or the history of feminist literature? Here I’m a little out of my own area of expertise. I don’t know enough about Stein’s relationship, say, to the Women’s Right Movement in the U.S. or any other kind of feminist social action, so I suppose it’s possible that she had no connection to women’s political movements in her own time, without quite believing that the phrase “played a role (only) for men” really expresses the problem adequately. And again, since many feminist writers of later generations (again, see short list above) have been very influenced by her work, how can it be true that her role was played only for men?

Can anyone help me? What does Showalter mean here? And is the point uniquely her own or have others made it and I’ve simply never heard it before? Is there a discussion going on among experts on women’s literature about what makes literature “for men” or “for women” that involves grounds by which Stein might be seen as a writer for men?

Thanks for anything you can tell me.

Are You a Poetry Ideologue?

Because of some comments about a month ago on Johannes Görannson’s blog, in which Johannes was accused of being an “ideologue,” I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to be a poetry ideologue and to what extent I and other people I know are or are not poetry ideologues.

I would define a poetry ideologue as someone who can only like poems if those poems express ideas (whether in theme or aesthetics) that the person approves of or agrees with. The true ideologue cannot like any literature that does not fit with what the ideologue believes literature should do. Pure ideologues would think that the literature they don’t like is so harmful that in fact it shouldn’t exist.

So now it’s time to explore whether I’m a poetry ideologue.

Someone who has no standards or set of values at all regarding literature would not be particularly interesting to me, and of course anyone who says they “like everything” probably just isn’t being honest with themselves. The most interesting critical takes on literature always have some sort of defined perspective. It doesn’t have to be rigid or narrow but it has to exist. So key questions for me are both how one defines what one values and whether or not one can like work that does not fit those values.

I must be at least partly an ideologue (if to say “partly” here is not already inherently a contradiction). I have strong ideas about what I like and what I don’t and why. I don’t think that literature I don’t like shouldn’t exist though, although I can think of the work of a few poets that, if it did not exist, wouldn’t bother me much.

Still, here’s a partial list of some poets from about 1800 until now whose writing I really like and who don’t fit well with my usual ideas of what I think makes for the most worthwhile poetry or whose ideologies or aesthetics are very much different or even opposed to mine.

Ai
John Berryman
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
H.D.
Ezra Pound
Robert Frost (North of Boston only; the rest, yuck)
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Laura Riding
Algernon Swinburne
James Wright

The list is actually pretty short, isn’t it? That may be partly because my ideology regarding poetry is fairly broad-minded, while I clearly prefer risk-taking aesthetics and poetry not afraid to explore social and political problems. I don’t feel like I have to choose my interests too narrowly (none of this “Language poetry is great! New York School sucks!” for me, as just one for instance) and so there are probably a fair number of writers who wouldn’t like each other’s work while I like both just fine. Nor am I putting writers like Audre Lorde or Nazim Hikmet on the list: as a writer I have nothing much in common with their social or political struggles or aesthetics, but I love their ideas as well as their work. And I suppose the list would be longer too if I was including poets whose aesthetic I don’t really feel much commonality with and whose work I like well enough without deeply liking—Plath or Sexton or the Life Studies/Union Dead-era Lowell, for instance, or earlier figures such as Yeats and Stevens. Similarly there are many poets whose poetry and aesthetics I really love while not entirely agreeing with their poetics. For instance I could probably quibble with almost everything Steve McCaffery or Ron Silliman has ever said about poetry while at the same time I think their writing is fantastic and it has been crucially influential on how I think and write. And needless to say perhaps, there’s a very long list of writers whose ideas I don’t like and whose poems I don’t like either. As one example, I’ve read a few Robert Pinsky poems that I like well enough, but the rest strike me as so much Dead Text.

Just as an aside, Silliman, whose sometimes murky yet still useful School of Quietude notion sends so many people into bemusement or teeth-grinding anger, and who is perhaps more often accused of being an ideologue than anyone else in contemporary poetry, in fact writes frequently and admiringly on his blog about poets whose aesthetics he does not share. I sometimes wonder if many of the people who accuse him of ideological narrowness actually consider how much narrower their own aesthetic range is.

Anyway. It turns out to be true that I find it difficult to really love poetry that goes against my own ideas about poetry. But my guess is that I’m not alone in that problem. My guess is that there are more Poetry Ideologues out there than there are people who will acknowledge that they too don’t like much poetry that isn’t in accordance with what they want out of literature. Frankly, I think Poetry Ideologues are much less of a problem than people whose preferences are guided by ideologies that they have never tested or become conscious of having.

Beyond Avant Garde/Mainstream and Back Again

Based partly on the discussions about third-way and hybrid poetics that we had on this blog some weeks back, Michael Theune have been playing around with some ideas for conversing at more length in a public forum on the issues involved. Perhaps a panel at AWP or other conference, perhaps a one-day or even weekend conference if we could find a location and the resources.

Below are the ideas we have at this point for a potential event of this kind. Both of us would appreciate hearing any thoughts you may have. Additions, questions, problems, annoyances, accusations of heedless arrogance or willful ideological bias are all encouraged.

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Recent years in poetry and poetics have seem numerous attempts to break out of, blur, or undermine distinctions between ideas of “mainstream” and “avant garde” poetics, a distinction that from the 1950s well into the 90s often dominated discussions about new directions in contemporary poetry. Yet after as much as fifteen years of attempts to move beyond this often unnecessarily limited distinction, it’s important also to move beyond assertions that the distinction has collapsed or is irrelevant. Instead, it now seems time to evaluate the specific attempts that writers and anthologists have made to create a hybrid poetics. Are we really living in an era when the mainstream/avant garde distinction no longer has value and significant common ground has been found among poetic approaches long considered opposites? Or has this new era simply adjusted, replaced, or perhaps only re-named this older boundary? Do the terms “avant garde” and “mainstream” still have any contemporary value or have they become the marks of a bygone age? If, as Hegel suggested, any synthesis of earlier ideas is always followed by a new antithesis that challenges it, what future poetic ideas will challenge any common ground that actually has been achieved or has been claimed as achieved?

This panel will feature diverse answers to these and related questions that have intrigued writers, editors, and anthologists involved in the issue. Are boundary-crossing, hybrid aesthetics a moderate, moderating force that smooths distinctions in a homogenizing and perhaps bland way, or one that allows for radical conjunctions not dreamed of in earlier generations of the “poetry wars”? Have anthologies promoting the collapse of the mainstream/avant garde distinction created genuine bridges across aesthetics or simply new poetic coteries? Do we now have no camps, new camps, more camps than ever? Have a variety of aesthetics really been included in the hybrid approach or have they instead been offered only token inclusion? Is the attempt to eliminate or downplay coterie inevitably a good idea, or is the often intense argument and difference between coteries a crucial source of vitality in new directions for poetry? What fringes and margins remain, if any? To what extent has the debate been framed too often as simply a problem within American poetry and thus remains wedded to a nationalist vision? What role do poetries in different languages, multiple languages, and translation play in complicating the notions of what it means to cross boundaries, whether aesthetic, linguistic, or cultural? What roles do race, class, or gender issues play in this new environment? When if ever are there reasons to assert the importance of maintaining or recognizing boundaries? What aesthetic, cultural, or ideological boundaries remain most relevant?

The Pot Calls The Kettle Black

How about the implications of that metaphor? Still, the writer writing the following deplores the situation that he describes below and believes to be true:

I also think poets are no longer taught the art of “judgment”, or evaluative criticism…”good” and “bad” are simply not supposed to be the way we look at things—they are more apt to look at how poems work, the various contexts behind poems and at poets themselves, as, perhaps, one big happy family of the like-minded engaged in a collective project which will lift them all equally to whatever degree of importance poetry can still have in public life.

Huh. The above does not seem to me to be a comment that shows an understanding of the art of judgment. It seems general, willfully subjective, and totally lacking in evidence. Did I forget to mention pompous and wrong?

A lot of poets obviously know how to judge poetry and spend a lot of time doing it, whatever they were or weren’t taught and by whom. Anybody think I’m wrong about that? Sure, many people—maybe most—have poor judgment, when it comes to poems or anything else. But does anybody think that poor judgment is a recent development in the history of literature or that it’s something that has been created by recent changes in what aspiring poets learn in school, unlike the good old days when people were really taught how to read poems?

I’m not going to say, here, who this writer is, since my goal isn’t to insult anyone but to encourage all of us wonderfully trained evaluators to evaluate just a little more carefully what we ourselves are saying. You can find out easily enough who said this if you want. Let’s just say that he takes himself to be a commentator of some significance upon contemporary poetry, and that other people seem to believe he is one.

It’s not that I expect every person writing a blog or participating in a blog discussion to avoid big statements or resist generalized accusations addressed to the aether. Let’s face it: they’re all over the place. It’s just that I’m thinking, were I to receive an undergraduate student paper with comments like this in it, the paper would look like C material to me. “On what grounds do you make this claim?” is one of the main comments I make about weak undergraduate paragraphs.

Note to well-respected literary critics: please evaluate contemporary writing well enough to get at least a B in an undergraduate lit course at Cal State San Marcos, okay?

Guess my spring break’s over.

What Poetry Needs Right Now Is More Nostalgia For Me

If you ever catch me making any of the following statements, you’ll know that I finally believe that the world of poetry has left me behind and that I’m content to live in the glow of nostalgia for my quickly vanishing self. At that point please remove me from the shelf and take me to the trash. But do it gently, for once upon a time I served you well.

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Back in the [fill in date], poets were genuinely concerned about the world and actually had vision. These days it’s all a corrupt game and people only write poems for what it can get them.

You’re not really raising that issue again, are you? We resolved all that back in [fill in date].

These educational institutions are ruining poetry. Things were better when to get a real education in poetry you had to go to [fill in name of my now tremendously expensive city or neighborhood] and [perhaps one or two others in a grudging second or third place on the list].

Nobody in [fill in name of city or neighborhood where I don’t live] knows anything about poetry. I just don’t understand those people.

Unlike [so and so]’s trendy work of the moment, which [I am quickly dismissing on certain grounds while barely reading, if at all], the work of [so and so] manages to [really own][long elaboration of same grounds].

Poetry really started to decline when [people no longer saw the world or thought about poetry the way I did when I was their age].

All these recent self-serving theories have taken the attention away from poems themselves and what they can really do.

This kind of poem will never speak to the ordinary reader [which my poems do even though nobody much is reading them].

All these uptight self-serving little communities need to stop reading and promoting each other [and instead read and promote my work and my ideas or the work of the writers I prefer].

Things would be better if we could write poems that [returned to the values of another time and place, most likely the one when I first became excited about poetry or had some success or maybe the one I fantasize about having lived in].

Today’s poets would be more interesting if they [returned to the values of another time and place, most likely the one where I first became excited about poetry or had some success or maybe the one I fantasize about having lived in].

Poets need to stop pretending that new-fangled techniques will write poems for them and go back to the days [when writing a poem was like scrubbing a floor].

Poets are fucked up because they [don’t listen to me] and will be better off when they [stop writing and listen to me].

Hybrid Art Can Do Lots of Shit

Anyone who leaves a comment using this art work as a metaphor for any area of poetic, artistic, or cultural production will be considered pathetically obvious. So you better be funny about it.

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from the article “Hybrid Art Awards” by Regine:

An award of distinction in the category of Hybrid Art was given to Wim Delvoye for the ultra-famous Cloaca, an installation that gulps food and mechanically processes and produces what is —even under scientific examination—impossible to differentiate from human excrement.

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from the article “A Human Masterpiece”
by Els Fiers

Cloaca, the latest work by the Belgian conceptualist Wim Delvoye (b. 1965), has just closed out its run at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA) in Antwerp. It was a room-sized installation of six glass containers connected to each other with wires, tubes and pumps. Every day, the machine received a certain amount of food.

Meat, fish, vegetables and pastries passed through a giant blender, were mixed with water, and poured into jars filled with acids and enzyme liquids. There they got the same treatment as the human stomach would supply. Electronic and mechanical units controlled the process, and after almost two days the food came out of a filtering unit as something close to genuine, human shit.

During the exhibition, the smelly assembly line caused quite some consternation. It seemed to bring an infernal message into the world. There is enough dung as it is. Why make more?

Worse, the installation was placed in a cold, clean space at the museum, where it was nourished by a first class chef who prepared two meals a day in an attached kitchen. The atmosphere suggested a hospital equipped for a strange experiment -- the birth and care of a machine that eats and defecates -- a mechanical baby. "Hi," it seemed to say, "I'm almost like you."

Delvoye's work doesn't resemble the human body, though perhaps it could be called a figurative work. But visitors walked out with a strange look on their faces, as if they'd just paid a visit to the devil. Cheeks turn a little pale as art, the beautiful image of humanity, turned into the making of stool.

Delvoye has given a name to his harsh creature: Cloaca, referring to the ancient sewer in Rome. But while the cloaca maxima proved to be useful, this Cloaca goes beyond every purpose, except of course revealing of the meaning of art. So, too, the spending and earning of money is part of its purpose. The machine daily delivered turds that were signed and sold for $1,000 each.

Absurd? "Imagine a very rich man who plays golf," Delvoye said. "He spends a massive amount of time and money for just one purpose: to put a little ball into a hole. Isn't that absurd?"

The End of America

As part of the Positions Colloquium in Vancouver last August, the colloquium organizers published a limited edition collection of poetics statements from those of us who had gathered. We were asked also to provide a brief excerpt of the work we would be presenting. Since that collection was a conference-only publication that may no longer be available (and since I’ve had a busy past week), I thought I’d just put my piece from the collection up here. I hope the statements by the other writers will be available again in printed form at some point.

The colloquium was the inaugural reading for the long poem, The End of America, that I’ve been working on since September 2006 (the start of my second year living in California). If anybody would like an e-mail copy of the 17-single spaced pages that make up Book One of the poem and are excerpted from below, let me know. I think it’s ready to be seen at this point. And also, anybody who would like a free copy of my most recently published book of poems, Felonies of Illusion, for potentially writing a review, please let me know that too.

Oh, and re the photo above: the country around here really does look like that, from some angles. From other angles it looks like a parking lot.

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from The End of America, Book One

So many people searching
for the end of America: from here
it’s not much, white jeep
cutting tracks through sand, black-suited surfer
fighting into the water, surfboard raised high,
runners, walkers of dogs and babies, blinking lights on the turret
of the Encinas Power Station, a constantly changing
breeze through the palms. Coast Highway slow through town.
Cars, which can’t imagine traveling. Beach fires prohibited
except in marked pits, a note to the crucial
need to fear fire. I grab one more instance
of love and rage, impotent and powerful
by turns, looking for more
than I already know. The end of the land, instant myth,
becomes a place to look from, or look away, to walk,
to head on out. All those poets
who seemed certain what they wanted, the ocean
a source of world, result of cosmos,
mystery under the crest of a wave.
Too much is not forgotten but never known,
history no more than the present webbing
distortion of what’s temporarily remembered. Money back,
no cash down, no payments this year, good annual rates.


A roadmap has a poetics also, on some level a conscious one. But the degree to which the poetics of the roadmap seems a cultural given makes a self-consciously explored geographical poetics necessary, not so much a response to prevailing hierarchies as a reshaping of them.

I’ve taken a few positions in my life—sometimes even insightful ones—but more often positions have taken me. Rarely has that been more true than in writing The End of America, a project that has helped me explore what it’s like to live in a place I never expected to live. Anyone who knows me well can attest that my sense of self is greatly shaped by my east coast urban experience. Like many poets I’ve often needed money, and when after many years of searching I was offered a position I could stand to take, I took it, but since my options weren’t multiple it’s not so clear who did the taking. And so this east coast poet found himself in North County San Diego, miles of strip malls proliferating among the dry natural beauty of hills and mountains over which no one has been able to build a railroad. People vote 60% percent Republican here. The local papers argue that George W. Bush’s problem is that his overspending desire to democratize the world makes him too liberal. Luckily so many people live here these days that 40% non-Republicans adds up to several million. Still, I work at a college in hill country and live two blocks from the ocean in a suburbanized beach village around which houses sprawl in every direction except into the water. It’s from conditions like these that The End of America began.

Actually the project wasn’t even my idea. I was talking, as I do often, to poet K. Lorraine Graham about my exhaustion from new conditions at work and not having energy for writing. She suggested that I should just write down what I see. And so The End of America began, a few lines every few days. A geography, not a landscape, in the sense that a geography includes how culture and economics and power interact with the natural world. Not a catalog, though it catalogs at times, and not a view from outside, but one that’s inside and outside both, alienated in a home that isn’t home.

The title has two meanings. I literally live about 1000 feet from where America, at least in one direction, ends. Beyond it is water. Of course many of us are keenly aware of the difference between America and The United States of America. And not only, I hope, because America as a geographical location includes many peoples, cultures, nations, islands and even several continents. For myself at least, and maybe others, the mythical ghost of America as a place where justice and freedom are possible haunts me long after the corpse has been buried. The project struggles with a concept: the end of America, one that many people assert, or want, even as the United States and Canada and Mexico and much else remain operating entities. Sometimes I think I’m working out a dystopic response to Whitman, wrestling with his vision of a free America in the original Leaves of Grass while trying to critique the grandiosity with which he wanted the United States to swallow the world.

There are four books so far, each getting along towards whatever completeness they’re going to have, and each with a different way of exploring the relation between aesthetics and meaning. I’m not sure yet whether there will be further books. An idea that wasn’t my idea, defined by a position that may have taken me more than I took it. That defines fairly neatly some of the problems faced by those of us who, as poets, recognize that the world’s condition is not one we have chosen and one which we often struggle against, but one that we nonetheless live within while simultaneously working through a poetics of what might otherwise exist. Our writing is our first example of what this other place might be.

Hybrid Likes and Dislikes

I like the concept of the literary hybrid as a work that uses and refigures influences from a number of literary schools or genres or traditions, thus questioning the idea that literature is best when influenced by a single tradition only.

I like the concept of the literary hybrid when it takes up artistic elements from beyond the world of literature, whether music or visual art or others.

I like the concept of the literary hybrid when it exposes rifts and differences both within literary traditions and across them, and when it deforms its influences in such a way as to question the commonly assumed limits of those influences.

I don’t like the concept of the literary hybrid as something that synthesizes the differences of its influences and therefore “smooths the rifts” or “heals the wound” or “takes the best of both worlds and ignores the excess.” This concept tends to suggest that the hybrid is a centralizing work that has achieved a common ground superior to the traditions which it refigures. I use the word “synthesizes” to note the Hegelian aspects of this concept: one that takes earlier concepts and synthesizes them on a higher, more integrated plain. Of course, as Hegel would suggest, even a successful attempt to do so would lead to a reaction against this new synthesis.

I like the concept of the literary hybrid as one that juxtaposes languages, cultures, and histories in surprising ways and plays with the interconnections and differences between them.

I even like the concept of the literary hybrid as one that ignores or blurs the specifics of the interconnections and differences between language, cultures, and histories as long as in doing so, it does not claim to be a healing, seamless whole.

A blurry hybrid can be fascinating but an amorphous one is always boring.

I like the concept of the literary hybrid when it enlightens by confusing and confuses by enlightening.

I like the concept of the literary hybrid when it displaces, disrupts, exposes, makes strange, highlights alienation, or undermines assumptions, whether in reference to other literary and artistic practices or to the world itself.

I even like the concept of the hybrid when it becomes a new specific tradition of writing or highlights a new way of living in the world.

I like the concept of the hybrid as gender-bending but not as “man and woman are one” or “‘til death do us part.”

I don’t like the concept of the hybrid as the overcoming of differences but there’s a place for it as the mediating of them, as long as the mediation does not assume for itself a position of centralized authority. I like the concept of the hybrid as multiple or diffused mediation.

I like the concept of the hybrid when it wastes your time or makes you a better person or even when it gets you a job or makes you famous. I don’t like the concept of the hybrid as The Board of Directors.

I don’t like the concept of the hybrid when it is discussed as the only, the best, the right, the balanced, the middle, the cautious or the most inclusive.

I don’t like the concept of the hybrid as a big tent under which to gather the big names.

I like the concept of the hybrid as a way of combining things without including them.

I like the concept of the hybrid when it does what has not been done in a way that shows the value of its being done.

I don’t like the concept of the hybrid if it suggests that there’s nothing to do but re-mix what has already been done.

I like the concept of the hybrid as generous but I don’t like it as benevolent.

I like the concept of the hybrid as alongside, with, in contrast to, and as exception to the rule.

I like the concept of the hybrid as new potential guidelines but I don’t like the concept of the hybrid as the new rule.

I like the hybrid when it steals the show but not when it demands center stage.

I like the hybrid when it’s sleight of hand and I even like it when it picks my pocket. I don’t like it when it calls the shots.

I like a concept of the hybrid that scrambles the sides or says that none of the sides are worthwhile sides but I don’t like a hybrid that’s afraid to take sides.

Michael Theune on Third Way Poetics

In a group of articles and reviews, critic and scholar Michael Theune has been critiquing in more detail than any other writer I’m aware of the concept of third way poetics. Below, I’m reprinting with permission his 2005 review of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries edited by the late Reginald Shepherd.

Several quick questions and points of my own:

To what extent did the writers in The Iowa Anthology think of themselves as third way writers? In other words, do the group of writers gathered in the anthology see themselves as interrelated in the sense, for instance, that the language poets, the flarf poets, and some of the gurlesque writers seem to do? Or was the concept mainly Shepherd’s own? Is third way poetics a literary movement or one writer’s concept? Theune's review explores this question closely and comes up with an answer somewhere between these two poles.

To what extent might The Iowa Anthology (along with, perhaps, the just recently released American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, which I haven’t seen) be said to be primary examples of what might be called a contemporary Iowa School Poetics? For instance, there’s a relatively close connection between the work featured in the anthology and what Johannes Göransson described awhile back (go to August 8 2008 post) as the kind of poetry taught and promoted in the Iowa MFA program in the Jorie Graham years when he was a student there. On the other hand, I remember talk about a UBuffalo Poetics in the 1990s. My sense, at that time, of how there were so many differences in the writing of the students and professors there that I was (and am) convinced that there was no one such poetics, although people outside the context often thought there was.

There’s a big difference between an anthology that tries to build a bridge for writers with different approaches to aesthetics and politics, and one that claims to have found an overarching aesthetic that renders such differences passé and irrelevant.

The poems featured in The Iowa Anthology often have a grand lyrical sophistication, classical references (perhaps just a idiosyncrasy of Shepherd but nonetheless suggestive), and come equipped with claims by the editor to have overcome partisanship. To what extent might the anthology be an attempt at defining not simply a new American middle ground poetry but a new version of an American elite poetry?

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Review of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, edited by Reginald Shepherd
(Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2004).

Michael Theune

This review originally appeared in American Book Review 27.1 (Nov/Dec 2005): 16-17


Randall Jarrell writes that "[a]nthologies are, ideally, an essential species of criticism." The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries clearly wants to be an important critical/theoretical text by presenting work that situates itself in the supposedly newfound territory between American mainstream and experimental poetries. As Reginald Shepherd asserts in the anthology's "Introduction," "This anthology collects the work of twenty-four poets whose work crosses, ignores, or transcends the variously demarcated lines between traditional lyric and avant-garde practice" (xiii). However, when considered carefully, this anthology reveals itself to be, at best, carelessly crafted and, at worst, actively detrimental, presenting a skewed picture of what otherwise might be a significant, interesting, transgressive trend in American poetry.

Though, as its introduction makes clear, this is not a collection of work by younger poets, this anthology does collect work by poets who had published, at the time of the anthology's publication, "no more than two full-length books of poetry" (xiii). These poets, the introduction asserts, have been brought together not through synchrony and not as a "representative sampling" of trends in American poetry, but so that the poetry of the between, of the lyric/experiment middle space, might be "explicitly laid out and brought together" (xiii). This rationale, though, smacks of a cover-up. The notion that the middle space might be fruitful territory for poetry to explore is not the invention of these newer poets but others-including Jorie Graham, Alice Fulton, Donald Revell, and Michael Palmer, just to name a few mentioned in the introduction-who have theorized and written in and from this space with varying degrees of success for decades. Including such work, though, in this anthology would be problematic, revealing how derivative so much of the anthology's supposedly "new" poetry actually is.

Or is it "poetries actually are"? Though this is an anthology assembled according to the "commonality" of the included work, its title refers to "poetries" and its introduction refers to the poets' various "directions," as if to say that among this new work there are new developments and varieties (xiii). While this anthology wants this to be the case, it employs many pages, regardless of its "[s]evere space constraints" (xiii), to introduce the work of each individual poet with a brief "Artist's Statement," a cursory look at the poet's aims and influences-such is not the case. What is most shocking about the statements is how very similar they are to the introduction and to each other.

Many of these poets think of themselves as poets of the middle space. Jocelyn Emerson notes that she is "…fascinated by the process of trying to map governing epistemes of putatively antithetical discourses against one another (the 'scientific' and the 'aesthetic' for example) to see where their mutually exclusive definitions of self and other become visible and audible" (35), and Heather Ramsdell begins to investigate the governing epistemes of the anthology, wondering, "Is language poetry scientific? Is lyric spiritual?" (223) In this middle space, these poets also, as Shepherd writes, "…reject the dichotomy of thought and emotion, feeling thoughts and thinking feelings…" (xvi). This notion is borne out in Dan Beachy-Quick's hopes that "…the poet's mind pulses, the poet's heart thinks" (1) and in Joanna Klink's positive assessment of Stevens, Bishop, and Eliot as "…poets [who] thought in their poems," who "…could not separate physical pain from its mental shape…" (113). Lastly, according to Shepherd, all included in this anthology are "…poets for whom experience is not prior to the poem but something we undergo with and within the poem, for whom the poem itself is an experience" (xvi). Karen Volkman agrees, stating, "I believe one of the jobs of poetry is to discover and enable different and more complex ways of engaging experience…" (234). And Amy Newman virtually seconds this, defining poetry's task as answering "…the complicating, intoxicating call for the near-impossible, the magic trick of representation: a desire to capture the moveable world with a tool that might always seem somehow inadequate" (176).

From such similar ideas spring very similar poems. The inadequate tools of choice for many of the anthology's poets seem to be chance, fragmentation, and paratactic assemblage. As the various statements reveal again and again, these poems have been put together "by slow accretion" (47), according to "phonetic associations…[an] accrual of design…[that] allows for electrical mistakes, resonant slippages, kinetic cryptographies" (85), employing "accident" (163), with "a lot of hypertextuality" (176) and not too much concern for "fit" (197). This results in, largely, a plethora of half-baked meditations, pointless narratives, and series of short-circuitings which in the end really are, as Cynthia Cruz labels her own work, "broken lyrics" (22). While this may be the new American poetry, it is reminiscent of the kind of poetry challenged in Mary Kinzie's 1984 essay, "The Rhapsodic Fallacy." What's really new here is not the poetry but how familiar such poetry has become, and how improved are the capacities and means-including the anthology's introduction and statements-for theorizing, or excusing, such poetry.

What the anthology's cant tries to conceal is the anthology's general lack of wit. Though Emily Dickinson is a tutelary spirit, referenced in numerous artist statements and poems, the Dickinson who intrigues this anthology's poets is the Dickinson of variants, of multiplicity, the Dickinson favored for her obliquity, her telling it "slant." But this understanding of Dickinson gives no credence to why her multiplicities are worth attention in the first place: Dickinson is the great poet of wit, if we mean by wit something much more than mere verbal cleverness and mean by it, as Charles R. Anderson does in Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise, "…the power of joining thought and expression with an aptness calculated to delight by its unexpectedness…" (4). Though Shepherd claims that the work in his anthology is "fully accomplished work" (xiii), it is not to the extent that it's true that, as Anderson claims, "Wit is indispensable to the great poet" (3).

In part, the omission of wit is due to the nature of writing now. Many of the included poems simply weren't made to be anthologized in the way that they are, as they have been selected from longer, sometimes book-length, series of poems in which, according to Karen Volkman, the "movement of mind" is "from poem to poem" (233), in which, according to Jenny Mueller, as a result, there may be "less interest…in 'finishing' or 'originating' individual works" (151). However, part of the anthology's lack of wit also is the result of bad editorial decisions. Some of the writers here are poorly represented; often, their wit has been removed. Nowhere is Laura Mullen's cheeky "After I Was Dead." Nowhere is one of Rachel Zucker's strongest poems, "In Your Version of Heaven I Am Younger"-a sassy poem that begins, "In your version of heaven I am blond, thinner, / but not so witty." And while the poems included by D.A. Powell generally are very good-like so much of Powell's poetry, which is some of the strongest poetry being written today-they are not nearly Powell's best, and they all largely share a similar elegaic tone. Nowhere appears the bawdiness of Powell's "dogs and boys can treat you like trash. and dogs do love trash," a traditional poem, much like Wyatt's "They flee from me," about lost love, but completely contemporary in its brashness and liveliness, or the sheer inventiveness of the sad and hilarious "morning broke on my cabin inverted. tempest in my forehead," a poem that employs the narrative of The Poseidon Adventure as an extraordinary extended metaphor for dealing with AIDS.

Shepherd clearly is not just re-presenting poetry of the middle space, he is shaping it, defining it. The problem is that he hobbles it, too, by presenting it weakly, substituting for literary quality-at most, 30 of the nearly 200 poems included are really good poems-a safe, unified style and tone. The extent to which this representation is hobbled is even clearer when one considers all that Shepherd has not included. Even limiting oneself to poets with a family resemblance to the anthologized poets-excluding, for example, poets participating in that very American phenomenon, slam poetry-it's hard to imagine how Shepherd relegated poets such as Olena Kalytiak Davis and Geoffrey G. O'Brien to a "Further Reading" list at the end of the anthology, and it is simply unimaginable that there is no mention whatsoever of work by poets such as Gabriel Gudding, Chelsey Minnis, or Spenser Short, poets who have written some amazing poems very different from each other's yet situated squarely in the middle space. Such exclusion seems especially unconscionable when it is considered that in their place was selected the generally convoluted work of Jocelyn Emerson, Catherine Imbroglio, and Jenny Mueller, three poets Shepherd, one assumes, knows, as they are thanked "for their comments, encouragement, and inspiration" at the end of his book, Otherhood.

Of course, it should be noted that in his introduction, Shepherd states, "…I have chosen poets whose experiments most compel me" (xiv). Fine, but it's not clear why their experiments are really new, or particularly American, or actually plural. Far from presenting new, American poetries, Shepherd has half-assembled and half-created a coterie, and, in doing so, he merely asserts a manner of writing already indicted and surpassed by so much of what it excludes.

Nada Gordon's Folly

Nada Gordon’s Folly may be the most essential theoretical statement of what the flarf aesthetic might be said to be about and include. Given the flarf groups’ resistance to the creation of conventional manifestos to explain their intentions, this point may seem paradoxical, but paradoxes present no problems for the author of Folly. With all its whimsy, winking, flirtatiousness, porousness and irreverence, there’s finally a very steely center to this book, even while that center is in many ways the opposite of what we usually mean when we say a book has a center.

The concept of folly, and the way that concept plays out through the poems and dialogues and poetic plays collected in the book, reveal that Gordon has a convincing theory of folly that links the often disparate strands of the marvelously energetic writing she has gathered here. If her book is not a comprehensive elucidation of all the possible elements of that theory, that’s mainly because folly laughs at the idea of comprehensiveness (or maybe just giggles) while at the same time implying how much strength there is in its own breadth. Gordon’s earlier books of poetry had an often scattershot yet compelling structure and energy, as if always threatening to fly apart. While Folly has a similar feel, everything here seems more thoroughly grounded in a sense of why it all belongs together.

As a word, folly was originally named folly by reason, of course. Everything that reason considers not to be itself it considers folly, whether it considers the folly in question disastrous or merely silly. The idea of folly contains not just playfulness, artifice, the slothful, the ornamental, the excessive and the wasteful; that is, not just the daily behavior that always sober seriousness rejects as extreme. It also includes marginalized cultures, histories, and genders, as well as everything that reason, and the various types of reason that pass as reason, tell us can’t or shouldn’t be said. When no longer seen from behind the veil of reason, folly turns out to be no fool, to know that in the moral realm reason is not often reasonable, that much of the time what gets called wisdom is not. Folly wants payback for the fact that reason named it. A payback party perhaps, but payback nonetheless.

In another essay I once called the concept of the avant garde, at its most progressive and least static, “the rejection of Western cultural rejection,” not an affirmation, although sometimes it contained an affirmation, but a double negative. A refusal of the historically acceptable standards for Western Art in a way that also refuses to accept the desire of Western Culture to determine who can be part of it and in what way, who is outside of it and not able to reap its benefits, who must work in poverty so that others can prosper, who must die so that others are allowed to live the way they want. But also a refusal to create even a new, rewritten centrality, a new canon, that would return us once more to the old game of folly and reason. It’s remarkable that Gordon’s Folly manages to refuse to rewrite centrality while at the same time highlighting a concept of what that centrality might be.

The poems in Folly often depend on incongruity, placing together things that, according to reason, ought not to be placed together. The book is full of unexpected juxtapositions, whether between vulgarity, satire, and lyric gracefulness, or between images of older and more contemporary outcasts, shapeshifters, jokesters and freaks. Vocabularies, histories, mythologies and much else are shaken loose from their expected contexts and interact with each other. Charles Bernstein’s back cover comment is exactly right, I think, when he says that Gordon is “on her way to inventing a new type of poetry in which Pre-Raphaelitism meets Zeppo Marx while doing the hokey pokey in a fox trot beat.” Right also in saying “on her way,” since the goal is not to determine who can or can’t belong but to fight back against, and laugh at, all those moments that readers might want to say “you can’t get away with that.” The result is not a coalition but a carnival.

Essential to Gordon is playing around with, and unraveling, the often assumed dichotomy of feminine and feminist.

Lovetta: You look real cute in that ninja getup.

Brianna: And may I say you look delicious in that sari, you wicked thing. The original exposed midriff, how very charming indeed.

Sheptanya: This makes me look like Queen Victoria on a bad day.

Lovetta: Are you kidding? You look totally shaggable in that. I mean, you look cute in that “OMG, that girl has got some BALLS to wear that in public” way. At least you didn’t have to wear elf ears.

Brianna: Does this make me look fickle? Or versatile?

Lovetta. Versatile. Does this make me look two-dimensional? Or careerist?

Sheptanya: Careerist. Does this make me look gelatinous? Or like slightly less of an awesomely intimidating authority figure?

Brianna: I think it makes you look “published.” (38)

There’s play here with the implications of clothing, obviously, and the social roles regarding sex, gender and power always implied by it. Certainly Gordon takes the supposed feminine/feminist dichotomy far beyond early evocations of the feminine as a set of traits revealing powerlessness and the idea of feminism as an assertion of group or individual action (whether separatist or assimilationist) designed to take power back. She goes past the step beyond as well, the idea that the feminine is or can be powerful, a discourse that can not only change in and of itself but in relation to others, spinning magic circles around conventional masculinist notions of power. Instead there’s a flamboyant game playing in Folly that suggests identity and relation and power and sexuality are found in how all of us play together, play even with the idea of playing. The characters note how quickly their relation to the game can change and how easily such changes can be signaled. In Folly the feminine and the feminist turn out to be interconnected roles that players might take up, both for the revel and the sheer pleasure of play as well as for the power at stake. Not so much play as a way to obtain change, but change as a means to more enjoyable playing.

That said, Gordon consistently signals her awareness of the sociopolitical conditions that not only limit choices for behavior but make play seem at times an impossibility, as in “Viagric Importunings:

God: For fuck’s sake, I despair at some humans, I really do. Gods, I am so angry. I wish there was something to be done, I feel so impotent.

A star-shaped pillowcase: I am able to convey so many things through nonverbal communication, why is it that I feel so impotent using tools that others use with ease?

Fat Thing: And the worse part is that I cannot do anything about it—except go on being a part of it. My god, why do I feel so impotent? When will we ever learn?

Rusty helmet: I’m scared. Everything has changed. I feel so impotent. There’s nothing that can be done but to sit here and watch.

Earthquake: I feel so impotent when I can’t think of the right words to describe the sound of an individual band or maintain an erection. (59)

It’s not surprising that feelings of helplessness are common in the face of the foibles of human behavior, the power of contemporary social institutions and the conditions of complicity that come with being inevitably part of them or at least subject to them, as well as the frantic pace of change that often overwhelms individual and even group response. Still, what this particular short sketch also shows is that the feeling of impotence has itself become a ritual, a social game people play in relation to each other. It’s a ritual that’s both ludicrous and paradoxically energizing. In “Viagric Importunings,” while reflections on impotence might in private doom us, the ritual of displaying it to each other comes with a sexual energy that must certainly be the ground of getting beyond it. Not that we will necessarily get beyond it in this or any other given instance, just that if we could, that would be where the impetus would have to come from. No resistance without sexuality.

In fact, Gordon also wants to make clear that the ultimate human folly is human belief in our own centrality in the universe, as in the opening to the poem “Nothing Is Untitled”:

Dear universal hominid ancestor:

Do you think you’re special because you have
A DIRECT LINE
TO THE SONG OF THE UNIVERSE? (91)

It’s not easy to mix an often harsh critique of contemporary social conditions and human limitations with a good time party, yet Gordon manages to do just that, as in the two poems entitled “Why America Sucks” and elsewhere as well. Much of the book’s satire comes with a lush, sensual prose that certainly recalls 19th century verboseness without ever seeming actually retro. The book is a carnival of real and imaginary animals, human beings in strange, voluptuous costumes, sadness and cheerfulness and a thrilling celebration of the perverse in character, sexuality, and language.

The dialogues and poetic plays present characters expressing a wide range of emotions: depression, ecstasy, embarrassment, loathing, longing, horniness and many others. But Gordon doesn’t use the poems in Folly for direct confession or blatant exploration of her own subjective state, at least beyond the fact that the totality of the statements in the book might be said to map a whole arrangement of thought and feeling that’s uniquely her own. These are impersonal poems full of personal revelations, and also the opposite: personal poems displayed through the impersonal methods of characters and role players who serve as objective correlatives of emotions and social conditions. The poems refuse conventional notions both of subjectivity and objectivity, revealing both to be a play of physical surfaces while never turning the point into a purely theoretical suggestion. In fact another remarkable thing about Folly is that the poems never seem controlled by the idea of folly or written with the advance intention of proving a point. Instead they seem to revolve around and return to key ideas without seeming pre-mapped and while still coming together in a way that feels convincing as theory.

Saying that Folly is a central theoretical statement of the flarf aesthetic isn’t to suggest that the book can account for all the different types of writing that the flarf group has produced. The flarf group has usually resisted defining themselves through manifestos or other statements of its own importance, replacing such statements with ironic, self-undermining commentaries meant to make fun of the manifesto-issuing tendency while simultaneously turning the manifesto into another flarf game. Gordon herself somewhat notoriously refuses to define the flarf aesthetic, sometimes claiming that flarf is nothing more than a particular set of writers working in all their various ways in attempts to instruct and delight—the kind of claim that can make stance takers white-knuckled with annoyance. All that said though, the concept of folly that plays out in Folly seems to me a crucial ground for understanding the flarf group’s essential obsession with impropriety, with doing in poems all sorts of things that others say they cannot and should not do. One of the things that makes flarf so controversial is that it doesn’t just explore the improper as it’s defined in mainstream capitalist culture. It also takes on the improper as it appears in the tightly-interlocking social mores of the world of poets themselves who, in an age when society-at-large doesn’t pay attention (although if it did, it would inevitably disapprove), seem to make a tremendous effort to tell other poets what they shouldn’t do. If the world will not police our work, we will do it ourselves.

Frankly, I doubt that Folly is going to convince people who dislike flarf that they should change their minds. Though the book seems to me a statement of purpose, it hardly proselytizes for its cause or attempts to win converts across any of the well-worn aisles of contemporary poetry debates that one can read about every day on the Harriet or Ron Silliman blogs. It has more of a chance perhaps to reach some readers of mainstream verse who are trying to look beyond the most commonly asserted divisions in contemporary poetry. Gordon picks and chooses from various literary and cultural traditions, avant garde and otherwise, and restlessly unsettles many commonly accepted critical distinctions about literary language. In fact the book seems very connected to Arielle Greenberg’s ideas about the gurlesque. Still, Folly isn’t any kind of middle ground poetry. The poems never reach to define a middle but celebrate and juxtapose extremes. There are no linear narratives, no concluding lines of heightened emotion for lovers of traditional lyric, no descriptions of current events for those who like relevant of-the-moment protest poems. Folly is an important book not because it doesn’t offer such moves but because it shows us that all sorts of things which people think should not be part of poetry are actually crucial to it: all the impurities we’re always trying to cast out in order to remake the universe in our own image.

Some New Multiplicities: A Conversation

This is the first round of a conversation with myself, Joseph Mosconi, and K. Lorraine Graham about new directions and multiplicities in poetry and related arts among younger writers.

Joseph lives in Los Angeles, where he works as one of the co-organizers of the Poetic Research Bureau and co-edits the literary and arts journal Area Sneaks. Lorraine lives in Carlsbad, California, about two hours south of L.A., and not very far away from where I live at all, as it turns out. Her book of poems Terminal Humming is forthcoming from Edge Books in 2009, and she’s one of the co-organizers of the Agitprop Literary Series in San Diego.

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Mark Wallace: Joseph, in a conversation we had a few weeks back, you claimed that one of the things that was interesting about poets of your current, up-and-coming generation is their use of multiple artistic traditions and cultural contexts. I wonder if you could elaborate on that point. Whose work in particular were you thinking of? Did you mean poets specifically in L.A., or elsewhere as well? The point is similar to one I made in my article "Towards A Free Multiplicity of Form" which discussed among other issues the way poets of our present moment seem to think of themselves as working in (or playing around with) multiple literary traditions rather than belonging in a singular lineage of poetic practice. But my sense was that you thought that this issue was being taken up in new ways at the moment among a crowd of younger poets whose writing you're perhaps more familiar with than I am. Can you give me some examples of how this issue is working itself out at the moment?

Joseph Mosconi: My sense is that there are a number of poets and prose writers from my generation for whom literature, and poetry specifically, is one among many disciplines from which one might seek to build a poetic practice. In this sense we are un-disciplined. I do not use this term pejoratively. It is not an extravagant and promiscuous practice. It is deliberate, considered, and partly a result of our media literacy. Our books are only one form of media. Many poets are well-read in classic, modern and contemporary literature, but some may be even more literate in cinema history, art history or perhaps even (due to the way we were raised) television and Internet history. These various media disciplines inevitably find their way into our work. In Los Angeles there are several young writers whose work crosses these various disciplines. Marcus Civin is a poet who has transcribed Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy's War and Peace into extremely detailed visual poems. The poetry and essays of Stan Apps draw as much from the bathos of television sitcoms as the speculative prose of Montaigne. But I don't think this is necessarily a Los Angeles phenomenon. Poet David Larsen's neo-benshi performance Paris of Troy (in which the poet reads an original text over an excerpt of Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 film Troy) might be his greatest triumph so far. New York poet Brandon Downing's book Dark Brandon is categorized as Poetry/Cinema Studies.

But perhaps, in our original conversation, I was remarking on a phenomenon I've observed in the fields of both poetry and visual art. The installation artist Stephanie Taylor works with a variety of materials and media, but one of her greatest influences may be the OuLiPo and their predecessors, such as Raymond Roussel. She has even begun to give readings at poetry events. Artist Marie Jager appropriated some aspects of a late Victorian science-fiction novel by M.P. Shiel called The Purple Cloud in order to create her beautiful collage video The Purple Cloud (2006). The Orange County Museum of Art even published a poem-sequence by Jager to accompany the video; it is a work of erasure drawn from the Shiel novel, similar to Ronald Johnson's Radi Os.

How all of this differs from previous generations' engagements with various disciplines—what this phenomenon means today, how poets and artists conceive of their influences and traditions, and why they've turned away from "pure" disciplinarity—remains to be theorized. It's not as if this phenomenon is new, exactly. Many of the Surrealist poets were integral to the development of avant-garde film. Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers famously cast his final book of poetry in plaster and exhibited it as a sculpture in 1964. Then he turned to film. "For me," said Broodthaers, "film is simply an extension of language. I began with poetry, moved on to three-dimensional works, finally to film, which combines several artistic elements. That is, it is writing (poetry), object (something three-dimensional), and image (film). The great difficulty lies, of course, in finding a harmony among these three elements." Maybe younger poets today are looking at the freedom of form, discipline , and materials that visual artists have enjoyed for so long and are saying, "Hey, why can't we do that." Whether this is harmonious for poetry or not remains to be seen.

MW: What’s fascinating to me about your response is how you highlight mainly though not exclusively what used to be called “multi-media” work, and especially work that crosses text with film, TV, internet and related influences, that is, artistic media that, visually, moves. Certainly, as you point out, this confluence is hardly new in avant garde contexts, and in fact it’s right at the historical heart of the emergence of avant garde practice in the early part of the 20th century. And it’s absolutely true that such work is hardly localized only here in Southern Calfornia, with Hollywood and that history close at hand. I’m thinking for instance of New York City filmmaker and poet Abigail Child and her genre-crossing work and interest in feminist theory. Still, I wonder whether your focus on those particular kind of multi-media or multi-disciplinary (and we’ll have to talk about the ramifications of multi- vs. un- more in a moment) forms, as opposed to say, work that crosses into realms of music or works with multiple linguistic traditions, does highlight something specific about the nature of current developments in poetry (or work, let’s say, that calls upon poetry in some degree) in this part of the world.

Lorraine, as a poet and visual artist who has recently relocated to Southern California, how do you see these kinds of multi-media, multi-disciplinary approaches in relation to the work of writers “in your generation”? If it’s even relevant to put the question that way. And what do you see as the value of this kind of crossing? What are some of the advantages or pitfalls, in your work or that of others?

Lorraine Graham: Hi Mark and Joseph. My response to you both is now so late that it is absurd, maybe, but I still feel this conversation is relevant, so I hope you're still interested in talking. I've just emerged from a fairly significant period of general malaise (don't call it depression) initially brought on, I think, by not just our no longer recent move to San Diego but also a feeling of frustration when interacting with writers in “my generation.” I love the fact that there is a proliferation of form, discipline, and materials in contemporary poetry right now, but I also feel that having a satisfying and productive conversation about contemporary poetic practice with my peers is incredibly difficult: such conversations require all the participants to have a certain degree of shared interests and the ability to agree on terminology. I guess I mean a discourse.

Obviously, no discourse (especially an interesting one) is static. Shared interests and terms shift and change, participants come and go. I'm certainly not arguing that everyone should refrain from making poetry or talking about it until they are familiar with every element of all poetic traditions. That would be ridiculous and very uptight. But I do think that the agreed meaning of certain terms I was accustomed to using in conversation like "avant-garde," "language poetry," "form," and "content" are a bit more up for grabs.

That's exciting, but it's also confusing. Certain conversations are probably perennial: I'm tempted to see the recent interest in procedural work and Oulipo as well as continued debates about Flarf as part of a fairly constant debate over the relative values of form and content in experimental poetry.

Joseph, I'm struck by your use of the phrase "media literacy" to describe the fact that some poets are perhaps more literate with cinema, art, television, and the Internet than classic, modern, and contemporary literature, or the fact that many are literate in all these media. I spent a substantial part of my life overseas or in Maine with access to only two TV channels, one of which was French-Canadian, so it's not surprising that TV used to freak me out or that my interest in film has come late. I'm literate in new media, certainly, as is most of my (our) generation, but I suspect that this literacy is uneven. While I'm increasingly comfortable participating in conversations about poetry via virtual networks, I'm still getting used to it—especially the pace at which such conversations move and the way they expand horizontally. My point, which is obvious, is that in order to become literate in any form of media, you need to have access and exposure to it so you can develop or become part of discourse about it. It s a cliché to think about New York and LA as a print versus celluloid dichotomy, but I think there is something to that. Perhaps it's not a dichotomy, but more of a continuum that could be useful for thinking about the history of innovative art and media discipline in the United States. What I mean is that geography still does matter, and art and writing communities function differently in different places.

In LA, the visual art community really does feel like it’s the center of the entire art and writing community. In San Francisco, for example, the feeling is completely different—there are plenty of visual and multimedia artists and writers doing interdisciplinary work associated with the Bay area, as you’ve noted. However, the art community there just doesn’t have the history and international reputation and connections that the writing community does. So, given the history of art and media in LA, it’s not surprising to me that so many writers in LA might feel a kind of kinship with Oulipo or conceptual writing.

Mark, I’m still not used to being called a visual artist, but it’s true that I’ve been making and showing visual work for a while now, in addition to making poems. I started making visual pieces shortly after I started teaching at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. The first college class I ever taught used the anthology Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, as a textbook. That course as much of an introduction to post-WWII art for me as it was an introduction to critical reading and writing for my students. I started making doodles and reading responses and other visual pieces for the reasons that Joseph suggested—it seemed fun. There was indeed a certain "freedom of form, discipline, and materials" that did make me think "hey, I'm going to try that." It's been relatively easy for me to share and publish my work in the context of visual poetry. That's been great, but at the same time I feel like I don't get the same quality of feedback on my visual work as I do my other work. Maybe that's because I haven't been doing it long, but it's also because, I think, editors are so happy to publish visual work by a woman. I haven't tried to share or show my work in any visual art networks because I wouldn't know where to begin—I'm not at those parties.

I think I've been talking about and conflating at least two different discourses relevant to me and my peers. These categories are inexact and too general, but bear with me for the sake of dialogue. 1) The multi-disciplinary or "un-disciplined" discourse that Joseph described. 2) A discourse that is primarily focused on innovative poetry without necessarily having shared definitions of what innovative poetry is, can be, or should be (Absent magazine and H_NGM_N magazine come to mind). OK, this response is long enough for now!