Stan Apps on the Flarf/Conceptual Issue of Poetry Magazine

I find Stan Apps' take on the very odd latest issue of Poetry Magazine intriguing.

Competence and incompetence, refinement and vulgarity are only a few of the concepts that Stan believes are called into question by this certainly one-of-a-kind issue.

quick takes

Here are some books of poems I’ve been enjoying recently. I’d like to write more about these books later if I ever have more time, but who knows when I will? Outside of business for work, at most I can read a few poems here and there. I mean, there's only five minutes until the door opens.


Robert Mittenthal, Value UnMapped

Is it possible to be a major contemporary poet that no one much has heard of? Robert Mittenthal might be an example. His poetry is always structurally complex, socially insightful, and more lyrical than one might expect for a poet who understands so much about the relation between language, history, and large-scale social structures. Value Unmapped, his new chapbook, starts out with a few intriguing short poems, perhaps not his most energetic work, that nonetheless bristle with misdirection and lost chances. The second half of the chapbook, though, contains the major work here, the long poem “Value UnMapped,” which is as good a poem as I’ve read by anybody in a while, a meditation on the alienation fostered by a public world in which words rarely mean what they say. “I saw you at the stop and pray, a temple built to Morse comma Samuel. The guy who dashed and dotted—fingers snapping in synch with his head—so that our mouths rope off whatever miswired thought.” Mittenthal lives in Seattle but in its understanding of the relation between political and linguistic structures, his writing is closest in spirit to the poets of Vancouver (where he lived for some years). If you see his work somewhere, don’t pass it by.


Susan Landers, Covers

This second book by Susan Landers came as quite a surprise to me because it’s so completely unlike her first book. A sort of landscape poetry of contemporary, post 9/11 NYC is juxtaposed and intermingled with a rewriting, and a loosely procedural writing through, of Dante’s Inferno. I was somewhat skeptical of the concept at first: projects that write through another text can often turn into dry, overly intellectual exercises (and I say this having done them myself), and the metaphorical connection between hell and NYC seems a tad strained and obvious. But the poems themselves quickly overcame these worries by being so consistently inventive and powerful: “nothing about this is funny/ the way I come to enter this place / I am crowded by sleep and sleepy crowds crowding/” The quick cuts between lines and social frameworks make this book a very dynamic reading experience.


Joe Ross, EQUATIONS = equals

The world of poetry changes fast. Now that he’s lived in Paris for a few years, I’m not sure how many American poets remain aware of Joe Ross (I can hear Johannes Goransson complaining already, and rightly so). Joe’s writing has always been carefully crafted, not to mention socially and politically thoughtful. Among his numerous books and chapbooks, EQUATIONS just might be the best, a book that’s unafraid to risk emotional darkness along with its social insights. Don’t read more than a few at a time; short though they are, these are poems that require slowing down. They’re flatly conversational yet constantly veering towards hinted-at abysses: “There is no it there being smoked to the core. Empty rooms and hope: left./Stranded on the edge of strategy, you are the only and forget once again comes to mind.” I may not see Joe on the streets of DC anymore, but these new poems are ones I’m going to think about a long time.


Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney, Something Really Wonderful

If Elisa Gabbert isn’t my favorite writer among a younger generation of lyric poets whom I’ve never met, then.... well, wait, she is my favorite of those poets. Hands down, as they say. These poems, co-written with Kathleen Rooney, have some of the necessary creakiness of co-written works, but that creakiness only further serves the charm and biting humor that makes these poems, well, just more entertaining than poems are supposed to be. And I’m not using the word “entertaining” as some kind of sly put down either. These poems have more human interaction going on in a couple of lines than many writers manage in a couple of books. The linguistic energy and, really, virtuosity, can be stunning. These are poems that know what people are like when they’re around people. “Say your prayers, princess—/I didn’t become a knight to meet girls./I wouldn’t slay a dragon—/I became a knight to meet dragons.” I have to admit that I don’t know Kathleen Rooney’s solo writing, but I look forward to finding out more.


Vanessa Place, Dies: A Sentence

This first book by Los Angeles area writer Vanessa Place is only one sentence long. Kinda screwed up minimalism is that? But the sentence itself may just be the longest single sentence ever written. I’m still checking that out, so if anybody knows any sentences that are more than 130 pages, please fill me in. Clearly, such a book risks being mere intellectual exercise. But a startling range of subjects emerge and re-emerge in an obsessive focus that is easy to pay attention to and is simultaneously a rejection of singular focus. Read it directly from beginning to end, if you can manage that, or jump around. I was reminded somewhat of Steve McCafferys book Black Debt, at least on the level of the combination of intense restraint and intense chaos. And there’s black humor in plentiful doses too. “...those who would refuse to be the Empire’s lapdog, don’t fret, my pets, you’ll get the hang soon enough, and if not that, the gate...” I’ll be interested to see where Place’s work goes next.

a poet to look out for

An up-and-coming poet whose work has remained on my mind since I read it for the first time this year is Elisa Gabbert, whose 2007 chapbook Thanks for Sending the Engine was published by Kitchen Press. Her work resonates for me with a number of other outstanding women poets who have been around a little longer: K. Lorraine Graham (towards whose work I’m understandably partial), Stephanie Young, and precursors by only a few more years like Nada Gordon and Catherine Wagner. All of their writing shares a few things in common; restless energy, a willingness to turn the expected upside down, and an ability to bluntly startle with things usually supposed to remain unsaid. There’s a relationship between sexual desire, anger, and an exploration of the dynamics of power in specific human interactions that appears in the writing of these women and that strikes me as different from what came before it. But I’m not sure I can define that difference just yet. Maybe it’s a kind of aggressive femininity, an active contradiction that challenges the common definition of femininity in cultural studies contexts as a passivity born of powerlessness.

Thanks For Sending The Engine has a number of really memorable poems, funny, insightful and daring. Gabbert is eager to put the more intense aspects of human behavior on display, even and especially those things that we all know we’re supposed to keep to ourselves: contradictions, blindspots, neediness, annoyance, the desire to act badly just so we don’t have to listen to somebody drone on about everything that’s safe to say. An exhilarating chaos runs through her poems, one that’s aware of itself as performance at the same that the performance collapses distinctions between what’s playful and what’s serious. The metaphor/image game poems like "What The World Was Like" or "Blogpoem W/Epigraph" show a flexible, wide-ranging, but also relaxed ability with language. But as fun as they are at moments, they’re a little less down and dirty than my favorite poems here: "Blogpoem w/Ellipses,", "Lousy Day Blogpoem," "Blogpoem @Sea," to name just some.

Here’s the opening of "Blogpoem W/DTHWSH”:

Take me to the library: I’m in the mood
to get murdered. Mm, murder in the stacks:
shove the LING shelving over and let those
uncracked grammars in teal and burnt umber
make papery work of the burying. Chris,
this is me courting depression, or it courting
me. I’m not seduced by death, just death’s
techniques—the way it lets me let it buy me
a drink. Then drives me home with the lights
off, in stealth mode. I want that void IN me.

If the casual line breaks seem obviously New York School, the frenetic and fierce perversity feels unique. The lines attack and reveal at the same time. The narrator may care what Chris thinks but that’s not going to stop her from requiring Chris, and herself, to understand exactly what’s on her mind. But the desire for self-destruction expressed here isn’t the same as giving way to that desire. Instead, the bluntness of the sexual metaphor at the end of the passage suggests not so much a giving in to the death drive as a willingness to welcome it and acknowledge its presence, then to go on from there.

In her poems, Gabbert relentlessly turns inside out the daily foibles of personal relationships and people's fucked up feelings, including the narrator's own. And she does it frequently with a frame of reference that understands the larger contexts of social institutions and art. I wonder whether as Gabbert’s writing continues she’ll be able to stretch to more areas outside the interpersonal, or find new ways of exploring it. This isn’t a criticism so much as a way of asking whether her poems can continue to be in the eye of the maelstrom, or whether as time goes on that focus will become a restraint that she’ll feel the need to step outside of. But maybe that’s just a question from right out of the boring drone that Gabbert, and so many of the rest of us if we can be honest, have gotten tired of hearing. If as Frank O’Hara said, “You just go on your nerve,” Gabbert’s got as much nerve as anybody. For a first chapbook, Thanks For Sending the Engine is all that it needs to be to make all sorts of things happen. Although I’ve never met her or heard her read, if she’s giving a reading anywhere near you, go see it.

And to see where she’s started to go next, check out even the details have details, a workshop blog of one-a-day poems for poetry month written by Elisa and her collaborator Kathleen Rooney.