He Shoots, He Scores!

Trust me, this is hilarious.

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Little Red Leaves #3

The new issue of Little Red Leaves is out, and leafing through it a couple of lines jumped out at me:

the motor of the sunlight of the
weather steady trees

[Lisa Jarnot]

the metal
in my neck stronger than any
revisionist fantasy of Pocahontas.

[Erica Kaufman]

– The latter, especially, given the title of my poem in the issue.

Featuring work from Lisa Jarnot, Sarah Campbell, Erica Kaufman, Dennis Phillips, Sun Yung Shin, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Elizabeth Barbato, Richard Kostelanetz, Bonnie Emerick, Adam Golaski, Jessica Wickens, Bronwen Tate, David Hadbawnik, Tung-Hui Hu, Shiela Murphy, Linh Dinh, Eric Baus, and Rick London.

Also in this issue are
–an excerpt from a collaboration between Erica Lewis and Mark Stephen Finein,
–poems from Ibrahim Nasrallah (trans. Rick London and Omnia Amin),
–and an excerpt from Norma Cole’s Do the Monkey.

Tags: Literary by dhadbawnik
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Letter to Poetry Magazine, Jan. 2009

Dear Editor,

Treemont Retirement Community has a poetry study group that meets every week. We have studied individual poets and their works, processed every word of An Introduction to Poetry, worked our way through The Best Poems of the English Language, and read Garrison Keillor’s collections. So naturally I felt that a subscription to Poetry would provide the group with some stimulating discussion.

As it turns out, we cannot make head or tail out of your selected “poems.” We agree that there is no rhyme and very little reason—only phrases, snatches of words or thoughts in random order, with very little cohesion. The poems are neither enjoyable nor enlightening.

We feel that we are giving Poetry a fair trial, but are dismayed to think that this magazine represents the best of modern poetry.

Alice Pillsbury
Houston, Texas

The editor responds:

We’re grateful to the Treemont Retirement Community for their interest in Poetry. We decided to ask some of the members to discuss the poems in the current issue with us on our monthly podcast, which can be found at poetrymagazine.org. We hope other readers will listen in and let us know their responses.

The Editor

from Poetry Magazine

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Roger Snell’s The Morning

So here’s what I would propose, if this conversation moves forward: enough, please, certainly enough of the sophomoric insults. But to the extent that we’re all interested in the fate of poetry, why don’t we each post a short poem, either our own or one we admire, and say why we admire it (or what we think it does)?

– Joe Safdie, in comments box of Possum Ego

In the spirit of this post from Joe, a poem from The Morning by Roger Snell:

lost car comes
in on the morning
light, off reflecting pool
of Creeley
quiet as is proper for such places
this space between
each bale of words
a fistful of green shoots
tansy on hill
fissures of blue

What I like here is the poem’s engagement with both sense and reading practice — namely, the sensuality of reading, the way perception of both words and environment can be heightened by the intimacy of a book and one’s attention. It’s a modest poem in its way; doesn’t try to squeeze too much out of the small moment it opens out from, yet bears repeated readings. Also doesn’t try to implicate me in the poem or force my attention towards some overbearing emotion or insight; rather, lets me ride / read along with it. I like that the italicized Creeley line, from his poem “Return,” acts not as as “return” here (in that poem the line’s echoed later, “Quiet as is proper for such people”) but a turn — or hinge — midway through the piece. Thus, while it shares the solitary, reflective tone of that poem, it also challenges, perhaps critiques, the Creeley line (as it’s also the longest line here), and seems to want to go outward, where that poem goes inward (last lines: “Enough for now to be here, and / To know my door is one of these.”). The musical qualities of the poem are, I think, pretty evident — not flashy, highly competent. I’d like to write a fuller consideration of this book, but given Joe’s call, I just wanted to get this quick mention out there. You’re right, Joe; time to start talking about what we like!

Available via Bootstrap Press and SPD.

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Flarf — another view

The following is K. Silem Mohammad’s five-point summary / response to the recent “charges” made against Flarf. I’m just about done with this carousel ride, but there’s actually a pretty good back-and-forth as well in the comments box of Dale’s recent post.

Enjoy (and, as always, let me know what you think):

1. Flarf appropriates the discourse of many persons, many of them undoubtedly disempowered, by scavenging the traces of their utterances on the internet for use in the composition of poems. Since no credit is given to these persons, and since some of said discourse is extremely stupid, it is evident that Flarf is mocking the underclasses.

2. Flarf deploys a wide sampling of sometimes tasteless and insensitive language under the guise of social critique, but in ways that make it difficult for some readers (particularly those who are ignorant of the use/mention distinction, or who reject flatly on moral grounds anything that resembles irony) to tell the difference between said critique and the injuries perpetrated by the original subjects who are the source of that language.

3. Flarf sometimes takes advantage of the media attention that is focused upon it (a relatively small amount of attention compared to that enjoyed by more commercially viable art forms such as music, customized T-shirt design, or those plastic testicles some people hang from the tailgates of their pickup trucks, but more than is usually focused upon the work of Dale or his friends, and therefore enough to throw into disequilibrium the fragile economy of all the poetic communities concerned), thus making no attempt to hide its complicity in the Spectacle.

4. Flarf commits the dual error of a) resorting to humor as a means of engaging its readers, in a social climate where humor must be considered a grossly self-indulgent bourgeois barbarism; and b) not always bothering to make sure its jokes are funny.

5. Flarf fails to provide a coherent theoretical apparatus with which to contextualize its disruptions of sense and syntax as acceptable modes of political intervention, and so leaves itself open to the charge of willful obscurantism. This failure is exacerbated by the apparently total lack of interest exhibited by most Flarfists in answering its detractors’ demands for such an accounting.

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Scenes from the War

There’s been a highly interesting, contentious, engaging, thought-provoking, at times over-the-top, at others simply silly, battle being waged over the past couple weeks regarding Flarf. My engagement in this fray has mostly been via Dale Smith’s blog possum ego, though it’s played out on the territory of several other blogs as well. The dramatis personae on various fronts include Dale, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Ben Friedlander, K. Silem Mohammad, Kent Johnson, John Latta, Joe Safdie, Michael Robbins, Gary Sullivan, Jordan Davis … (I’m deliberately naming names here for the benefit of those who keep themselves on Google Alert).

Andrew Neuendorf has chimed in as well, asking on his own and others’ blogs whether some of the current criticism isn’t partly or mostly a matter of professional jealousy, given the current attention (NPR, the Nation, etc.) being directed at Flarf. A fair enough question. And one that I can’t answer for everyone, except insofar as I personally know some of these poets and believe that, for them as for me, the crux of the matter really is one of those vital sticking points that’s actually worth fighting for, the stakes being a great deal more important than who’s getting reviewed where. But I leave the discernment of personal motives to those who actually know them, or feel confident in claiming them.

Just one of the sticking points, perhaps the main one, I will briefly develop here, before I dip my head back into some books. Dale Smith crystallizes the theoretical side of the argument in his post on Symbolic Efficiency:

If reality and symbolization split apart altogether, we make no claims of knowledge, only we spin our narratives within a void of meaningful possibility: we are left with appetite, and the sheer reduplication of words devoid of significance in a corresponding reality.

Zizek and others see a decline in symbolic efficiency, and indicate that it’s a result of the ongoing transformation of capitalism. I suggested that Flarf naively contributes to this decline not because of its recycling of texts or its hyposyntax, but because it doesn’t account for its symbolization process—doesn’t suppose the significance of the big Other, nor does it much seek association between its symbolic acts and a corresponding reality.

If I understand this properly, it relates to what I think of as a lack of responsibility inherent in the Flarf project. We already stand at a remove from ourselves, and language, and ourselves in language. Generally speaking, humans who type things into the void of the internet are already automatically disconnected from their words in a way that someone speaking face-to-face would not be, or, for that matter, someone writing for print. Just one small but important example is the ability to post letters and blog comments and be “present” in a chat room anonymously or under a pseudonym. A quick scroll through such fields shows how quickly the discourse degenerates into insults, platitudes, and lazy, disjointed thinking that says nothing, connects with nothing. Through the lens of Google, words are freed to be “things” — not in the sense that Byron would have had it, but “devoid of significance in a corresponding reality,” free-floating and able to be perverted, co-opted and sold.

If the Flarf project were a radical critique of this process — as I believe it can and possibly has been in certain authors’ hands — I would be more apt to celebrate it. (I realize, by the way, that there is a critique of language coming from an entirely different vector that emerges from linguistics theory and philosophy, which would be equally as troubled by the Byronic, Romantic notion of “words as things” as I am by the “decline in symbolic efficiency.”) However, I’ve too often perceived Flarf as not really offering this critique; instead, like brokers high up in a Madoff-type investment scheme, they’ve taken advantage of the “excess” burned off in the Internet’s endless proliferation, without really paying the price. I’m talking, mostly, about the tendency of Flarf to profit at the expense of the aforementioned “disembodied,” lazy thinking and writing it gleans from the WWW.

I realize this is a gross generalization based on not one specific example of a poem or author. Drew Gardner’s recent post on Dale’s blog, in defense of his use of the web as a “language chord” that offers access to both high and low, from ordinary speech to Shakespeare, is intriguing to me, though it ultimately does not, I think, address the above issue. But I’m willing to be convinced. Also I will, as time and energy allow, explore more specific authors and texts and respond to those.

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