Flarf / Conceptual in Poetry p. I

It’s a very strange moment in the world of poetry. Not unlike the kind of partisan bickering and ad hominem sniping that’s transforming the world of politics into more and more of a vicious bloodsport, where the winners gloat insufferably on blogs and comment threads and the losers lick their wounds and launch conspiracy theories on Facebook walls and in chatrooms, there is very little room for common ground and little possibility of productive debate.

The one thing everyone can agree on is that their kind of poetry is better than everyone else’s. A standard move seems to be to set up a straw man of narrative-based, linear, boring, lyric poetry that emerges from a cohesive “I” (in other words, bad poetry), and then claim that [fill-in-the-blank] poetry is finally breaking us out of the chains of that standard lyric ego. Gary Sullivan makes this claim for Flarf in an interview from three years ago; Bruce Andrews makes it retroactively in his recent speech delivered at Orono; now, Kenny Goldsmith performs an almost identical move in the new issue of Poetry. Rich Owens has posted perhaps the most thorough and trenchant response to this introductory essay, and its claims, that I’ve seen; I wanted to briefly take a look at the issue as a whole, which includes the usual Poetry mag fare, sandwiched around a special feature devoted to Flarf and Conceptual poetry, edited by Mr. Goldsmith.

There are, as one would expect in the flagship publication for mainstream poetry (or what passes for mainstream in the niche world of poetry), some big names in the first half of the magazine. Tony Hoagland, who has written some pretty good poems here and there, starts things off with a real clunker. Titled “At the Galleria Shopping Mall,” it reflects an affluent minor-key angst of just the kind one might expect from the title, with lines like “So let it begin. Let her be dipped in the dazzling bounty / and raised and wrung out again and again. / And let us watch.”

Borderline creepy (the narrator is describing a shopping trip with his niece), definitely overwrought, just the kind of bad, boring poem that the above-mentioned avantists would free us from — deservedly so. Not much later, Charles Simic — and again, Simic’s early work, especially in the prose poem, was often fantastic — delivers these lines in his poem “The Melon”:

The children were going back to school.
Their mother, passing out paper plates,
Would not live to see the leaves fall.

Passively voiced, uninterestingly phrased, and worst of all begging the question of the readers’ response, these lines would have been met with derision in a beginning poetry workshop. There is perhaps no worse poet writing today than one who’s so highly lauded that his or her merest scribblings are eagerly gobbled up by any editor.

It goes on like that. It takes until 15 pages in for any humor to break through — a piece by John Hodgen that applies hip-hop phrasing and rhyme to a poem about a man on Viagra. Poems by Tim Dlugos (who died in 1990) do very interesting things with words, and are the first in this number that challenge the reader to do more than follow the lines from left to right and nod along in easy agreement. This is a pretty good poem:

Mehr Licht

were the last words
of Goethe on his
deathbed as the darkness
closed around him.
But Mayor Licht
was also the chief
executive of Providence,
Rhode Island in the early
Eighties. I’m dreaming
of the best political
commercial of all time–
Weimer in the 1830s,
Goethe gasping “Mehr licht,
mehr licht”–and suddenly
Mayor Harry Licht of Providence
appears to pump the paw
of the poet, and save the day.

The poem moves with associative wit in — dare I say it? — an almost Flarfian way, without straining for too much, either in phrasing or humor. Not terribly challenging, but at least it doesn’t try the reader’s patience with overloaded imagery or forced syntax. Likewise the Ange Mlinko poem that follows — a condensed meditation that introduces interesting juxtapositions a la a post-NY school approach. It’s very readable.

But here are some of the titles that follow: “After the Stroke” (David Bottoms), “My Soul” (Richard Lehnert), “Identity” (W.S. Merwin), and, most unfortunately, “Blowing the Fluff Away” by Robyn Sarah. That piece, especially — concerning an “unknown bloom” that apparently serves as metaphor for a relationship gone to seed, and chock full of facile end rhymes that only call attention to the stilted rhythm of the lines themselves, screams out for the kind of parody that the avantists propose to offer. At the very least, it puts one very much in sympathy with the broad outlines of their project.

So to Kenny Goldsmith’s intro. I’ve heard it said privately that Goldsmith’s intro was aimed at readers who might not be familiar with the various streams, movements, and schools that have formed in the world of poetry over the past 80 years or so. Yet, I find it hard to imagine such a reader, especially given the very narrow cultural niche that poetry occupies. I would have to assume that the average reader of Poetry is either a) a graduate from an MFA program, where the various discourses starting with and responding to Modernism would have been covered, or b) a practicing poet who has taken it upon him- or herself to go beyond Whitman and the tepid offerings of mags like Poetry.

In any event, rarely has a revolution been launched with such glib, self-congratulatory, off-putting language as this. “Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past 100 years, has left the building.” As in his editorial in poetry.org last January, Goldsmith can’t be bothered with things like details and historical accuracy. For someone who assumes a low level of poetic background in his readers, Goldsmith doesn’t do much to contextualize his claims.

“There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty.”

Statements like these — and the intro’s full of them — would be laughable if they weren’t so astonishingly offensive. So — everyone not on board this train has suffered from literary anorexia, refuses to have fun, and also can’t “feel” language. All right. Glad we got that straight. But the best is yet to come:

What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end…

Once more, Goldsmith plays fast and loose with his datelines. First, I could swear I attended a launch reading for Deer Head Nation (as well as Rodney Koeneke‘s Rouge State) at SPT sometime in 2001, 2002 at the latest. Flarf — almost from the first an incredibly cohesive movement — must be at least 7 or 8 years old by now. But that’s quibbling next to the larger issue of pretending that Conceptual Writing as envisaged by Goldsmith has only existed for five short years.

It’s nonsense. Rich Owens discusses this at length in his post. Without the tradition of conceptual writing that goes back at least to Fluxus writers, Steve McCaffery, Dick Higgins et al., starting in the 1950s-60s (themselves inspired by 1920s Dada, which in turn owes a debt to Futurism, etc etc), the Conceptual Writing that Goldsmith proposes simply could not exist. It’s especially difficult to stomach given that one of Goldsmith’s featured writers, Christian Bök, is a well-known associate (if not a member?) of OuLiPo, which likewise has existed for going on 50 years.

Anyway, the next bit, wherein Goldsmith answers his own question, is even more egregious:

“Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out, as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean.”

There’s so much wrong here that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s not so much the willful ignorance of what good poets have been doing with identity going back hundreds, if not thousands of years (read the Anglo Saxon elegies sometime), it’s the underlying assumption that only now, with the advent of this little screen and the ability to click here and there, we’re finally free from the shackles of identity. What an impoverished view of literary history and poetic tradition.

Next, the equally wrongheaded idea that “sincerity must be tossed out,” which does not at all follow from the notion of messing with identity. Pessoa, that master of multiple identities, perhaps put it best in his poem “Autopsychography”:

The poet is a faker
who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
of pain he feels in fact.

(forgive the poor translation.)

The idea is that no matter how unsettled and unsettling the identity or identities in a poem is for the poet and, hopefully, the reader, there has to be some knife twist of pain, heart, human feeling involved, otherwise as a reader I’m simply not interested, no matter how high the concept behind it. As I’ve written elsewhere, this holds especially true for Flarf. Frankly I see only two moves possible when it comes to the wholesale importing of others’ language into one’s poems: the sort of easy parody that Flarf is very much prone to, and which Kent Johnson has often railed against, and a radical recontextualizing of genuine expression that strips away whatever self-consciousness existed in the initial utterance, leaving real feelings to stand alone in an almost unbearably naked way.

As far as the last part of Goldsmith’s essay — the loosely defined idea of “materiality” (again dealt with by Rich) and the “quantity of words having more bearing on a poem than what they mean,” I don’t see how that gets us any further than the passel of bad slam poetry to which we were subjected all throughout the 1990s. Also, some of the poems that follow in the actual feature contradict this statement in really interesting ways.

But more on that tomorrow.