Suzanne Dathe, Grenoble, France – Can We Win? (On Carol Mirakove's Poetry)

[Here's a short essay I wrote for Keston Sutherland's poetry zine Quid. I still don't have ordering information for this issue but if you are interested in acquiring one please write to me. "Suzanne Dathe, Grenoble, France" is the first name on an anti-war email petition that I received about 30 times over the course of the week leading up to the writing of this article on 10/11/02.]

Suzanne Dathe, Grenoble, France – Can We Win?
(On Carol Mirakove's Poetry)

Some kind of argot –

not entirely given over to the track star at Mineola Prep model – these poems are worked – but nonetheless somewhere in the sprawl of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, jacked-in but running freely through the night that could be day – "muscle a language / monumental / & free" – trying to move forward – avoiding the snipers – scanning the roadside – refiguring the spectacle less as a saturating, unlocatable ethos but as an array of robotic effigies, the divisible choruses of ad agents, secret agent men, agent oranges, and agency debilitators choked up by the nefarious database and becoming Senators – I guess one might suggest she turns it [the language game, or Debord’s "game of war"] into a video game, L.A. freestyle, fusing Flash sprites from this herecleitian noize – but she’s hired the best animators (pals of David Choe), best screenwriters (that would be the poets she’s read and emulated, several including Rod Smith and Heather Fuller from DC days) and her software has pledged strict allegiance to grassroot copyleft principles – the "anxiety of influence" of choice for code writers once known as "hacks" –

[I plug allergens… into the engines… of Audiogalaxy Satelitte… and the repository... from which I stream… one frisson... undivided… with listservs… and Rasputina… for all…] – etc.

Our speech will occasionally be struck by a flying neutrino and the social glue of the lyric will turn into shards – "chewtoy colliding somewhere with dust" – we somehow get back into it, thanking the machinery [melancholy?] of the page, especially Nurse Ratchett’s syndicated tab key (keeping the runaway spaces in check) – high school disciplines including Projectivism (Olson, but I champion Morley) and performance poetry’s post-hip hop [?] "new fusion" [!] yawp, but also Pound’s clear imagistic coins and Bernstein’s sonic dada empurplement – to wrest control and even a momentary classical stasis from a datachick’s tendency to mallarmé one’s way across the white amidst the throes of chance which are really the underlying op sys gone sluriously bonkers –

The heartfelt themes mingle freely with the ironies – the "TV mantis / placing her neck on the guillotine" with the "fuck you I pray / for a big soundtrack" – the rape with the camp – [these are poems from 3 cities, as Carol has informed me in an email: DC, LA, and NY – so there’s something following her everywhere] – we call these… "metastases," in Wilkinson’s sense, the sites of pain that appear in different poems and draw our attention to the borders of the lyrical-corpus-as-somatic-graph as they are limned by acute punkts –

Fake punk bands, two of three eyes on the market, seem to want to say: anyone over 25 looks so old – but we are all over 80 and struggle with a deforming language of impressions, experience, and cultural obsolescence [their omniscence] – that nature’s legs lag behind the further we grow from the Modernist moment and self-creation is more individualized than ever, which is to say the older are farther from youth but closer to the old, sterling Futures shared by a mobilized communal imagination. Now [these are the conversations my friends and I have] there seems a dearth of major dreaming in the follow-up generations, one symptom of which is that they can’t find utopian moments when bringing it down a notch – "devoid of drapes / and bedspreads / the clock’s on pause / the window part of / the outside / eyes the surface / this / just beneath just / beneath " – that New York strategy ["habitus?" asks R. Toscano] of being the darkest, hippest thing on earth though writing about flowers, Sunday morning and loving Jimmy Schuyler – [z.b. I saw Richard Hell at two St. Mark's memorials this month, for Kenneth Koch and John Wieners, which isn’t surprising but might be chaos theory for some with doctoral dividends] – and conveyed through language uncluttered by mannerist elaborations [I’d like that to be the good new magic but I’m waiting for the overture to end… ] – American plain-song, of course, a clean slate for microtonal aesthletics…

[the other folks in my office aren’t talking to me because they see I am reading these poems –
I suppose I always am because they don’t talk to me even when I’m not holding 8.5 x 11 soon to be A4 sheets
– it’s too bad –
– I’d tell them of the mirakove worker and the minus signs that became an em-daschle in my Word autoformat mode…] –

Of course I’d like to mention William Carlos Williams, the poem as a single motion – in Mirakove’s case, perhaps a spill, or a butoh-like abandon in which the body is given over entirely to gravity (Min Tanaka, when asked about his jump: "I didn’t jump, I fell"), but with an electric animé splendor – so that at the finale of "extensity: to Mina Loy" there is that WCW trick of ending a poem with one little pocket of divergent activity ("this was / Icarus falling") quite often closing on a gerund or adverb: "tumbling / seductions / that would also be made / of glass & flower / vengefully." This "leaves them wanting more" but also continues the activity of the poem beyond it, deeper into the pit of the entropic flowerpot or contemplating the emotional and moral elements that have become LIVED because we have shared the wandering – like the camera drawing back at the end of a feature (for instance, Easy Rider, our Fonda-ness enflamed) – something still happening, it’s not strictly death, so why stop the camera now?

I write "an argot" above, meaning I guess those criminal or inner-city languages that surface like pearls in which neologisms and nicknames are pretty much the same thing – "sucktank / abducted weapon / at the stucco" – and reflect some sort of urban verbscape of "snipers," "vixens," – as I suggested earlier (drawing from the same poem "girl in dunes"), Mirakove is hardly a meditative poet in any conventional sense nor a language poet – there are constant and never indifferent negotiations between the will to self and the impositions of the world’s image banks – one can certainly not do without the other (and Carol, that's her name, has long been the snappiest, but also most giddily recombinatory, dresser on the NY scene) – Baudelaire loved artifice as did Oscar Wilde but New York vatics tend toward the newspaper realism of faded black jeans and poems of the catholic self, simply because Dada is everywhere and there is hardly need to dress up when everything’s on the verge of becoming a ready-made

(so you thought – not any longer – though the seventies will be back sooner than you’d like as this year’s budget crisis unfolds – piles of garbage and subway fare hikes, David Bowie kissed on the lips singing "I am a DJ," etc. etc. – probably not as interesting, but yet fodder of an urban apocalypsists imagination, more readymades – )

now that the dot com bust has also revealed to us how uninteresting our fashion sense has been [and how interesting the 20th century can be!] we’ll like that artifice spirit coming back, but with cybernetic tensegrity, grafted to the soft tissue between the bones, a "guttered ballerina," as nothing can be plain anymore – "the 'Nineties' tried your game / And died, there’s nothing in it" (Pound).

Words just sort of drop in in this non-linear lyric writing – no base tone, always ready to spring – Mirakove

it’s so possible to be indifferent, the first thing the fake punk bands do, elevating middle-class indirection to a cardboard socialite platform (an enervated Alex Katz), but there’s something to be said for a poem that won’t suffer indifference after having already rented it kühl loft space deep in its agitant's heart – "it doesn’t pay to not be complex, muting in an ear leaves chained an archived document to affront shellac, she is susceptible to faith" – and in another poem: "you were bored out of long whatevers," or "you distracted your distraction without careless closeness away from that beginning" – it’s hard to start where one is I suppose –

there is nothing natural about this "argot," I think she made it up.

Posted by Brian Stefans at December 31, 2002 12:21 PM