Loose Notes on the "Creeps" Essay

[Kasey Mohammad recently wrote a longish essay in response to my essay called "When Lilacs Last in the Door," which appears on Steve Evan's Third Factory website. Ron Silliman has posted a response to Kasey's essay on his blog (David Hess did also, though I haven't read it), and in turn, because I have this bad habit of responding to "assignments," I have constructed a few hastily written thoughts which I am sending off to Kasey and Ron in an email, I guess with the hope that it will be posted on their blogs.]

Hi Ron and Kasey,

I try not to respond to writing about my writing to avoid the “echo chamber” effect and also to curtail any elevated sense of self-consideration about what I am doing, since, after all, like everyone else I probably think a bit too much about what I am doing, what people think I am doing, etc. Better to pretend it's not happening, like in that Roy Lichtenstein painting of that woman drowning, and the thought bubble saying “This is not happening.”

But nonetheless, here are a few quick notes to clarify and hopefully further confuse the situation.

I should mention, first, that I have translated the essay into synthetic Scots and that it appears in Fashionable Noise: on digital poetics, forthcoming from Atelos. The poems are also translated into Scots, though in what I hope is an absurdly literal fashion, illustrating what I elsewhere describe in the book as the vulnerability of digitized text to algorithmic processes, but also the possibility of “teleactive” literary activity in web culture -- the ability to participate and influence the distribution of ideas and even the management of “cultural capital” in real-time from great distances (it seems Silliman's Blog confirms the efficacy of this formulation). So, I am trying to make Kevin Davies known as the great Scottish poet, as he damn well should be.

Also, the essay was a direct response not only to the substance of Steven Burt's “Ellipticist” essay but to the style. I wanted to explore a rhetoric that I hadn't previously used, or at least signed my name to, and also to test whether such an absurd term as the “Creeps” would ever actually be adopted in the critical world -- all of this is stated in the essay.

On lists: I am generally against lists as a critical strategy, whether they be the lists at the end of Harold Bloom's books (The Western Canon, most obviously) or, yes, the ones prefacing In The American Tree and The Art of Practice. The reason for this is that it is much more easy to include a writer whose work one has not read or even ever enjoyed on a list than it is to write insightful comments about this writer's work -- a list takes easy advantage of the Adamic power of “naming” without doing the heavier, more threatening work of going out on a limb in support of the project of another writer. It puts one who has not been named in the position of waiting to be “named,” whereas many of us choose -- by instinct -- to avoid responding to such scholastic perspectives.

But also, the kind of writing such a list engenders in response is almost always of the “why is so and so in, why another out” variety, which I find not productive (this goes as well for anthologies). Ezra Pound's list of Imagists was in fact quite short, and very imperfect, but his dogma -- I like dogma better, believe it or not, though lie as often in my dogmatic statements as I do in my lists -- seems to me to have had a more lasting, usefully provocative effect. There is a mistaken assumption that the list of names is more democratic -- has closer ties to some concept of "freedom" -- than a more didactic, overdetermined prose, but I feel that the latter method, when used well, creates more opportunities for useful proliferation of ideas -- it is engendering.

That said, lists are fun, and I do believe all of the poets (or rather, the books) belong on that list. I think of the list as a rebus, and leave it up to the reader to figure exactly how the individual element belongs within the parameters being described in the body of the essay. And all of the books were published since 1996 or so (I don’t remember what I wrote), and I’ve enjoyed reading them much more than I enjoy a similar list of books published around, say, 1991 -- the “New Coast” time, which, for me, was a rather diffuse time for poetry in the United States. I'd rather hear useful, engaging rhetoric that is nonetheless incorrect (think of Rimbaud's Lettre du Voyant) than anything that could be mistaken for indifferent, even "even-handed," prose. (That said, I'm actually quite a nice guy in person.)

This is going on too long... I'll just hit some points, in defense I suppose.

I'm always amused by people who tend to see Jennifer Moxley's work as some sort of “return” to emotion, affect, sentiment, and how few people really think that there is an underlying humor, even irony, to her use of archaic tropes, etc. One can look at the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads to see that the motion of JM's writing is neither backward nor forward but both: maybe a "smart" (as in "smart bomb") pinpointing of that one cataclysmic moment when the Enlightenment and the "cult of reason" turned into Romanticism (and its attendant cults).

People seem to think that Jennifer’s work singled that it was ok to be “honest” and “candid” again, when it strikes me that -- compared to, say, the later poems of Williams, like “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” which I feel much of The Sense Record responds to -- the apparent emotional complexity of her work is actually more attributable to the drama, in the reader’s mind, of trying to determine how exactly she feels toward the language she is using. Most of the salient features of her poems can be attributed to her reading of books, even dictionaries (like Mullen’s Muse & Drudge language coming from Clarence Major’s Dictionary) and how she feels, as a woman who identifies with the working class, utilizing these words. (A similar drama is at play in Pamela Lu's novel, I think.)

If that's what you mean by epistemological issues, then I guess you have a point, but I guess my point is that the flavor of Moxley's writing is a far cry from that of Burt's essay -- which, again, is partly what this is a response to -- in that her project is conceptually cleaner (she is not knocked off her pedestal with every opportunity for a pregnant white space or a curious paradox) and she follows through with the premises of her poems (the Apollinaire riff, for example, or any metrical base note that she decides to declare in the first ten or so lines) that is absent from the more free-wheeling style of the "elliptical writers." There isn't any "magical realism" in Moxley's work much as there might be in, say, Michael Palmer's, and there is always a sense of pushing toward something "candid" in JM that attempts to critique the very artifice being employed while -- in the fashion of "emotional exhibitionism" as I write elsewhere of JM -- giving herself very much over to it.

It's also a form of "camp" -- John Wilkinson links her writing to John Wieners in this fashion -- that, were I to have thought of it, might have been a useful term to employ in the essay (though I don't think Darren Wershler-Henry, for instance, is writing in any sort of drag).

Ok, I'm getting tired... I wish Kasey would post his essay online somewhere so I can cut and paste a few things from it. The phrase "spectacularly unusable" seems a useful one, for example, and the "trope of getting it wrong" is also provocative -- he (you, Kasey) accurately, for me, described how the essay was both bosh at heart but useful to describe, which is I suppose something I try to achieve in my "writings on poetics".

As for community: my sense is that I am involved in an international community of writers and artists, and that, in fact, I am much closer in spirit, and even friendship, to some writers in Toronto (in terms of the digital stuff) and the U.K. (at least when Miles Champion was there) than I am to many of the writers here in New York (but, of course, there are hundreds of those, many of them close friends). Nonetheless -- and the project of Circulars has brought this to the fore, to me -- we've all been "in touch" with each other, even if talking past each other, since the internet took off, and that, in "moments of scandal" (as I write in the essay), there is a sort of contraction that occurs among these poets no matter how geographically and even aesthetically diverse they are.

I am on the verge of believing that, in politics, one can point to the presence of virtual countries -- not just communities -- that are already operating in a fashion directly contradicting the legal fashions as laid out by the government-entertainment complex (file swapping being the most salient feature, but also indy media sites that are more read than, say, the NYTimes site), and that these people will be able to behave in unison, in a coordinated fashion, regardless of how the governments of the members of these virtual "countries" are constructed. This may seem like science fiction for now, but my sense is that there is a hot lava working under the hardened bedrock of governments and any sort of institutional structure that accepted as legal, productive, useful, etc. and that it can behave as an organism in times of crisis to terrible effect. (Pardon the awkward metaphors.)

What this has to do with the "Creeps"? I guess I'm just pointing to how one can be "invisible" and "flea-like" and yet not feel so terribly small, since after all our lateral acknowledgement of each other across the horizon of today is far vaster than can be understood within the paradigm of looking for the "break with the past", pointing to singular phenomenon like "New American Poetry." I'm more interested in Caroline Bergvall, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Tom Leonard right now than I am in New Americans, but also in Dagmar's Chili Pitas, Aurelia Harvey and Ivan Brunetti, silly as that sounds. (This weekend, I am being interviewed by Giselle Bieugleman, a Brazilian digital artist, about my "hacktivism," as another example.) To break out of one's community has nothing to do with becoming part of a "mainstream" so much as becoming a node in larger cultural structures that are not given air-time in anything that could be considered a reputable media venue.

I don't think this is so pathetic as you make it sound, nor do I think that there is any sense among my peers that we don't know what we're doing here (but I love the fact that you know the song, which isn't in fact very good). My sense is that, were one to collect all of the various statements about what Language poetry was supposed to be "about," as a gesture, a coherent aesthetic moment, one would see more holes -- more porousness -- than unity, making one wonder whether the dictatorship of a Breton (which, after all, spawned Guy Debord, another useful aesthetic dictator), was more seminal in the long run than the all-inclusive good vibrations, but ultimately contradictory and even, to some, substanceless, project of Language writing -- at least Breton was a moving target, a "body" of thought that, if only coherent within itself, was something to throw bricks at and hear a clang. There was an endgame in Surrealism and Situationism that doesn't exist in Language writing, since it seems, finally, that the point of Language writing was to make books and live forever in the minds of mankind, much like most writers do. How argue with that?

But I'm not the first one to suggest this; I'm only pointing to the fact that replies are coming in, but in terms that move "below the radar" (another Creeps term). One must be an achieved cultural polyglot to have any sense of "what's coming next."

[Looking back at your blog post, this line -- "Sure sounds like Sartre’s vision of serialization & capitalist atomization to me, a series of infinitely substitutable parts that can be popped out of a box or anthology – like a chess set composed entirely of pawns – and dropped into any theory one wants." -- is particularly vulnerable to critique specifically because you have had a tendency to make lists, create theories for them, then make lists that operate nearly as disclaimers to your theory -- an equally good list could be created for such and such a theory is practically a trope in your writing. Isn't a singular, no-holds-barred theory better than one that gives away before it's gotten off the ground? But I don't believe Sartre's description is very accurate anyway, or that this hasty comparison is particularly persuasive.]

Oh, this is way too long...

Lastly, let me just note that, ridiculous as the Creeps essay was, some phenomena that followed long after it was written fit right in. First there are the books: Lytle Shaw's book The Lobe could have been a member of the list, as could Toscano's more recent work, Kim Rosenfield's Good Morning Midnight, the font work of Paul Chan (whom I didn't know at the time), etc. "Flarf," the school of poetry invented by Gary Sullivan that is currently all the rage in the Left Bank, seems quite Creep oriented to me, as does the phenomenon of Blogs (Jordan Davis's blog is full of solipsism, haranguing to invisible congresses, etc.) and metablogs, like the "Mainstream Poetry Blog" -- "arpeggiated squeals of Moog fanfare without justification or apology" to use another of Kasey's phrases.

That "moments of scandal" are like the torches that light the bats in the cave seems also accurate to me -- I noticed that more people read Tranter's Jacket when something controversial, even mean, appears there, as more people probably read your blog for the same reason (viz. the Canadian controversy a few months back). This suggests not a porousness and a replacibility so much as an unwillingness to show one's cards unless forced to, and with any luck the present war crisis will bring more and more poets into searching for ways to harangue -- the public, the congress -- while reserving the right to retreat into "rugged individualism," the comfort zone of sitting behind a PC, in touch but, yes, not. To be invisible is a useful property in times when one might be targeted by the government -- or critics! (But alas, I am a critic too, and without apologies... just strong reservations.)

Ok, too long... knowing me, there'll be a postscript forthcoming. Thanks for the notes, etc.

best,
Brian

Posted by Brian Stefans at February 27, 2003 08:41 PM