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[Once again, I'm refraining from commentary as I'm about out the door, way too tired -- had drinks with John Wilkinson, Bruce Andrews, Marjorie Welish, etc. yesterday after Craig Dworkin's reading at "A Taste of Art", not too late but did have to be at work by 9. So here's a post from Patrick Herron of Lester's Flogspot and proxmiate.org fames and other fames -- just noticed that I don't have his blog on my blog roll, but will soon.]
"The Creeps wonder why, in a culture that has public enthusiasm for artists like Matthew Barney, Ornette Coleman, and Cindy Sherman, all of whom are taken to be defining cultural figures of their time or at least "artists," poets who are similarly disruptive and experimental are often not noticed, and not missed. They wonder why the poetry world is not as interested in the "edge" as the art and music worlds.
They don't consider themselves outsiders, the "marginal," and hence never of any use to mainstream thought. On the contrary, they take interest in many of the greatest debates of our time, particularly over globalization, cultural memory and the goal of human agency. Their distinguishing feature from writers from the mainstream, and also the writers of "Elliptical" verse, is that they expose, are exposed, and do not recognize any glass ceilings in terms of what can go into a poem, nor some safe, predefined notion of the "self" as their subjective limit."
Disruptive. De-egoized. Anti-manifesto. Concerned with information overload & technology. Challenging notions of self. How to synthesize agency with post-structuralism. Wondering where the edge is in poetry. Finding barriers just to dash them to bits.
You know, this really nails it for me personally. Particularly in my efforts to get Lester's _Be Somebody_ published (the book is on one of the CDs I gave you). I've been having an extended discussion with a well-respected poet and writer about Lester's book, that it toys with the notion of seducing the reader. The book gets perhaps downright unfriendly at times. I mean, seduction in writing is something I'm personally into, but it is nonetheless a will-to-power author-dominance function that maybe could be criticised in just one damn book of poetry? Just one? And that's what Lester wanted to do--challenge the assumptions of author-dominance through gestural play of linguistic dominance and submission, and still remain somehow poetic. Poetry seems more than any other literary field to depend highly on the AUTHority and AUTHenticity of the AUTHor. In retrospect Lester's book is a sort of 4th stage Baudrillard, all simulation--simulation right down to who the pronouns reference. A simulation of getting personal. A simulation of authorial integrity and authenticity. Gestures towards the book itself (repulsion) invert the author-reader hierarchy. And so on.
And interestingly the other half of our discussion about the book regarded its use of longer fractured lines. I don't write that way so much anymore, but I did so quite heavily two years ago. Trying to cross Spicer with Whitman, Ginsberg, and Giorno and turning blue in the process (blue emotionally and physically). I felt I had to sort of defend the practice, you know, and explain about shifting frameworks & subjects, and the way such writing speeds over a sonic, imagistic and/or logistic landscape. There's not a great deal of the longer-line form in the book, but it, like so many other tropes, sticks out when set against its context not only within the book but in the context of the po-world.
Some very big ups to this writer-friend of mine--one of the things I did not have to defend was the relative lack of "poet's voice"--he rather enjoyed the looping structures and widely varied poetic tropes. The post-modern aesthetic doesn't have to be defended. Some of the less readily apparent syntheses of subjects and formal issues and critical theory, however, do require such defense. Your statement helps take the pressure off me a little.
Mostly though it's gotten very good responses, and all of them at least have been strong, whether in favor or against it. And it has definitely been disruptive. And it is certainly obsessed with information. I am scratching my head, now realizing I finished writing that book in 2000. And it still does not exist--you know, the proverbial tree falling in the uninhabited wood. C'est la merde.
So perhaps I should not admit it but you might have me pegged too. Or at least have Lester pegged. The "danger" with pegging Lester is that he's a parody of himself in his "frank-talking" way. He's not above his own criticism. He was already parodying the info-hound mode back in '99 and 2000. And maybe he still does. He's more interested in testing the divide between a poet and hir poetry, a sort of zen whipping. But I think you compensate for and encompass that possibility in your essay, too.
I'm not so curious anymore about why poetic edgework is not considered relevant, though I was maybe a year or two ago. I realized a few months back just how much poetry is a burled wood and 30 year old Port-meets-Ben Shahn pursuit, a profession that is dominated by the over 40 settled class. Painting and music and photography professions all realize that creative genius generally peaks in the mid to late 30s and they don't want to miss that output when it's happening. They capitalize on youth and trade on youth. (It's not above criticism; we all know the art and music worlds exploit that youth frequently.) Poets are much more conservative and much more dependent upon authoritative critical opinions. Those opinions happen to move much more slowly in the po-realm and are less widely distributed than in painting, music, photography. Poetry perhaps also potentially poses a little more of a cultural/political threat than music, painting, photography. Language is very immediate and dangerous, unlike images, (words can conjure non-imagistic ideals, rallying cries, etc.) but the poetry industry ensures all must come through them and slowly accepted before even a trickle is to come through.
When we look at the lives of so many poets, they were nobodies up until their late 30s and each gets a sort of big break or phat association or something. Olson was a nobody when he became Rector at BMC, just to give one example. And he at least had Ivy on his wall to make it easier for the authorities pick him. I think something like only ONE poem of his was published before he became rector. That sort of visionary foresight exemplified by BMC is of course still delicate and rare, perhaps even moreso fragile and infrequent today. I dare say there is NO modern-day equivalent.
Shit, even radical improv music listeners have WIRE to read; artists can read Flash Art; and so on. But poetry? What, POETS & WRITERS? I had a gift subscription to that for a year, and every time I received a copy in the mail either it was already covered with cobwebs or someone's set of false teeth fell out of it. It was so incredibly fogey and safe. Full of saccarine platitudes about the lives of writers. I developed back pains and grew gray hair just in reading the first issue. It's OK to be fogey, but why be fogey to the exclusion of youth?
The study of modern american poetry is the study of settled aging people. We young poets are apparently not mature enough; we too are told to wait like everyone else to be published. Yet it is difficult to imagine that I will have anything left in me by my 40th birthday.
Chris Stroffolino's had the same sort of experience that Lester has had; having the "nice" stuff published while the more confrontational work languishes. And I think he's struggling to have his most recent book published, which is absolutely absurd considering how good his writing is. Art in poetry languishes.
And yeah, performance too...it was fun to read with Lee Ann last year because we both will do some sort of singing when reading. Shamelessly entertaining but what else can we do?
I even don't mind having Thom Yorke (the requisite pop-cultural figure) as a referent in the naming of this. You know, two years ago, so much of the sensibility of Radiohead's "OK Computer" really summed up so much of my own will to articulate. That album formed a sort of musical representation (a very incomplete one) of some of my feelings at the time.
Okay, I'd personally dissent with some minor points of your essay: I guess I'm very much FOR community BUT against "interactivity" (which is a sort of proxied intimacy and anti-community in some respects), and devoutly committed to epistemological issues. I can't separate heteronymity, notions of self, ambiguity, poetic artifice, and barrier-breaking from epistemology. The very necessity for a heteronym is an epistemic consequence of my own personal experience of the act of writing, or, rather, my non-experience of it. I don't think that really creates any sort of problems for what you wrote, however. You're describing a landscape that describes my yard. Just because my yard might have a patch of sand here or there doesn't preclude it from being forested.
I have to admit that at the same time I am a huge admirer and ardent reader of manifestos I also remain highly suspicious of them. Manifestoes require yet another hierarchy, and their concomitant big egos. I rather like the workman "play the part on a team" aesthetic implied in your essay. I don't see the serializeable and substitutable parts notion as a consequence of capitalism: communist countries used interchangeable parts as well; they have factories (look at China). Anarcho-syndicalist organizations might have production lines as well, just so long as participants 1) have a sense of humor about work and 2) are legitimately vested in the produce of their labor. I rather like the flexible anti-hierarchical structure implicit in your notion of the Creep. And even if such a structure is capital-derived, then it can co-opt, outpace, and overcome the problems of capital by its very nature of subjugating capitalism's needs. Why be so puritanical? Given the Darwinian flavor of Marx's writings it makes little sense to advocate leftist revolution, even in art. And we all know how ugly right-wing revolution is (look at America in the here-and-now).
Kasey's analysis in a certain way makes your position more attactive, not less. You see, being invisible and flea-like as a writer ain't so bad. It's anarchism and anarchism requires that people voluntarily come forward to do what they love, to play their parts. It kind of, um, clips the wings of those who feel the need to dominate others. It cuts down on the asshole factor. Assholes might be found in golf shirts making corporate deals on cell phones in their khaki dockers, but the assholes might also be dressed in hemp pushing print versions of their revolutionary manifestoes. The asshole factor is everywhere someone or other wants to dominate, lead, or didactically instruct.
So many things in your essay resonate. It's folks like you who make a huge difference to poetry. Well, you make a difference to me anyway. Keep it up.
Patrick
Posted by Brian Stefans at March 5, 2003 04:59 PM