Review of Poetry Magazine July/August 2009 (part 1)

I am fascinated by the latest issue of Poetry Magazine, which I picked up because I knew it included some Flarf poems, Conceptual Writing, and related materials. I was excited to get it, among other reasons, because it could be bought at Barnes & Nobles in Tampa FL, for cash. Imagine, buying poetry with an internet connection and a credit card! Outrageously old-fashioned and strange, and the ability of Poetry Magazine to put its issues in all sorts of places where no one wants them (such as the Barnes & Nobles in Tampa FL) is a charming expression of near-hegemonic power.

Anyway, it was novel to buy something with Flarf in it without having to contact Small Press Distribution. It may never happen again!

The excitement begins with the magazine's table of contents, which is carefully sub-divided into these sections:

Poems
Flarf and Conceptual Writing
Comment
Poets We've Known
I Belonged to Yvor Winters

Notice that only the first section is labeled as "Poems" which are then followed by experimental stuff classified not as poems but rather as "Writing." After Poems and Writing come Comment, followed by Poets and by the mainstream poet's special friend "I" (which did indeed belong to Yvor Winters, as much as any other man and moreso than Bruce Andrews). The sectioned structure of the magazine seems defensive, as if the section labeled as "Writing" has been quarantined off from the rest. This "Writing" is neither Poems not Poets, nor is it Comment or I. (Am I reading too much into this?)

So the idea naturally is that there should be classy elegant "Poems" in the first section, followed by deliberately awful or bland "Writing" in the second section. But it doesn't quite happen like that. I went into the "Poems" expecting class and elegance, expecting to find it a bit snooty and pretentious, but nonetheless syntactically sinuous and imagistically floral. However, oddly, most of the poems in the "Poems" section were more awful and/or more bland than the things in the second section. Flarf clearly has no monopoly on awfulness! Conceptual Writing has no monopoly on boring!

So the shocking experience of reading the issue is:

Unintentionally awful poems that are more awful than the deliberately awful ones that follow, and unintentionally boring poems that are more boring than the deliberately boring poems that follow. In a sense, the experimental writers are upstaged by the fact that the "Poems" chosen by the editors of Poetry offend good taste more egregiously than the deliberate tactics of the avant-garde.

I can prove this. Here are quotes:

Tony Hoagland:

"I was the dog, chained in some fool's backyard;
barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too."

Absolutely dreadful. "I was the dog." No you weren't, Tony Hoagland; you are a biped.

For comparison, here is Nada Gordon trying to provoke us with deliberate inanity and in-your-face tasteless (in the "Writing" section):

I was sort of doodling Hitler at my friend's
house and we couldn't stop watching
unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards
containing scenes in which the baby angora unicorn
and Hitler stay warm on a cold night.

"unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards" is a rather succinct and accurate description of contemporary consciousness in the developed world in the early 21st century, an immersive media environment in which we can "stay warm on a cold night" of the soul. . . Nada's silliness turns out to be profound after we blink at it three or four times, and the thrill of its awfulness. . . fades in the face of that dog, Tony Hoagland, chained in some fool's backyard, barking and barking. Nada's awfulness is so much more inventive than Tony's that in comparison hers ceases to be awful.

It's weird how this issue of Poetry Magazine reminds me so aggressively that awfulness is relative. Consider this description of the road in Scott Cairns' "Another Road Home":

Meandering, manifestly
inconclusive, and for that reason not
so likely to ferment blithe disregard.

"blithe disregard" as in, I guess, smiling at someone you're ignoring? Well, that's okay, but fermenting it, give me a break. Now if the dude were making home brew and bottling it and labeling some of the bottles "Blithe Disregard," then okay that could be a nice name for an IPA. . . since that doesn't seem to be the context, I have to say this entire sentence is quite unfortunate.

Scott Cairns was in "Poems." Compare his bad writing with some lines from K. Silem Mohammad's "Poems about Trees" in the "Writing" section:

brainwashed creationists go ever yodeling to attract
the jolly echo of a forest of orange sauce
"you anus look like a chicken pie"

Mohammad provides jolly nonsense, the vivid cartoonish image of "a forest of orange sauce" and an unsettling reminder that, in fact, some people's anuses do, in certain situations, look like chicken pies. Mohammad's trashy throwaway lines are more fun and more true than Cairns' "Meandering, manifestly / inconclusive" epiphany, and therefore, despite the de facto awfulness of Mohammad's lines, they are relatively less awful than Cairns'.

And so it goes. There are a handful of really good, elegant "Poems" too, the sort I predicted would be there, such as Ange Mlinko's "This is the Latest" which is luscious, Merrillesque, subtly funny and formally impecable (and not very interesting to me), but they are outnumbered by bland and maladroit poems that make the "Writing" section seem much more competent than it really should, considering that both Flarf and Conceptual Writing eschew displays of competence in favor of, for Flarf, anarchic vigor, and for Conceptual Writing, icy acts of framing and reframing.

Jessica Greenbaum: "cool enough to slake one of all our many raging, hissing thirsts." The awfulness lies in the fact that the line is more than two words long.

And then Hailey Leithhauser was bit "By its posthumous chomp, / by its bad dab of venom, its joy-buzzer buzz." Flarf seems so refined and professional, so well-done, compared to this. . .

I'll have more to say about the later sections of this fascinating magazine in a day or two.