Review of Poetry Magazine July/August 2009 (part 2)

Sharon Mesmer provides her own commentary on this issue of Poetry, focusing more on the contrast between the Flarf and the other poems: here. I continue to be more interested in the similarities, the awfulness in common. Maybe American poetry needs to be awful, is generally growing in the direction of awfulness, and Flarf poetry is just the self-conscious leading edge of this? Embracing what has been seen as bad writing does seem to have been the traditional way out for American poetry--Whitman and Dickinson wrote "badly" in the sense of in the wrong way, in an unapproved way--and Robert Lowell was writing badly, rejecting his own standards, when he wrote Life Studies and created the normative mode for decades of MFA poetry. Perhaps it's because American poetry is controlled by a sort of fastidious, scholastic mentality, and there has to be a leap into the awful to escape from an over-managed stasis? Anyway, in the first part of this review I pointed out the awful peaking out from the serious poems, and how many of them were more awful than the deliberately awful Flarf. In this second part I'm going to discuss the portrayal of consumer culture in this issue of Poetry, which begins with the first poem, Tony Hoagland's "At the Galleria Shopping Mall."

The issue begins with:

Just past the bin of pastel baby socks and underwear,
there are some 49-dollar Chinese-made TVS;

one of them singing news about a far-off war,
one comparing the breast size of an actress from Hollywood

to the breast size of an actress from Bollywood.

This is not awful, and in fact the first two lines are excellent. The third line becomes hackneyed with the word "singing"--a very bland and unnecessary metaphor. The fourth and fifth lines are interesting but seem poorly observed; I don't think they actually make direct comparisons of breast size on broadcast television--and why should they, when the images are there to do that work? So lines 4 and 5 seem like a shortcut to the point Hoagland wants to make, rather than making that point more honestly, with an accurate observation.

But Hoagland has managed two good lines, and there's more good material to come. He writes, of his niece Lucinda:

Today is the day she embarks upon her journey,

swinging a credit card like a scythe
through the meadows of golden merchandise.

Today is the day she stops looking at faces,
and starts assessing the label of purses.

There is a false gravitas to these lines that is dreadful. "Today is the day she embarks" . . . Hoagland is reaching too hard to make the mall experience dramatically significant, rather than letting it be just a trip to the mall. Again, his powers of observation seem limited, and he uses poorly observed images or overblown metaphors as shortcuts to the moralizing he wants to do. I actually approve of all the moralizing he wants to do, but the problem is that trying to make it so heavy, with stern overstatements like "Today is the day she stops looking at faces," has the effect of subjectivizing the trip to the mall so much that Lucinda's experience disappears and only Hoagland's experience of disapproving of her remains. Now, it's his poem so that's fine if he wants to emphasize his negative feelings about the mall above all else, but his experience is the least interesting part of the narrative he proposes. Lucinda's experience is more interesting than his, because it's liminal, and more interesting than both is the fact of the mall itself, and the fact of the mall is precisely what Hoagland fails to capture with his weak metaphors. "swinging a credit card like a scythe / through meadows of golden merchandise" is just not an adequate expression of what's going on. The merchandise is not all "golden" for one thing, and I don't think shopping is very much like mowing by hand with a scythe. Cutting with a scythe is hard, unpleasant labor, whereas shopping is fun for Lucinda or she wouldn't be doing it.

And yet there is something good here: if this passage were boiled down to "Today is the day she starts assessing the labels of purses" then you would find a solid, interesting observation. "assessing the labels" of objects for sale is a specific type of consumerist activity that Lucinda is learning to do and that Hoagland regrets. Really, he regrets that she's becoming a capitalist, but he regrets it for aesthetic and psychological reasons--he thinks that a consumerist mindset will hurt her in the long run (and he's probably right--as I said, I agree and sympathize with his moralizing.) Lucinda is learning to take in and process the information that the mall offers, the label information and the rest. The mall is an information-rich environment and Lucinda is assimilating the information there. Hoagland does not want this to happen, and he especially doesn't want it to happen to him, so he defends himself by failing to observe or assimilate the information-rich mall environment; beginning with line 3, he repeatedly gets it wrong, putting in "singing" and "a scythe / through the meadows," defending himself by adding lyrical elements to the mall, elements that aren't there.

The poem ends with a summary moral observation: "so we were turned into Americans / to learn something about loneliness." The implication is that consumerism makes us lonely and alienated and that Lucinda will suffer loneliness on the deepest existential level as a direct result of her immersion in the mall environment. Here, Hoagland shows himself to be a hippie at heart (and presumably nowhere else). Perhaps he should read Adorno for confirmation and further development of these sorts of feelings. I agree with Hoagland that consumerism tends to induce loneliness in the populace, mostly because it tends to replace public spaces with consumer spaces where people purchase things rather than interacting. I think that his poem is both sad and worthwhile, and that it fails formally in a way that is productive, a way that can be learned from.

It may have been the intent of the editors of Poetry Magazine to begin with a poem that fails in precisely this way, that fails because it is too angry, condemnatory, or lazy to observe accurately. Because, whatever else one may say about the work in the "Flarf and Conceptual Writing" section, it definitely succeeds in accurately observing information-rich consumer environments. Furthermore, since even our own homes are information-rich consumer environments now (the PC and TV collaborate to do this), Flarf and Conceptual Writing seem like the necessary precursor to any new realism in contemporary poetry. Mainstream lyric poetry at this moment tends to act on the assumption that information-rich consumer environments are not worth observing accurately, that they are too crass to bother looking at directly. This attitude tends to insure the irrelevance of much poetry, in this moment when contemporary Americans experience reality as a constant struggle with consumerist encroachment on the prerogatives of private experience. Hoagland is trying to come to terms with what he experiences as the gradual, attenuated destruction of his traditional family structure by information-rich consumer environments that co-opt his niece and destine both her and himself to a new type of all-American loneliness. But he does not have the correct tools to adequately observe and diagnose his environment.

What Hoagland needs are precisely the sort of tools Kenneth Goldsmith describes in his introduction to "Flarf & Conceptual Writing". Goldsmith writes: "Our immersive digital environment demands new response from writers. . . . 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. . . . Disposability, fluidity, recycling: there's a sense that these words aren't meant for forever." Accurate observation means looking at the labels and the TV shows and being unafraid to copy the words they use. This means recognizing that the words of which consumerist ideology are constructed are not only crass; rather, they are incredibly powerful, persuasive, and pervasive. The refusal to accurately observe or depict his language, as in Hoagland's poem, can only strand us in a condemnatory stance that cannot fully see what it is we are condemning. But Pop culture is not a Medusa and to depict it, even by copying it, is not to become Pop. Goldsmith, typically, fails to mention the political significance of his stance--misguidedly, he wants to be Warhol. But what is more interesting is to study and imitate the rhetorical powers of consumerist language, a language whose power comes from its disposability, from a sense that "these words aren't meant for forever." Consumerist language is constantly replaced, ever-fresh, and thereby enacts a perpetual present that is more imaginatively powerful than the continuous past evoked by traditional poetry.

In this selection, the conceptual poem that observes the mall environment is Robert Fitterman's "Directory;" the structure of this issue of Poetry magazine makes "Directory" the essential riposte to Haogland's "At the Galleria Shopping Mall." Fitterman gives it to us straight:

Macy's
Circuit City
Payless ShoeSource
Sears
Kay Jewelers
GNC
LensCrafters
Coach
H&M
RadioShack
Gymboree

Of course, the names are beautiful. Using unadulterated direct observation, Fitterman makes available to us the linguistic beauty that is the backbone and deep structure of the consumerist environment. The Mall turns out to be a poem, already, even without the addition of a scythe. It may be a poem that destroys us, that dooms us to a bleak destiny (but so was The Iliad). But it is a poem; the deep structure of the consumerist environment is a linguistic structure created by the association of brand names. Fitterman finds the poem that has been hidden by the glitz:

The Body Shop
Eddie Bauer
Crabtree & Evelyn
Gymboree
Foot Locker
Land's End
GNC
LensCrafters
Coach
Famous footwear
H&M

This is the poem that Lucinda is experiencing, the necessary answer to Hoagland's Galleria poem.

The only possible weakness of Fitterman's poem is the quality that makes it a species of "pure poetry": the lack of comment. Whatever the observational failings of Hoagland's poem, he does at least make an interesting comment on what he observes. I do not personally think it is advantageous for social commentary to be always implied, never stated as in Fitterman's work. What is perhaps necessary is an impure poetry that can mix direct, accurate observation with social commentary.

I'll say more about that in the 3rd part of this review. . .