Review of Poetry Magazine July/August 2009 (part 3)

Mark Wallace, in his comment on the previous part of this review, took me to task slightly for my assertion that "social critique [is] always implied, never stated. . . in [Rob] Fitterman's work." Mark wrote, "it's important that we see Rob's poem in the context of his long Metropolis project, which includes a great deal of both direct and indirect commentary. On its own, his poem here avoids such comment, but in context, its flat observations are part of a much more complex group of commentaries." I agree with this assessment of Fitterman's work, and I consider Rob's larger project very valuable. At the same time, I do think most of the social commentary in Rob's long poem is implied rather than stated, and that his work provides a powerful model of how contemporary culture can be implicitly critiqued through direct observation. Fitterman is one of the poets who has made the tactic of "sampling" (analogous to the "sampling" done in hip-hop and other genres of pop-music) into a powerful observational strategy through which poets can engage with culture. Of course, this tactic of sampling isn't new, but Fitterman has used it in new ways.

In his comment Mark also worries about the "broader tendency to read poems without reference to their larger seriality" which is an important issue for this review. The "Flarf & Conceptual Writing" section in this issue of Poetry contains work by 13 poets, each represented by only one piece; such an arrangement is almost an invitation to decontextualize the work. And indeed, many of the qualities that make "Flarf" writing important to me are almost invisible in this context. For example, where are the politics? The emphasis in this selection is on Flarf's aesthetic stance, on what Flarf poets view as beautiful, aesthetically attractive, and aesthetically relevant, but this selection does not demonstrate the intense political engagement of Flarf writers such as Drew Gardner and Sharon Mesmer (or any of them really).

Flarf writing initially emerged as a reaction to the absurd public discourse and jingoism of the U.S. response to 9-11 and the early years of the War in Iraq; in a sense Flarf emerged from a fear that American people had become too insensitive and, not to put too fine a point on it, too stupid to make meaningful moral judgements. Many Flarf poems, above all, challenge the reader's moral judgement, challenge the reader to correctly discern the difference between the moral and the aesthetic in a culture in which moral reasoning has been aestheticized, binarized, anesthetized and trivialized. In a sense, the poems asked readers to distinguish between what looks good and what is good, and to understand that no aesthetic construction or representation has intrinsic moral value. To do this, Flarf poems could not look good; they had to be "not OK" or even aggressively awful in order to provoke the reader's moral and aesthetic sensibilities and challenge any easy dovetailing of the two.

In this issue of Poetry, the Flarf poems emphasize aesthetic concerns and particularly they emphasize aesthetic freedom, the irrelevance of regimes of poetic decorum. Thus Sharon Mesmer's poem begins,

The Swiss just do whatever
like masturbating their doink-doinks
deep in rural France
in the shadow of Mont Blanc.

It's very unusual to see the Swiss exoticized; we imagine them, perhaps, as a humble hard-working people averse to conspicuous displays of emotion or wealth. Mesmer describes them very differently, as a people whose behavior is characteristically Flarfy: indifferent to decorum, self-pleasuring, and conspicuously crass. In the middle of a location ideally suited for lyrical, poetic rhapsody ("rural France / in the shadow of Mont Blanc"), the Swiss are free to do what they like; they don't have to conform to the expectations raised by the historically significant location. And after all, I imagine many great poets "masturbat[ed] their doink-doinks / deep in rural France."

The inclusion of this poem in Poetry Magazine makes certain allegorical connections unavoidable. Clearly, "the shadow of Mont Blanc" signifies Poetry Magazine itself and "masturbating their doink-doinks" signifies what the Flarfist Collective has done in the magazine.

Mesmer continues,

Everyone knows when these bizzarre Swiss cometh
they cometh with fluffy Beatles-like
six-packs of shit-covered reindeer
knock-knocking like a bummer.

The lyricism of this poem (and of Mesmer's Flarf work in general) has to do with the piling on of imagery and references, a continuous increase in complication. These complications lead not to complexity but to a sense of hyper-elaborated liveliness: "fluffy Beatles-like / six-packs of shit-covered reindeer." There are 4 descriptive details applied to the reindeer in just this line-and-a-half; the reader is invited to integrate the imagery, a process which is easy and fun. (In my opinion, the descriptive details that are hardest to integrate, such as "Beatles-like" or "fluffy," are the most fun to visualize.)

Probably my favorite stanza in this poem is:

King Hussein and President Fabio,
always just about to touch each other
on their devolved sparkle-offs
and Neil Patrick Harris appreciation pages.

"devolved sparkle-offs" reaches back to "doink-doinks" in a way that is riotously absurd. The genitalia of these heads of state have been "passed on or delegated to another" [that's a dictionary definition of devolved] as well as emitting sparkles and thereby losing their sparkle [as in the phrase "the sparkle is off of" whatever is no longer interesting, no longer economically viable, or no longer in fashion]. Obviously, the reader is invited to help understand these lines; equally obviously, the point of doing so is pleasure, pure and simple, an intellectual pleasure that is simultaneously naughty and respectful of readerly prerogatives. The question is also raised to what extent the "doink-doinks" have "devolved" into celebrity "appreciation pages" on the internet, which raises some interesting, though incidental, social concerns about the role of the web in depersonalizing sexuality. And of course the idea of "President Fabio" is hilarious.

K. Silem Mohammad's "Poems About Trees" demonstrates a similar disdain for conventions of poetic decorum, and yet he begins by announcing his credentials as a conventional poet. He writes:

I have written a couple of poems about trees
poems about trees and snakes and lakes and birds
poems about nature and life in New England
I write crappy poems and eat babies
if you like poems about trees you're in for a treat

The point is that poems about trees are not intrinsically better than any other type; conventionality does not confer any special aesthetic or moral value on a poem. "if you like poems about trees" (or anything else) then you'll probably enjoy more of the same, and, to Mohammad, that is all the value that convention has, a small, aesthetically irrelevant, pleasure of recognition. Mindful of the customers who buy Poetry Magazine, Mohammad thoughtfully reassures them that he is a conventional writer and that if they like conventional poems about trees they are "in for a treat." I view this first stanza as a parody of consumerist impulses and of the over-valuation of recognition and familiarity in our corporate-dominated economy, which devalues originality by turning conventions into consumer fetishes. Indirectly, Mohammad is accusing Poetry Magazine of catering to a consumer fetish mentality.

Mohammad leaps out of this frame in his second stanza:

when I get nervous I get hyper and bump into people
I read to them what MapQuest gave me
round during then in the mom seeker panties
to help me narrow down the slut thing word jobs
rawr I'm too stupid to be able to make my point clear

The sexualized anxiety of this passage depicts life as Mohammad knows it, culminating in the desire to "narrow down the slut thing word jobs." Mohammad recognizes words as instruments of control, levers through which to attempt to gain power, either by labeling others "the slut thing" or controlling the expressive behavior of others "word jobs" or both at once. This stanza references verbal agendas aimed at accumulating power (such as "to make my point clear") but charactizes the poet as someone too "hyper" to implement such agendas, someone who bumps into people and carries directions with him wherever he goes, a person whose confusion can't be managed by the power-structure.

Mohammad continues:

if you for critique you eventually works at what a
chromosome disorder speech theory itch be responsible
congratulations, really nice birth control
is the most important challenge to vintage porn food stamps
and then I thought only God etc. (i.e. chemicals about progesterone)

This stanza focuses on the relationship of social critique to foundational problems. How can we criticize society when we don't know what is responsible for its current state? Is it that a "chromosome disorder speech theory itch be responsible" for our problems? But is the problem in the "chromosome" or the "speech" or the "itch"? Is the problem genetic, is it based on verbal representations of reality, or is it based on the unmanageable desire or unmanageable specific experience of individuals (i.e. the "itch" as in "The Seven Year Itch," or the "itch" as in an experience that one person has and no one else can really share)? Mohammad makes stacks of nouns to represent the failure of philosophical distinctions to interpret our experience, and it is fascinating to consider the ideas evoked by constructions such as "vintage porn food stamps" which seems to reference the economic oppression of women, but which at the same time will elicit different points of reference for each reader.

Ultimately, Mohammad's writing here is a writing that attempts to elude the sense of mass-production promised by conformity to convention, a writing that aims to be different to each reader. What underlies Mohammad's pursuit of cognitive difference and readerly difference is an intense philosophical skepticism about regimes of standardization, whether they take the form of origin stories (such as a story about "chromosome disorder"), or the form of theories (such as "speech theory") or the form of assumptions about normative social behavior. He writes in a universe in which God is indistinguishable from "chemicals about progesterone" (i.e. various neurotransmitters and hormones). He represents social reality as something anxious, sexual, and resistant to simplification by philosophy or narrative.

(When I say that Mohammad views social reality as "sexual" what I mean is that he depicts it as something that is constantly observed and observable and which is primary to the formation of social arrangements and hierarchies--a view that is (slightly more) feminist than lustful.)

Mohammad ends his poem with this tiny stanza: "kids are stupid / $10" I think this is Mohammad's version of the kind of conventional wisdom that intellectuals are paid to produce in our culture, a kind of crankiness passed off as profundity that Mohammad disdains.

I'll discuss one or two more of the Flarf poems in the next part of this review. . .