Artificial?

These comments began as a response to some remarks in the comment box to my mini-review of Drew's Petroleum Hat, but they started getting so long that I decided to give them their own post.

I'm pretty sure that the perception that "flarf" is somehow "computer-generated," or somehow more "artificially created" than other poetry, plays into some of the resistance it has met (a resistance fed by the attribution of grand "claims" to flarfists). The fact is that even when it uses Google as a compositional tool, flarf is never just "generated" out of the computer. In Drew's case, for example, he has taken a source text, or bits of different source texts, and arranged and changed them with the same intentionality that someone would use in selecting and combining words that are to be constrained by iambic pentameter, or rhyme, or whatever. I could devise a program that would produce a "poetic" text all by itself, but that would be a completely different thing from what Drew has done here, and--to me at least--it would be pretty uninteresting. What makes Drew's poetry interesting to me is precisely the sense, meaning, intention, etc. that he has put into it, because he is the actual intelligence behind it. That the raw materials come from sources found on the internet is important only to the extent that those materials tend to have a certain variety of "flavors" not found so much elsewhere. He could just as easily have used a dictionary as his source, or a novel by Charles Dickens, or his own emails to and from friends, or the words that happened to be circulating in his brain at the time.

This doesn't in itself touch the broad objection that the poetry doesn't "make sense." I think maybe people who make that objection are just looking for a different kind of sense from the sense that Drew makes, and that's a matter of taste and reading habits. (And this is of course not a concern unique to flarf; it's an oft-rehearsed difficulty with modern and contemporary poetry in general.) But the fact that the poetry is built around collaged materials found (among other places) on the internet doesn't make it any more or less "artificial" than other poetry. At any rate, as artists must constantly keep reminding themselves and others, "artificial" used to be a compliment, in ye olden days. It meant splendidly assembled, with craft and skill and a maker's vision. The kind of poetry Drew writes is conceived in part as a critique of these magisterial categories, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also keep them fresh and alive.

Drew Gardner's Petroleum Hat

I've been stalled in reviewing Drew Gardner's Petroleum Hat (Roof Books, 2005) for two reasons: first, a general fear that any honest expression of my immense admiration for this book will be read as partisan, since Gardner and I have both been associated with "flarf," the name given to a sketchy poetic clique some of you may have heard mentioned recently; second, getting beaten to it by Joyelle McSweeney's eloquent review at the Constant Critic. But here goes anyway.

The poem that has attracted the most attention so far from this collection is "Chicks Dig War," the title of which was at one point the planned title of the book. Although the attention is understandable, as it is a very funny and challenging poem, in some ways it might create a misleading sense of the book as a whole. "Chicks" is an audaciously blatant piece of near-plagiarism lifted largely from one male human's cockeyed internet rant, lightly spiced here and there with outrageous substitutions. Like many of the poems in the book, it is deliberately sloppy, displaying its what-the-fuck seams at nearly every other linebreak. The overall effect is one of excited haranguing combined with distracted reverie. What it might not fully represent, however, is the at times ecstatic lyricism of the collection as a whole. Take these lines from "Improving":

I disrobe, taking off the trappings of fear
next, I'm off to clean my torch collection
and take out a contract on my family
tired enough by this time
to choose the easier of the two porcupines
the recycling of my body
now that dreams come again
no one will ever know
the ink sac behind the head
begins to think
as if ruptured with satin
the tail or what your personal circumstances will be
the electrostatic whirl

ask your students to impede your life
if you charge
a rod and hold it close
to your ink sac
don't make me call people
by their names
afraid of the amount of time you need
to remain in your home
start now by scared crows and border collies
when you're scared, you are the danger
from a biological good morning
give it a ritual a big hug
when chemical or radiological
attacks are passed out

As extensive a passage as I've cited, it still doesn't quite get across the cumulative power, across an entire poem, of Gardner's alternations between the absurd and the pedestrian, the hyperactive and the intimate. I'm hard pressed to think of much other recent poetry that evokes for me so accurately the actual, anxious textures of true daily experience. One the one hand, it's hard to imagine how lines like "afraid of the amount of time you need / to remain in your home" could have been constructed without the collaging together of found sources (probably from Google, though I'm not certain); on the other, Gardner's brilliance in recognizing the emotional truth of the synthesis, along with and because of the pathos of its awkwardness, is what most impresses the reader.

Sometimes the intensity of imagistic and thematic incongruity alone is enough to create visionary effects, as in this stanza of "Why Would You Listen to That Patronizing Asshole?":

mom's email contacted the world
it would be like going to parties where
they say "assistant ass-kissy" etc.
and listen to people
who smell just like the regular soap
permanently delete
the whole cast
of Salem's Lot

As mentioned before, the sloppiness is a key poetic device here, especially as it affects the reader's apprehension of syntax: is the "people / who smell just like the regular soap" who "permanently delete / the whole cast / of Salem's Lot"? or do the lines beginning "permanently delete" initiate a separate grammatical imperative to the reader (or whoever)? The overall paucity of punctuation radically indeterminatizes (not a word? sorry) these interpretative decisions. As a result, syntax asserts itself, but only in a contingent and therefore evocatively flimsy manner, making the total poetic image really really wack. It's like the poem is trying to grow a concrete universal but keeps having an accident in its pants. Then we feel sorry for it and want to pay for it to get corrective shoes.

Most of all, however, we want to just hug the poem, chiefly because, as in the case of "Win One for Me," it tells us to:

I enlist the sun to hear my story

create something life-threatening
all the memories I lost while I was here
trees cause more pollution than cars
though what I love is naked penguins playing--
it is an historic inevitability.
What errors have been made?
What Chicken Errors have been made?

I have to be honest with you,
I have a great color.
You can't communicate with me,
but I have a strong heart and strong lungs.
All you can do is just hug me,
and give me a kiss and say a prayer
and hope for the best

The "Chicken Errors" Gardner has made--the very errors that prohibit communication and lead to loss of memory--are themselves "an historic inevitability," in the sense that they "create something life-threatening" by making us more acutely aware of "naked penguins playing." In that sense alone, you should definitely go out and buy this book right away.

Chapbook Roundup

Three chapbooks that have landed in my mailbox over the past couple of weeks:

1. Silk Flowers by Nada Gordon by Benjamin Friedlander, with a preface by Nada Gordon, from Slack Buddha Press. The title pretty much explains the concept, right? Friedlander's poems present themselves as lyric addresses from Nada to various recipients, but each is at least partly a deft scramble of lines from some Golden Treasury poet (Wordsworth, Baillie, Gray, Thomson, Charlotte Dacre, et al.):

trait'ress breast alone
thee fondly gaze--I've heard thee
sigh; O, form'd for love!

adhere with stubborn
philosophic friendship still
bid us feel can burn

indiff'rence repose.

Sublime froth! Features a colorful handmade cover with real construction paper silk flowers.

2. David Larsen's poem The Folded Note (POEMS-FOR-ALL No. 571). Again, the title is almost completely self-descriptive: this is two tiny sheets of paper folded in the middle with a cardstock cover of the same size likewise folded. The poem begins:

Oh my fucking god Stephanie
this movie Satan's Brew
you have to see it right away
it's all about me & the horrible things I put my
family through

Vintage LRSN. The cat's mee-yow.

3. Tony Tost's World Jelly from Effing Press. First of all, Scott Pierce makes beautiful chapbooks, as many of you don't need me to tell you. Second, this is a truly superb book of poems (or is it one serial poem?). I could practically select a passage at random to show how finely tuned Tost's lyric sensibility is (I'm trying to avoid the overused term "ear," but it's hard):

The deer cats
across the lawn

Revelation is not change
though each of the blossoms
are revealed

Wolf is a verb
horse is

or

Forever at the crying door
definite shadow doll
jumping to hide

An astronaut's camera
is attached to his chest
joining the weeping
in order to hide

Photo of waterfall
casts shadows

What do you say
of the miles and miles
fish in the barrel
mail order brides

"This is clarity / speaking from Rome," says Tost on another page, and the ironic doubleness of the allusion is apt. On the one hand, these pieces are marked by a classical cleanness and lucidity of phrase; on the other, they are constantly troubled by the cranky old fascist muse that underwrites the Black-Mountain-esque style which is one of Tost's points of departure. Slurs and wisecracks slip sneakily in and out between the gleaming lyricisms, but the total effect is one in which the poet acknowledges the intimidating weight of his influences, as well as the potential for the intimidation to continue through his participation in them, and leaves it to us to decide how to receive the magisterial embrace he offers: "the real thing bear hug."

More on Flarf

Since so much discussion recently has been spinning and spinning around the question of what exactly flarf is and who can lay claim to the term and so on and so on, I want to set out a triad of distinctions that seem to me to encapsulate the major applications of the term in "popular" usage. These might be considered competing or merely overlapping distinctions, depending on whom you corner and threaten at knifepoint.

1) Flarf is what the Flarf Collective, a group of writers on the "flarf list," have dubbed their ongoing activities. These activities include poems, fake news stories, funny noises, private jokes, semi-public gestures, etc. The term was coined by Gary Sullivan, a member of this list. The first flarf poems came out of facetious entries to the ongoing Poetry.com poetry "contest" (actually a marketing scheme), and were conceived as deliberately "bad" or "unacceptable" compositions as a way of testing Poetry.com's supposed standards for excellence.* These early poems were marked by a certain distinctive tonal "dialect": they were often peppered with phrases like "aw YEEEAHH," intentional typos, mildly offensive language (e.g., childish references to bodily functions and faux slurs against the Irish), oblique political "statements," and incongruous animal imagery. At a fairly early point, some flarfists began incorporating the results of Google searches into some of their poems. The poems in my Deer Head Nation, early drafts of which were circulated on the flarf list, were composed in this manner (which may or may not cause the poems in the finished book to count as "flarf"), as were many poems by Sullivan, Drew Gardner, Katie Degentesh, Rodney Koeneke, Michael Magee, and others. Some attention was given to the use of the Google-based process in Deer Head Nation, which sometimes gave rise to a general misconception that "flarf" meant any and all poetry written via such a method. Which brings us to:

2) Flarf has for some persons become a catch-all term for poetic composition that makes use of search engines such as Google, or other web-based generative devices. This implies a retroactive application of the term to authors who were using such devices well before the Flarf Collective, such as Robert Fitterman, Alan Sondheim, and others. Some of these writers, naturally, may resist such connections, as their work deserves to be considered on its own terms without the imposition of anachronistic categories. It is probably too late, however, to object to the increasingly widespread use of "flarf" to refer to a wide variety of research-software-based modes of composition. One might even say that it was always "too late"--that no one can lay claim to the meaning of made-up words in the first place, unless they care enough to copyright them, if even that were enough.

3) For the same reason, it is too late and perhaps undesirable to object to another, perhaps even more widespread general definition of "flarf": any intentionally bad, frivolous, or wacky poetry, or perhaps any textual or verbal doodling or nonsense of any sort. "What's this gibberish?" "Oh, just something I flarfed during my lunch break." "What did that guy say?" "I don't know. Sounded like flarf to me."

These appear to be the chief denotations that are currently in most widespread use, but really, at this point, the term is beyond contestation or delimitation: it belongs to the zeitgeist, which will do with it as it wills. And as I've pointed out before, if we want to talk real origins, the FLoridA Renaissance Faire has the clearest claim.

-----
* As Patrick Herron has recently pointed out, others were engaging in similar provocations at or around the same time that Gary was submitting entries to Poetry.com. As far as I'm concerned, it should never be suggested that the Flarf Collective claims to have invented any "new" methods or techniques. At base, for better or worse, the original application of the term amounts to little more than the designation of a specific, self-identified social formation. In other words, flarfists are flarfists not because they produce some unique poetic commodity, but simply because they refer to themselves as flarfists. Obviously, anyone can do this at any time--there is nothing "special" about it.

Jon Leon Responds

What follows is stitched together out of three emails sent to me by Jon Leon in response to my last post:

Because I've been thinking on these things you mention in your most recent post, and aside from the biggest factor of money and time, they play a big role in my decision to quit as editor of Wherever We Put Our Hats, I will attempt to respond to your question of anxiousness in the poetry culture. I agree it seems things are moving very quickly. When I started working on WWPOH in December of 2004 there weren't any journals in Atlanta. Now, in the space of a year, there are three, with Coconut and the forthcoming Skyrocket Gospel. And the long-time non-mainstream Atlanta Poets Group seem to have become friends with the Lucipoets, bringing about an even greater attention to the area, as well as Bruce Covey's hard work in getting poets into town at Emory. Perhaps Atlanta could be one example of a larger burst in national activity. With things like this happening all over the country, it is inevitable and necessary that the questions you're raising now become common until we can figure this thing out, if ever we can.

What it seems like to me is that competition is ruining people. And journals and MFA programs and blogs and book publishers are ruining people, no matter which side of the bed they roll out of.

You say:

I'm trying to figure out what exactly the relation is between 1) the dominant organs of poetic publication and recognition (e.g., university-based journals, large publishing companies, various incarnations of the literary "establishment" such as Poetry Magazine, etc.), and 2) the residual and emergent poetic community of "independent" writers and venues that positions itself at least implicitly outside the first category.

But you are forgetting about the third category. Which is the non-category that will define the future. From my point of view your category 1 doesn't exist. They in no way influence challenging or progressive poetries. The first poetry I ever read was in Lungfull!, Columbia Poetry Review, and Longshot. I never even knew mainstream existed. To me category 2 is the mainstream and they are getting boring-er by the minute. And I think more and more category 1 is looking at category 2 to imitate for credibility.

I'm trying to coherently put into words what I've only felt intuitively and forcefully. I'm having some trouble, but I will conclude until I can speculate later that it seems your Category 2 is not defining what's good in poetry but what's cool, and further that they are not exempt from the same ruthless ambition the mainstream possesses. Doesn't the name Poker or Fascicle or whatever other magazine excite the same ambitious giddiness that marks the mainstream, with the books on their shelves being the major difference? I feel like there should be radical dis-organizing of the way poetry is disseminated. One that doesn't offer anything. With this conciousness I'm certain I can never participate in the same way again.

Out of and because of this historical tension the new breed won't "position" themselves anywhere. They'll be born of struggle and discontent and BE revolutionary by inception. Perhaps even unrecognizable for many years.

I asked Jon for permission to reprint his comments here (thanks, Jon) because I am very sympathetic to what he says generally, even if I find difficulties with some of his individual points.

My first observation is that the content of his first paragraph paints an overwhelmingly positive picture (except for the part about him no longer editing WWPOH), as I'm assuming he intends it to. It does seem that poetry is gaining more and more of an interested following all over the place. This has to be first and foremost a good thing, doesn't it? I can already hear the counterarguments against naive or exploitative popularization, but any art form that can't bear up under success with mass audiences, and all the perils such success presents, must be revealing some fundamental weakness.

Second, I agree that there is a very destructive form of competition which does indeed "ruin people," and that such competition is rampant in big MFA programs and the corporate publishing world--that is, those sectors that hold out the promise of some kind of material profit, however meager in comparison to that which may be had in other pursuits. Under the heading of "material profit," I am including not only money itself, but luxuries associated with academia and "the writer's life," including things like summers off, institutional privileges, etc. I'm not saying that these things are always bad in and of themselves--just when they become the primary motivation for doing art, to the extent that the art itself takes on the cynical quality of work performed for hire, and to the extent that the artist behaves destructively toward other artists solely for the purpose of securing one's own advancement in the aforementioned goals.

I'm less clear on how blogs and journals might be ruining people, except inasmuch as they are organs of the institutional entities in question (which most blogs, at least, still aren't, though some journals have of course long represented dominant institutions). There is a massive power difference between individual websites/independent journals and larger institutions. One thing that might be helpful here is to rehearse Raymond Williams' distinctions between "dominant," "residual," and "emergent" formations (I brought this up in some posts back in September, but I didn't spend much time defining the terms).

The dominant is that formation which not only controls an overwhelming percentage of total social power, but which does so in such a way that this control is perceived (if at all) by those it most controls as "natural," beyond question or comment. Actually, this bleeds into a definition of hegemony, but hegemony is an inevitable facet of a truly dominant formation.

The residual is what remains of earlier dominant formations that have not been completely effaced by the current one. It typically exists in an unstable relation to the dominant, neither dispensable nor fully assimilable to its interests. For example, fundamentalist Christianity is essential to the workings of the current dominant capitalist ideology of the major US political parties, but is also part of a much older system of practices and values that is not always compatible with the central aims of capitalism.

The emergent is the most slippery of the three categories, because it is the one that by definition does not yet exist in its perfect state. That is, the residual is that formation which has already been fully realized and is now on the wane, the dominant is that which exists now at or near the height of its potency, and the emergent is that whose dimensions cannot yet be completely discerned. For this reason, it is often difficult to tell whether a new tendency or movement really is emergent in the sense of posing a possible site of resistance to the dominant, or whether it is just some novel innovation on the dominant's part.

In answer, then, to Jon's suggestion that from his point of view my "category 1 doesn't exist," I would say that it is partly by virtue of seeming not to exist that the dominant poetic mainstream maintains its hegemony. "You're soaking in it," as they used to say in that old commercial. It is not a matter of whether the visibly dominant entities of category 1 "influence challenging or progressive poetries"; it is a matter of how those entities are increasingly able to do exactly what Jon says: "looking at category 2 to imitate for credibility." I would simply want to insist that there is a difference between imitations of category 2 and category 2 proper, and to suggest that it is the imitations which are "not defining what's good in poetry but what's cool." Cool is a very powerful ideological tool. Part of what makes cool so seductive is that it is often based on something that begins as an emergent form--that is, something with the potential for resistant semiotic (or even direct material) action. Think Che Guevara T-shirts. For this reason, it is important not to reject out of hand anything that smacks of cool. Cool can be good. That's why we call it cool in the first place, as in "oh, cool, penguins!" (assuming we like penguins). What we have to learn to develop is the more rigorous skill of being able to tell that which is genuinely cool (or, if you prefer, "good") from category 1 simulacra of cool (or "kewl").

The Poker and/or Fascicle may excite an "ambitious giddiness" in some would-be contributors, but if so, this points to a serious misconception of the magazines' actual power to confer the sort of prestige being imagined, and accordingly a misdirected fetishization of such prestige. Perhaps publication in these journals might serve some nominally measurable career-building purpose as credits in a long list of other credits, but by far the majority of accredited institutions sponsoring MFA programs and so forth are looking to hire people who have published in pretty much the same recognized mainstream outlets that have been privileged for the past half a century (this would include both book publishers and journals).

This, however, brings me to the level at which I share many of Jon's concerns. As the mainstream learns rapidly that it can use the "cool" associated with independent poetic formations to enhance its own mechanisms of dominance, it threatens to domesticate even those journals and small presses that have been most active in constructing alternatives to dominant practice. Much of this domestication, to be sure, occurs purely through the power of association, and may have little or nothing to do with any conscious complicity on the part of individual editors and poets. In much the same way, although as I've recently argued, the Legitimate Dangers anthology represents an attempt at a major power grab by mainstream forces, I am fairly certain that the editors themselves do not see it this way. Nor am I--nor is anyone--immune to the subtle and ubiquitous influences of mainstreamification: it occurs in small ways constantly, every time we publish a book with a bar code on the back, or every time we blurb someone who publishes a book with a bar code on the back, or every time we are invited to read in a reading series by someone who has blurbed someone who has published a book with a bar code on the back. I hope no one takes all that entirely literally, but the point should be clear: the only way to remove ourselves entirely from the machinations of the poetic spectacle would be to go off to a cave somewhere and only write poems with charcoal on the backs of rocks--and even that would be to valorize some romantic myth of primitive purity sponsored by, you guessed it, the dominant poetic mainstream.

That's why it's important to keep fighting for category 2. Without it (or for that matter with it), I guarantee you no heroic category 3 is going to rise up in thirty years from the underbrush. Put another way, category 2 is category 3, and what Jon sees in category 2 as category-1-like is really not category 2 at all but category 1 in category 2 drag. Jon mentions the books on the shelves being the only substantial difference between category 2 and category 1 poets: I don't think that's true, but even if it were, those books are what matter. If they're not, what on earth are we fighting for in the first place. The fantasy of a "non-category that will define the future," a "new breed" that "won't 'position' themselves anywhere," is a blind alley. There are no non-categories, no positionless positions. If you don't position yourself, someone else will do it for you, and fool you into thinking they haven't.

All of which is to say many things, but among them that it would be a shame if Jon stopped editing for good. There are a lot of journals out there all of a sudden, many of them very good, some of them of mixed potential in their seeming suspension between the worlds of career-promotion and poetry-promotion, and some of them quite shapeless and thus acquiescent to dominant cooptation by default. WWPOH, like The Poker and Fascicle and fortunately quite a few others I could name, is one of the good ones, one of the we-need-all-we-can-get ones.

Poetry World Thoughts

I'm not ready to squeeze this idea into a definitive statement yet, but I'm trying to figure out what exactly the relation is between 1) the dominant organs of poetic publication and recognition (e.g., university-based journals, large publishing companies, various incarnations of the literary "establishment" such as Poetry Magazine, etc.), and 2) the residual and emergent poetic community of "independent" writers and venues that positions itself at least implicitly outside the first category.

I'm especially interested in the tension-filled overlap between the two categories--an overlap that undoubtedly constitutes a bigger category than either of the first two by themselves. The kind of overlap I have in mind involves, among other things, a vying for sponsorship, with tacit claims to ownership, of new talents. To pick just one example out of dozens, to whom does the very talented Sabrina Orah Mark "belong"? To the big-league MFA mafia, or to the indie kids? Can she be "shared," or does such a compromise compromise the legitimacy of one side or the other's claims? Or, to what extent are the indie kids as a total phenomenon often in some ways merely a shadow wing of the MFA mafia, whether they know it or not? Or, from another perspective, to what extent is the "establishment" making enforced adjustments in its infrastructure that might genuinely allow greater exposure for interesting new writing (but then again, at what cost, and so on)? My general sense is that even those poets who have positioned themselves most outside the "mainstream" are now having to deal with the way in which that ever-more acquisitive and resourceful mainstream offers itself up as a platform on which to stand and be seen. Scratch "offers"--it inserts itself irresistibly, unavoidably. It's not a matter of something you can consciously choose to do, like "selling out" or "buying in"; it's more of a paradigm shift that you just wake up one morning and find you inhabit, through no real actions of your own. Before, it was just a problem of being excluded or ignored. Now it's a problem of the spaces one could formerly occupy while not being included being "bought up" and refurnished so that wherever you stand, you too are included in ways you have no say in. It's like, before, you could opt out by going and having your coffee at the locally-owned shop on the corner, but now, although the shop is still there and you still hang out there, the whole city block it's on is owned by Starbucks. So whatever you say or do or complain about in your little indie cafe is always being said or done or complained about courtesy of Starbucks.

That's clearly more than one question, and probably not all that clear at all. I do, however, sense a lot of heat around questions like these, heat that has risen dramatically in the last few months. Does anyone else feel like the poetry world (like the world world) has gotten markedly more anxious all of a sudden?