Daniel Borzutzky, The Ecstasy of Capitulation

Daniel Borzutzky's The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVOX [books], 2007) consists of one cheap conceptual joke and Mad-Libs-style grammatical gimmick after another. It is filled with snarky poetic in-references and broad satirical jabs at broader social targets. The humor is consistently pitched at either a scatological/bratty/infantile level or a glib/bratty/faux-surreal level. Here are the first three sentences of "The Heart Is a Lonely Perineum":

And if it is true that all I can do is float
through these tunnels of dust and pain in which
capital swims in the arms of mercilessness,
then I will put you in the coffin I wear
around my waist and bind you with a rose to the
small triangular bone at the end of my
spinal column where the you that is not you shall
meet the you that might be you and together we
will form a family who will flourish inside this
golden abyss whose entryway is guarded by
a gaggle of slithering creditors with
pee-pees for guns and Chinese porcelain for
eyeballs. For who is to say that the air we breathe
is anything more than a secret code both
capricious in structure and marketable in
the substance of its sad and tender humility.
I was teaching the Laotians about the
existential implications of the
conditional voice when a man came on the
loudspeaker and said we were all a bunch of
Mexican widows with secret Jewish husbands
on our titties.

The signature gesture throughout is the familiar one of Romantic Irony: deflating "elevated" or "poetic" expression by subjecting it at each crescendo to a sudden bathos. This is the stuff of schoolroom goofery, of hollow show-offy lampooning. Even prosodically, Borzutzky's method is transparently threadbare--the line-ends occur on articles and prepositions with mechanical regularity, in order to create a precipitous, continually revolving, logorrhetic effect, as of someone who can't find a way to finish a phrase and so just keeps going.

And yet, somehow it all works. At the bottom of all this horsewash is an impassioned literary sensibility. I'm using "literary" here to mean a quality of creative engagement with the culture's language as it actually exists, in the service of whatever not-entirely-utilitarian end. Is that an adequate definition of "poetic" as well? I'm not sure. But it is texts like this one that make testing such distinctions very interesting.

Borzutzsky is willfully unrestrained by taste, discretion, or subtlety, at the same time that he appears to be plunged deep in a dedicated love-struggle with the root forms of artistic verbal expression. If this amorous fumbling sometimes results in the birth of clunkers, they are clunkers whose collective dull thuds add a sonorous echo to the whole.

All in all, one of the two or three very best books of poetry of the twenty-first century so far that feature a large animal-shaped sales balloon on the front cover.

The Crises in Poetry

The crises in poetry are the crises that have always been in poetry, most of them attributable to the fact that more or less equally intelligent people disagree with each other violently on questions of value, each side presenting perfectly reasonable arguments. Even among generally like-minded persons, or sometimes for a single individual, certain issues seem irresolvable: accessibility and inaccessibility mean something different to almost every reader; irony and sincerity are frequently indistinguishable at the level of material expression; ethics and aesthetics are somehow both necessary and irrelevant to each other.

Part of this, surely, has to do with poetry being a fundamental function of crisis. Not all poems are as firmly built around antithesis as Catullus' odi et amo, but that principle of built-in impasse surely haunts the poetic spirit at its base. When Sappho complains, "I am as green as grass," or Dickinson says "I'm Nobody," or Rilke counsels, "You must change your life," or James Wright realizes, "I have wasted my life," the language is consistently that of crisis. Things have come to a head, have shown themselves as they really are, have reached a point where silence must be broken, have shifted in their orbits so as to reveal the looming form of a new constellation.

Crises are turning points, moments of uncertainty that lead toward either decay or improvement--or perhaps nothing, stasis. What is important is that for the moment of the crisis, fixity appears as though lifted. Dido: quae me suspensam insomnia terrent! The unsettling dreams of poetry hold us in suspense, suspension, a state of epistemological and existential levitation.

To argue about the primacy of ethics or aesthetics in this context is to miss the point. It is not that they are different sides of the same coin; they are the same coin in its entirety, both sides at once. What determines its ethical or aesthetic valences is what it is spent on. Similarly, irony and sincerity are values judged properly not by form, but by use--and by who gets to do the using. And accessibility is a completely contingent quality. Accessibility to what? For whom? At what price? The crisis in all these instances has more to do with the world than with the poem. It means nothing for poetry to be in a state of crisis all by itself. Poetry reflects and responds to crises that are already extant, embodied, political, personal, lived. The whole theoretical problem is meaningless in the absence of an understanding of the crisis that precedes the poem.

The poem's job, on the other hand, is not so much to understand the crisis as to render it palpable. This is both an ethical and an aesthetic task.

The crises in poetry are the same crises we would have with or without poetry. Poetry is not accountable for them; it is merely subject to them, like everything else. Or, if poetry sets out to appoint itself as an actual crisis mediator, it had better bring some money, food, blankets, and maybe weapons.

Folk Jam

Anne observes in conversation that the notion of "folk poetry" conceived as an outsidery independence, in opposition to poetry created in a collective context, is very tricky, since as soon as you can read, you're already on your way to being social, being contextualized as part of a collective rather than as a monad (I'm combining her words with my own reflections).

Nevertheless, as Anne has also pointed out (earlier, in another conversation), part of what distinguishes truly innovative literary work is its apparent lack of what is conventionally accepted in its time as competence. This "incompetence" may well take on the look of folkiness, or even folksiness ("folkness"). It doesn't have to, though. It can also take on the look of a haughtily hermetic exclusivity that some disparagingly call "academic."

Not that there isn't an apt object for the term "academic poetry," but people too often make the simplistic equation: academic poetry = poetry written by persons who happen to be academics. Academic poetry, I say, may just as well be written by anxiously emulative parties outside academia. If it's academic enough, it goes full circle to being so weird that even (especially?) academia rejects it. Anyway, the only justification I can see for using the term derogatorily is as a corrective to transparent, failed displays of erudition (when they do not fail, they are not transparent).

So what would a true "folk poet" look like? I guess her or his assimilation of social conventions associated not just with current taste and style, but with basic literacy, would have to be conspicuously imperfect. John Clare comes to mind as someone whose evident brilliance stands in stark contrast to the unavoidable fact that in some ways he can barely put together a sentence (although I have to say, not being at all a Clare expert, that this may be a mistaken impression on my part). Who of poetic note in the past century is comparably "incompetent"? Peter Orlovsky? Or is that an act? I really don't know enough about him to say.

But before I go any further with this line of thought, I'm obliged to question the whole concept: do we want to equate "folk" universally with "incompetence" in this way? Of course not. Folk musicians, for example, can be considered incompetent only according to a very narrowly chauvinist definition of competence as the mastery of a set of conventions associated with the dominant version of what counts as "real" music. Folk musicians learn from other musicians, and their success, unless it is achieved ironically (as in the case of The Shaggs) is dependent at least in good part upon the standards upheld by those other musicians. Folk visual artists may seem to be a partial exception, as their work is so intimately connected to mimesis as a factor of immediate perception, or some abstracted derivative from that principle. "Competence" at this point becomes a meaningless notion. Writers, on the other hand, cannot even be recognized intelligibly as writers until they have entered into the social covenant of the linguistic code. And when they do that, they are instantly subject to the pangs of influence and tradition and all those literary maladies.

So maybe it is only in the case of writing that the folk/incompetence equation applies. My point is not that writers striving for relevance should deliberately, straight-facedly, court incompetence, as such effort would clearly be hypocritical. Nor is it that the notion of a competence of the kind I'm invoking should be used as a way of policing "legitimate" poetic practice (though unfortunately such policing does occur, both in "academic" and "independent" circles). My point is simply that if you posit a dichotomy between folk(ness) and collectivity in poetry, you have to include the overwhelming majority of practice on one side or the other, which in either case produces such a lopsided imbalance that the distinction becomes useless, on par with "those poets who are outside of any twofold classification of poets and those who are not."