“When he looks at submissions to [the Paris Review], [Lorin Stein] said, he is searching for pieces that could be ‘stuck up on the fridge’—stories and poems that resonate because they are about real life.”
—Yale Daily News
“I’m having one of those days where I want to KILL SOMEONE”
—jroota
I hate Mondays
toad magnet
I’m an employee
Racoon magnet
I hate Mondays
gerbil magnet
I hate Monday
Fridge magnet
\\\\
Office humour
A monkey’s job
Work sucks
I hate Mondays!
\\\\
(multiple products selected)
I hate Mondays
(multiple products selected)
I hate Mondays
Monday magnet
Monday fridge magnet
Fanciful ape
I hate Mondays
Refrigerator magnet
Mondays suck
I hate Mondays
Monday magnet
Monday magnet
Fanciful ape
Mondays suck
\\\\
One of those days
Sulking rhino
hate fear mondays
I love Mondays
Mondays,
no one likes them
Monday morning blues
Cat magnet,
Scream if you hate
Mondays fridge magnet
I don’t do Mondays
I don’t do Mondays
I hate whatever today is
I don’t do mornings
Sleepy kitten, I don’t do mornings
I’m an employee
Casual Fridays
Love on Sunday,
Fridge magnet
Love on Sunday,
Silly:
Happy Monday
Good morning to you too
Two Sentence Review of Andrew Cedermark’s “Moon Deluxe,” Padded with a Youtube Video Which I Think Is from the First Time I Saw Him Play (It Was LOUD)
You know the kind of riff that gets stuck in your head and you can’t remember where it’s from, and then later you figure it out and realize you’ve never really noticed it before and you can’t understand why because suddenly it’s your favorite song now?
This whole album is like that.
This whole album is like that.
One Sentence Review of “Everything Was Fine Until Whatever” by Chelsea Martin, Prefaced by 4-6 Paragraphs Explaining That Sentence
I like funny poetry best but there’s a difference between “jokes” and “poetry jokes.” A joke is shaped like this: There’s an initial incongruity that disrupts normal expectations, and behind it a different level of congruity that makes things make sense again. A poetry joke is shaped like a normal joke, except it doesn’t have the second level, or the second level it has is malformed, it doesn’t quite make things make sense again or it doesn’t make any more sense than the first level. A normal joke is ruined if you explain it; a poetry joke can’t be explained and thus can’t be ruined.
So poetry jokes often stay funny longer than regular jokes. But then again they’re funny “for no reason,” you read them and start to laugh and then you wonder why, and worry maybe it’s just because you saw something shaped like a joke.
Here’s some examples. Neither of these is particularly funny, but they have the advantage of being sort of parallel.
A waste is a terrible thing to mind.
That’s a joke. It disrupts normal expectations because it reverses two words in the common saying A mind is a terrible thing to waste. But the reversed sentence makes just as much sense as the original, while also kind of reversing that sense, in that the original is sort of optimistic and inclusive and the inversion is sort of cynical and mean. Invert the words and you also invert the meaning; scratch the surface of something optimistic and you get something mean. It’s easy to fairly exhaustively explain, it disrupts your normal expectations for a second but then it’s based on premises that feel just as familiar. There’s a kind of conservation of meaning going on.
Now here’s a quote from a Charles Bernstein poem (“Lives of the Toll Takers” from Dark City) (This should have some crazy indentations but they’re not going to show up right in your browser no matter what so screw it) (Charles Bernstein might be one of the pioneers of the poetry joke as we know it).
I had
it but
I misp
laced
it somewhere
in the
back burner
of what
is laug
hingly
called m
y
mind
(my
crim
e). A
mind is a terrible thing to steal:
intellectual property is also
theft.
“A / mind is a terrible thing to steal” doesn’t make a lot of sense; adding “intellectually property is also / theft” kind of just makes it worse. The only reason to substitute “steal” for “waste” is that “crime” almost rhymes with “mind”—in other words no reason, really. It’s maybe not any funnier than the regular joke, but it doesn’t conserve logic. It creates the same moment of confusion as the joke and then it just hangs there, so even if you successfully explain it once you can come back later and laugh for different reasons, and then explain it again. Poetry joke. Okay?
So: Everything Was Fine Until Whatever has a few more jokes than I usually like in my funny poetry (“She seemed maternal to me because she cursed a lot and always asked me if I was pregnant”); but then they’re mostly really good jokes, so I won’t complain.
So poetry jokes often stay funny longer than regular jokes. But then again they’re funny “for no reason,” you read them and start to laugh and then you wonder why, and worry maybe it’s just because you saw something shaped like a joke.
Here’s some examples. Neither of these is particularly funny, but they have the advantage of being sort of parallel.
A waste is a terrible thing to mind.
That’s a joke. It disrupts normal expectations because it reverses two words in the common saying A mind is a terrible thing to waste. But the reversed sentence makes just as much sense as the original, while also kind of reversing that sense, in that the original is sort of optimistic and inclusive and the inversion is sort of cynical and mean. Invert the words and you also invert the meaning; scratch the surface of something optimistic and you get something mean. It’s easy to fairly exhaustively explain, it disrupts your normal expectations for a second but then it’s based on premises that feel just as familiar. There’s a kind of conservation of meaning going on.
Now here’s a quote from a Charles Bernstein poem (“Lives of the Toll Takers” from Dark City) (This should have some crazy indentations but they’re not going to show up right in your browser no matter what so screw it) (Charles Bernstein might be one of the pioneers of the poetry joke as we know it).
I had
it but
I misp
laced
it somewhere
in the
back burner
of what
is laug
hingly
called m
y
mind
(my
crim
e). A
mind is a terrible thing to steal:
intellectual property is also
theft.
“A / mind is a terrible thing to steal” doesn’t make a lot of sense; adding “intellectually property is also / theft” kind of just makes it worse. The only reason to substitute “steal” for “waste” is that “crime” almost rhymes with “mind”—in other words no reason, really. It’s maybe not any funnier than the regular joke, but it doesn’t conserve logic. It creates the same moment of confusion as the joke and then it just hangs there, so even if you successfully explain it once you can come back later and laugh for different reasons, and then explain it again. Poetry joke. Okay?
So: Everything Was Fine Until Whatever has a few more jokes than I usually like in my funny poetry (“She seemed maternal to me because she cursed a lot and always asked me if I was pregnant”); but then they’re mostly really good jokes, so I won’t complain.
DRUNK MODERNISM
SO MUCH DEPENDS
UPON
A RED WHEEL
BARROW
GLAZED WITH RAIN
WATER
BESIDE THE WHITE
CHICKENS
***
I HAVE EATEN
THE PLUMS
THAT WERE IN
THE ICEBOX
AND WHICH
YOU WERE PROBABLY
SAVING
FOR BREAKFAST
FORGIVE ME
THEY WERE DELICIOUS
SO SWEET
AND SO COLD
***
WHIRL UP, SEA
WHIRL YOUR POINTED PINES
SPLASH YOUR GREAT PINES
ON OUR ROCKS
HURL YOUR GREEN OVER US
COVER US WITH YOUR POOLS OF FIR
***
I WISH THAT I HAD SPOKEN ONLY OF IT ALL
[modern drunks]
UPON
A RED WHEEL
BARROW
GLAZED WITH RAIN
WATER
BESIDE THE WHITE
CHICKENS
***
I HAVE EATEN
THE PLUMS
THAT WERE IN
THE ICEBOX
AND WHICH
YOU WERE PROBABLY
SAVING
FOR BREAKFAST
FORGIVE ME
THEY WERE DELICIOUS
SO SWEET
AND SO COLD
***
WHIRL UP, SEA
WHIRL YOUR POINTED PINES
SPLASH YOUR GREAT PINES
ON OUR ROCKS
HURL YOUR GREEN OVER US
COVER US WITH YOUR POOLS OF FIR
***
I WISH THAT I HAD SPOKEN ONLY OF IT ALL
[modern drunks]
Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (in Helvetica)
A note in case anyone ever actually comes across this post again: In 2018 Steve Roggenbuck was outed as having groomed multiple younger, often underage girls and trans people for sexual relationships over the course of his public career, as well as having treated his partners in manipulative and coercive ways. I've left up posts about him on this blog because I don't want to erase my support of him in the past, but I've removed links to his work so as not to provide continued support now.
if you call me, i wont answer
if you call me, i wont answer
i am sitting under the moon inside of a wheelbarrow
***
Actually, no, that’s a poem from Steve Roggenbuck’s new chapbook i am like october when i am dead. But “‘In a Station of the Metro’ in Helvetica” seems like a good enough description of Roggenbuck’s poems—which are quick and lyrical, like that one, or else weird and funny (“i dont care about reading a poem / who do you think i am, robert frost?”), or occasionally weird and creepy (“i am like the killers of people”). Or else they’re pop-conceptualist appreciations of found language that less sensitive souls might mistake for unpoetic (“oh, you have a smock on”—that’s an entire poem), which is something that Roggenbuck is also doing a nice job of through his series of visual poems based on chat logs.
I’d quote more examples, but since the whole book is only about 300 words I think I should leave some. It’s free, it’s good, it’s short—there’s basically zero investment on your part, you could just go and read it.
T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (in Comic Sans)
THE WASTE LAND
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo.
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo.
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off . . .”
Meet Emily Pumpkinson, the Gourd of Amherst.
Unfortunately, Emily isn’t bright enough to photograph in the dark.
Also, the inside of her head is infested with brain slugs.
Generally feeling a little sad about Emily right now.
Also, the inside of her head is infested with brain slugs.
“The sky the color of tenure”: On Jim Behrle’s “Succubus Blues”
If all the poet-bullies on the internet were as funny, weird, and self-deprecating about it as Jim Behrle, it might actually be a bad thing that Silliman closed down his comments. Behrle’s online persona is like a broken clock that always points to “self-important douche”—except that since he’s talking about other poets, he’s right way more than twice a day. So: refreshing.
That would only make him an interesting online curiosity, though, if his poems didn’t back it up. Well, I’ve just finished reading his most recent chapbook, Succubus Blues, and I feel that I can fairly say he does alright. I’m not sure if he’s really (as he’s declared himself) funnier than most of the Flarfists, but he sure as hell holds his own, and by pairing his cut-up/standup routines with a more straightforward first-person voice, he gives himself a chance to really maximize the dynamic of comedy and pathos that Flarf usually only teases.
If that doesn’t quite happen, maybe it’s because Behrle’s sincerity remains more artificial than Flarf’s artifice. Where the best Flarf poets can—by channeling their own deepest anxieties through the chorus of Google—tap into something that feels both fundamentally human and utterly impersonal, Behrle’s shticky pseudo-confessions tend to bury him further in a kind of hard-luck, “don’t-get-no-respect” persona. There’s huge poetic potential in his strange mix of exposure and artifice, vulnerability and facetiousness; but as of yet he may be best tapping that potential through his series of endlessly churned-up, ambiguously one-sided internet feuds. He may just be the first literary artist whose true medium is the flame war.
Whatever else he is, though, he’s also kind of clever smart-ass that poetry still needs more of, full of sick satirical burns like “I adored the blurb you gave me so much / I wrote you a thank you blurb,” or “I want to shock you in a wine & cheese kind of way.” And then there is that other voice that lurks behind the wisecracks, the one that, in “I Establish Rapport,” seems to genuinely wish it could do just that—the voice that hates all the careerism and fakery not for its own sake but for the way it isolates and dehumanizes; the skillful lyric voice that can instantly pivot our viewpoint from the togetherness of the crowd to the loneliness of the performer: “We can’t help it, Jim, we touch and feel loved / Although completely alone / Behind the mic I’m burning too.”
“This is as good as I’m ever gonna be / So, you’ll have to be the one to change into a green brutal / Diamond,” Behrle writes in one self-deprecating yet ironically wonderful moment. Could be—but I wouldn’t be surprised if he still got better. Or if not, hey, there’s always the flame wars.
That would only make him an interesting online curiosity, though, if his poems didn’t back it up. Well, I’ve just finished reading his most recent chapbook, Succubus Blues, and I feel that I can fairly say he does alright. I’m not sure if he’s really (as he’s declared himself) funnier than most of the Flarfists, but he sure as hell holds his own, and by pairing his cut-up/standup routines with a more straightforward first-person voice, he gives himself a chance to really maximize the dynamic of comedy and pathos that Flarf usually only teases.
If that doesn’t quite happen, maybe it’s because Behrle’s sincerity remains more artificial than Flarf’s artifice. Where the best Flarf poets can—by channeling their own deepest anxieties through the chorus of Google—tap into something that feels both fundamentally human and utterly impersonal, Behrle’s shticky pseudo-confessions tend to bury him further in a kind of hard-luck, “don’t-get-no-respect” persona. There’s huge poetic potential in his strange mix of exposure and artifice, vulnerability and facetiousness; but as of yet he may be best tapping that potential through his series of endlessly churned-up, ambiguously one-sided internet feuds. He may just be the first literary artist whose true medium is the flame war.
Whatever else he is, though, he’s also kind of clever smart-ass that poetry still needs more of, full of sick satirical burns like “I adored the blurb you gave me so much / I wrote you a thank you blurb,” or “I want to shock you in a wine & cheese kind of way.” And then there is that other voice that lurks behind the wisecracks, the one that, in “I Establish Rapport,” seems to genuinely wish it could do just that—the voice that hates all the careerism and fakery not for its own sake but for the way it isolates and dehumanizes; the skillful lyric voice that can instantly pivot our viewpoint from the togetherness of the crowd to the loneliness of the performer: “We can’t help it, Jim, we touch and feel loved / Although completely alone / Behind the mic I’m burning too.”
“This is as good as I’m ever gonna be / So, you’ll have to be the one to change into a green brutal / Diamond,” Behrle writes in one self-deprecating yet ironically wonderful moment. Could be—but I wouldn’t be surprised if he still got better. Or if not, hey, there’s always the flame wars.
On “A Pulling from the Inside Downward or to Wherever” by Bryan Coffelt
I had to wait a while for my copy of Bryan Coffelt’s chapbook The Whatever Poems, long enough to generate a kind of private hype in my head that might be difficult for any chapbook to live up to. But if the extra build-up made The Whatever Poems itself seem merely-good in my reading, the wait was more than paid off by the other micro-chap that I bought along with it, A Pulling from the Inside Downward or to Wherever. Tiny rectangles stitched with virgules and dashes, the poems there (or is it a single sequence?) visually recall Emily Dickinson; but in their swirling, mosaic use of shattered fragments of language, they’re closer to Dickinson’s latter-day acolyte Susan Howe. This one might be my new favorite poem:
phantoms
April / adorned with — the blossoms
adorned with — the pallor, the guilty
erasingly tingly Wi-Fi
dying fingers
/ adorned with —
the bricks the Harvard bricks, suited
adorned with — doggie-style analog
spectrum — the being mule-like of it —
adorned with —
reunions & reunions & reunions
Coffelt is a young poet seemingly still sorting through a range of influences—language writing, Flarf, MuuMuu House–like minimalism—and sometimes his work seems visibly experimental. In this little pamphlet, though, he’s hit on a style that feels both timeless and blindingly contemporary, luminous and depopulated yet scab-pickingly emotional. Like Howe’s—or the more intensely focused of Pound’s or Dickinson’s—it’s the kind of poetry that seems carefully chiseled and at the same time totally authorless, as if it condensed out of the air, or radiated from the sun.
And in a show of great instincts, Coffelt has underlined that effect by not putting his name anywhere on the book. With its landscape orientation and slight page count, the book feels like some kind of reverse-polarity Chick tract, a subtle bit of viral marketing that cries out to be passed on. If it weren’t for the fact that I want to keep it more, I’d be tempted to leave it on a bench somewhere—a little mystery (which of course Google would make it easy to solve, leading the finder back to Coffelt’s blog and perhaps out into the wider world of good poetry) for anyone called to pick it up.
***
Oh and I guess you can read the whole thing as a blog post, too, though I think it must lose a lot without the clean, poem-per-page presentation of the print version.
phantoms
April / adorned with — the blossoms
adorned with — the pallor, the guilty
erasingly tingly Wi-Fi
dying fingers
/ adorned with —
the bricks the Harvard bricks, suited
adorned with — doggie-style analog
spectrum — the being mule-like of it —
adorned with —
reunions & reunions & reunions
Coffelt is a young poet seemingly still sorting through a range of influences—language writing, Flarf, MuuMuu House–like minimalism—and sometimes his work seems visibly experimental. In this little pamphlet, though, he’s hit on a style that feels both timeless and blindingly contemporary, luminous and depopulated yet scab-pickingly emotional. Like Howe’s—or the more intensely focused of Pound’s or Dickinson’s—it’s the kind of poetry that seems carefully chiseled and at the same time totally authorless, as if it condensed out of the air, or radiated from the sun.
And in a show of great instincts, Coffelt has underlined that effect by not putting his name anywhere on the book. With its landscape orientation and slight page count, the book feels like some kind of reverse-polarity Chick tract, a subtle bit of viral marketing that cries out to be passed on. If it weren’t for the fact that I want to keep it more, I’d be tempted to leave it on a bench somewhere—a little mystery (which of course Google would make it easy to solve, leading the finder back to Coffelt’s blog and perhaps out into the wider world of good poetry) for anyone called to pick it up.
***
Oh and I guess you can read the whole thing as a blog post, too, though I think it must lose a lot without the clean, poem-per-page presentation of the print version.
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Places Where I Read “Richard Yates” by Tao Lin
A note in case anyone ever actually comes across this post again: This is a fictionalized account of Tao Lin’s acknowledged, arguably abusive relationship with a much younger person. I realized that at the time and was deeply disturbed by it, hence my unwillingness to say anything substantial at about the book then.
—Laundromat on Preston Avenue.
—Charlottesville train station.
—Train from Charlottesville to New York.
—Friend’s apartment in Manhattan.
—Sushi restaurant near that apartment.
—Train from New York to Charlottesville.
I think that’s all I want to say about it right now.
Things That Always Work
When someone yells out “solo,” or something similar, to announce a solo—that always works.
You can do it earnestly:
You can do it ironically:
You can do it like a little girl who just saw a spider:
Or you can do it all like “Whatever, I don’t care”:
Doesn’t matter. It always works.
You can do it earnestly:
You can do it ironically:
You can do it like a little girl who just saw a spider:
Or you can do it all like “Whatever, I don’t care”:
Doesn’t matter. It always works.
Partial List of Things That Ariana Reines Can Do, Based on Her Book "Coeur de Lion"
She can write and even publish a poem in what seems like the next thing to real time, as kind of journal of a failed relationship, and yet still give it a shape and arc that couldn’t have been planned out to be any more satisfying or true. She is able to burrow through the weltering, needlingly poetic emotions of breaking up and somehow bring the whole thing down for a safe landing in the prose of getting-over-it, without any feeling of anticlimax—she is able to make an anticlimax that feels earned? She is able to take apart this guy, the guy she had the relationship with, so intimately and so relentlessly that you actually feel sorry for him even though it’s pretty clear that he pretty much deserves it, and she is able to make herself more and more engaging as a narrator the meaner she is. She is able to make you feel embarrassed for the guy and for yourself just by quoting a few bits of his love letters, which are pretty normal, among her own language, which is seriously not. She is also able to drop old-school poetry lines like this on you and make you fucking believe them:
Where are the messy women who love the fragile boys.
Where are the suicides who are my heroes.
Where are the bitches who know what they want
Who love what they do, bosomy and declarative,
Happy to be artistic in this stupid night.
She is able to write a second book in the year after publishing her very successful first book that is better, more profound, and yet also more accessible than that first book, and then publish it herself in a tiny run with no blurbs and little promotion like, “Oh, here’s this great book I wrote, I’ll just toss this out there, I’m sure there’ll be more where that came from.” And, unless I’m seriously wrong, she is able to be right about that, because this woman seems to produce poetry the way that other people produce sweat, as if she just has some special glands that make her excrete amazing poetry just by sitting around. Or else she is really good at giving that appearance, like Yeats wrote, “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught”; I wouldn’t want to give the impression that she doesn’t do that, I’m sure she does, or she might anyway.
The Coeur de Lion of the title turns out to be a cheese, which at some point in the poem gets compared to the poet’s vagina. She is able to make that comparison work, as like, the central motif of a one hundred page love poem. She could write stuff like “Where is the ‘you’ of You / Tube” all day and it wouldn’t make this book any less amazing; delivered in her skinny, almost violently controlled lines, with her mysterious and unrelenting conviction, that shit sounds fucking profound.
When I got to the page in the book where the following lines appear, by themselves, I actually read them over a good five or six times, because she told me to, that’s why:
I love words
Cos they’re so weak
(repeat)
Basically, she can do what the hell she wants, is what I’m saying.
Where are the messy women who love the fragile boys.
Where are the suicides who are my heroes.
Where are the bitches who know what they want
Who love what they do, bosomy and declarative,
Happy to be artistic in this stupid night.
She is able to write a second book in the year after publishing her very successful first book that is better, more profound, and yet also more accessible than that first book, and then publish it herself in a tiny run with no blurbs and little promotion like, “Oh, here’s this great book I wrote, I’ll just toss this out there, I’m sure there’ll be more where that came from.” And, unless I’m seriously wrong, she is able to be right about that, because this woman seems to produce poetry the way that other people produce sweat, as if she just has some special glands that make her excrete amazing poetry just by sitting around. Or else she is really good at giving that appearance, like Yeats wrote, “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught”; I wouldn’t want to give the impression that she doesn’t do that, I’m sure she does, or she might anyway.
The Coeur de Lion of the title turns out to be a cheese, which at some point in the poem gets compared to the poet’s vagina. She is able to make that comparison work, as like, the central motif of a one hundred page love poem. She could write stuff like “Where is the ‘you’ of You / Tube” all day and it wouldn’t make this book any less amazing; delivered in her skinny, almost violently controlled lines, with her mysterious and unrelenting conviction, that shit sounds fucking profound.
When I got to the page in the book where the following lines appear, by themselves, I actually read them over a good five or six times, because she told me to, that’s why:
I love words
Cos they’re so weak
(repeat)
Basically, she can do what the hell she wants, is what I’m saying.
The Conspiracy Against Growing the Hell Up Already
So Adam Fieled wants to “take up cudgels” against the “outré,” the “ethnic,” and the “deviant,” because they constitute a “conspiracy” against “consensus opinions... borne out or subtly shifted over long periods of time.” But don’t leap to accusations of “regressive conservatism”; it’s just that in today’s world, “the way forward is the way back” because “it must be.”
Okay, that’s a cheap shot, but not that cheap. Those quotes aren’t that far out of context: Fieled really does link “the ethnic and the deviant” as the two things that “political correctness” gravitates towards (which means that “deviant” stands for what here—gays, women, outsider art, all of those?). And the essay contains a quantity of metaphoric violence that would make Marinetti blush, all starting fires and burning things to the ground and building on the ashes.
Here would be a less cheap response, and the reason why I normally try to abstain from responding to this kind of thing at all: The entire argument that poetry has “has ceased to be itself” because there’s a lot of it you don’t like should be embarrassingly solipsistic. I happen to read a heck of a lot of poetry that I like all the time, and I bet a lot of it is exactly the stuff that Fieled thinks is “moribund.” Some of those “grayish fortresses” he wants “burnt to the ground” happen to have people living in them, you know. Somehow, though, he seems to feel that the world would be objectively better if he could displace those people to make more room for himself. Poetry becomes a weird kind of aesthetic colonization, a zero-sum game in which the would-be conqueror's personal satisfaction is equated with the right alignment of the universe.
If Fieled wants to see a different kind of poetry in the world, all he has to do is write it, or spread it where he finds it in the writing of others. These are activities that I gather he’s participated in, and none of them require him to destroy the work of others to make room—as should be evident from his own healthy list of publications, apparently none of which were canceled in order to publish an extra book by (I’m guessing here, since he doesn’t name any names) Kenneth Goldsmith or Ron Silliman. Seeing poetry you don’t like isn’t a reason for a revolution; it’s a reason to go read a different book.
This kind of attitude is so prevalent, and I find it really frustrating and depressing. Maybe I should set fire to it?
(A much funnier response to similar attitudes that everyone should read is here.)
Okay, that’s a cheap shot, but not that cheap. Those quotes aren’t that far out of context: Fieled really does link “the ethnic and the deviant” as the two things that “political correctness” gravitates towards (which means that “deviant” stands for what here—gays, women, outsider art, all of those?). And the essay contains a quantity of metaphoric violence that would make Marinetti blush, all starting fires and burning things to the ground and building on the ashes.
Here would be a less cheap response, and the reason why I normally try to abstain from responding to this kind of thing at all: The entire argument that poetry has “has ceased to be itself” because there’s a lot of it you don’t like should be embarrassingly solipsistic. I happen to read a heck of a lot of poetry that I like all the time, and I bet a lot of it is exactly the stuff that Fieled thinks is “moribund.” Some of those “grayish fortresses” he wants “burnt to the ground” happen to have people living in them, you know. Somehow, though, he seems to feel that the world would be objectively better if he could displace those people to make more room for himself. Poetry becomes a weird kind of aesthetic colonization, a zero-sum game in which the would-be conqueror's personal satisfaction is equated with the right alignment of the universe.
If Fieled wants to see a different kind of poetry in the world, all he has to do is write it, or spread it where he finds it in the writing of others. These are activities that I gather he’s participated in, and none of them require him to destroy the work of others to make room—as should be evident from his own healthy list of publications, apparently none of which were canceled in order to publish an extra book by (I’m guessing here, since he doesn’t name any names) Kenneth Goldsmith or Ron Silliman. Seeing poetry you don’t like isn’t a reason for a revolution; it’s a reason to go read a different book.
This kind of attitude is so prevalent, and I find it really frustrating and depressing. Maybe I should set fire to it?
(A much funnier response to similar attitudes that everyone should read is here.)
not experiment but equipoise
not heroics but healing
not nostrums but normalcy
not revolution but restoration
not agitation but adjustment
not surgery but serenity
not the dramatic but the dispassionate
not experiment but equipoise
not nostrums but normalcy
not revolution but restoration
not agitation but adjustment
not surgery but serenity
not the dramatic but the dispassionate
not experiment but equipoise
Tao Lin, Lorrie Moore, a Chimp Washing a Cat
A note in case anyone ever actually comes across this post again: I later learned about Tao Lin’s acknowledged, arguably abusive relationship with a much younger person. I've left up posts about him on this blog because I don't want to erase my support of him in the past, but I've removed links to his work so as not to provide continued support now.
I’m reading Lorrie Moore’s Like Life, realizing how directly Tao Lin imitated her in Bed (this is not an unfounded accusation, he’s more or less said so here). Yet somehow that doesn’t take away from my appreciation for Bed at all. Maybe it’s because of the way that Tao Lin’s reflections of other writers—whether it’s Moore in Bed or Anne Beattie in Eeeee Eee Eeee—are so cracked and distorted, in ways that are more idiosyncratic than most writers’ originality, ways that he maybe couldn’t help even if he wanted to. Even the flaws of Moore’s writing get picked up and heightened, as if unconsciously. Example: If Moore uses appositive descriptions along the lines of “the refrigerated smell... the vague shame and hamburger death of it” distractingly often, Lin in Bed uses them more often, more weirdly, and even more distractingly: “the word awning… the complete, incomplete word of it,” “the air conditioner… the biscuit-brown plastic appliance thing of it,” “her teeth, the private collection of them,” etc. What comes through is a kind of untameable unprofessionalism, rough edges and self-indulgences that would be polished away in any decent workshop, but that for Lin constitute something like a voice, one more vibrant than correct, more distinct—even in pastiche—than controlled. An overdriven version of his models that, for all the times I might wince at the weird grammar or repetitive tics, seems worth the costs for the sheer electricity and volume of it.
It’s kind of like watching a chimpanzee wash a cat. Bear with me here. You know the chimp’s only doing it in imitation of a human, you know you’ve seen humans do this a million times before, you even know that a human would, by some standard, do it “better”—but none of that makes it any less funny to watch. Whereas with a human the cat would be the star, somehow the chimp kind of steals the show. And, though the human might be the best way to get your cat clean, you know which one you’d rather watch on an endless loop on YouTube.
Of course, Tao Lin never really uses what he’s called his “Lorrie Moore” style anymore; it’s all about the “concrete style” now. But from what I’ve heard in advance of and about Richard Yates, due out in just weeks, I’m hopeful that he still won’t—still can’t—lose those rough edges.
Click My Name
Sometimes it is hard to distinguish what is spoof, what is crazy and what is the actual truth.
But it is easy to see the direction we are headed in. Martial law is a definite possibility.
Click my name and see my blog.
But it is easy to see the direction we are headed in. Martial law is a definite possibility.
Click my name and see my blog.
"Death is the Mother of Beauty" (on "Man on Wire")
Note: I've just got Netflix, so this may become something of a film blog for a while until I catch up on the many, many interesting semirecent releases I've missed.
The construction of this documentary sometimes strays towards the cheesy, as with the computer-animated plane that tracks the protagonist’s travels, or the borderline Unsolved Mysteries–style reenactments. Yet the incredible story of Philippe Petit’s unsanctioned 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers fully shines through, aided by some incredible archival materials and by Petit’s own pleasantly hammy storytelling. It’s almost a stroke of luck that no motion footage exists of the walk itself, turning that impossible reality into a kind of sublime semi-absence at the heart of the film, leaving the filmmakers to linger over still-shots of Petit grinning as he strides confidently across the wire, or lying languidly on his back gazing up like a picnicker on a hill—except seen from a quarter of a mile below. Seeing these images, knowing what Petit went through to get up there, it’s difficult not to feel as overwhelmed by the event as the eyewitnesses telling the story—and even the cop who arrested Petit afterwards (captured in a contemporaneous news interview) appears to tear up a bit as he speaks of “watching something that somebody else would never see again in the world.”
Whatever pall of grim prophecy is cast over those words by the subsequent history of the World Trade Center is consciously ignored by the film, yet not tonally inconsonant with its implicit critique of the monomania, and the attendant selfishness and irresponsibility to those who aid and support him, that drives Petit to his miraculous performance. The image of this man defying all authority, from the police on up to gravity itself, to achieve something like tranquility and freedom on a literal walk through the clouds—it’s truly beautiful. But it’s also impossible to forget—indeed, it’s necessary not to forget, since the beauty depends on it—the 1300-foot deep mouth of death above which he balances.
The construction of this documentary sometimes strays towards the cheesy, as with the computer-animated plane that tracks the protagonist’s travels, or the borderline Unsolved Mysteries–style reenactments. Yet the incredible story of Philippe Petit’s unsanctioned 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers fully shines through, aided by some incredible archival materials and by Petit’s own pleasantly hammy storytelling. It’s almost a stroke of luck that no motion footage exists of the walk itself, turning that impossible reality into a kind of sublime semi-absence at the heart of the film, leaving the filmmakers to linger over still-shots of Petit grinning as he strides confidently across the wire, or lying languidly on his back gazing up like a picnicker on a hill—except seen from a quarter of a mile below. Seeing these images, knowing what Petit went through to get up there, it’s difficult not to feel as overwhelmed by the event as the eyewitnesses telling the story—and even the cop who arrested Petit afterwards (captured in a contemporaneous news interview) appears to tear up a bit as he speaks of “watching something that somebody else would never see again in the world.”
Whatever pall of grim prophecy is cast over those words by the subsequent history of the World Trade Center is consciously ignored by the film, yet not tonally inconsonant with its implicit critique of the monomania, and the attendant selfishness and irresponsibility to those who aid and support him, that drives Petit to his miraculous performance. The image of this man defying all authority, from the police on up to gravity itself, to achieve something like tranquility and freedom on a literal walk through the clouds—it’s truly beautiful. But it’s also impossible to forget—indeed, it’s necessary not to forget, since the beauty depends on it—the 1300-foot deep mouth of death above which he balances.
When Mumblecore Meets Hardcore (on "The Girlfriend Experience")
I’m pretty pleased that Steven Sodergergh hired the world’s most market-savvy porn star and used her to make what amounts to a big-budget mumblecore movie about capitalism as prostitution. I dig the film’s implication that our high-gloss, sell-or-be-sold culture encourages us to hollow out our actual lives for the sake of our personal brands; and I love the postmodern twist of casting someone who’s by all appearances living that critique (and owning it?) to play the lead role. But—and this is a real question for anyone who’s seen the movie—how is the last scene not Ezra Pound–levels of anti-Semitic?
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