MEAN FREE PATH
BEN LERNER
MEAN FREE PATH
BOOKS BY BEN LERNER
Mean Free Path
Angle of Yaw
The Lichtenberg Figures
MEAN FREE PATH
BEN LERNER
COPPER CANYON PRESS
PORT TOWNSEND, WASHINGTON
Copyright 2010 by Ben Lerner
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Cover art: A long-exposure photograph of U.S. Peacekeeper III reentry vehicles splashing down during a test near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Image courtesy of the United States Army.
Copper Canyon Press is in residence at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington, under the auspices of Centrum. Centrum is a gathering place for artists and creative thinkers from around the world, students of all ages and backgrounds, and audiences seeking extraordinary cultural enrichment.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lerner, Ben, 1979-
Mean Free Path / Ben Lerner.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-55659-314-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3613.E68M43 2010
811'.6—dc22
2009043652
98765432 FIRST PRINTING
COPPER CANYON PRESS
Post Office Box 271
Port Townsend, Washington 98368
www.coppercanyonpress.org
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Critical Quaterly (UK), Jacket, jubilat, Lana Turner, Narrative, The Nation, New American Writing, The New Review of Literature, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and The Seattle Review, where some of these poems first appeared.
I would like to thank Geoffrey, Cyrus, Ed, and my parents for their attention to these poems.
Dedication
3
Mean Free Path
7
Doppler Elegies
27
Mean Free Path
37
Doppler Elegies
57
About the Author
69
MEAN FREE PATH
DEDICATION
MEAN FREE PATH
DOPPLER ELEGIES
MEAN FREE PATH
DOPPLER ELEGIES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Lerner’s first book, The Lichtenberg Figures, won the Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, was a Lannan Literary Selection, and was named one of the 2004’s best books of poetry by Library Journal. His second book, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), was a finalist for the National Book Award and Northern California Book Award, among other honors. A former Fulbright Scholar in Spain, Lerner teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He was recently appointed poetry editor of Critical Quarterly.
The Chinese character for poetry is made up of two parts: “word” and “temple.” It also serves as pressmark for Copper Canyon Press.
Since 1972, Copper Canyon Press has fostered the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. The Press thrives with the generous patronage of readers, writers, booksellers, librarians, teachers, students, and funders—everyone who shares the belief that poetry is vital to language and living.
Major funding has been provided by:
Amazon.com
Anonymous
Beroz Ferrell & The Point, LLC
Golden Lasso
Lannan Foundation
National Endowment for the Arts
Cynthia Lovelace Sears and Frank Buxton
Washington State Arts Commission
For information and catalogs:
COPPER CANYON PRESS
Post Office Box 271
Port Townsend, Washington 98368
360-385-4925
www.coppercanyonpress.org
The poems have been typset in Adobe Garamond, designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe Systems. Headings are set in Gotham, a sans serif type designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Fere-Jones in 2000. Book design and composition by Phil Kovacevich. Printed on archival-quality paper at McNaughton & Gunn, Inc.
$16/POETRY
MEAN FREE PATH
BEN LERNER
In physics, the “mean free path” of a particle is the average distance it travels before colliding with an-other particle. The poems in Ben Lerner’s third collection are full of discrete collisions—stutters, rep-etitions, fragmentations, recombinations—that track how language breaks up or changes course under the emotional pressures of the utterance. Failures of communication articulate what escapes description. Lines are often out of order or belong to several possible orders simultaneously, inviting the reader to collaborate with the poem. Both a book of love poems and a book about the difficult possibility of writing love poems within a commercialized and militarized language, Mean Free Path is at once Lerner’s most personal and most formally adventurous work.
Unhinged in a manner of speaking
Crossed with stars, a rain that can be paused
So we know we’re dreaming on our feet
Like horses in the city. How sad. Maybe
No maybes. Take a position. Don’t call it
Night-vision green. Think of the children
Running with scissors through the long
Where were we? If seeing this as portraiture
Makes you uncomfortable, wake up
IN PRAISE OF BEN LERNER’S POETRY
“[Ben Lerner’s poems] compact layers of thought into a language of emergency. No offhand commentary, no prophecies, no reassurances . . . Instead, a sane voice orbiting the failed authority of a culture. Instead, the radiant sanity of dissent.”—from the National Book Award judges’ finalist citation for Angle of Yaw.
“Lerner [is] among the most promising young poets now writing.”—Publishers Weekly
“Sharp, ambitious, and impressive.”—Boston Review
COPPER CANYON PRESS
Cover art: U.S. Peacekeeper III reentry vehicles
Cover design: Phil Kovacevich
ISBN 978-1-55659-314-7
51600
9 781556 593147
Why I didn't buy “In Rainbows” even for free.
A while ago, without their music becoming any less good, per se, I stopped liking Radiohead.
I stopped liking them because they are the Seriousest Band.
They are seriouser than U2 (they would never score a musical about Spider-Man).
They are seriouser than Arcade Fire (they would never actually show up at the Grammies).
I have literally never had any emotion that was serious enough that I could relate to any Radiohead song, I think.
I don’t think I would want to, seems like it would be terrible.
But does the fact that their new video consists entirely of Thom Yorke doing silly dances while wearing a Joshua Tree–era Edge costume make them more or less serious?
I think it actually makes them more serious. I think they’ve reached the transcendent level of seriousness where no matter what happens, they can only continue to become more serious.
Wait, no, I take it back: this makes them seem way less serious.
I stopped liking them because they are the Seriousest Band.
They are seriouser than U2 (they would never score a musical about Spider-Man).
They are seriouser than Arcade Fire (they would never actually show up at the Grammies).
I have literally never had any emotion that was serious enough that I could relate to any Radiohead song, I think.
I don’t think I would want to, seems like it would be terrible.
But does the fact that their new video consists entirely of Thom Yorke doing silly dances while wearing a Joshua Tree–era Edge costume make them more or less serious?
I think it actually makes them more serious. I think they’ve reached the transcendent level of seriousness where no matter what happens, they can only continue to become more serious.
Wait, no, I take it back: this makes them seem way less serious.
5 Books #1/2: Anne Carson’s “Nox” and Tan Lin’s “Seven Controlled Vocabularies . . . ”
In a typically ill-conceived effort to fit in, I decided to read 5 books of poetry that everyone was talking about last year. I’m going to talk about the first two in real time with revisions also in real time, just a different real time (later).
One of them was Nox by Anne Carson, which turned out to be wonderful but infuriating and tedious. Carson makes these beautiful shapes by cutting up her own photo albums, but then she craps all over them with things that are none of our business or lecture notes from her Latin class. I love Anne Carson and I love this book but neither one is even slightly tolerable actually.
A second book I read is Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking by Tan Lin. Tan Lin is not Tao Lin, but in the world where more people are as smart as Tan Lin, more people hate him instead of Tao. This book has (fake?) CIP data on its front cover, a library call number on the back, and like three conflicting title pages. Reading it is like watching someone slowly remove their own organs as performance art while narrating the procedure, except instead of someone it’s a book and the narration keeps talking about Chloë Sevigny (sp) and disco. This book is sort of like what Nox would be if it had been written as a book of poetry.
Later (after this post), I read 3 more books. I’ll tell you about them after that happens.
\\\
Also later (before this post) I actually finished Seven Controlled Vocabularies... and had the following additional thoughts:
The entire book is like an instantiation of Derrida’s il n’y a pas de hors-texte (sp), especially if you realize that in the original French hors-texte is a pun: literally it translates as “outside-text,” but actually it means the front matter of a book. Actually it means inset plates, which might have been even better if I knew it yet, since Seven Controlled Vocabularies... is full of plates or blank pages labeled as plates. In Seven Controlled Vocabularies..., the normally transparent architecture of the hors-texte is scrambled and shuffled into the text proper, so that even a list of permissions has to be regarded as part of the poem. (It’s like he’s found the found poetry inside the book itself.)
But the book pursues Derrida’s adage in its other sense, too, incorporating snatches of (fake?) autobiography and discourses on the nature of love into its garbled aesthetic arguments, so that love and life become just two more aesthetic forms in the big constellation of TV/shopping/poetry/film/art/architecture/cooking “The activity of lovemaking, like film or reading, should function in the same way as a hotel room, fringe area, e-mail address, train ticket, parking garage, or light manufacturing building converted into luxury condo or nightclub.”
It’s necessary to imagine the whole book taking place in the interior of a Wal-Mart or contemporary art gallery, and to imagine those 2 spaces as indistinguishable, like the supermarket in the video for “Fake Plastic Trees.”
One of them was Nox by Anne Carson, which turned out to be wonderful but infuriating and tedious. Carson makes these beautiful shapes by cutting up her own photo albums, but then she craps all over them with things that are none of our business or lecture notes from her Latin class. I love Anne Carson and I love this book but neither one is even slightly tolerable actually.
A second book I read is Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking by Tan Lin. Tan Lin is not Tao Lin, but in the world where more people are as smart as Tan Lin, more people hate him instead of Tao. This book has (fake?) CIP data on its front cover, a library call number on the back, and like three conflicting title pages. Reading it is like watching someone slowly remove their own organs as performance art while narrating the procedure, except instead of someone it’s a book and the narration keeps talking about Chloë Sevigny (sp) and disco. This book is sort of like what Nox would be if it had been written as a book of poetry.
Later (after this post), I read 3 more books. I’ll tell you about them after that happens.
\\\
Also later (before this post) I actually finished Seven Controlled Vocabularies... and had the following additional thoughts:
The entire book is like an instantiation of Derrida’s il n’y a pas de hors-texte (sp), especially if you realize that in the original French hors-texte is a pun: literally it translates as “outside-text,” but actually it means the front matter of a book. Actually it means inset plates, which might have been even better if I knew it yet, since Seven Controlled Vocabularies... is full of plates or blank pages labeled as plates. In Seven Controlled Vocabularies..., the normally transparent architecture of the hors-texte is scrambled and shuffled into the text proper, so that even a list of permissions has to be regarded as part of the poem. (It’s like he’s found the found poetry inside the book itself.)
But the book pursues Derrida’s adage in its other sense, too, incorporating snatches of (fake?) autobiography and discourses on the nature of love into its garbled aesthetic arguments, so that love and life become just two more aesthetic forms in the big constellation of TV/shopping/poetry/film/art/architecture/cooking “The activity of lovemaking, like film or reading, should function in the same way as a hotel room, fringe area, e-mail address, train ticket, parking garage, or light manufacturing building converted into luxury condo or nightclub.”
It’s necessary to imagine the whole book taking place in the interior of a Wal-Mart or contemporary art gallery, and to imagine those 2 spaces as indistinguishable, like the supermarket in the video for “Fake Plastic Trees.”
Four Changes
Why is Jon Stewart such a tool of the corrupt democratic institution?
Who wrote the book of love?
Who of you are going to the Rally to Restore Sanity?
First, delete “group.”
Second, delete “individual.”
Third, delete “signed by hundreds.”
John Stewart = not a tool.
John Stewart = one of the many people who regularly shit on Democrats for being pussies.
You = noob.
You didn't want it to happen this way,
but it did. Aggressive lawyer.
Who wrote the book of love?
Who of you are going to the Rally to Restore Sanity?
First, delete “group.”
Second, delete “individual.”
Third, delete “signed by hundreds.”
John Stewart = not a tool.
John Stewart = one of the many people who regularly shit on Democrats for being pussies.
You = noob.
You didn't want it to happen this way,
but it did. Aggressive lawyer.
Pretty Well Proportional Post on Timothy Willis Sanders’s “Orange Juice”
This book is good. It’s a collection of short stories written in something like the same minimalist style as Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad, but not as strictly maintained. That’s mostly a loss, I think, because with this type of minimalism strictness is kind of the point. But Orange Juice makes up for it by catching lots of familiar, mundane details—spilling a bottle of Pepto Bismol, lying to a homeless person about having cash, getting Facebook invites from people you haven’t seen in ten years who live in other states—that would normally be lost to fiction for the sake of tired concepts like plot or drama.
It also has the advantage over EWYFS of the shorter format, which lends itself to this kind of slice-of-life writing, with less of the temptation to create artificial tension/significance in order to hold a reader over 100-plus pages. Mostly this book is about what doesn’t happen, catching the characters in stretches of vague anxiety about little things and abandoning them before the anxiety is resolved, as if to say, “It doesn’t matter how this turns out; one petty anxiety will just be replaced by another.”
It’s not so earth-shaking, not radically new, but it is really true and convincing and, because of that, very easy to like.
It also has the advantage over EWYFS of the shorter format, which lends itself to this kind of slice-of-life writing, with less of the temptation to create artificial tension/significance in order to hold a reader over 100-plus pages. Mostly this book is about what doesn’t happen, catching the characters in stretches of vague anxiety about little things and abandoning them before the anxiety is resolved, as if to say, “It doesn’t matter how this turns out; one petty anxiety will just be replaced by another.”
It’s not so earth-shaking, not radically new, but it is really true and convincing and, because of that, very easy to like.
5 Totally Ridiculous Blondie Songs (That Are Also Awesome)
5. “Attack of the Giant Ants”
Everybody drowns
The moon falls on the ground
La la la la la la la la la la
4. “Contact in Red Square”
Gotta hide inside my trench coat and be clev-ah
3. “Love at the Pier”
No more love splinters in my rear end
2. “The Hardest Part”
In a wire mesh cage
With a twelve-gauge
1. “X Offender”
I think all the time, how I'm gon’ to
Perpetrate love with you
And when I get out, there’s no doubt
I'll be sex-offensive to you
\\\
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 all links to his work so as not to provide continued support now.
Also, this site scored a sweet cameo midway through this clip celebrating the, uh, three month anniversary of Steve Roggenbuck’s i am like october when i am dead.
Everybody drowns
The moon falls on the ground
La la la la la la la la la la
4. “Contact in Red Square”
Gotta hide inside my trench coat and be clev-ah
3. “Love at the Pier”
No more love splinters in my rear end
2. “The Hardest Part”
In a wire mesh cage
With a twelve-gauge
1. “X Offender”
I think all the time, how I'm gon’ to
Perpetrate love with you
And when I get out, there’s no doubt
I'll be sex-offensive to you
\\\
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 all links to his work so as not to provide continued support now.
Also, this site scored a sweet cameo midway through this clip celebrating the, uh, three month anniversary of Steve Roggenbuck’s i am like october when i am dead.
Disproportionately Long Post on Rodney Koeneke’s “Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren)”
Anyone who’s ever flipped through the index of first lines in the back of Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems has thought, “Hey, these would make a pretty good poem just like this.” In case you haven’t, here’s a random sample:
I am afraid to own a body
I am alive I guess
I am ashamed - I hide
I asked no other thing
I bet with every wind that blew
I breathed enough to take the trick
But it takes a practiced eye—the eye of a trained Flarfist—to have that same thought while browsing the titles of hit songs by Diane Warren, which is what apparently inspired Rodney Koeneke to produce this little chapbook. Warren, incidentally, being the “Emily Dickinson of Pop” according to a prominently displayed quote on her Wikipedia page.
Listening to the CD of Warren’s songs that comes along with the book, I have to question that comparison—songs like the KISS-recorded “(You Make Me) Rock Hard” are just as clever lyrically as that title sounds; or actually a little less so. But in the chapbook itself, which takes probably under a pop-perfect three minutes to read, Koeneke uses a more or less alphabetical list of titles beginning with “I” or “you” to tell a dumbly affecting little love story. Here’s the turning point, right before the narrative shifts from the honeymoon phase of the I section to the painful breakup of the you section:
I Feel Beautiful
I Get Weak
I Hear Your Voice
I Just Wanna Cry
I Keep Hoping
I Know You Too Well
I Learned From The Best
I Love You, Goodbye
And, if you really listen to the compilation of songs—or better, just kind of half listen; like squint while you listen—the same kind of unfiltered pathos comes through. In fact, these songs are totally fucking pathetic, full of swarming, smothering desperation, like the dick-wilting one-upmanship of the Trisha Yearwood jam “I’ll Still Love You More”: “And for every kiss I’ll give you back a hundred times / And for everything you do I’ll just do more.”
(Stick around for the delightfully wtf shirtless, headless back rub that Trisha scores around 1:58, by the way.)
Come to think of it, maybe that kind of emotional extremism isn’t so far from some of Dickinson’s love poems. But Dickinson was lonely and weird and obscure; the fact that Warren is one of the most successful songwriters of our time suggests that these sentiments aren’t just hers, they’re ours—this blinding crucible of nuancelessness is our ideal conception of love. And, before I get too carried away, I should point out that the schmaltz-addled, love-crazed speaker/singer that emerges from the songs isn’t so unsympathetic. She’s the same wounded, needy romantic that we all remember being, hiding out beneath the covers of some very slick production.
That’s the scary upshot here. What Koeneke (along with Alli Warren, who edited the mix) has made is a nice little piece of social critique through the vehicle of rock criticism in the form of a conceptual poem. It’s a hell of a lot to get across in thirteen songs and thirteen matching poems, all without writing a single word yourself. But then that, to me, is the beauty of the conceptual poet as appropriator/arranger—as much can be said with a tiny book like this or with a huge tome like Day, it’s all about the efficiency of the gesture. In that moment when you saw the poem in Dickinson’s first lines, it was already written; all the potential content was there. To be as good as Rodney Koeneke, you just need the eye to spot poems hidden in less obvious, more revealing places.
I am afraid to own a body
I am alive I guess
I am ashamed - I hide
I asked no other thing
I bet with every wind that blew
I breathed enough to take the trick
But it takes a practiced eye—the eye of a trained Flarfist—to have that same thought while browsing the titles of hit songs by Diane Warren, which is what apparently inspired Rodney Koeneke to produce this little chapbook. Warren, incidentally, being the “Emily Dickinson of Pop” according to a prominently displayed quote on her Wikipedia page.
Listening to the CD of Warren’s songs that comes along with the book, I have to question that comparison—songs like the KISS-recorded “(You Make Me) Rock Hard” are just as clever lyrically as that title sounds; or actually a little less so. But in the chapbook itself, which takes probably under a pop-perfect three minutes to read, Koeneke uses a more or less alphabetical list of titles beginning with “I” or “you” to tell a dumbly affecting little love story. Here’s the turning point, right before the narrative shifts from the honeymoon phase of the I section to the painful breakup of the you section:
I Feel Beautiful
I Get Weak
I Hear Your Voice
I Just Wanna Cry
I Keep Hoping
I Know You Too Well
I Learned From The Best
I Love You, Goodbye
And, if you really listen to the compilation of songs—or better, just kind of half listen; like squint while you listen—the same kind of unfiltered pathos comes through. In fact, these songs are totally fucking pathetic, full of swarming, smothering desperation, like the dick-wilting one-upmanship of the Trisha Yearwood jam “I’ll Still Love You More”: “And for every kiss I’ll give you back a hundred times / And for everything you do I’ll just do more.”
(Stick around for the delightfully wtf shirtless, headless back rub that Trisha scores around 1:58, by the way.)
Come to think of it, maybe that kind of emotional extremism isn’t so far from some of Dickinson’s love poems. But Dickinson was lonely and weird and obscure; the fact that Warren is one of the most successful songwriters of our time suggests that these sentiments aren’t just hers, they’re ours—this blinding crucible of nuancelessness is our ideal conception of love. And, before I get too carried away, I should point out that the schmaltz-addled, love-crazed speaker/singer that emerges from the songs isn’t so unsympathetic. She’s the same wounded, needy romantic that we all remember being, hiding out beneath the covers of some very slick production.
That’s the scary upshot here. What Koeneke (along with Alli Warren, who edited the mix) has made is a nice little piece of social critique through the vehicle of rock criticism in the form of a conceptual poem. It’s a hell of a lot to get across in thirteen songs and thirteen matching poems, all without writing a single word yourself. But then that, to me, is the beauty of the conceptual poet as appropriator/arranger—as much can be said with a tiny book like this or with a huge tome like Day, it’s all about the efficiency of the gesture. In that moment when you saw the poem in Dickinson’s first lines, it was already written; all the potential content was there. To be as good as Rodney Koeneke, you just need the eye to spot poems hidden in less obvious, more revealing places.
Hoarders
A couple who both suffer from hoarding risk losing their children if they don’t comply with numerous citations given to them by the city. A woman’s food hoarding is so bad that she places herself at risk for food poisoning. A woman’s compulsive shopping has depleted her family’s finances to the point where her marriage has become strained. She must clean out and sell the family home as part of the divorce settlement. A man is at risk of eviction from his government subsidized housing as his apartment is filled with garbage, human feces, bottles, and cans. A woman’s compulsive shopping habits have taken over the entire house. Her children were removed by authorities as a result of the living conditions. A man’s hoard of both home renovation supplies and outdated materials is so bad that his common-law wife broke her arm tripping over a pile of his things. After seeming unfazed over the accident, he is given an ultimatum to clean up or move out. Adult Protective Services removed an elderly woman’s sick alcoholic husband from their home because of the hazardous conditions. The family’s financial problems are complicated by their schizophrenic daughter, who is also a hoarder. A woman who is an obsessive collector faces eviction if she fails to clean up her home. A young man, who also suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, hoards garbage (snack wrappers, empty bottles, and rotting food) in a two-bedroom townhouse he shares with his alcoholic father. An elderly woman’s animal hoard is so bad that every room of her home is cluttered with over 75 living and dead cats, cat feces, and urine soaked carpets and furniture. A couple are facing imminent foreclosure on two houses as a result of a decision to buy a second home to solve the wife’s lifelong hoarding problem. A woman’s relationship with her boyfriend is in danger as a result of her hoard, which has taken over their entire townhouse. A man has failed to meet three court-ordered deadlines to clean his yard which is filled with junk cars, scrap metal, and old appliances. A single mother is concerned about her hoarding behavior when her seven-year-old son begun to exhibit hoarding tendencies. Her son has cried hysterically over things like a rusty chain and an old used cotton ball when she attempts to throw them out.
A woman’s son was removed from her home as a teenager as a result of the squalid living conditions she lives in, and she now lives without water, gas, heat, or appliances. The courts have become involved and are forcing her to clean up. Time is running out for an elderly woman whose cluttered home has been condemned as a result of the squalid conditions that progressed over time to deteriorate the value of her house. A woman who was once a disciplined ballerina acquired most of her hoard from her deceased parents. Her house is so full of possessions and critters that she risks facing another winter without heat and water. After her son is stillborn, a woman tries to fill the void with possessions that jeopardize custody of her daughters. A man is at risk of eviction from his city-subsidized apartment filled with materials for art projects. The parents of four children must clean out their entire house or risk losing everything. A retired veterinarian’s dozens of costly collections have come at the expense of his marriage and lifestyle. A series of tragedies triggers hoarding that leads to a woman losing custody of her son to her ex-husband; Child Protective Services arrives with police at a couple’s squalid home to remove their four children. A woman risks losing her children and marriage as a result of her hoarding. She blames her hoarding on his alcoholism, and he blames her hoarding as the cause for the latter. A self-employed beekeeper struggles with compulsive hoarding as his daughter threatens to call Adult Protective Services on him if he doesn’t change his lifestyle for the sake of himself and his eight-month-old granddaughter. A woman’s family has been torn apart by her hoarding. Despite her threats of suicide, her family has given her an ultimatum to either clean up, or her husband will divorce her, and she will lose all contact with her children. A man who has been collecting hobby items since childhood is given an ultimatum by his girlfriend to either clean up or the relationship is over. Despite their mutual agreement to start a family, he is unsure how to begin. A woman’s hoarding has spun out of control following the death of her husband. She shops compulsively and has filled her home with supplies in hopes of redecorating the house. A former psychologist is literally suffocating beneath her things. She has filled her home with clothes for her twelve-year-old daughter. Although most of the clothing has been unworn for years, she refuses to part with it. She now must clean up before her health problems worsen. An elderly woman’s house needs major home repair, but she needs to clean it in order to do so before her surgery. A self-employed heating and refrigeration specialist ends up taking his work home with him. The house is filled with old refrigerators, tools, and supplies, which creates an unsafe environment for his toddler son. A firefighter’s coworkers worry his hoarding is affecting his job performance. A woman’s two sons suffer due to her unkempt home. A woman faces the loss of her mobile home and her daughter if she doesn’t get help for her hoarding. A single father must clean up his home if he hopes to keep his two special-needs children. A married couple blame each other for their hoarding compulsions. Two sisters whose parents were hoarders try and combat their own hoarding but find the process difficult. A woman’s hoarding threatens to tear apart a very large family unless she changes her ways. An elderly woman’s animal hoard is so bad that her husband of 30 years has been chased from the home by the animals and the hoarded piles that in some places reach five feet high. A pharmaceutical sales rep risks unemployment if she can’t get her hoarding under control. In this special follow-up episode, Hoarders checks in on the progress of Jill, Jake, Betty, Bill, and Paul from the first season.
Daughters help their mom in an effort to clean her home to keep it from being condemned. A mother of two is threatened with divorce if she doesn’t stop hoarding. A hoarding couple and their adult children who are still living at home are given 72 hours to vacate their house if it isn’t cleaned. A man collects goblets, dolls, fountains, and artwork. A woman’s hoard is so bad that the city has condemned the house and has plans to demolish the property. A man is just weeks from a court date where he faces six months in jail if he doesn’t clean up his home and yard. A young woman’s seven-year-old daughter is so distraught about her mother’s hoarding that she has contemplated suicide. An elderly woman’s house is a collector’s dream but is destroying her marriage of 48 years to her husband. A woman in fragile health attempts to clean her home in a last chance attempt to unburden her family and give them back a home. A single mother’s hoard is so bad that her toddler son has been forced to sleep with her on the living room couch. An elderly woman is hoarding more than 30 sickly cats that have completely destroyed her home by using it as a litter box, which is also filled with piles of hoarded food and garbage. A thirty-year-old fifth grade teacher has already lost one job by bringing her hoard from home to the classroom. She now fears that her current job is at stake and that her three-year relationship with her boyfriend is in jeopardy as a result. A woman’s hoard is so bad that her son gave up his college scholarship for fear of leaving his sixteen-year-old sister home alone with their mother. A minister’s wife is struggling to come to terms with a couple of tragic losses and a strained marriage is giving her one last shot to clean, or their marriage is over. After losing a cousin on 9/11, a woman’s hoarding spiraled out of control, filling much of the house and part of the yard. Another woman’s hoard is so bad that her diabetic husband is unable to maneuver through the home by himself. A terminally ill woman’s hoard is so bad that it jeopardizes her recovery. A man’s hoard is so bad that he has been cited by the county to clean up his property or face jail time. A single mother’s hoard is so bad that her teenage son made up a story about her abusing him just to get into foster care. A woman’s impulsive shopping is so bad that the delivery people are advised to stop delivering to her home. A woman’s handbag collection has depleted her husband’s retirement fund. A former lawyer’s drug addiction and hoarding is fueled by thirteen years of grief following the loss of her three-month-old daughter. A man’s hoard is so bad that his three-year-old son was taken away by Child Protective Services after it was revealed he took his son on dumpster dives. A woman’s hoard is so bad that she and her husband were unaware that a homeless woman had been living in their cluttered basement. An elderly man suffering from dementia must clean up his property or face an enormous fine from the county. A woman’s hoard is so bad that her husband has threatened to divorce her if she refuses to part with her paper collection. A woman’s hoard is so bad that her husband is forced to sleep in his car in hot, humid weather. A woman’s hoard is largely obtained through theft, causing rifts in her family. A man’s hoard literally has forced city officials to condemn his home and put his grandchildren at risk to be apprehended by Child Protective Services. A woman’s hoard of dolls is so bad, that it has forced her husband, who is recuperating from surgery to retreat to a chair in the basement. The clutter on a man’s property has led to threats from the county to have him removed; the situation is complicated by a long-running dispute with his brother over the settlement of their late father’s estate, as well as the presence of a homeless man living in the backyard. A teenage girl asks for help controlling her hoarding, but her mother proves to be the real reason that nothing is ever thrown out at the house. A 19 year old man struggles with hoarding behavior, which he has acquired from his mother and fears he will continue to carry on her hoarding tendencies if he doesn’t get help. A woman whose son is paralyzed and soon to be released from hospital is forced to clean out her home to accommodate him, or risk having him placed in a nursing home against his will. A consignment shop owner risks losing both her home and business, after it is revealed she is near bankruptcy after blowing through an inheritance fund on items for her store. A woman’s hoard is so bad, that she risks putting her marriage of over 40 years in jeopardy as a result of being unable to part with her belongings. A woman’s property is cluttered with farm animals, many of which are in poor health and garbage to the point where she is forced to sleep in a windowless single-wide trailer with her chickens. A hoarding couple faces eviction after it is revealed that their rental home has been damaged by the rabbits which have roamed around the house freely, destroying the property in the process. A man’s rat collection has forced him to retreat to a shed in his backyard. A woman, who hoarded her father’s home faces eviction if she does not clean up and part with many of her animals.
A woman’s son was removed from her home as a teenager as a result of the squalid living conditions she lives in, and she now lives without water, gas, heat, or appliances. The courts have become involved and are forcing her to clean up. Time is running out for an elderly woman whose cluttered home has been condemned as a result of the squalid conditions that progressed over time to deteriorate the value of her house. A woman who was once a disciplined ballerina acquired most of her hoard from her deceased parents. Her house is so full of possessions and critters that she risks facing another winter without heat and water. After her son is stillborn, a woman tries to fill the void with possessions that jeopardize custody of her daughters. A man is at risk of eviction from his city-subsidized apartment filled with materials for art projects. The parents of four children must clean out their entire house or risk losing everything. A retired veterinarian’s dozens of costly collections have come at the expense of his marriage and lifestyle. A series of tragedies triggers hoarding that leads to a woman losing custody of her son to her ex-husband; Child Protective Services arrives with police at a couple’s squalid home to remove their four children. A woman risks losing her children and marriage as a result of her hoarding. She blames her hoarding on his alcoholism, and he blames her hoarding as the cause for the latter. A self-employed beekeeper struggles with compulsive hoarding as his daughter threatens to call Adult Protective Services on him if he doesn’t change his lifestyle for the sake of himself and his eight-month-old granddaughter. A woman’s family has been torn apart by her hoarding. Despite her threats of suicide, her family has given her an ultimatum to either clean up, or her husband will divorce her, and she will lose all contact with her children. A man who has been collecting hobby items since childhood is given an ultimatum by his girlfriend to either clean up or the relationship is over. Despite their mutual agreement to start a family, he is unsure how to begin. A woman’s hoarding has spun out of control following the death of her husband. She shops compulsively and has filled her home with supplies in hopes of redecorating the house. A former psychologist is literally suffocating beneath her things. She has filled her home with clothes for her twelve-year-old daughter. Although most of the clothing has been unworn for years, she refuses to part with it. She now must clean up before her health problems worsen. An elderly woman’s house needs major home repair, but she needs to clean it in order to do so before her surgery. A self-employed heating and refrigeration specialist ends up taking his work home with him. The house is filled with old refrigerators, tools, and supplies, which creates an unsafe environment for his toddler son. A firefighter’s coworkers worry his hoarding is affecting his job performance. A woman’s two sons suffer due to her unkempt home. A woman faces the loss of her mobile home and her daughter if she doesn’t get help for her hoarding. A single father must clean up his home if he hopes to keep his two special-needs children. A married couple blame each other for their hoarding compulsions. Two sisters whose parents were hoarders try and combat their own hoarding but find the process difficult. A woman’s hoarding threatens to tear apart a very large family unless she changes her ways. An elderly woman’s animal hoard is so bad that her husband of 30 years has been chased from the home by the animals and the hoarded piles that in some places reach five feet high. A pharmaceutical sales rep risks unemployment if she can’t get her hoarding under control. In this special follow-up episode, Hoarders checks in on the progress of Jill, Jake, Betty, Bill, and Paul from the first season.
Daughters help their mom in an effort to clean her home to keep it from being condemned. A mother of two is threatened with divorce if she doesn’t stop hoarding. A hoarding couple and their adult children who are still living at home are given 72 hours to vacate their house if it isn’t cleaned. A man collects goblets, dolls, fountains, and artwork. A woman’s hoard is so bad that the city has condemned the house and has plans to demolish the property. A man is just weeks from a court date where he faces six months in jail if he doesn’t clean up his home and yard. A young woman’s seven-year-old daughter is so distraught about her mother’s hoarding that she has contemplated suicide. An elderly woman’s house is a collector’s dream but is destroying her marriage of 48 years to her husband. A woman in fragile health attempts to clean her home in a last chance attempt to unburden her family and give them back a home. A single mother’s hoard is so bad that her toddler son has been forced to sleep with her on the living room couch. An elderly woman is hoarding more than 30 sickly cats that have completely destroyed her home by using it as a litter box, which is also filled with piles of hoarded food and garbage. A thirty-year-old fifth grade teacher has already lost one job by bringing her hoard from home to the classroom. She now fears that her current job is at stake and that her three-year relationship with her boyfriend is in jeopardy as a result. A woman’s hoard is so bad that her son gave up his college scholarship for fear of leaving his sixteen-year-old sister home alone with their mother. A minister’s wife is struggling to come to terms with a couple of tragic losses and a strained marriage is giving her one last shot to clean, or their marriage is over. After losing a cousin on 9/11, a woman’s hoarding spiraled out of control, filling much of the house and part of the yard. Another woman’s hoard is so bad that her diabetic husband is unable to maneuver through the home by himself. A terminally ill woman’s hoard is so bad that it jeopardizes her recovery. A man’s hoard is so bad that he has been cited by the county to clean up his property or face jail time. A single mother’s hoard is so bad that her teenage son made up a story about her abusing him just to get into foster care. A woman’s impulsive shopping is so bad that the delivery people are advised to stop delivering to her home. A woman’s handbag collection has depleted her husband’s retirement fund. A former lawyer’s drug addiction and hoarding is fueled by thirteen years of grief following the loss of her three-month-old daughter. A man’s hoard is so bad that his three-year-old son was taken away by Child Protective Services after it was revealed he took his son on dumpster dives. A woman’s hoard is so bad that she and her husband were unaware that a homeless woman had been living in their cluttered basement. An elderly man suffering from dementia must clean up his property or face an enormous fine from the county. A woman’s hoard is so bad that her husband has threatened to divorce her if she refuses to part with her paper collection. A woman’s hoard is so bad that her husband is forced to sleep in his car in hot, humid weather. A woman’s hoard is largely obtained through theft, causing rifts in her family. A man’s hoard literally has forced city officials to condemn his home and put his grandchildren at risk to be apprehended by Child Protective Services. A woman’s hoard of dolls is so bad, that it has forced her husband, who is recuperating from surgery to retreat to a chair in the basement. The clutter on a man’s property has led to threats from the county to have him removed; the situation is complicated by a long-running dispute with his brother over the settlement of their late father’s estate, as well as the presence of a homeless man living in the backyard. A teenage girl asks for help controlling her hoarding, but her mother proves to be the real reason that nothing is ever thrown out at the house. A 19 year old man struggles with hoarding behavior, which he has acquired from his mother and fears he will continue to carry on her hoarding tendencies if he doesn’t get help. A woman whose son is paralyzed and soon to be released from hospital is forced to clean out her home to accommodate him, or risk having him placed in a nursing home against his will. A consignment shop owner risks losing both her home and business, after it is revealed she is near bankruptcy after blowing through an inheritance fund on items for her store. A woman’s hoard is so bad, that she risks putting her marriage of over 40 years in jeopardy as a result of being unable to part with her belongings. A woman’s property is cluttered with farm animals, many of which are in poor health and garbage to the point where she is forced to sleep in a windowless single-wide trailer with her chickens. A hoarding couple faces eviction after it is revealed that their rental home has been damaged by the rabbits which have roamed around the house freely, destroying the property in the process. A man’s rat collection has forced him to retreat to a shed in his backyard. A woman, who hoarded her father’s home faces eviction if she does not clean up and part with many of her animals.
Madeleine as Blog Post about Paul Legault’s “The Madeleine Poems”
Back in November, UVa-alum Paul Legault came to the Bridge PAI in Charlottesville for a great sort of homecoming reading. The entire reading came out in one nervous, charmingly fumbling rush, just the right amount of between-poem banter seamlessly tumbling from one poem into the next. Afterwards, I think Paul sold a copy of his first book, The Madeleine Poems, to just about everyone who showed up, including me.
Now that I’ve finally gotten around to it, the book turns out to be just as good as the reading, but in an almost totally opposite way. It’s all pregnant pauses and quiet control, with elegantly balanced, even quasi-metrical cadences and a subtle, sculptural use of white space. The ending of the first poem sets an accurate tone, packing genuine menace into every period, and inexplicable meaning into a few odd indents (which I hope I can at least approximate):
Woodsnail, breathe for me,
or beware for your life
which I will shudder just to hold it.
Everyone was rich.
We hunted wild animals.
The worst was when they looked at you.
Stevens is clearly a big influence (there’s even a poem about a snowman), and like Stevens the book can come across as affected, even prim. But it’s never too stodgy to pull off a quirky gag—yetis in police cars, James Dean as Jonah—without looking sillier than intended. The turn from J. Alfred Prufrock to William Moulton Marston at the end of “Madeleine as Heroine” effectively caps one of the book’s best poems:
One would give it—it being
it all—one would gladly siphon
all of one to say
I have watched her seal an envelope.
Or worse, I have seen her
take three paces back from me,
reach to a door in the air,
step into her invisible plane and then nothing.
It’s not a perfect debut. The long last poem, “Madeleine as Crusoe,” slips into the same kind of dryly abstracted philosophizing for which Stevens sometimes gets panned. But even there Paul keeps things interesting, in part by interjecting the jig-saw ellipticism of another obvious influence, Emily Dickinson, and pushing that influence to a pretty near cubist level of fragmentation. I quote here at length because it’s impossible to know where to break a sentence:
What was not
and what—the bell-eyed-horse
horse-carts of—was was only
—which the mere look of which
—not once—meant
a music even to—then it was
only once—the dark-
horse—not
only what—or that it was then—or
how it was each of them or was not
in these—the impressions
of places where
we reined in
these days our lives.
Parts of that read like the particlized language of Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, until you notice that the fragments might actually fit back together if you rearrange them just right (“What was not and what . . . was was only . . . the impressions of places . . . ,” e.g.). But try it and you quickly find that there are a dozen patterns they might fit in and no pattern that’s complete.
It’s a contemplation of (among other things) the opacity of language, delivered in the most opaque language in the book. And it’s an interesting counterpoint to Paul’s earlier chapbook, The Emily Dickinson Reader, an “English-to-English translation” that comically turns Dickinson’s notorious difficulty inside out. More on that later, probably.
Now that I’ve finally gotten around to it, the book turns out to be just as good as the reading, but in an almost totally opposite way. It’s all pregnant pauses and quiet control, with elegantly balanced, even quasi-metrical cadences and a subtle, sculptural use of white space. The ending of the first poem sets an accurate tone, packing genuine menace into every period, and inexplicable meaning into a few odd indents (which I hope I can at least approximate):
Woodsnail, breathe for me,
or beware for your life
which I will shudder just to hold it.
Everyone was rich.
We hunted wild animals.
The worst was when they looked at you.
Stevens is clearly a big influence (there’s even a poem about a snowman), and like Stevens the book can come across as affected, even prim. But it’s never too stodgy to pull off a quirky gag—yetis in police cars, James Dean as Jonah—without looking sillier than intended. The turn from J. Alfred Prufrock to William Moulton Marston at the end of “Madeleine as Heroine” effectively caps one of the book’s best poems:
One would give it—it being
it all—one would gladly siphon
all of one to say
I have watched her seal an envelope.
Or worse, I have seen her
take three paces back from me,
reach to a door in the air,
step into her invisible plane and then nothing.
It’s not a perfect debut. The long last poem, “Madeleine as Crusoe,” slips into the same kind of dryly abstracted philosophizing for which Stevens sometimes gets panned. But even there Paul keeps things interesting, in part by interjecting the jig-saw ellipticism of another obvious influence, Emily Dickinson, and pushing that influence to a pretty near cubist level of fragmentation. I quote here at length because it’s impossible to know where to break a sentence:
What was not
and what—the bell-eyed-horse
horse-carts of—was was only
—which the mere look of which
—not once—meant
a music even to—then it was
only once—the dark-
horse—not
only what—or that it was then—or
how it was each of them or was not
in these—the impressions
of places where
we reined in
these days our lives.
Parts of that read like the particlized language of Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, until you notice that the fragments might actually fit back together if you rearrange them just right (“What was not and what . . . was was only . . . the impressions of places . . . ,” e.g.). But try it and you quickly find that there are a dozen patterns they might fit in and no pattern that’s complete.
It’s a contemplation of (among other things) the opacity of language, delivered in the most opaque language in the book. And it’s an interesting counterpoint to Paul’s earlier chapbook, The Emily Dickinson Reader, an “English-to-English translation” that comically turns Dickinson’s notorious difficulty inside out. More on that later, probably.
“Why am I always saying I’m anointing when what I’m really doing is abluting?” or Sharon Mesmer Keeps the Faith
While a lot of other Flarfists are moving beyond or backing away from the style, Sharon Mesmer’s recent work online seem to be burrowing in, mining flarfy aesthetics and materials for untapped thematic possibilities. Flarf as Buddhist meditative practice? Flarf as vague devotional poetry? Awwwww yeahhh.
There’s less aggression in these new poems, either directed towards or emanating from their speakers—which makes them much less bracing, and maybe a tad less funny, than the ones in Mesmer’s great Annoying Diabetic Bitch. But as someone who’s always imagining links between Kenneth Goldsmith’s self-transcriptions and Buddhist mindfulness, or between the antireferentiality of avant-garde poetry and the transrationalism of Zen koans, I can’t help looking forward to where this might lead.
There’s less aggression in these new poems, either directed towards or emanating from their speakers—which makes them much less bracing, and maybe a tad less funny, than the ones in Mesmer’s great Annoying Diabetic Bitch. But as someone who’s always imagining links between Kenneth Goldsmith’s self-transcriptions and Buddhist mindfulness, or between the antireferentiality of avant-garde poetry and the transrationalism of Zen koans, I can’t help looking forward to where this might lead.
On Affect and Appropriation/Nada Gordon’s “Scented Rushes”
Nada Gordon’s new book, Scented Rushes, takes a big step away from the Google-sculpted Flarf poetry of her previous one, Folly. The internet does remain an influence, whether through the occasional direct sampling of text (as in “Apex of the O”), or through the seemingly lolcat-inspired distortions that occasionally inflect her grammar (“Have you ever fall into loops with me?”; “I wish I can answer that”). But for the most part, language culled from the internet is replaced with Gordon’s own woozy, swooning way with words—for good and for ill.
For good insofar as that pell-mell, polymorphously perverse diction is undeniably one of Gordon’s great poetic gifts. Her vocabulary is a unique instrument, large and eclectic and luxuriantly weird, and she uses it to smoosh together conflicting registers in ways that suggest a kind of sensualist Charles Bernstein. It’s hard to fully articulate what makes phrases like “the phooey condescension of wryness” or “decorative blame arcade” so physically satisfying, but the sensation of reading—or, maybe better, saying them—unmistakably evokes a mouthful of gooey, sticky caramel.
But also for ill, in that the move away from appropriative poetry leaves Gordon available for a flirtation with more traditional lyric, one that, for me, remains as unconsummated as the romantic infatuation the book ostensibly recounts. The kind of direct lyric that Gordon approaches in “Form Dissolve,” and many of the other poems towards the end of the book, demands as much skill in the economical suggestion of narrative as it does in the poetic use of language. But the most realized scenes in Scented Rushes are of the poet riding the subway and thinking about her emotions, without enough structured detail to get the reader invested in those emotions with her. By the penultimate poem, she winds up citing and decoding lines from earlier in the book, as if trying to explain a joke she knows hasn’t quite gone over.
That we all get tangled in these kinds of hopeless attachments is potentially profound; that any one of us does is generally banal. That’s why Gordon is usually at her best when she finds a kind of collective voice, one that can tell an existential story rather than a personal one. It’s why one of the most affecting poems in this book, “Is Nourish a Noisy Quarrel?,” is also one of the most mediated, like a sampling of Yahoo! Answers posts fed through Google Translate a few times and then stuffed in a blender (if you imagine Gordon’s poetic sensibility as the blender, the rest of that description might well be literally true):
Is nourish a noisy quarrel?
Mature size of foxes?
What are some dialogues that show irony?
Why grooming is important in aviation?
What is the voice of the girl the lovely?
What did Mary Wollstoncraft argue for?
How do you use being?
What is the definition of a boyfriend?
As in so many of the best poems from Folly, the alienation that this language imposes between poet, poem, and reader only adds to its keening loneliness—like that tragically inarticulate, sobbing undercurrent that starts to emerge a certain distance down in any online comment stream. From inside the echo chamber of Google, Gordon hits that cold yet reverberant tone better than anybody—and it takes all this book’s linguistic verve to compensate for the lack of that emotional prosthesis, not quite successfully.
For good insofar as that pell-mell, polymorphously perverse diction is undeniably one of Gordon’s great poetic gifts. Her vocabulary is a unique instrument, large and eclectic and luxuriantly weird, and she uses it to smoosh together conflicting registers in ways that suggest a kind of sensualist Charles Bernstein. It’s hard to fully articulate what makes phrases like “the phooey condescension of wryness” or “decorative blame arcade” so physically satisfying, but the sensation of reading—or, maybe better, saying them—unmistakably evokes a mouthful of gooey, sticky caramel.
But also for ill, in that the move away from appropriative poetry leaves Gordon available for a flirtation with more traditional lyric, one that, for me, remains as unconsummated as the romantic infatuation the book ostensibly recounts. The kind of direct lyric that Gordon approaches in “Form Dissolve,” and many of the other poems towards the end of the book, demands as much skill in the economical suggestion of narrative as it does in the poetic use of language. But the most realized scenes in Scented Rushes are of the poet riding the subway and thinking about her emotions, without enough structured detail to get the reader invested in those emotions with her. By the penultimate poem, she winds up citing and decoding lines from earlier in the book, as if trying to explain a joke she knows hasn’t quite gone over.
That we all get tangled in these kinds of hopeless attachments is potentially profound; that any one of us does is generally banal. That’s why Gordon is usually at her best when she finds a kind of collective voice, one that can tell an existential story rather than a personal one. It’s why one of the most affecting poems in this book, “Is Nourish a Noisy Quarrel?,” is also one of the most mediated, like a sampling of Yahoo! Answers posts fed through Google Translate a few times and then stuffed in a blender (if you imagine Gordon’s poetic sensibility as the blender, the rest of that description might well be literally true):
Is nourish a noisy quarrel?
Mature size of foxes?
What are some dialogues that show irony?
Why grooming is important in aviation?
What is the voice of the girl the lovely?
What did Mary Wollstoncraft argue for?
How do you use being?
What is the definition of a boyfriend?
As in so many of the best poems from Folly, the alienation that this language imposes between poet, poem, and reader only adds to its keening loneliness—like that tragically inarticulate, sobbing undercurrent that starts to emerge a certain distance down in any online comment stream. From inside the echo chamber of Google, Gordon hits that cold yet reverberant tone better than anybody—and it takes all this book’s linguistic verve to compensate for the lack of that emotional prosthesis, not quite successfully.
Also his new album is ridiculously good. (On Kanye)
Does anyone else think Kanye West has his sights set on the wrong rock icon, in his arguable fascination with Michael Jackson? In the era of online distribution and niche marketing, neither Kanye nor anybody else is ever likely to be the new King of Pop—but as a certified hit-maker now entering a sumptuously weird, contentiously independent late period, he could already be the Prince of his generation.
Hell, he’s even worked out how to use his vocoder to chop & screw himself a pretty fair guitar solo:
Hell, he’s even worked out how to use his vocoder to chop & screw himself a pretty fair guitar solo:
Up to two of these statements are true.
A note in case anyone ever actually comes across this post again: Tao Lin documented his acknowledged, arguably abusive relationship with a much younger person in his book Richard Yates. I regret that I kept writing about Tao as if I didn't know about that after reading that book.
Think I might rewrite my dissertation chapter on Charles Bernstein to be about [whatever it would need to be about] so that I could retitle it “The Reference of Critique.”
Think I might write a defense of Ke$ha in which the key line would be, “To hate Ke$ha shows a lack of imagination; to hate on her publicly shows a lack of courage.”
Think I might write a longish essay on Tao Lin as hustler and hipsterism as consumerist-critique-of-capitalism called something like “Tao Lin and the Critique of Effort.”
Anne Boyer’s “The Romance of Happy Workers”/ Taste and What to Do with It/Questions Marks, Parentheses
Anne Boyer’s The Romance of Happy Workers takes me out of my usual poetry comfort zone. It’s written in medium length, normal-looking free verse lines and little two-line stanzas. It’s often very pretty and only occasionally very funny. It has lots of similes, many of which are surrealist. It seems vaguely Russian or Eastern European, in kind of a sophisticated way.
It looks like poetry, and also it is poetry. It’s even labeled “Poetry” on the cover, right above where it says “Anne Boyer,” like that was her name, Poetry Anne Boyer. If I hadn’t come to Boyer via her social ties to flarf, I might’ve preemptively dismissed the book as hybridist something-something, “not my thing.” Even with the flarf connection, I’d might’ve prematurely written it off as a disappointment if I hadn’t already read and loved Boyer’s biting prose poems in The 2000s, which are so, so very up my poetic alley.
But I’m glad those prior experiences encouraged me to give this book more of a chance—because it’s really a pretty good book, but more so because enjoying it reminds me of just how easy it is to let my tastes calcify and shrink. I mean—“Snow peas, I don’t like the great atmosphere sings”—that’s not exactly Tony Hoagland, right? It’s typical of this book, more in the range of John Ashbery, Susan Howe, or Lyn Hejinian, and guess what—I totally like those poets, but if I met any of them now I might be disposed to dismiss them, too.
I’ve been lucky in the past several years to find multiple waves of funny, prickly, yet sincere poets who match my taste more squarely than anything I’ve seen since I first formed that taste on Dickinson and the modernists; but I don’t want to let that turn me into a finicky eater. After all, it’s bound not to last, and I don’t want to wind up one of those guys roaring through comment sections like he thinks he’s Harold Bloom, declaring that poetry is dead because it hasn’t produced anything precisely to his taste in a while.
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All that said, let’s play Harold Bloom for a minute. This book also makes me hope that Boyer won’t—as she’s sometimes cryptically threatened—walk away poetry altogether, because she’s getting better. Those .pdf books from earlier this year (The 2000s and Ma Vie En Bling) seem so much freer, fuller, more confident and sincere to me, whereas this one seems ever so slightly cowed by an idea of what poetry is supposed to be like, rather than unselfconsciously pursuing what these poems might be in themselves. For every startlingly weird phrase, there’s at least one you’d swear was a quote from Stevens, or from some one of dozens of latter-day Stevens-wannabes—like: “Given / the hermeneutics / of pincers, one could / mouth a theory / of leafcutters.”
Is this another covert statement of my general aesthetic, then, hidden in a supposedly specific evaluation—like poetry jokes and poetry-as-perversion and “description” vs. description? Would I want to speak up for poetry that’s a strong expression of personality without being openly lyric—poetry as the continuation of personality by other means, Eliot’s line about only those who have personality knowing what it means to want to escape it? Does that aesthetic favor poets with somehow extreme personalities, individual strangeness somehow authenticating the writing? Would that contradict some of my other aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical values—and would I care if it does? And should I?
I guess what I’m really thinking about here (and by here I mean, on this blog, always) is how to make publically useful discourse out of subjective impressions—in other words, how to do criticism (including in that reviewing and interpretation and just idle chatter about art) in a way that’s relativistic and noncoercive while it also has intersubjective meaning and consequence. That (in my subjective opinion, of course) would be a useful and enlightened angle from which to address the perennial question of the supposed need for negative reviews (even if it leaves aside the practical core of that issue, namely the need for more disinterested reviewers).
It looks like poetry, and also it is poetry. It’s even labeled “Poetry” on the cover, right above where it says “Anne Boyer,” like that was her name, Poetry Anne Boyer. If I hadn’t come to Boyer via her social ties to flarf, I might’ve preemptively dismissed the book as hybridist something-something, “not my thing.” Even with the flarf connection, I’d might’ve prematurely written it off as a disappointment if I hadn’t already read and loved Boyer’s biting prose poems in The 2000s, which are so, so very up my poetic alley.
But I’m glad those prior experiences encouraged me to give this book more of a chance—because it’s really a pretty good book, but more so because enjoying it reminds me of just how easy it is to let my tastes calcify and shrink. I mean—“Snow peas, I don’t like the great atmosphere sings”—that’s not exactly Tony Hoagland, right? It’s typical of this book, more in the range of John Ashbery, Susan Howe, or Lyn Hejinian, and guess what—I totally like those poets, but if I met any of them now I might be disposed to dismiss them, too.
I’ve been lucky in the past several years to find multiple waves of funny, prickly, yet sincere poets who match my taste more squarely than anything I’ve seen since I first formed that taste on Dickinson and the modernists; but I don’t want to let that turn me into a finicky eater. After all, it’s bound not to last, and I don’t want to wind up one of those guys roaring through comment sections like he thinks he’s Harold Bloom, declaring that poetry is dead because it hasn’t produced anything precisely to his taste in a while.
\\\\\
All that said, let’s play Harold Bloom for a minute. This book also makes me hope that Boyer won’t—as she’s sometimes cryptically threatened—walk away poetry altogether, because she’s getting better. Those .pdf books from earlier this year (The 2000s and Ma Vie En Bling) seem so much freer, fuller, more confident and sincere to me, whereas this one seems ever so slightly cowed by an idea of what poetry is supposed to be like, rather than unselfconsciously pursuing what these poems might be in themselves. For every startlingly weird phrase, there’s at least one you’d swear was a quote from Stevens, or from some one of dozens of latter-day Stevens-wannabes—like: “Given / the hermeneutics / of pincers, one could / mouth a theory / of leafcutters.”
Is this another covert statement of my general aesthetic, then, hidden in a supposedly specific evaluation—like poetry jokes and poetry-as-perversion and “description” vs. description? Would I want to speak up for poetry that’s a strong expression of personality without being openly lyric—poetry as the continuation of personality by other means, Eliot’s line about only those who have personality knowing what it means to want to escape it? Does that aesthetic favor poets with somehow extreme personalities, individual strangeness somehow authenticating the writing? Would that contradict some of my other aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical values—and would I care if it does? And should I?
I guess what I’m really thinking about here (and by here I mean, on this blog, always) is how to make publically useful discourse out of subjective impressions—in other words, how to do criticism (including in that reviewing and interpretation and just idle chatter about art) in a way that’s relativistic and noncoercive while it also has intersubjective meaning and consequence. That (in my subjective opinion, of course) would be a useful and enlightened angle from which to address the perennial question of the supposed need for negative reviews (even if it leaves aside the practical core of that issue, namely the need for more disinterested reviewers).
hate fear mondays fridge magnet
“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
—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.
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