Brian Kim
Stefans responds to my
blog on K. Silem Mohammad’s article on Stefans’ Creep anti-manifesto:
Hi
Ron and Kasey,
I try
not to respond to writing about my writing to avoid the “echo chamber” effect
and also to curtail any elevated sense of self-consideration about what I am
doing, since, after all, like everyone else I probably think a bit too much
about what I am doing, what people think I am doing, etc. Better to pretend
it's not happening, like in that Roy Lichtenstein painting of that woman
drowning, and the thought bubble saying “This is not happening.”
But
nonetheless, here are a few quick notes to clarify and hopefully further
confuse the situation.
I
should mention, first, that I have translated the essay into synthetic Scots
and that it appears in Fashionable Noise:
on digital poetics, forthcoming from Atelos.
The poems are also translated into Scots, though in what I hope is an absurdly
literal fashion, illustrating what I elsewhere describe in the book as the
vulnerability of digitized text to algorithmic processes, but also the
possibility of “teleactive” literary activity in web culture – the ability to
participate and influence the distribution of ideas and even the management of
“cultural capital” in real-time from great distances (it seems Silliman's Blog
confirms the efficacy of this formulation). So, I am trying to make Kevin Davies known as the great Scottish poet, as he damn well
should be.
Also,
the essay was a direct response not only to the substance of Stephen Burt's “Ellipticist” essay but to the
style. I wanted to explore a rhetoric that I hadn't previously used, or at
least signed my name to, and also to test whether such an absurd term as the
“Creeps” would ever actually be adopted in the critical world – all of this is
stated in the essay.
On
lists: I am generally against lists as a critical strategy, whether they be the
lists at the end of Harold Bloom's books (The Western Canon, most
obviously) or, yes, the ones prefacing In
The American Tree
and The Art of Practice.
The reason for this is that it is much more easy to include a writer whose work
one has not read or even ever enjoyed on a list than it is to write insightful
comments about this writer's work – a list takes easy advantage of the Adamic
power of “naming” without doing the heavier, more threatening work of going out
on a limb in support of the project of another writer. It puts one who has not
been named in the position of waiting to be “named,” whereas many of us choose
– by instinct – to avoid responding to such scholastic perspectives.
But
also, the kind of writing such a list engenders in response is almost always of
the “why is so and so in, why another out” variety, which I find not productive
(this goes as well for anthologies). Ezra Pound's list of Imagists was in fact
quite short, and very imperfect, but his dogma – I like dogma better, believe
it or not, though lie as often in my dogmatic statements as I do in my lists –
seems to me to have had a more lasting, usefully provocative effect. There is a
mistaken assumption that the list of names is more democratic – has closer ties
to some concept of "freedom" – than a more didactic, overdetermined
prose, but I feel that the latter method, when used well, creates more
opportunities for useful proliferation of ideas – it is engendering.
That
said, lists are fun, and I do believe all of the poets (or rather, the books)
belong on that list. I think of the list as a rebus, and leave it up to the
reader to figure exactly how the individual element belongs within the
parameters being described in the body of the essay. And all of the books were
published since 1996 or so (I don’t remember what I wrote), and I’ve enjoyed
reading them much more than I enjoy a similar list of books published around,
say, 1991 – the “New Coast” time, which, for me, was a rather diffuse time for
poetry in the United States. I'd rather hear useful, engaging rhetoric that is
nonetheless incorrect (think of Rimbaud's Lettre du Voyant) than
anything that could be mistaken for indifferent, even "even-handed,"
prose. (That said, I'm actually quite a nice guy in person.)
This
is going on too long... I'll just hit some points, in defense I suppose.
I'm
always amused by people who tend to see Jennifer Moxley's work as some sort
of “return” to emotion, affect, sentiment, and how few people really think
that there is an underlying
humor, even irony, to her use of archaic tropes, etc. One can look at the Preface
to the Lyrical Ballads to see
that the motion of JM's writing is neither backward nor forward but both: maybe
a "smart" (as in "smart bomb") pinpointing of that one
cataclysmic moment when the Enlightenment and the "cult of reason"
turned into Romanticism (and its attendant cults).
People
seem to think that Jennifer’s work singled that it was ok to be “honest” and
“candid” again, when it strikes me that – compared to, say, the later poems of
Williams, like “Asphodel, That Greeny
Flower,” which I feel much of The Sense Record
responds to – the apparent emotional complexity of her work is actually more
attributable to the drama, in the reader’s mind, of trying to determine how
exactly she feels toward the language she is using. Most of the salient
features of her poems can be attributed to her reading of books, even
dictionaries (like Mullen’s Muse &
Drudge language coming from Clarence Major’s Dictionary) and how
she feels, as a woman who identifies with the working class, utilizing these
words. (A similar drama is at play in Pamela Lu's novel, I think.)
If
that's what you mean by epistemological issues, then I guess you have a point,
but I guess my point is that the flavor of Moxley's writing is a far cry from
that of Burt's essay – which, again, is partly what this is a response to – in
that her project is conceptually cleaner (she is not knocked off her pedestal
with every opportunity for a pregnant white space or a curious paradox) and she
follows through with the premises of her poems (the Apollinaire riff, for
example, or any metrical base note that she decides to declare in the first ten
or so lines) that is absent from the more free-wheeling style of the
"elliptical writers." There isn't any "magical realism" in
Moxley's work much as there might be in, say, Michael Palmer 's, and there is always a sense of pushing toward
something "candid" in JM that attempts to critique the very artifice
being employed while – in the fashion of "emotional exhibitionism" as
I write elsewhere of JM – giving herself very much over to it.
It's
also a form of "camp" – John Wilkinson links her writing to John
Wieners in this fashion – that, were I to have thought of it, might have been a
useful term to employ in the essay (though I don't think Darren Wershler-Henry,
for instance, is writing in any sort of drag).
Ok,
I'm getting tired... I wish Kasey would post his essay online somewhere so I
can cut and paste a few things from it. The phrase "spectacularly
unusable" seems a useful one, for example, and the "trope of getting
it wrong" is also provocative – he (you, Kasey) accurately, for me,
described how the essay was both bosh at heart but useful to describe, which is
I suppose something I try to achieve in my "writings on poetics".
As
for community: my sense is that I am involved in an international community of
writers and artists, and that, in fact, I am much closer in spirit, and even
friendship, to some writers in Toronto (in terms of the digital stuff) and the
U.K. (at least when Miles Champion was there) than I am to many of the writers
here in New York (but, of course, there are hundreds of those, many of them
close friends). Nonetheless – and the project of Circulars has brought this to the
fore, to me – we've all been "in touch" with each other, even if
talking past each other, since the internet took off, and that, in
"moments of scandal" (as I write in the essay), there is a sort of
contraction that occurs among these poets no matter how geographically and even
aesthetically diverse they are.
I am
on the verge of believing that, in politics, one can point to the presence of
virtual countries– not just
communities – that are already operating in a fashion directly contradicting
the legal fashions as laid out by the government-entertainment complex (file
swapping being the most salient feature, but also indy media sites that are
more read than, say, the NYTimes
site*), and that these people will be able to behave in unison, in a
coordinated fashion, regardless of how the governments of the members of these
virtual "countries" are constructed. This may seem like science
fiction for now, but my sense is that there is a hot lava working under the
hardened bedrock of governments and any sort of institutional structure that
accepted as legal, productive, useful, etc. and that it can behave as an
organism in times of crisis to terrible effect. (Pardon the awkward metaphors.)
What
this has to do with the "Creeps"? I guess I'm just pointing to how
one can be "invisible" and "flea-like" and yet not feel so
terribly small, since after all our lateral acknowledgement of each other
across the horizon of today is far vaster than can be understood within the
paradigm of looking for the "break with the past", pointing to
singular phenomenon like "New American Poetry." I'm more interested
in Caroline Bergvall, Ian
Hamilton Finlay and Tom Leonard
right now than I am in New Americans, but also in Dagmar's Chili Pitas, Aurelia Harvey and Ivan Brunetti, silly as that
sounds. (This weekend, I am being interviewed by Giselle
Beiguelman, a Brazilian digital artist, about my "hacktivism," as
another example.) To break out of one's community has nothing to do with
becoming part of a "mainstream" so much as becoming a node in larger
cultural structures that are not given air-time in anything that could be
considered a reputable media venue.
I
don't think this is so pathetic as you make it sound, nor do I think that there
is any sense among my peers that we don't know what we're doing here (but I
love the fact that you know the song, which isn't in fact very good). My sense
is that, were one to collect all of the various statements about what Language
poetry was supposed to be "about," as a gesture, a coherent aesthetic
moment, one would see more holes – more porousness – than unity, making one
wonder whether the dictatorship of a Breton (which, after all, spawned Guy
Debord, another useful aesthetic dictator), was more seminal in the long run
than the all-inclusive good vibrations, but ultimately contradictory and even,
to some, substanceless, project of Language writing – at least Breton was a
moving target, a "body" of thought that, if only coherent within
itself, was something to throw bricks at and hear a clang. There was an endgame
in Surrealism and Situationism that doesn't exist in Language writing, since it
seems, finally, that the point of Language writing was to make books and live
forever in the minds of mankind, much like most writers do. How argue with
that?
But
I'm not the first one to suggest this; I'm only pointing to the fact that
replies are coming in, but in terms that move "below the radar"
(another Creeps term). One must be an achieved cultural polyglot to have any
sense of "what's coming next."
[Looking
back at your blog post, this line – "Sure sounds like Sartre’s vision of
serialization & capitalist atomization to me, a series of infinitely substitutable
parts that can be popped out of a box or anthology – like a chess set composed
entirely of pawns – and dropped into any theory one wants." – is
particularly vulnerable to critique specifically because you have had a
tendency to make lists, create theories for them, then make lists that operate
nearly as disclaimers to your theory – an equally good list could be created
for such and such a theory is practically a trope in your writing. Isn't a
singular, no-holds-barred theory better than one that gives away before it's
gotten off the ground? But I don't believe Sartre's description is very
accurate anyway, or that this hasty comparison is particularly persuasive.]
Oh,
this is way too long...
Lastly,
let me just note that, ridiculous as the Creeps essay was, some phenomena that
followed long after it was written fit right in. First there are the books: Lytle Shaw 's book The Lobe
could have been a member of the list, as could Toscano's more recent work, Kim Rosenfield's Good Morning
Midnight, the font work of Paul Chan (whom I
didn't know at the time), etc. "Flarf," the school of poetry invented
by Gary Sullivan that is currently all the rage in the Left Bank,
seems quite Creep oriented to me, as does the phenomenon of Blogs (Jordan Davis's blog is full of
solipsism, haranguing to invisible congresses, etc.) and metablogs, like the
"Mainstream Poetry Blog"
– "arpeggiated squeals of Moog fanfare without justification or
apology" to use another of Kasey's phrases.
That
"moments of scandal" are like the torches that light the bats in the
cave seems also accurate to me – I noticed that more people read Tranter's Jacket
when something controversial, even mean, appears there, as more people probably
read your blog for the same reason (viz. the Canadian controversy a few months
back). This suggests not a porousness and a replacibility so much as an
unwillingness to show one's cards unless forced to, and with any luck the
present war crisis will bring more and more poets into searching for ways to
harangue – the public, the congress – while reserving the right to retreat into
"rugged individualism," the comfort zone of sitting behind a PC, in
touch but, yes, not. To be invisible is a useful property in times when one
might be targeted by the government – or critics! (But alas, I am a critic too,
and without apologies... just strong reservations.)
Ok,
too long... knowing me, there'll be a postscript forthcoming. Thanks for the
notes, etc.
best,
Brian
* I have a deep suspicion
that the popularity of these indy sites – with the possible exception of the
rightwing Matt Drudge – are the net equivalent of an urban myth. – Ron