I want to take a closer look at some of the writing that appears in Another South. I’ve been mulling over Hank Lazer’s definition of kudzu textuality – “rich, generative, polyvocal, over-determined, hybrid” – with his characterization of it a little later as a kind of “hypertextuality.” What I take from this definition are the works in the book that mix media, typefaces, incorporate imagery & the like. In general, the strongest pieces in Another South tend to fall furthest from that sort of thing, including the writing of Lorenzo Thomas, Thomas Meyer & Lazer’s own – probably the most widely known authors here – but also that of Skip Fox, Brett Evans, Joel Dailey, Dana Lisa Lustig, Mark Prejsnar, Kalamu ya Salaam or Jerry McGuire.

 

But the two writers who do the most to seal my sense that kudzu textuality is more problematic than not are Bob Grumman & David Thomas Roberts. Each includes some straightforward visual poetry in their contributions. Each also includes straightforward text works. But in both instances, these works are distinct, each “media” or “genre” focused on its own dynamics. Their visual works in particular are some of the strongest pieces of any mode in the anthology.

 

Which makes me realize that the mixed-media poems that Hank is characterizing as kudzu textuality are about something very different. It’s not just that some of these writers use extra-verbal devices, but rather it’s the process of combining media that is both the signature feature of kudzu poetics & its fatal flaw. Whereas all single-media works to one degree or another build around a sense of focus, creating focus, guiding it through the text or image, shaping it almost as if it were a plastic medium like play, kudzu works go in just the opposite direction, as if the work were constantly distracted, shifting gears (or, more accurately, grinding them). My sense in almost all of the truly kudzu pieces here is that they dissipate whatever possible energy their media – especially the writing – might have had.

 

For the second time in one week, this raises for me the specter of Max Jacob. It was Jacob who argued – wrongly I think – that the purpose of art was to distract. I flat out think just the opposite. It’s all about concentration. Maybe this is just a discussion of which pharmaceuticals I tended to favor in the 1960s, but I think not – an art that doesn’t heighten the awareness of the person confronted with it (as reader, viewer, listener, inhabitant, etc., as well as producer) strikes me as completely pointless & less than interesting. An art that disaggregates attention, dispersing it in divergent directions, seems destined for irrelevance. This is not to say that there is only one way for an artist to be effective – I think, for example, one can take the path of Brecht or that of Artaud – but woe unto the artist who cannot make up his/her mind as to which path to take.

 

In this sense, kudzu strikes me as deep weeds indeed. A case in point being Jake Berry’s excerpt from the third volume of his ongoing longpoem Brambu Drezi, the first lines of which read:

 

In the clutch of blind embryo

              madness is a tongue robbing death

             in the matted black hair of darkness –

 

That’s about as dense a cluster of overwriting & cliché as I’ve come across in a long time. I wish that I could report that it was atypical or satiric in its intent*, but if the latter were true, Berry has failed to leave any clues with which to anchor the reading. Rather, this style is just one of several toward which Berry’s writing tends in this long verse gumbo he’s been composing for some years now. Not all of them are this obnoxious or off-putting, but dressing them up with periodic drawings does nothing to enrich the experience. Berry himself describes a writing process that is not unlike Spicerian dictation: “BRAMBU . . . is not projected but merely occurs – I don’t drive it or shape it, I allow it.” If ever there were an argument for driving instruction, this would be it.

 

It’s in this sense that I think that Another South uses that adjective in its subtitle Experimental Writing in the South** way too uncritically. This would seem to be experimental in the sense of an author tooling down the road at 70 MPH with eyes closed & no hands on the steering wheel – it’s sort of ready fodder for the likes of a Joan Houlihan. How contrast this against the likes of a poem like “Flash Point”:

 

This useless clairvoyance

Is embarrassing

What good is it to know

The motives behind manners

 

And worse, the so what stares

Of those upon whom you manage

To inflict this wisdom

 

There is more space

Awaiting exploration

More clouds of gas

That need their picture took

 

Lorenzo Thomas has more going on in eleven lines than Berry does in seven pages. Think for a moment of the frame set up by the terms useless & embarrassing in the first two lines & how each reacts off a term such as clairvoyance. Then think back to madness is a tongue robbing death. The most generous possible reading of that latter line is one-dimensional to the point of being flatline.

 

I have taken to using the phrase post-avant where editor Bill Lavender employs experimental not only because the neo-scientific frame of the latter is at this moment in history comedic at best – think of the late jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie wandering around a stage in his “mad scientist” lab coat – but also because post-avant acknowledges the 200-year-old tradition in which contemporary writing exists while also acknowledging that frames like avant-garde or experimental are not only dated, but misleading. It is in this sense that a deeper limitation to Another South is that generally there is no experimental writing in it, nothing that isn’t in some sense a recombination of trends already going on elsewhere within writing. Some is much better than usual, as in the case of Thomas’ poetry above, and some of it is not. And in this collection at least much of what is not is kudzu.

 

 

 

 

* The way it would be had, say, a Bruce Andrews or Charles Bernstein penned those very same lines.

 

** The use of the word South twice in the title suggests that the book’s name hasn’t been given very much thought. Similarly, the volume proceeds alphabetically – the default, no-value mode of editing. One possible version would have been to divide the volume into three sections: New Orleans, Atlanta and Other. A fourth section might have been composed of those, like McGuire and Lazer, who teach for a living. Even proceeding by year of birth would have offered more information & shape to a reader.