Of all the contributors to In the American Tree, the writer who has done the most to challenge & expand our sense of what genre might mean is Carla Harryman. Her prose poem “Forward” was the one “creative” work to make its way into the anthology’s critical section. Even now, Harryman is a cataloger’s nightmare – is she a poet who writes fiction & theater, a playwright who does poetry & fiction, etc.?

 

Like Leslie Scalapino – the other great genre-investigator of my generation – Harryman does this not by erasing the boundaries of conventional genres, but rather by setting them on edge against one another. Case in point: “Open Box,” a lengthy poetic series of Harryman’s produced via Macromedia Flash in the current number of the always excellent online journal, Mark(s), The poems are quatrains, as in:

 

An enterprise ghost with cake atop formal break

Better hear me out

Said an authoritarian fragment

I licked her icing

 

Or:

 

It had been there before

An open box

Invites the poem

To turn around in it

 

Or:

 

Someday

Some say

Snarl

For fun

 

Or (my favorite):

 

Otherwise

Without sticking

Her colors have less meaning

Is her desire for them

 

The etymological among us will recognize an echo between that term box & the Italian word for room or chamber, stanza, and these poems play with this – even tho one side of this reader rebels against a four-line stanza being equated, however loosely, with the six-sided figure of a box.

 

These are, as the above demonstrate, tightly packed short poems – one could trace a lineage back to the likes of Creeley & Raworth – perhaps two dozen in all (I tried counting, but kept getting lost in the poems themselves, then thwarted by the way the Flash program loops, so that there is, ultimately, no “end” other than “Xing out”).

 

The integrity of the line feels most central to me in these works, hard edged with caps at the left margin. Most of these poems entail what one might think of as two or more speech acts, as if to demonstrate how infinite the varieties of such a compacted form might be. When the statement runs over into a second or third line, you feel it almost physically.

 

At what level, then, is this a poem and at what level are these poems? “Open Box” seems to me to be playing precisely with that distinction, as if refusing to answer it might be its ultimate (yet hidden) meaning. The graphic on the site only heightens any categorical anxiety – there is indeed an open box, pointedly angled askew – this is, of course, the only way to see a three dimensional object like this on a two-dimensional medium such as a screen. Yet the pages emerge with each click, floating (not always in the same direction) to present a text on what appears to be a four-sided sheet of paper, two dimensional save for the shadow it casts. (Again, I suffer a twinge of cognitive dissonance here – the lines of the poems are perfectly straight, yet the page’s contours suggest a rippling effect, the limitations of 3D in a two-dimensional medium.)

 

A further question, for me, is whether or not Flash is part of the presentation of the poem or part of the poem itself. I think one can make a reasonable argument for either position. The poems are, after all, ultimately independent of the medium (what I always think of as the Blake test, that the poem must be platform independent) – this could just as effectively have been a chapbook. The poems don’t appear in a perpetually random sequence, such as with Bob Grenier’s web version of Sentences (which makes “looking up” one of Grenier’s texts all but impossible).

 

Yet that loop is infinite, and the graphic presentation is as much a part of the reader’s experience as the text itself. This is obviously not a “flash poem” in the same sense as Brian Kim Stefans’ “Please Think Again (A Poem for Airports)” – a text you have to alt-tab to get out of – yet the distance between Harryman &Stefans is almost one of degree, not kind. Almost, I wrote – because Stefans’ piece is not only not portable across platforms, the writing in it doesn’t really function as writing – it’s closer to Kenny Goldsmith’s utopia of “uncreative writing.” That’s a very different space than Harryman’s.

 

It may be a function of my age, but I find myself far more suspicious of the “uncreative” position than I am the inherent textuality of “Open Box.” Rather than evading that instinctual element that is at the heart of craft – you can sense it right on the surface of the third poem I quoted above – that aspect of “Please Think Again” strikes me as shut down, or, more accurately, as displaced to the dimension of graphic design.

 

This may be an echo of why (& how) Charles Olson can create palimpsests of words and it’s writing, often great writing, but the far more elegant graphic texts of Karl Kempton (say, as represented in his contribution to Writing to be Seen, Bob Grumman & Crag Hill’s anthology of vizpo) come across as flat & ultimately boring, aspiring to be snowflakes but turning out doilies.

 

There is that instant of cognitive depth – no one has ever defined more acutely than Bob Grenier in “On Speech,” “the word way back in the head that is the thought or feeling forming out of the ‘vast’ silence/noise of consciousness experience world all the time, as waking/dreaming, words occurring and these are the words of the poems . . . .” If Harryman’s language has this – and it does, in spades – and Stefans’ does not, that’s because it’s not the language that he’s interested in. And that, it seems to me, is a grand canyon of difference.