Literature loves its bad boys and girls, from Rimbaud to Kathy Acker, from Edgar Allan Poe to Jack Kerouac, from Jean Rhys to William Burroughs or Gregory Corso to Stephen Rodefer. We expect them to tell us the truth. We expect them to tell us what propriety would otherwise edit out.

I took both Chelsey Minnis’ Poemland and Douglas Rothschild’s Theogony with me to the U.K., not expecting them to be such a wonderfully matched set. But in more ways than they might suspect, Minnis is to the personal what Rothschild is to the political. Each volume is the yin to the other’s yang. Yet I know nothing to suggest that these two exceptionally witty, often brilliant poets have ever read one another, let alone met or been influenced by one another. Nor, for that matter, do I have any reason to believe that the “bad boy” or “bad girl” aspect to their work is anything other than a stance. They may live like monks for all I know.

Each lets you know instantly that you’re in for an intense & unusual experience. The first poem in Theogony:

Hard at Work

“[S]he told me /Top/ik/, [eminent danger] I heard, [impending disaster]”

–        Jean Luc Nancy

i shifted back & forth

all day. i had thought it out.
The reality of disaster over-
took the concept of danger
& became tantamount

in my mind. i was paralyzed
& reacted suddenly & with-
out warning.

The first work, or page, in Poemland:

This is a cut-down chandelier…

And it is like coughing at the piano before you start playing a terrible waltz…

The past should go away but it never does…

And it is like a swimming pool at the foot of the stairs…

Each poem here might be said to be about tone as much as anything else – Rothschild’s is anxious, Minnis’ whimsical & offbeat. Minnis manages to hold to her tone even in pieces that have darker implications:

This is a present of tiny pretty scissors…

Which you must use to cut your beast hair…

I am a vile baby…

Look, death, I have so much delicious vulture food within my chest cavity…

Likewise, the undercurrent of alarm is maintained by Rothschild – often by the judicious use of linebreaks that appear offhand but prove to be razor sharp – even when the topic appears innocuous:

What
is it Wittgenstein says? At the end
of the Tractatus? Hovering just above
the edge of the page – the wide, flat
edge? The one on which you write? Or
that which you cannot see, it is not
there?

One might argue that Rothschild’s thesis in Theogony could be reduced to That which is not there is all that is the case. Although the book collects poems from as far back as 1997, it is a volume profoundly “about” the events of September 11, 2001 from the perspective of someone who lived in close proximity to the fallen towers. “Union Square,” directly opposite the poem above, is as evident a political poem as one might imagine:

As the F-14’s circle, the possibility
of an oppositional politics has
evaporated. The young people
sit, their heads empty, their can-
dles lit. Their eyes focused on
nothing & their mouths agape
in the headlights’ glare.

One might ask here which headlights, whose headlights? But Rothschild’s point here is the utter vulnerability of the shocked & his despair seems absolute, figured in the mid-word linebreak within candles, the poem itself flickering. Yet Theogony – think of that title for awhile & what Rothschild is intending by appropriating Hesiod – is not all gloom. Thus, for example, “Mysterious Playwrights”:

Even as a Joke:

The real mystery is
why some poets don’t
just leave the play

writing to the play
wrights. Really – ever

read any of August
Strindberg’s poems?
or Harvey Fierstein’s?

This sounds just like Jack Spicer at his most dyspeptic. Rothschild doesn’t need to name names here to make his point.

In parallel (but opposite) mode, Minnis can let down her guard so that we see what underlies her almost manic surrealism:

I look to the left and right with my eyes and then I swing the sharp thing…

As you rise out of a cloud on a mechanized contraption…

If you open your mouth to start to complain I will fill it with whipped cream…

There is a floating sadness nearby…

This appears directly opposite the poem I quoted above. It’s a love poem, but one predicated on terrible grief, entirely unnamed. Stopping the complaint via whipped cream may seem like the foolery of lovers, but it is precisely the same refusal to name, to confront names, that is at the heart of Rothschild’s Wittgenstein work.

Poemland is composed of short sequences, mostly seven to ten pages, of works just like the ones quoted here, three to six lines in prose always ending in an ellipsis (even when none is needed). There are maybe a dozen of these sections, each divided by a black page containing the book’s title & half of its universal product code. Theogony is more traditional, broken into seven sections that could have been chapbooks.

Finally, both books end unsatisfactorily, at least to my eye. Neither poet is completely able to carry off their song & dance all the way to the end and the last 20 pages seem to peter out in repetition of what’s gone before. In one way, Minnis gets more faint while Rothschild gets more shrill, sounding finally like a leftwing Glen Beck, with no more political subtlety or nuance than Fox News’ newest wingnut broadcaster.

And this ultimately is the great structural problem of “bad boy (or girl) poetics” – if you carry it on long enough, it just gets sad or pathetic (which is why the ones who fare best die young). Watching, say, “terrible genius” Andrei Codrescu devolve from naughty surrealist to avuncular southerner is like watching a car crash re-enacted in Jello. But at least Codrescu – unlike, say, Charlie Simic – was able to gun the engine for awhile. Minnis & Rothschild are almost certainly at their very best right about now & these are both really excellent books. But it’s much harder to imagine what they’re going to be writing in another 20 years.

The “bad girl” in the arts is not new, but it has had a new lease on life in & around poetry & performance art since Kathy Acker – who rarely acknowledged the degree to which her novels functioned as part of the poetry scene – rewrote so many of the rules 35 years ago. Karen Finley, Leslie Dick, Dodie Bellamy, Tracy Emin, to name just four, have all demonstrated very different ways of being transgressive, especially around issues of the body & sexuality, in the years since.

Chelsey Minnis adds her name to the roster with a volume that wants to be outrageous, Bad Bad, from Fence Press. It’s a complicated project and one that demands the writer put herself out there for all pretty much to see. But it’s not, in the usual sense, a “difficult literature” – one can, in fact, plow right through the book.

I read Bad Bad three times in the process of judging the William Carlos Williams Award earlier this year and it joins that list books that I was unhappy I couldn’t give some kind of prize to, because it’s really very good. But reading it again after a couple of months hiatus, I find myself noticing its limitations more. This is a terrific book, yes, but it could have been a devastating one, and there’s a difference. And on a fourth reading it starts to show up.

Essentially Bad Bad consists of three types of work. First, thirty pages of prose-poem prefaces, a total of 68. Then a series of nine poems that would actually be very airy, just a few lines scattered around the page were it not for many rows of dots connecting them almost into a prose structure. And then finally some poems in a relatively conventional format. Each section is noticeably weaker than the one preceding it. Reading the book, I’m convinced that this is intentional – it’s part of the larger set of transgressions. But as a reader of the book, I’m not convinced that this is the best strategy. Like a lot of “uncreative” poetry from the conceptualists, this is actually more interesting to think about than it is to read.

But the prefaces here, on the other hand, are simply glorious. Here is “Preface 30,” my personal favorite. All of the ellipses are in the original:

Once I became a poet I could not be taught to be a poet…

It is like wearing a slit slip under a slit skirt…

 

Now I am careless of my statements…

And it feels good…like a champagne bidet…

 

I should not have poetry as a vanity and I should not have it as a career…

 

But I should have it!...like a doorknob covered with honey…

I would love to read the book for which that truly was the preface, but this is not that book. You can hear the pout of the narrator, half valley girl, half Eurotrash ingénue. At the same time there is, in almost every line, some remarkable observation. That first sentence is, as anyone who’s been around the scene for awhile will recognize, exactly on target.

The second section is roughly seventy pages long, but contains considerably less in the way of words than the prefaces. Not atypical is the following, picked pretty much at random:

The dots really do transform the text. The sensation is not unlike the experience of reading Ronald Johnson’s redaction of Paradise Lost, Radi  Os, in the original manuscript where, instead of clusters of words wafting ethereally about blank space, the words rise up instead from within Milton’s crossed-out original. This is very much a denial of blank space as a field, as those periods are intensely linear. In other places, it’s worth noting, they don’t go all the way to the right margin, and they cluster or spread out.

Underneath all this speckled energy, very much the same kind of persona emerges, totally irritating, totally charming. But it’s really in the final section, fifteen moderately conventional post-avant poems (one is a time-line), that the role of persona is most deeply underscored here. And my association in those poems was not with Kathy Acker at all, but with somebody completely different albeit from the same generation, the late Darrell Gray, especially of the Philippe Mignon poems, more satiric & less subtle than Kent Johnson’s more recent heteronyms.

At one level, this is all quite good. But on another, Minnis doesn’t quite pull the trigger – this is a work that cries out to be outrageous, but after Kathy Acker or Dodie Bellamy or the films of Carolee Schneeman¹ actually fucking her boyfriend of 30+ years ago, Minnis’ sort of kiss-and-tell hints about an unnamed mentor come over ultimately as coy.

But this fits with the book’s downward spiral structure, its use of truly dreadful headline fonts (see the cover above, readable enough at the 180 points – or whatever it is – there, but genuinely inhuman at 12 points in the “Prefaces”), not to mention the choice of pink – a Jeff Koons sort of “bad bad” – for the cover, rather than the black with a dog collar aesthetic of an Acker. Cheesy, instead of sleazy.

I think there are all kinds of questions here about how much of this is in Minnis’ control. Maybe all of it, but if you believe in the persona & equate it with the author, maybe not so much. And a lot of what you think about this book will probably depend on how you answer that question. After four times through, I find myself with different answers on different occasions. I don’t know that this means I’m getting closer to “the truth.” That remains elusive.

 

¹ Schneeman was never a “bad girl” that I can tell since she has always lacked the one thing that binds all the bad ones together – a sense of shame, some concept of all this being somehow dirty.  Hers truly is a sex-positive position, with no sense of what Sianne Ngai calls Ugly Feelings. It’s interesting to contrast how Acker relies on this framework of social (and self-) condemnation whereas a later writer, such as Dodie Bellamy, is far more playful with these borders, able to evoke & examine but not be ruled by them.