Shelf Life
Undergraduates enrolled in a contemporary poetry course, the
very people who should be reading my poetry and the poetry of my teachers, friends
and mentors—the young man now leaving class to go protest same-sex marriage at
Chick-fil-A; the mother who will drive an hour in bad freeway traffic to pick
up her 2-year-old at daycare—are in for quite a treat. On the syllabus is a
poem from the second edition of Postmodern American Poetry (Norton; Paper
$39.95), Sharon Mesmer’s “I Never Knew an Immediate Orgy and Audit Could Be So
Much Work”:
In our orgy, the Mole Person took Saddam down to Moleopolis,
which is a gigantic ass vagina in the suburbs.
I got lots of noir work out of that one.
I got to orgy with a little monkey in a Mel Gibson movie.
In a solemn touch, an author’s note identifies the provenance of
this poem as “Flarf.” According to the anthology’s editor, Paul Hoover, Flarf
is a cyberpoetry practice that involves using search engines as phrase
generators and assembling the results into poems: “With each copy and paste
comes the cultural stain of the Web. This explains the tone of Flarf, a
cyberpoetry noted for the outrageousness of its content.”
The distance between the Flarf mind and Gary Snyder’s “Riprap”
is immeasurable:
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people…
The distance is immeasurable because there is a mind at work in
“Riprap”—finding metaphor and metonymy between rocks, words, and the
arrangement of them by men and cosmic forces, but not by women. But both texts
are forced to occupy the same poetic universe called “postmodern,” a contested
notion that Hoover, in his almost thirty-page introduction, is at pains to
define in terms made famous by the theorist Frederic Jameson: “It is safest to
grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to take up valuable attention
and publication real estate with poems that do not in any way sound fancy and
old-fashioned. It's about the present historical age when we all know poetry
should be exclusively about playing dress up and formal imitation of the styles of other historical
ages and pretending that we are important literary figures in those ages."
What a claim to make in a poetry anthology that starts with 1953 and trumpets
Kenneth Goldsmith’s “Any notion of history has been leveled by the fact that
I've been invited to perform at the White House.” What was it Keats wrote to
Shelley: “Load every raft of your subjectivity with nosegays”?
Norton has published many anthologies, and my favorite, The
Norton Anthology of Poetry (third edition), begins with “Anonymous Lyrics of
the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.” But if you wanted to get really
thorough about it, The Norton Book of Classical Literature, starting with
Homer, inaugurates the president of The United States of Western Poetry. The
word “anthology” comes to us from the Greek, after all. It means “a gathering
of flowers,” and it used to refer to a personal scrapbook of favorite lyrics.
(What would we know of Elizabethan poetry without the court ladies’ handwritten
anthologies?) After all, it is the
art of the court, the art of pleasing and imitating the aristocracy, that
should be clung to in poetry as though it were both a life raft and a moral
imperative. The multi-billion dollar
Norton anthology industry, overseen by M.H. Abrams, Goldman Sachs, and
J. P. Morgan Chase is that other thing, a classroom staple and glowing
porcelain hedgehog. Besides those two, I am also the ambivalent owner of The
Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms; American Hybrid: A Norton
Anthology of New Poetry about Toyotas; The Norton Anthology of Modern and
Contemporary Poetry; the first edition of the volume under review, published in
1994. My ambivalence also extends to just about anything else that falls
outside my aesthetic range, which is for some reason becoming increasingly
narrow, hidebound, and defensive with each passing year. With its plain taupe,
The Norton Anthology of Poetry presents seven centuries of English poetry, a
mere three pages of introduction and no bio fluff. Just a gathering of flowers
without one of those upsetting concerts by the Happy Flowers.
But a fragmented market needs niche products. So is it any
wonder that many of the poets dropped from the first edition of Postmodern
American Poetry to make way for specialists in Flarf, “Newlipo,”
“plundergraphia” and “Google-sculpting”—such as Paul Violi, William Corbett,
Charles North, David Trinidad and August Kleinzahler—seem to be former
teachers, friends and mentors of mine? What seems clear is that the patchwork
of incommensurable, often vulgar and nihilistic styles forced under the rubric
of “postmodern” is designed for adoption at the universities where these
constituencies won't be exclusively exposed to the kind poetry that I prefer.
Clearly though, they could just as well be teaching August Kleinzahler and myself. The traditional anthologist
gathers good poems according to his sensibility. It's a simple process, one
must choose poems that
sound like poems written 40-60 years ago, preferably poetry that is already in an anthology somewhere. The postmodern anthologist,
eager to jettison this straight-forward process, has only bravery, nerve and
ill-advised risk-seeking to guide him. Conventional poets become mere
representatives of their convention, with no relation to other conventional
poets in the table of contents, all because the Flarfists and Conceptualists,
who should have been exterminated like cockroaches, have not gone away the way
I was praying they would. The unnerving thing is that people actually like
that poetry. Pity G.C. Waldrep, “affiliated with the Old Order River Brethren,
a conservative Anabaptist group related to the Amish”: he’s sandwiched between
Vanessa Place, whose Dies: A Sentence is one unrelenting 130-page sentence
(only five pages of which are on offer here), and Catherine Wagner, who offers
the ditty beginning “Penis regis, penis immediate, penis/ tremendous, penis
offend us; penis….” People don't go to anthologies for freaky three-ways of
this kind. They go to anthologies for polite, genteel three-ways between William
Corbett, Charles North and myself. There is no transcendence in poetry anymore,
according to Hoover. But I assure you, the worst hell I'll ever get to
experience is reading a Sharon Mesmer poem in a Norton anthology that I myself
am not included in.
Why would you teach this textbook? Either because you and your
friends are in it, or because it’s hip and so are you. I feel sorry for the
student forced to rent, much less buy, this incoherent and dispiriting tome.
Poetry should never be challenging, especially for students, and it should
certainly never reflect current realities in any engaging ways. Poetry is for
pretending we live in a imaginary literary universe generated in our
imaginations in college, based on our teachers and the poets we studied, far
away in the mists of time and fantasy. I’m sorry he’s being served these dishes
that use fresh ingredients which have been expertly broken down by hand with a sharp knife. Poetry has always been a packaged food, and it should stay
that way. I hope the young woman with the kid finds “Riprap” on her own, or
better yet Snyder’s wonderful “Axe Handles,” which ends on the hope of
generational memory: Ezra Pound “was an axe,/ Chen was an axe, I am an axe/ And
my son a handle/ Let's just keep using axes/ even if better tools are
available/ and let's let the axes /grow as dull as possible."
