For some reason, literary movements are inordinately complicated to pin down. Back when "modernism" was in its infancy, circa 1920, there was a distinct sense of a something new, something fresh. Williams Carlos Williams was writing intense, precise wildly-enjambed lyrics about everyday people and things. Wallace Stevens had not published Harmonium yet, but was writing the poems that would go in that collection. Gertrude Stein was chillin' in Paris sipping espresso with Picasso, and doing her thing. H.D. and Marianne Moore were conducting their own experiments with language.Then Eliot, along with "il miglior fabbro" Pound, comes along and devastates the poetic world with "The Waste Land," in 1922. Well, now the literary world took more notice of what was happening, and felt compelled to label this movement. The word of choice - Modernism. Given the incredibly diverse range of of poets listed here, how can any group label be anything but imprecise and lame? Though, to our benefit, much wonderful work has been done by some brilliant critics, and we now have a clearer understanding of the whole poetic landscape, its experiments, its prerogatives, and its scope. Though I wonder if the same will happen with what is being deemed "Post-Modern" poetry. This movement does share some of same difficulties for categorizing as its predecessor (variety, methodology, technique, etc.), but I wonder if it has the same value. A new anthology entitled Post-Modern American Poetry has recently emerged from the folks at Norton, and is edited by Paul Hoover. This book has caught the attention of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Peter Monaghan has written a pretty decent article about the book and its contents.
Hoover admits that much of post-modern poetry is silly and derivative, but there are some poems that pose several interesting questions for traditionally held notions like "author." For instance Kenneth Goldsmith's "Seven American Deaths and Disasters" contains nothing he has written himself, or Craig Dworkin who has become more of a "conceptual" poet. As a literary movement, this is understandable. After WWI Dada emerged to question notions about art, politics, and life. Then the Surrealists emerged from them, and they began they inquiries through many, ahem, interesting means. Then Absurdist literature emerged and posed more challenges. All these movements, like this post-modern stuff, share the quality of defining themselves through opposition. Dada was anti-art. Surreal is anti-rationality. Absurdism is anti-meaning (in some ways). Post-modern poetry is anti-tradition.
Now I'm not against these movements or their anti- nature. Their interrogation and critique are crucial to the fecundity of art, ideas, and our views on life. The best of the post-modern poetry is really quite stunning, and does pose some serious questions about citation, quotation, pastiche and collage (here are two short poems from Goldsmith's The Day for a taste). Or consider the first few lines from "Head Citations," again by Goldsmith:
1. This is the dawning of the age of malaria.
2. Another one fights the dust.
3. Eyeing little girls with padded pants.
4. Teenage spacemen we're all spacemen.
5. A gay pair of guys put up a parking lot.
5.1. It tastes very nice, food of the parking lot.
6. One thing I can tell you is you got to eat cheese.
7. She was a gay stripper.
8. Fly like a negro to the sea.
9. Hey you, get off of my cow.
This is absolutely side-splitting. Clever wit and a fine ear are on display here as we pick up vestiges of misheard, misappropriated, or parodied popular songs. We are awed by the ingenuity and attention, and are impressed by the sheer volume of these witticisms (Goldsmith chugs along for 800 lines). The sense of arrangement here is also keen, as Goldsmith mixes hilarity with a sense of infection or outbreak. Though, we must wonder why so much sampling is used, what's its effect is, and why must we endure it for 800 lines.
Part of the answer is that Goldsmith is reworking the relationship between poet and audience. The pleasure of reading this is discovering what he has sampled and has reworked. We take part in the game, and feel a certain way when we solve the puzzle. We experience the speaker's associative imagination, which is akin to the "automatic writing" of the surrealists. The speaker's mind shifts from The Who, to The Counting Crows, to The Beatles, to the Steve Miller Band, then to The Rolling Stones, and this is all very entertaining, but any sense of connection between them is avoided. Fierce juxtaposition, not fluidity, is the rule.
There is a rather illuminating discussion about flarf, poetry, and Sharon Mesmer's poem "I Accidentally Ate Some Chicken and Now I'm in Love with Harry Whittington" on the Poetry Foundation website, and it is very much worth the twenty-nine minutes.They sketch many of the dominant trends and ideas surrounding flarf, and somehow flarf manages to be "anti-poetic" and "super-poetic" at the same time. Well how can this be?
It is undeniable that flarf would not exist with the internet, is certainly an expression of our hyper-connected society, and is very intellectual in many ways, though it seems their methodology is what is truly new, creative, or has never been done before, not necessarily their devil-may-care attitudes, subversive politics, or nothing is taboo content. They have created various methods to manufacture poetry, such as typing a word or phrase into Google and then copying all the associated searches. or reshuffling words from a website. They claim to have a unique movement of thought that is jarring, tangential, and often goes off in odd directions that challenges our biases on beauty, quality, and other standards.
If there is anything I'm against it is the lack of grace, beauty, sensitivity, and tonality. Much of flarf is like this, as much "modern" poetry was gibberish, but also like the moderns, the very best of flarf is surprising, intelligent, and funny.
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