The American Poetry Review
September/October 2012
Vol. 41 No. 5
The Blurred, Visionary Promise of Hybridized Poetics.
ARIELLE GREENBERG
reprinted from the Free Library
at Farlex
Back in the late 1990s, when i was in graduate school, I signed up, with
my friend and fellow MFA-er Christopher Boucher, for a summer class to
learn how to use and incorporate computer and internet technology in our
creative writing projects. Chris and I agreed that this was where things
were headed, innovation-wise, in literature, and we wanted to feel
comfortable, capable and capacious in what we saw as The Next Big Thing:
our own work was skewing toward that slippery stuff between
genres--prose poems, creative nonfiction, flash essays, found and
collaged pieces and the like--and what could be more relevant and vital,
we thought, than considering how to make our newly online- and
computer-centered lives part of our art-making. Hybridity, we were
thinking.
Chris recently published his first book,
the wonderfully hybrid novel-manual-memoir-metafiction (though
non-hypertext-utilizing) How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. But it
strikes me that what Chris and I thought was about to burst forth a
decade ago in literature--a hybridized, intergenre literature that
utilizes the vast network of technologies and book-objects now at the
ready--has not happened. It's like watching The Jetsons and wondering
whatever happened to the promise of flying cars.
In this edition of this column, I
consider a nonetheless delightfully challenging and provocative spate of
recent hybrid-genre works of poetry. (For lack of a better term, since
to call them "works of poetry" is perhaps oxymoronic to calling them
hybrid-genre?) None exactly look like a traditional--or even
"traditionally innovative" (goodness, the trouble with naming I am
already getting myself into here!)--book of poetry, but I'm going to
call them books of poems, because they look more like books of poems
than anything else, and all of the authors are primarily considered to
be, by reputation and interest and publisher, "poets."
And when I talk about hybrid literature, I mean projects, like those
discussed here, that cross or work between or shape shift through or
otherwise "hybridize"
genre, at both macro and micro levels. As books, I think of hybrid works
as those which at least hover between nonfiction, drama, verse,
performance, visual art and other forms; and within individual pieces or
sections, poems that shift modes and form mid-stream.
Take, for example, Marjorie Welish's new
book In the Futurity Lounge/Asylum for Indeterminacy.
The very title hints at the liminal,
a (architectural/ linguistic) zone between construction and
deconstruction. This postmodern condition is represented through both
form and content: the second poem in the book, "Consecutive Studios,"
begins with the line "Valiant folding screens doubling back to
distinguish COMPLETE from COMPLETED," and we are immediately in a limbic state
of folds, screens, doubles, distinctions and (in)completions. In this
first section, the Futurity Lounge section (the Asylum section, we are
told on the back cover, is a sort of free translation of/meditation on
Baudelaire's "Correspondence," though I would not have known that),
Welish often gestures toward the book as object--"the TABLE OF CONTENTS
'from top to bottom or from bottom to top'"--as if acknowledging the
materiality of the project while simultaneously critiquing it. In the
poem "Statement (Some Assembly Required)," Welish writes, "PLEASE TEAR
ALONG PERFORATION between
this wet and refreshed axis/and adjusted reading." And in "Dextrous":
"The object/with standard staples: writing to be looked at, drawing to
be read//in opaque questionnaires: WHAT DO I KNOW? obliges our doubling
back to fractional skepticism toward normative universal attempts: FOLD
HERE."
Throughout, poems shift between lineated
and non-lineated sections, employ strange capitalizations that smack of
stage directions or newspaper headlines, insert footnotes, allow for
lots of white space and fragments, and otherwise "make use of the whole
page" in a way that has come to signify a certain kind of Language
School (and post-) poetics. I found myself more challenged--and
moved--by similar formal moves in Akilah Oliver's (sadly, last) book A
Toast in the House of Friends. If one was to simply flip through In the
Futurity Lounge/Asylum for Indeterminacy and A Toast in the House of
Friends, with their similar use of varying line lengths, prose sections,
white space and sentence fracture, one might presume some similar
strands of lineage and influence ... and one would probably not be
wrong. But the tones, voices and themes are quite divergent.
Where Welish's book is deliberately and
overtly theoretical, non-biographical and somewhat intellectually
distanced from its emotional concerns, Oliver's goes straight for the
heart, the soul, the jugular.
A book about mourning--a beloved son, a beloved brother--the poems often devolve,
or ascend, into prayer, or sometimes chant.
From the poem "grace":
by vocation i shall call my brother
parachutist,
by desire i shall call my mother
minor god,
by birthright i shall call my father
salesman
The long, shape-shifting sequence "an arriving guard of
angels, thusly coming to greet," which also includes a starkly
gorgeous epistolary prose section to her son--"what do you wear out
there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i'm so proud
of you. i'm so sorry for the way you died."--as well as list sections,
found text, and other experiments in form, offers this trancelike song:
beautiful
boys girls beautiful
beautiful girls
boys beautiful
beautiful boys
girls beautiful
i'm extending to
you this oh
i'm extending to
you this oh oh o ho
which continues on awhile further. I
found these incantatory moments completely compelling and affecting. It
is as if the grief, and the love, in these pages are too large to be
contained by any kind of static or consistent form.
(A book I discuss below, A Lily Lilies, a site-based collaboration
between a choreographer and poet, also makes generous use of litany and
repetition: Josey Foo's poem "Wishes"--"I wish for
dissolving-in-fact.//I wish for micas of nights.// I wish for hued
imagining; two occasions happening at once, the rule of three
singular."--is followed on the same page by Leah Stein's dance note "A
single movement is repeated over and over as the body seeks what is
remembered and finds it each time.")
Ultimately, though, as provocative as works like these can still be in
2012, they perhaps look, undeniably, like poetry: a certain strain of
innovative poetry to be sure, but recognizably poetry. Poems like
these--or, for another example, those in younger poet Darcie Dennigan's
irreverent, rollicking, poppy second book, Madame X, with its use of
prose forms and relentless ellipses--do challenge the notion of poetry
as verse, but they do not seem more like any other genre than poetry.
I am also somewhat disappointed in the lack of seized potential around
collaborative hybrid literature. A lot of interesting stuff, I think,
can happen in the gray area between boundaries of authorship and voice:
if hybridized poetry seeks to upend notions of genre convention and
exist in a more mutable, permeable territory, could it not also seek to
upend notions of authorial voice, individual style, and fixed selfhood?
So I am curious as to why, in a book I admire a good deal, A Lily
Lilies, by poet Foo and dancer Stein--in which lyric lines appear
alongside and mimic the abstracted, clipped cadence of notes and images
of modern dance--the writers chose to make the distinctions between
their works so, well, distinct. Stein's texts are, we are told, "notes
on dance," and they are italicized throughout to indicate that they are
by Stein. But they are every bit as lyric and literary as what we are
told are Foo's "poems." So on the same page as Foo's "Witness," in which
she writes, "I haven't slept for days. / return to things almost
finished.//Picking up your shirt, taking off my shoes/to put away
because transient things / will witness us," Stein's "notes" include
these fascinating, and fascinatingly resonant (and "poetic"!) lines: "Is
this my torso? Or is it fabric? / Repeat 'sleeves and collar' gestures
over and over. / The rest shudder, unable to rest."
Likewise, Foo's still life photographs are as interesting and necessary
to the work as the pictures of Stein's dancers (the book includes
reproduced photographs of dance performances, rivers, driftwood, and
other images throughout). "Ultimately, we map each other," the authors
tell us in the introduction, and the title of the book references the
Navajo language, in which the words for an object and its action are
conflated, or unified: "the sun is the shine, the wind is the blowing."
But I found myself looking for more complex, beautiful evidence of this
kind of overlap in the book itself. And while I loved the idea that this
place-centered project--much of it is "about" the American southwest,
and, more generally, "hereness"--in its "book form" is "a transportable
'site,'" as the authors tell us, it occurred to me that there must be
ways, in our Age of Nook & Kindle & App, to make a book form more of a
site, no?
Another way I think of hybrid poetics manifesting itself is not just by
existing between literary genres, but by seeking to echo the form and
style of that which we consider to be resolutely non- or anti-poetic,
such as screenplays, interviews, lectures, and other literatures with
rather strict notions of form and convention; as well as work that
incorporates visual, audio, and performative elements
in the form of photographs, drawings, choreography, music, and other
artistic media (like A Lily Lilies).
There is a section of Oliver's book, in fact, that employs both of these
strategies, called "the visible unseen," about urban graffiti: it
"sounds like" a theoretical/critical essay (though it is very short, and
occasionally lineated), and it is illustrated with uncredited color
photographs of unspecified graffiti sites. If I could, I would lift text
from "the visible unseen" wholesale and use Oliver's smart ways of
describing how graffiti functions in the culture to define my notion of
some other ways hybrid poetics can function.
Actually, ok, I will do this: from Oliver: "I recognized in it an ugly
ecstatic, a dialects of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph."
"As a form [it] is in a constant state of tension/shifting its nomadic
position spatially/transiently." "[The work] upset[s/and
reconstitute[s/the ... forms of public discourse .... it advertises
difference and insurgency, illegality, vandalism, distraction not just
in its placement, but in its aesthetic, in its attention to the shape of
the emotion, to the act of naming."
Yes! Yes! Where is the hybrid poetic literature that does this, that
reaches an "ugly ecstatic" in a "constant state of tension" that
"reconstitutes the public discourse"? This is perhaps what I am looking
for most, what I see as the potential, in hybrid work.
And this, thrillingly, is what can be found in radical
poet-scholar-publisher-translator Joyelle McSweeney's latest book
Percussion Grenade, and in the latest book by her life partner and
fellow radical poet-scholar-publisher-translator Johannes Goransson,
entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate. I
hope these two will not take offense at the discussion of their books
together: I do so because they are partners not only in life but as
editors of the press Action Books, the online journal Action, Yes and as
members of the collective blog Montevidayo (all of which encourage and
promote hybrid forms); McSweeney also appears as a character in
Goransson's book, described as "my wife, wearing the 'pussy' made from
Charlotte Bronte's gauzes." And although the books are not
collaborations, they share much in the way of aesthetic leanings, social
and cultural concerns, and form.
As the titles suggest, both of these books are bombs: explosive,
violent, owing much to Surrealism (especially the Artaud kind) and
Dadaism but propelling these movements forward, via catapult, into a
very 21st-century Theater
of the Absurd. And they both play fast and loose with the
form of theater: both begin with something like stage directions. In
McSweeney, we are told "the pieces in this volume were written for
performance and should be read aloud--a-LOUD!"; Goransson's book opens
with the instruction, "The main scene should be full of ornaments and
crime."
entrance to a colonial pageant's array of monologuing characters
includes The Natives, Father Firing Line, Miss World (who is played by a
young boy), Trauma, and The Aftermath. The overall tone is vitriolic.
"Can I kick you in the face?" asks the first character to speak, The
Passenger, "Why do your spasms look infantile? Do you know how to break
a radio?" Sex, nationhood, and domestic life are all treated as dystopian grotesqueries
amidst a backdrop of cultural imbecility.
The Girlfriend, we are told, speaks with "her body rioted, her clothes
luxurious, her smile religious, her body anorexic,
her gun warm, her reasons obscure, her fire ridiculously fake."
Percussion Grenade spins through many formal modes, including a number
of different serial pieces and text-and-image work by Douglas Kearney
(whose own book was discussed in my first column, on African-American
innovative poetics), but at least two sections could be considered
theater or performance pieces. One is a play in three acts called "The
Contagious Knives" (echoes of Edward Gorey's plays?), in which the
character of Louis Braille, in "pink panties and a pop-star
T-shirt from Target" opens the first scene with the lines, "Hi whores. I
know you took my cell phone in gym class, but, whatever." The other is a
series of monologues (in wildly inventive, time -traveling
pun-dialect--"Just surviving this was a chitlin circuit flangebanged
worth staggering the ranch"--that reminded me of the Nadsat slang
created by Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange) spoken by "Hannie"
(or, in one case, "Hammie") "Oakley," like the lines "Here's a theory of
performance for you: aim for the rafters. Shoot the room. Aim for the
kids in the back," which could be seen as a sort of ars poetica for the
project as a whole.
Despite all this invigorating anarchy, however, McSweeney and
Goransson's books are not as innovative in their use of the book-object
as I was searching for in considering work for this column. Where are
the books that follow the elaborately visual, typographical and
shape-shifting narrative spaces promised by a work like VAS: An Opera in
Flatland by Steve Tomasula, which you can buy in a Lucite-encased
"cyborg" edition and which comes with an accompanying CD? What about
hypertext poetry, as practiced beautifully by Stephanie Strickland and
represented in hard copy only by a URL printed in the center
of her thrice-named book V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'Una? What about the
mother (to my mind) of all hybrid genre poetry collections, Dictee,
originally published by Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha in 1982, which boldly and poignantly examines
issues of migration, exile, womanhood in multiple languages and forms,
as well as in maps, photographs, charts, found texts and more?
And what of gender and race and ethnicity, of border crossing and marginalization?
These concerns seem to almost demand, topically, a hybridized form, and
there must be something to the fact that, when looking through stacks
and stacks of new books in search of the hybrid, I came up with a pile
of work mostly by women, people
of color, and immigrants.
All of this comes to fruition in Jennifer Tamayo's Red Missed Aches/Read
Missed Aches/Red Mistakes/Read Mistakes: I have saved the best for last
here, in my opinion. In this virtuosi tic debut (which name-checks Cha,
along with McSweeney and Zucker, as some of many sources and
inspirations), Tamayo stitches--literally stitches: three-dimensionally
reproduced red thread, with all its associations (surgical, girly, corrective,
domestic, spiritual) stabs through many of its pages--together a
narrative/memoir/investigation of migration, family, language, and
sexuality. "Play surgeon o seamstress," the book begins, under a
reproduction of the Christ child held by Mary, a snapshot of the
author's mother sewn onto the Virgin's face. In the poem "(Before,
After)," Tamayo writes, "This is / a figuring & fingering / This is an
utter a fuck a suture."
This attention to layering, wonderfully expressed through the title,
results in a gratifyingly complex
work, full of textual and visual collage overlaps; intersections between
languages, ethnicities, nationalities, generations and identities;
mishearings and linguistic slippage in the forms of synonyms,
heteronyms, patois and slangs; word and
image erasures and ruptures. Tamayo's book winds its way, tightly and
messily, like tangled thread, through issues of motherhood, mothering,
motherlands, and mother tongues. "There is nothing clean about this
writing," she writes in "(Dear, Lover)." Like Dictee, it's an ambitious
and inventive project that at its core is deeply personal and
evocative.
But even so, even in looking at a book like Tamayo's that I'm sure can
still shock, baffle and unnerve many readers of contemporary poetry, I
wonder what is limiting us, as poets, in our utilization of the vast
possibilities of genre and "book." Are we able to see a way to a
literature that genuinely pushes past the page and into a performative,
electronic, or otherwise uncontainable realm, while still deserving the
ink and pulp to be read and reread?
Afternote
Toward the end of Goransson's book, Ezra Pound speaks through a
character called The American Poet ("wearing a hood"): "If a book
reveals to us something of which we are unconscious, it feeds us with
energy; if it reveals to us nothing but the fact that the author knew
something which we knew, it draws energy from us." I suppose this kind
of feeding energy is what I am looking for in all the books I discuss in
this ongoing column: please be in touch to tell me about which recent,
nationally published books of poetry are most feeding you.
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS COLUMN
Darcie Dennigan, Madame X, Canarium,
2012
Josey Foo and Leah Stein, A Lily Lilies,
Nightboat, 2011
Johannes Goransson, entrance to a
colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, Tarpaulin Sky, 2011
Joyelle McSweeney, Percussion Grenade,
Fence, 2012
Akilah Oliver, A Toast in the House of
Friends, Coffee House, 2009
Jennifer Tamayo, Red Missed Aches/Read
Missed Aches/ Red Mistakes/Read Mistakes, Switchback, 2011
Marjorie Welish, In the Futurity Lounge:
Asylum for Indeterminacy, Coffee House, 2012
ALSO MENTIONED AND RECOMMENDED
Christopher Boucher, How to Keep Your
Volkswagen Alive (fiction), Melville House, 2011
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, University
of California Press,
2001
Stephanie Strickland, V:
WaveSon.nets/Losing L'Una, Penguin, 2002
Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in
Flatland, University of Chicago, 2004 and Chiasmus,
2009
ARIELLE GREENBERG is the author of the
poetry collections My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005) and Given
(Verse, 2002) and the chapbooks Shake Her (Dusie Kollektiv, 2009; to be
reprinted by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2012) and Farther Down: Songs from
the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003). She is also co-author, with
Rachel Zucker, of the hybrid genre nonfiction book Home/Birth: A Poemic
(1913 Press, 2011).
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