Sharon Mesmer: Annoying Diabetic Bitch

In the closing years of the Bush era, poetry from the Flarf collective emerged as one of the most challenging creative responses to contemporary American culture. The era’s key themes – 9/11 and the subsequent wars, the ongoing occupation of Iraq, the rise of the religious right, tensions over immigration, and the conspicuous consumption of the credit bubble economy – have littered Flarf poetry over the past few years. Poets such as K. Silem Mohammad, Nada Gordon, Gary Sullivan, Drew Gardner, Sharon Mesmer, and others have actively taken up the challenge of creating a literature of critical engagement in a culture characterized by the almost complete pervasiveness of mediated communication (recently dominated by the internet, but also TV and radio). Diving headfirst into the information flows, Flarf poets have surfaced with a practice that operates like the literary equivalent of burlesque: the pastiche of “serious” content mashed up with kitsch, the corrosive parody, the teasing humor, the glittering costumes and play with identities, and the essentially performative nature of burlesque are consistent with much Flarf poetry.

Burlesque’s intention was rarely to shock (in the 20th century avant-garde sense), but rather to titillate and seduce, while at the same time overturning and challenging social norms. While it may not be possible to shock a literary audience anymore, the extreme Flarf of Sharon Mesmer’s recent book, Annoying Diabetic Bitch, may prove challenging (at least in this burlesque sense) to some readers. In Mesmer’s hands, the earnest lyrical voice of confessional first-person poetry has degenerated into scatological language, garbled gibberish, inane conversation and insults as she mines the excesses of conventionally unpoetic realms such as online chat rooms, spam and celebrity gossip websites for material. While lacking in earnest gravity and narrative continuity, the voices Mesmer employs are nonetheless compelling and at times, the dialogue she employs reads like a series of warped comedy skits – her reading at the Flarf Festival 06 and the audience reaction here really capture the sense of a Flarf poem as a kind of burlesque performance.

Characterized by abrupt changes in voice and register, Mesmer’s poetry is composed from within a culture of extreme distraction. She creates a strangely artificial zone inhabited by characters derived from chat room handles such as “SmarmyMan” and “Fckme69” or pop cultural figures such as the Olsen twins, and the use of words and phrases such as “like, totally”, “crazy ass” and “go figure”. The characteristically Flarfy juxtapositions of “serious” political or philosophical content with frivolity or banality serve to undermine any attempt to establish a clear polemical position. Conventional literary criticism (such as this essay) and close reading techniques seem only marginally useful in coming to grips with the Flarf of Annoying Diabetic Bitch. Indeed, as Mesmer points out in the poem “Why I Love Literary Criticism”, “literary criticism is extremely boring, whilst a squid superconducting quantum interference devices is exciting.”) The latter squid may well serve as a handy metaphor for a Flarf poet: conducting (in both senses of the word) interference devices within the streams of contemporary media culture.

In the book’s Postscript, Mesmer describes how some of the poems were composed using the results of Google searches in which she entered odd word combinations into the search engine. This technique appears most obviously in poems such as “Ass Vagina”, a poem that reads like a kind of pornographic spam salad, beginning: “Free Lindsay Jessica Carmen topless puss ass butt vagina 100% free”. The mash-up of porn search tag phrases is pushed into absurdity with subsequent reiterations and mixes in later lines, such as: “Hairy preggo men teen orgy Greenville manufacturing district with endangered hairy ass teen rappers 100% free”. Again, the performative nature of the repetition of key terms (“ass”, “hairy”, “100% free”) continually undermined by unrelated material makes for a hilarious live reading experience (see here). Mirroring internet searching, language shifts horizontally in these poems, skimming across the surface of meaning. Perhaps Mesmer’s poetry thus cynically performs the absence of transcendence in contemporary American culture (other than the excitement of being pulled along the information stream by a superconducting squid).


Mesmer teasingly offers up mashups of incredibly inane, unsophisticated language and banal declarations, almost as if to challenge our expectations of what poetic language is or should be. Beyond the literary provocation, she is also highlighting the flippant superficiality of much online culture – the exaggerated whining of blog culture appears in numerous poems, the self-centered and superficial voices of “I am Beautiful” take vain declarations to extremes (“I also have a beautiful soul, to go with my body”), and the repetitive insults of “Annoying Diabetic Bitch” and its companion piece, “Fine Hormony Bitch”, reflect the online culture of discussion board flaming:

You annoying diabetic bitch.
You anorexic bulimic diabetic bitch.
You dumb annoying talentless diabetic bitch, eat some diabeties.
You and your bitch monster diabetic junkhead father,
and your diabetic cat, your pathetic diabetic cat that eats birds

A poem such as “I Wuv Bumblebees” pushes this inanity envelope to the extreme, opening with a series of variations and extensions on the phrase “I Wuv Bumblebees” and continuing:

I wuv kittycats and I have three cats.
No – ha! – seriously, I wuv bumblebees more
and I think you’re a deadly bumblebee crack whore
(oh, I meant “fucking legend”).

Mesmer’s parody of such online banter exposes cracks in the culture of banality, bursting at certain points into violent confrontational language as the wuvable bumblebee suddenly becomes a “deadly bumblebee crack whore”. While titillated by the transformative bumblebee, the reader is ultimately left frustrated, as the final lines serve to deflate any rhythmic sense or continuity of the bumblebee theme:

And you only have to insert “Flight of the Bumblebee” to produce
duotone balls, pink and white,
and anal beads of purple.
I’m sick of this.
Let’s go pirate gaming at Brickfest.

Cruising through the datascapes of distraction horizontally from bumblebees to anal beads, Mesmer ends her “search poem” with a signature abrupt and illogical change of course: an invitation to attend a Lego convention. Like the form, Mesmer’s content is also “irrational”, sliding horizontally across contexts as it gains and sheds meaning in a literary equivalent of channel or web surfing.

As with other recent Flarf volumes (see my previous reviews here and here), contemporary political realities are prominent in Annoying Diabetic Bitch. The collusion of the religious right and recent American imperialism are highlighted in the poem “My Jesus in Lint Form”:

My Jesus in lint form taught me
About taking barbarism to new levels,
Levels heretofore perceived only in metaphors
Of demon legions in a post-Dutch world.

But the most scathing parodies are reserved for the commander in chief, who Mesmer has performing thus in “I Am A Very Confident Little Fellow”:

When I do my flight suit sausage strut
On the deck of the frigate, flippin’ the bird
The grunts all know I have the primo cunt
And a whole butt-load of dung-sniffin’ butt monkeys.

While the sacred icon of the presidential figure is dragged through the scatological mud-pit several times in the book, the various voices Mesmer inhabit reflect varying political positions (presumably apart from her own). In the poem “I Know That Babies Feel Just As Nervous and Confused As You Do”, for example, she pushes a contemporary anti-immigration voice to extremes to expose its inherent racism: “I’m not all left-wing and shit, but I know the Religious Right can be easily replaced by a baby with a Pez dispenser … And you know what else I know? That America is becoming another Europe where the birth rate is so low the continent is now overpopulated by immigrants from Muslim countries, and that’s why I’m urging white people to have babies because most immigrants show up here with bad fucking attitude problems. Same with their babies.”

With the end of the Bush era only weeks away, perhaps the parodies of Annoying Diabetic Bitch already seem dated. In the not too distant future, critics may look back on this poetry as a cynical response to a particular era in American culture that has passed. However, there is much in Mesmer’s book that indicates productive future possibilities as well: the stinging comic parodies, the inhabitation of various online voices and the engagement with the particular languages and modes of contemporary communication. Finally, Flarf’s convincing convergence of literature, performance and communications technology (both as a means to build literary communities and as a data mine for both content and form) has created a 21st century poetry that is both entertaining and critically engaged.


Further reading

An interview with Sharon Mesmer
Sharon Mesmer’s blog

Kenneth Goldsmith: the New York Trilogy

Kenneth Goldsmith’s “conceptual writing” has been the subject of some debate in recent years, much of it fuelled by Goldsmith’s provocative and quotable quotes. In interviews and theoretical essays, Goldsmith refers to his writing as “boring”, “unreadable”, “uncreative”, and even describes himself as “the most boring writer that has ever lived” (from Goldsmith’s Conceptual Writing Journal. See also the extensive bibliography on his EPC site). While such quotes make “controversial” copy for literary journals and fodder for online debates, it seems that much of the critical material on his writing is actually framed by Goldsmith’s own terms. He has shaped the discussion of his own work so that it focuses almost exclusively on the creative processes he uses and his theories about them. To emphasize this focus on the process rather than the end product, Goldsmith stated recently: “You really don’t need to read my books to get the idea of what they’re like; you just need to know the general concept.” (Conceptual Writing Journal) Given that the author died some time late last century, why are we still intent on granting authority to his (sic) ghostly voice? In the following reading of Goldsmith’s recently completed Trilogy – comprising the books Weather (2005), Traffic (2007) and Sports (2008) – I want to put aside Goldsmith’s framing of his work as merely conceptual processes and instead attempt to read the unreadable.

The process common to all three books of the Trilogy is transcription: transferring oral language into written language. In Weather, Goldsmith transcribes a year’s worth of daily weather reports from a radio station; in Traffic, he transcribes a twenty-four hour period of traffic reports at ten minute intervals; and in Sports, he transcribes an entire Yankees-Red Sox baseball commentary. This kind of appropriation and reframing has many precedents in twentieth century creative (or uncreative, if you will) practice, and Goldsmith himself has pointed out many of these — Dada, Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Pop Art, Language Poetry — in fact, Goldsmith’s remarkable Ubuweb can be seen as an ongoing charting of this territory. While the idea of creativity as simply recontextualizing something already out there in the world seems hardly revolutionary in the visual art world, for some reason poetry, at least in its popular understanding, seems inextricably linked to individual expression. Poetry has remained, for some at least, the last bastion of the personal, the private, the intimate and the profound. If we were to adopt this definition of poetry as profound and personal, Goldsmith’s transcriptions of public voices communicating everyday information would seem boring and trivial. But are Goldsmith’s books any more mundane than, say, Richard Prince’s Cowboy series, comprising photographs of cowboys appropriated from various Marlboro advertisements? Are these books unreadable? Perhaps not for a generation growing up in a culture that is comfortable with “uncreative” musical forms such as mashups, regurgitating past design and fashion styles in various manifestations of retro, and the staged intimacy of MySpace and Big Brother.

Although Goldsmith has referred to this trio of books as his “American Trilogy”, the subject matter is actually more specific than that. Despite the implication of conceptual writing’s universality, these works are the product of a particular American city, New York (although many New Yorkers seem to believe that New York is America). The “New York” Trilogy is also more fitting given the specificity of the material Goldsmith appropriates – New York City weather reports (Weather), New York City traffic reports (Traffic) and the commentary from a New York Yankees baseball game (Sports). On this note, earlier Goldsmith books might also be seen in a New York context. In Soliloquy (2001), for example, he transcribed every word he spoke for a week, and given he lives in Manhattan, New York references abound. In Day (2003), he transcribed every word of the New York Times. Rather than read Goldsmith’s New York Trilogy as simply the end product of conceptual processes, it is also productive to read the Trilogy as the documentation of the specific rhythms and voices of twenty-first century New York.


The Weather

The first book of the New York Trilogy, The Weather, comprises transcriptions of daily radio weather reports. Each daily report is a paragraph long, and they are arranged into four sections according to the seasons. New York City’s weather is characterized by its dramatic variations – from Summer’s humid, tropical heat, to Winter’s accumulations of snow; from Fall fogs and Spring flood warnings from melted snow, to high winds from off-shore typhoons. While New York City is at the center of The Weather, its weather patterns are not restricted to geographical or political divisions of the city. Cold fronts move across state and county lines, creating a space in which the city is connected to Long Island, New Jersey, the counties of the Hudson River Valley, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Even storms out in the Atlantic Ocean spread moisture or raise winds in midtown Manhattan.

Given New York’s hectic pace and intense pressure, the weather is a significant factor on its circulation systems (traffic, airports, subway and rail systems) and subsequently a cause of much anxiety for its residents. Imagine, for example, a similar project appropriated from, say, Sacramento’s weather reports – not only would there be the absence of dramatic seasonal contrasts, but due to the slower pace of life, there would also be less riding on a particular storm. In New York’s dense urban environment in which nature is tightly controlled (Central Park is a prime example of this), the weather’s elemental forces still affect everyday life, despite our scientific attempts at anticipating them. This sense of unpredictable forces is displayed in the following quote by both the uncertain language and the imprecise means of tracking and measuring these forces:

“Ah, yes, indeedy, and actually it’s a ... uh, you know... fairly tranquil as well, with sunshine getting dimmed by high mid-level clouds, high temperature thirty-four degrees. Clouds easily thicken tonight, low thirty. That’s the easy part of the forecast. The question mark is whether or not the, uh, rain that’s currently over the Delmarva Peninsula will actually come this far north, or will it get to a certain point over central Jersey, then pivot offshore?”

This short excerpt may also belie Goldsmith’s claim about his writing being “boring” – presumably, a truly boring weather report would be the purely “informational” language from a newspaper or internet source (ie. written language). In these radio transcriptions, the human voices are distinct and the language is idiosyncratic. The informational aspect of the language is not the only focus – reading The Weather as literature is very different from listening to today’s forecast in order to find out whether you should be wearing a coat or packing an umbrella. Even supposedly “functional” information often abounds in poetic phrases such as “clouds easily thicken tonight”, a snow system that seems to be “hustling away”, or this evocative imagery to describe the movement of a storm front:

“Feels pretty quiet across the country this evening. We do have a front, uh, draping from Michigan back into the Central Plains, and curling back up into the northern Rockies.”

The tension between a scientific/technological, or “objective”, means of measuring heat, cold and wind, and “subjective” human perception is highlighted in The Weather by the numerous references to the “real feel” temperature. “Real feel” takes us beyond the precision of “scientific” measurements where wind chill can make the air temperature seem colder than measured by instruments (see also Marjorie Perloff’s essay "Moving Information": On Kenneth Goldsmith's The Weather). Doubt begins to creep in at various points as this conflict between the objective and subjective appears from time to time, but nowhere more so than on Ground Hog Day, when the official groundhog meteorologists of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio offer differing forecasts:

“Now Staten Island Chuck did not see his shadow, meaning that Spring is, uh, getting reading to spring. But of course, Punxsutawney Phil did see his shadow, indicating six more weeks of winter. We’ve also heard from, uh, from, uh, Buckeye Chuck out in Ohio, and he agrees with Staten Island Chuck, and they’re against old Punxsutawney Phil. So, uh, we’ve got battling groundhogs here, and I guess time will tell, as it usually does.”

Here, scientific and technological precision is replaced by mythology as the movements of the unwitting groundhogs predict how much longer winter will be. Even comedy enters the forecasts occasionally, as displayed in this irresistible example of meteorological humor:

“It’s going to be beautiful today, high temperature sixty-eight with the sunshine. We do have bad news for one Halloween monster, however, who likes to fly it’s kites in a thunderstorm, the Franklinstein. Anyway, partly cloudy tonight, going down to fifty-eight.” (sic)

The Weather is neither unreadable nor boring, and indeed these terms say more about contemporary expectations of what constitutes literature and how to read it than they do about Goldsmith’s creative processes. The transcription and repetition of daily reports allows us to reflect on the content, language and aims of this everyday language, exposing it as compressed fragments of scientific data, technological measures, poetic imagery and phenomenological experience. In a New York context, the narrative traces the city’s ongoing struggle to measure and predict natural forces that ultimately remain beyond our control.

Traffic

Goldsmith’s second book of the Trilogy, Traffic, comprises transcriptions of New York City traffic reports taken at ten minute-intervals over a twenty-four hour period. Like The Weather, Traffic charts the rhythms of the city’s circulation system. While constructed and artificial, the city’s traffic patterns seem to have the randomness and unpredictability of the weather. Both weather and traffic reports are commentaries on the present (current conditions of the skies or the roads) as well as predictions about the future – while the weather forecast warns us to take a jacket, the traffic forecast warns us to avoid the George Washington Bridge. As well as auto traffic conditions, the reports also occasionally update information on railroads, ferries and water taxis. At one point during the morning gridlock, a reporter even recommends riding a bike or walking.

For his traffic reports, Goldsmith has chosen not just any day, but a particular day, that is, the beginning of a major holiday weekend in New York, when there is bound to be a lot of traffic, and a corresponding amount of drama. The narrative begins with image of “midnight gridlock” as traffic delays caused by road repairs, accidents, and a stalled bus convey the unpredictability of New York’s traffic:

“Well, in conjunction with the big holiday weekend, we start out with the Hudson River horror show right now. Big delays in the Holland Tunnel either way with roadwork, only one lane will be getting by. You're talking about, at least, twenty to thirty minutes worth of traffic either way, possibly even more than that.” (12:01, opening lines)

By two or three in the morning, traffic clears for a few hours before the remarkable morning rush hour begins around 5am, when the situation is like this:

“Well, the weekend getaway morning rush is in full swing and what a doozy it is. It looks like some of the first early delays I'm seeing here on the, uh, Jam Cam is on the westbound side of the Long Island Expressway service road coming up towards the, uh, Grand Central Parkway in Queens as I see it live on the Jam Cam. So it's gonna be, uh, again, the makings of a rough ride.” (5:01am)

While the vocabulary of Traffic is generally not as colorful as that of The Weather, New York traffic reporters often resort to metaphor (“Hudson River horror show”), quirky phrases (“what a doozy”) and sponsored jargon (“Panasonic Jam Cam”). Most notably, they have a particularly extensive range of descriptions for a traffic jam and its effects: stacked up, jammed-up, gridlock, backed-up, bumper to bumper, tie-up, clogged up, slowdown, extra heavy traffic, snail’s pace, absolutely crawling, big backup, a major mess, a total mess. While the reports are generally less “poetic” than those in The Weather, the particular rhythm of Traffic is established during the morning part of the narrative via a refrain at the end of most paragraph-long reports. This appears as a variation on the line, “Alternate side around town suspended, but you do have to pay the meters.” (10:41)

The refrain recurs all day in variations such as:
“Alternate side suspended for today.” (11:31)
“Alternate side remains suspended, you will have to pay the meters, though.” (11:51)
“Alternate side is suspended around town but you do have to feed the meters.” (12:21)
“Remember, alternate side of the street parking is suspended today and for the duration of the weekend.” (3:31)

The Weather featured a similar rhythm established through a repetition of the day’s temperature at the end of many reports (“Repeating the current temperature thirty-five headed up to forty in midtown.”). Such refrains make the book as a whole readable by establishing rhythmic continuity. Traffic’s story is ultimately that of New York City’s remarkable traffic situation – its decrepit, overburdened infrastructure and problematic auto-dependency. Finally, New York traffic delays are measured in time lost or gained by taking this or that route, indicating that space has been eclipsed by time, and time itself is at the mercy of traffic’s uncontrollable circulation patterns.


Sports

Sports, a transcription of an entire New York Yankees game, opens with perhaps the most provocative sentences of all Goldsmith’s appropriations: “1 800 LAW CASH reminds you that this copyrighted broadcast is presented by authority of the New York Yankees and may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form. And the accounts and descriptions of the game may not be disseminated without the express written consent of the New York Yankees.” Despite Sports also being a transcription from a New York radio station, it is immediately marked as a different information type to that of the previous two books. Here, the information is “owned” by the Yankees corporation and supported by corresponding copyright laws. Presumably Goldsmith is breaking the law by appropriating and “reproducing” the broadcast (technically, though he might escape prosecution on “creative” grounds. Note too that “law” and “cash” are intimately linked, and given copyright law generally comes into effect when there is cash involved, Goldsmith is probably pretty safe circulating this text as literature).

As with Traffic, Goldsmith’s choice of material in Sports is not completely random. This particular game is between the New York Yankees and their old rivals, the Boston Red Sox –not just any baseball game, but a competition marked by intense rivalry, tradition, and, as it happens, drama as well. Unlike the anonymous voices featured in the previous two volumes of the New York Trilogy, the voices here are those of well-known Yankees radio commentators, John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman. Less immediately accessible than traffic or weather reports, baseball commentary has a particular vocabulary and its own odd rhythms, as this excerpt describing the end of a Red Sox inning, displays:

“Here’s the 2-2 outside 3 and 2. David Ortiz on deck. Cora leads off second, Youkilis leads off first, two out bottom of the sixth. Myers deals swung on and lined to center. Damon toward right center, makes the catch and ends the inning. No runs, one hit, two left. And now, at the end of six innings of play, it’s 10-7 Boston on the Yanks Radio Network.”

While the informational aspect of language may be lost on baseball-illiterate readers, the game’s narrative unfolds dramatically and the characters and key moments soon become apparent. The characters include the hapless Yankees starting pitcher Sidney Ponson (who the commentators are down on before he’s even pitched a ball); Boston’s unstoppable and in-form players, Manny Ramírez and “Big Papi” David Ortiz (“Is he powerful? Does he have strength?” the commentators ask); and the flamboyant Yankee sluggers Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez and Derek Jeter. Key moments include the remarkable outfield catch by Robbie Cano in the bottom of the second innings and Johnny Damon’s two run homer that breaks the game’s stalemate.

Indeed, as the commentators point out late in the game, this is not just any game of baseball, but a particularly long one, and a potentially historic one: “… if this was done in the 30s or 40s or 50s it and you’ve read about it, you’d say, oh I wish I had been there. I can’t believe that it happened. And it’s not over! It’s not even close to being over.” The passion builds until the commentary reaches fever pitch in the seventh inning, with the excitement expressed via exclamation marks and staccato delivery:

“The pitch to Cano lined hard. Base hit! Right center field! Scoring is Abreu! Scoring is A-Rod! Cano holds at first. It’s a two-run base hit for Cano. The Yankees have scored seven runs in the seventh inning and they take a 14-10 lead. Is that amazing? Is that utterly amazing? Timlin has gotten racked.” And this drama continues to build, right to the final lines of the book: “Ball game over! Yankees win! The Yankees win!”

While there were elements of sponsorship that seeped into the commentary in Traffic (notably the “Panasonic Jam Cam”), the baseball commentary of Sports reads as a series of seamless shifts between commentary of the game and advertising material. These juxtapositions of different information types create odd, almost surreal conjunctions such as: “When Bernie Williams grounded out to short to end the top of the third, that was the fifteenth out and GEICO wants to remind you that a fifteen minute call can save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance.” Or this section comprising a sponsor’s phrase followed by a game score followed by some commentator humor followed by the real-time game commentary again: “We are coming to you live from the Loews broadcast booth let’s build something together. We’re in the top of the seventh, one out, no one on, the Yankees are trailing 10-7 in the nightcap which is what I need. The pitch is outside.” Such a compressed pastiche of languages (advertising, statistical information, humor and baseball commentary) and space-time shifting might have been considered text-book postmodernism in the 1980s, but here, postmodern pastiche has become part of an everyday language experience.

Datascapes of Grass

Goldsmith’s radio transcriptions translate ephemeral, spoken voices into permanent, material words. What readers might initially regard as “functional” information, when considered in another context, become very different – when written and read as literature, specific vocabularies, rhythms and linguistic idiosyncrasies become apparent. In the New York Trilogy, Goldsmith has framed a sliver from three everyday information flows and frozen it for close scrutiny, or, to adopt the contemporary phrase, “slow reading”. However, the process of transcription is not entirely objective or as mechanical as Goldsmith would have us believe. As other critics have pointed out, the process of transcription itself is subjective – even on a practical level, how do you to record the ums and ahs, pauses (ellipsis or not?) and indicators of tone (include an exclamation mark or not?). Inevitably, subjective expression (how to express a pause, a question, an exclamation) and “mishearing” creep in (Goldsmith’s earlier book Head Citations, a compendium of “misheard” pop song lyrics, is an illustration of the latter).

The focus on speech also places the New York Trilogy in a specifically local tradition extending from Walt Whitman’s appropriation of the rhythms and voices of nineteenth century New York to the Beats or New York School’s appropriation of the rhythms and voices of post-war New York. Unlike these however, Goldsmith’s language is appropriated directly from the meteorologist, the traffic reporter and the commentator, with minimal mediation by the author. Despite this, Goldsmith still plays the role of the creative genius transcribing readymade material from the everyday, rather than from the turbulent voices within. In this way, both his work and persona continue the avant-garde lineage of artists such as Duchamp, Cage and Warhol. Despite Goldsmith’s emphasis on the conceptual process, or perhaps because of his emphasis on the conceptual process, there remains a lingering attachment to the figure of the author (perhaps reflecting less the 19th century romantic artist and more the contemporary cult of celebrity). In this context, conceptual writing is as much a form of literature as it is performance art, and claims by Goldsmith that his work is boring and unreadable are all part of the act.

NOTES

While you should buy Goldsmith's books via SPD and read them for yourself, you could also download complete copies of The Weather, Traffic and Sports, as well as plenty of other Goldsmith material from his EPC site. I only have a copy of Traffic and read the other books online, hence the absence of page numbers in the quotations above.

My November 2007 review of Drew Gardner's Petroleum Hat.
My July 2007 review of Nada Gordon's Folly.

All photos by D.J. Huppatz, NYC 2007

Drew Gardner: Petroleum Hat

With its inconsistent tone and self-conscious awkwardness, Drew Gardner’s second book of poetry, Petroleum Hat (2005), may already be an early Flarf classic. The flatness, the fakeness, and the constant disruption of “communication”, that is, information consumption, doesn’t make for an easy read. Gardner’s poems, many of which read like constellations of fragments culled from internet searches or strings of spam, have caused some anxiety recently in poetry circles – anxiety specifically related to his methodology – are these anti-humanist poems simply “generated by machines”? Following generations of collage from Dada to Burroughs, not to mention MTV, mashups mediated by various forms of technological tools are hardly revolutionary. But beyond the methodology lies the importance of Gardner’s intervention into the spectacle of contemporary American media culture. For Flarfists, the contemporary muse is not an ancient Greek nymph who whispers sincere odes in the poet’s ear but a drag king impersonating the tragi-comic (late) Elvis in Las Vegas, all bejeweled jumpsuits and awkward karate moves. She may well be the specter haunting contemporary American poetry. Or it is a he? And perhaps that should be “spectacle” rather than specter?

While Gardner’s poems in Petroleum Hat might be perceived as conventionally “awful”, they ultimately declare themselves as poems. Nada Gordon’s recent book, Folly, on the other hand, extended poetry beyond its conventional bounds with Gordon’s interjections, conversations and references to theater or performance texts, all of which served to disrupt the book as a collection of discrete poems (see my previous post). In contrast, Gardner’s poems certainly look like conventional ones – blocks of text with justified left margins and ragged right margins, arranged into stanzas over a page or two. However, like Gordon’s Folly, Gardner’s Hat is characterized by its multitude of conflicting voices, its deflation of sincerity and its juxtaposition of serious and profane content.

Like internet search engines, Gardner’s poems make no distinction between “serious” information (“news”), personal asides and pop gossip: it’s all potential material to add to the mix. In Petroleum Hat, political figures mix it with celebrities in a flattened virtual world, and this may in fact be less of a literary construct than simply a reflection of the “real” contemporary America (the Governator of California, for example, springs to mind). While there are no consistent narratives or tones in Gardner’s work, the language all seems to be culled from the virtual world – what K. Silem Mohammad calls a poetry with internet “flavors”. At times, it feels as if Gardner is “drowning in the porridge of upload” – and, rather than distilling the information overflow into clear, rational packages of consumable data, he leaves it messy and thick with absurdity, cynicism and ambiguity. In “The Key and the Carrot”, Gardner writes:

I walk my room
looking for a destination,
only finding poets who love form and content
I have nonetheless found myself
walking to the receiver
as arsonist
with the new situation in quantum furrow
let it suffice with this:
the ground beef is still nothing received

The absence of punctuation makes it difficult to make “sense” of this poem, its initial autobiographical mode is disrupted by random appearances from quantum furrows and ground beef, as if our arsonist is burning the conventional autobiographical tone in which he (?) begins. If poets “love form and content”, Flarfists have instead fallen for relations and surface. Thus it does seem a little futile to be digging into the depths of these poems (what is “quantum furrow”? why “ground beef” here?) as they are less metaphoric than metonymic, establishing relations across a surface rather than mining a tradition (again, no evidence of ancient Greeks here).

A major theme of the book is the Iraq War, or more specifically, the images and language of the war as it is being consumed in contemporary America (or least on its computer screens). Gardner plays with War on Terror doublespeak, exposing its absurdity and deflating its seriousness. In this sense, it is worth considering the fragmented language and imagery of Petroleum Hat as a corrosive disruption to the sanitized feeds of information presented by mainstream American news sources. Gardner’s now-infamous poem, “Chicks Dig War”, for example, begins “Story time: Trojan Oil War (part 2)”, a pithy summation of the war, but he goes further than just the war with his repeated phrase “chicks dig war”. While it has been described as an anti-war poem, Gardner is actually dismantling the warped logic and propaganda that justifies war, and ultimately satirizes contemporary American gender and power relations. Joyelle McSweeny, in her excellent review in The Constant Critic, described the poem thus: “Fear of feminism, female strength and male weakness are conflated with each other and with the antithetical heterosexism of militaristic propaganda to create frightening, porny ideations: "God Made Girls Who Like War."” The foundational American trinity of miltarism, religion and patriarchy are all wittily deflated by Gardner’s satire.

In Gardner’s “John Denver Wawa Shadow Puppet Government”, he again mashes up key contemporary themes – the war, politics, celebrity and religion:

the NBC/Wall Street Journal doesn’t understand
the God of Isaac and Ishmael
soon we’ll all be praying to John Denver
if we don’t allow right-wing poor people to feel happy
ALL the time,
teach their kids how to pray in the direction of pizza
yet see no problem
with having the Lord’s Prayer printed in ghostly pubic hair

the president has become newly stressed-out
with the profound equality of all human beings
knocking over stone walls onto Avril Lavigne
as Abraham Lincoln once did

Here, Isaac and Ishmael, both sons of Abraham (though with different mothers), underline the common ancestry of Christianity and Islam (the former religion traces a lineage through Isaac, the latter through Ishmael). Mainstream news “can’t understand” that both religions have the same father. In a contemporary America where more people vote for TV pop stars than politicians, John Denver, bland country/pop singer of the 1970s and 80s, may be both a worthy idol and a worthy political candidate. However, unlike contemporary bland pop stars, and despite the potential patriotism of hits such as “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and “Rocky Mountain High”, Denver was also known for his political outspoken-ness, and was particularly critical of various (particularly Republican) governments.

In the following stanza, Gardner flattens the space of the poem to conflate Avril Lavigne and Abraham Lincoln. Beyond simply a curious juxtaposition, Gardner is also skating across the surface of language, with ALL as a key refrain from the last stanza – both bland contemporary pop singer and former president contain those letters in their names, underlining the equality of all. However, more seriously, equality is stressful for the president, with the resonance of “stone walls” recalling 1969’s Stonewall Riots, and suggesting that equality here is not just referring to the rights of America’s Pizza-eating poor but also the president’s “knocking over” gay rights proposals.

There certainly appears to be something sinister going on behind the scenes of the “shadow puppet government”, though Gardner does not offer a clear ethical stance on any of these issues – the poems force combinations or conflate discourses that do not usually belong in the same space. Another poem, “in this otherworldly quiet”, for example, begins:

in this otherworldly quiet
i heard the piercing cry of agony rent the air
dear little bird, why this shipbuilding?
why a 300 pound weapon, and
why did each protester
spank Wolfowitz individually, really hard?

administration has been made between
clauses relating to internet surveillance
and radioactive toys made of lint

Here again, Gardner presents a mashup of contemporary news issues – the war, internet surveillance, weapons – in a creepy silent otherworld (the silent distance created by the mediating screen?). But the messiness only allows the reader brief moments of empathy. By creating a space where prayer meetings meet celebrity porn and the war’s principle architect, Paul Wolfowitz is spanked by protestors, Gardner’s warped visions are certainly infused with an absurd humor. As spam aims to escape filters and spread virally, so too Gardner’s language escapes rational communication in unfiltered streams of the American collective unconscious, and the results are both humorous and frightening. Petroleum Hat is a collection of odd fragments that takes on the glittering surfaces of mediated culture in a combination of chance-generated spontenaeity and constructedness, resulting in a poetics which tries to take on contemporary media culture on its own terms rather than from the position of “poetry” that expresses “sincere emotions”. If not sincere, then serious? With the constant stoppages, voice changes and erasures, the reader is never really sure. As Gardner writes in “Skylab Wolverine Bunny Cage Nub”:

That last paragraph has to go—
I think that’s the wolverine bunny cage of
our problem—not counting the last paragraph
made of paper maché nub replicas.

FURTHER LINKS:

Drew Gardner reads "Chicks Dig War" at the 2006 Flarf Festival in NYC (YouTube video).

Drew Gardner reads from an earlier book, Sugar Pill, to the accompaniment of his own piano playing, in a duo with bass player Damon Smith (Ubuweb, sound only).

Drew Gardner's blog, Overlap.

The latest on Flarf, a National Poetry Foundation podcast. A good introduction and overview.

Nada Gordon: Folly

In a 21st American culture where simple dichotomies rule – good vs. evil, us vs. them, “as if it were a choice between OUD and BANJO” – Nada Gordon’s recent book of poetry, Folly (New York: Roof Books, 2007), is a self-conscious play and mix, an affected performance, a dandy language parade in sequins, wigs and false eyelashes where everyone is (good&evil) and they are us in the crumbling shortcake (eat me) world. A burlesque romp through language, Folly is corrosive precisely by virtue of its complexities and its ambiguities – there are no absolutes here, seriousness is constantly undercut by humor and frivolity interrupted by profundity.

Gordon’s omnivorous text includes material appropriated from wildly eclectic sources in what feels like a surreal carnival. In it, we encounter an odd cast of characters, from Bollywood’s “Asha Bhosle, in a mirrored choli” (“Vagabond Imperialism”, p.21) to Emma Lazarus, author of the poem on the Statue of Liberty, who says, “Why America Sucks. Corporate Pigs, it’s not going to work anymore.” The Chorus, comprising Loquacious the Snail, Melissa, a Chameleon and Mr Fucko, a Hamster, replies: “America sucks dick! America sucks dick!” (“Why America Sucks”, p. 65). Some pieces, such as “Abnormal Discharge” seem to be culled from listserves or internet chatrooms: “chlamydia thru blood transfusion? … VERY SCARED should i be worried about this? Jeni” (p.22) But the most surreal dialogue must be God’s exchange with a Star-Shaped Pillow, Fat Thing, Rusty Helmet, Earthquake, The Skull on the President and Google. When God says “I feel so impotent”, Google says, “Did you mean to search for “I feel so important.” God finishes: “I feel so important” (“Viagric Importunings” p.59). Viagric indeed.

But Folly is more than simply a loose collection of poems. The book is structured like a play – three acts and an intermission – or, more accurately perhaps, an opera or a musical (think cabaret or pantomime rather than Wagner). From the carnivalesque cover to the decorative flourish beside each poem’s title, the book itself is a complete performance, including passages of dialogue from a cast of thousands (well, a couple of hundred anyway), epigraphs and asides that continually disturb the integrity of individual poems. With its baroque language, the voluptuous words of Folly strain to express themselves, dance on the rim where words whirl towards the point of inadequacy, the overload expressed in the poem “Porpo-Thang”: “There isn’t a place in this world that doesn’t sooner or later drown in the porridge of upload.” (p.25)

The Wisdom of Gerrit Gerritszoon

The first obvious reference point of Folly is Desiderius Erasmus’ Praise of Folly and it is worth returning there in order to unravel some binding threads (aside: while researching this section, I discovered Erasmus’ real name was actually Gerrit Gerritszoon – now why would you want to change that?). Erasmus was an interesting character: a Renaissance Greek and Latin scholar but simultaneously a Christian scholar who spent much time and effort trying to reconcile Classical learning and Christian doctrine. Written in 1509, his Praise of Folly engages humor, satire and parody in its depiction of corrupt and hypocritical clergy, written at a time when the hegemony of the Catholic Church was under threat (and less than a decade later, the fragmentation began). Erasmus’ main character is Folly, a Classical “goddess” born of Plutus and Youth (suckled by Drunkenness and Ignorance) who exposes the inherent folly in everyone. Rather than Wisdom decrying foolishness from the pulpit (as we might expect in a Classical/Christian text), in Erasmus’ text, it is Folly who is praising herself, producing a dilemma of uncertainty for the reader. Designed to shock, provoke and question the state of medieval values, Erasmus’ rhetorical paradox also posits the coexistence of irreconcilable truths – how can we believe Folly praising folly?

Erasmus’ narrator, Folly, is a complex character, at times reflecting intellectual pomposity, at others child-like innocence. There are, for Erasmus, a variety of follies – from harmless triviality to dangerous lunacy (and everything in between). Uncomfortably for men of reason, Erasmus’ Folly also has moments of profound insight, making it impossible to distinguish folly from wisdom. Folly is above all human – ignorance, error and foolishness are all characteristically human qualities. Indeed, from a purely rationalist perspective, love is man’s (sic) greatest folly. Or folly is man’s greatest love? Erasmus not only makes clear our dependence upon folly for human happiness but also shows us that even the (reputedly) wisest man in Christendom wasn’t above having a good laugh, particularly at his own expense (he includes sly and comical references to himself). Finally, and perhaps most importantly for Gordon, Erasmus’ most beloved deity is female.

A discharge which forms an encrustation

While Erasmus’ Folly begins by “spouting a hotchpotch of words”, Gordon’s Folly opens with: “Who isn’t envaginated in rhetoric?” (“Vagabond Imperialism”, p.21). And the book certainly utilizes the tactic of “envagination” to critique Erasmus’ patriarchal assumptions about women. Gordon quotes Erasmus in the preface: “That an ape will be an ape, though clad in purple; so a woman will be a woman, ie., a fool, whatever disguise she takes up.” So Gordon took this cue literally in ACT ONE, entitling it, “An Ape in Purple Clothing” and continually evoking the most extravagant ornament and costume so beloved by Erasmus’ woman: “they garnish themselves with paint, washes, perfumes, and all other mysteries of ornament” (aside at the bottom of p.21). Like Erasmus, Gordon also includes herself in the text, most memorably in a comical narrative about the book itself between Nada (the author), James (the editor/publisher) and Folly. While Folly interrupts with “Have I got a proposition for you!”, Nada explains the book’s structure to her editor (and, of course, to her readers):

“An Ape in Purple Clothing” affectionately addresses the follies of sex, gender, and decoration; “A Very Boring Society” the folly of the social – of church’n’state™; and “A Dissonant Gaiety” the folly (PBUH) of poetry. In my third section and in Erasmus’, the irony doubles back on itself to negate itself – transforming into genuine (if cynical) praise.” (“A Conversation”, p. 68)

While Gordon’s aesthetic might contain echoes of Luce Irigaray or Hélène Cixous’ “feminine” language, in an American context, Kathy Acker’s deconstructions of patriarchal narratives might be a more direct precursor for Gordon’s envaginated performance. Certainly Acker’s appropriation and reworking of classic texts, her juxtaposition of “literary” language with “vulgar” language and even her sense of humor all find parallels in Gordon’s Folly. A line like Folly’s query to “redolent Ahnold” serves to illustrate all three parallels: “would you, could you, learn to felch / deceitful Beauty’s steely meany?” (“Decency in the Arts, p. 61)

Gordon’s writing might also been seen in the context of post-Language aesthetics, particularly the subversive strategies of Flarf. Much Flarf poetry is characterized by the appropriation of a wide variety of linguistic material – “The world is just one great big beautiful verbal quarry, after all” said Gordon in a 2003 interview – and its messy poly-vocal quality is a logical extension of Language writing’s challenge to the notion of authorship. But for Gordon particularly, the impact of Bernadette Mayer’s process-generated aesthetics is evident (Gordon wrote a thesis on Mayer’s work). In this way, Gordon’s work may be read as a poetic performance text created through various experimental processes, in which the process of sifting through the verbal quarry may well be as important than the creation of discrete, stable “poems”.

There may be more than a touch of Dada in all this absurdity, as noted by Rick Synder’s recent overview of Flarf (in Jacket #31, October 2006). If so, I’d place Folly in the provocative tradition of Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire – the masks, costumes, bizarre dance and puppet performances, wailing chants and even, yes, poetry recitals – rather than, say, last year’s MoMA survey of dead Dada masterpieces. Gordon’s poem, “Fountain”, confirms a Dada connection, via an homage (?) to Duchamp, critically noting Dada’s sanitation:

The world smells
like a urinal
mint today – I guess
from all the “cleansing.”

(“Fountain”, p.53)

The poetry of Folly is less characterized by (self-conscious) “poetic” language than verbal discharge, more or less codified. At times the writing is clear and rational (as in the lines above from “Fountain”), at others, tortured and confusing. This latter state is best illustrated when Gordon patches in non-native speaker’s English with its warped grammar and poetic associations. In “Human Are Always Growing”, for example, Folly (wino-mumbling) quotes a string of “bad” English sentences:

Everybody is exactly watching the irrational TV companies programs.
If every people except irrational to real, people are going to nihilistic or machine.
Saddam has weapons of mess distraction. (“Human Are Always Growing”, p.55)

The final line is more suggestive than the official media line and suggests instead the tactics of distraction utilized by the US government and official media in the “irrational” Iraq war. Finally, it is worth mentioning again that the serious subject matter is challenged by the humorous tone that runs through much of the dialogue in the book. While some may have trouble finding a clear ethical stance amongst all this folly, as literature, Folly can also be placed in a long tradition of tragi-comic dialogue and characters in English language poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Joyce.


“The folly of a carousel is the folly of life: lugubrious, sporadically hyperactive, ultimately terminal.” (p.12)

Nature Got Loose Identity and Changed Shape

As Stan Apps noted in his recent review of Folly, Gordon’s “poems reject existing standards of taste as too exclusive to be applicable to democratic society” (Jacket, No.33, July 2007). The reference to taste made me think of Folly as camp. In "Notes on 'Camp'", Susan Sontag linked camp to an excessively decorative sensibility that might apply here, a sensibility she describes as a “disengaged, unserious, ‘aesthete’s vision’ characterized by the spirit of extravagance.” Further, Sontag writes of the paradoxical nature of camp in terms that may help illuminate Gordon’s project:

“Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different – a supplementary – set of standards.” (Section 34)

And further:

“The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness – irony, satire – seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.” (Section 43)

While Sontag’s camp is usually linked to a specific gay 1960s sensibility, the aesthetic might be understood in a much broader sense. In a contemporary context, how might we response to the “oversaturated” image-world of 21st century American culture? For Gordon, it seems the response involves utilizing similar means of artificiality, hyper-reality or virtuality, but always with a complexity and ambiguity that contemporary mass media lack (“good & evil”, “BANJO or OUD”). In this way, Gordon’s critical theatricality presents no clear ethical stance, but instead forces the reader to actually participate by thinking (which can be a distressingly uncomfortable at times).

Following this in another direction, I wonder if Gordon’s hyper-intensity and excessively baroque language might also create a passage through to a heightened awareness of bodily sensations, as in this quote by Juliet in “Soapy Erection” (p.28):

His lips that licking my folded claspings send up
through the nerves puffs of melody from my painted
mouth.

Oily nipple, thrill of entry. Contracting tongues to
Activate the hearts, dual doumbeks in the craving
Room.

Carnival Elsewhere

“It’s not that the personal is the political. It’s that the interpersonal is the political.” (Nada Gordon, A Conversation with Tom Beckett, Jacket, No. 23, August 2003)

Finally, Gordon’s performative text creates an elsewhere space that might coincide with Bakhtin’s ideas about the carnival. Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (published in 1965) presents a vision of collectivity in just such an elsewhere space that is also, for him, a space of liberation or emancipation. Bakhtin’s book on the 16th century French novelist François Rabelais celebrates the lust, bingeing and excess of the medieval carnival, a space marked by the suspension of hierarchies and prohibitions. Rather than simply anarchy or a safety valve for releasing societal tensions, the elsewhere space of the carnival creates the potential for negotiating new relationships. In his analysis, Bakhtin focused on the festive culture of the marketplace and the street, rather than the high intellectual culture of the Renaissance (Rabelais is presented as a kind of last gasp of the medieval before the abstract universal theories of Descartes et al. Might Erasmus also be included alongside Rabelais, with his ambiguity, sensuality and emphasis on heterogeneity?). Carnivalesque literature, argues Bakhtin, could function as a challenge to the highly privatised world of mid-20th century capitalism.

As in the medieval carnival, for Gordon and her cast, disguise, mask and costume are key aesthetic devices. Gordon’s fundamentally unstable characters, emphasis on sensual language, uncodified verbal discharge and the combination of sacred and profane suggest a carnivalesque literature for the 21st century. Furthermore, her emphasis on the vernacular, or more precisely, mix of the vernacular with “high cultural” references, also link Folly to Rabelais’ carnival world.

For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque is a refusal to submit to the hegemony of the cultural status quo, with the suspension of heirarchies allowing multiple voices to be heard (particularly those that are usually suppressed or ignored). This polyvocal ideal of the carnival could be seen as a corrective within a highly uni-vocal dominant culture (in his case, of Stalin, in Gordon’s, the mass media culture of 21st century USA). Importantly, the carnival clears space for voices of those usually silenced and allows us to enter into new dialogues with them. Gordon’s inclusion of the voice of Sunny Pain, a New York subway beggar, in “Nothing is Untitled” (p.92), is a key example. Pain’s voice appears in this context:

“hit me! dance dance (pulsing) dance dance

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
My name is Sunny Pain.
I’m homeless and I’m hungry.
If you don’t have it
I can understand it
because I don’t have it.
But if you have a sandwich,
a piece of fruit, a little change,
I’d really appreciate it.
Have a good evening”

While the “dance dance” introduction accurately suggests the rhythm of Pain’s voice and the singsong quality that comes from endless repetition, I imagine it in Folly’s carnival sung over an upbeat (pulsing) dance track. Is the inclusion of Pain’s generic song trivializing poverty, celebrating it or condemning it? Well, perhaps none of the above. While Gordon’s elsewhere carnival is inclusive, it may also be a disturbing intrusion of the contemporary “street” into the world of “literature”: “Mother of heaven, habibi, don’t you feel intensely uncomfortable?” (“Vacuously Impermanent”, p.43)

In the context of New York, Gordon’s elsewhere carnival seems particularly challenging. This is a city certainly not noted for its joie de vivre – New Yorkers take themselves very seriously. While the city is characterized by hierarchical and exclusive culture(s), Gordon’s inclusive carnival flattens the hierarchies and allows for all kinds of odd imaginary interactions. Provocative and engaging, Folly constitutes a complex critique of the contemporary American image-world of reductive consumer “choice” (BANJO or OUD, Coke or Pepsi, good or evil) with no clear winners. "Minty swirl of mutant life / in jerk and lunge /of futile strife." ("Extreme Smile Makeover") American poetry for the 21st century?

Further links:

Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly, e-text: here
Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp (1964): here
Nada Gordon, “Form's Life: An Exploration of the Works of Bernadette Mayer”: here
Nada Gordon, interview in Readme: here
Two poems by Nada Gordon in EOAGH, A Journal of the Arts, #3: here
Previous post on Elsewhere, #2, by Gary Sullivan and Nada Gordon: here

Elsewhere

For me, Gary Sullivan's poetic comic book, Elsewhere # 2 (2006), sparked not only a renewed interest in combinations of text and image but also possibilities for reading New York. The 24 page comic book features poetry by Nada Gordon and black and white cartoons by Sullivan. In it, the authors riff off their experience traversing Brooklyn's Coney Island Avenue, a road which runs from the suburbs of predominantly white middle-class Brooklyn on the "right side" of Prospect Park, right through the heart of immigrant Brooklyn, to end in the predominantly Russian Brighton Beach neighborhood. While there is no progressive narrative to follow in Gordon and Sullivan's kaleidescope of images and words, you certainly get a sense of a journey through immigrant worlds - glimpses through shop windows and chainlink fences, the rhythms of conversations half-overheard in languages half-understood.

Gordon's poem is an homage of sorts to Frank O'Hara's 1953 poem "Second Avenue", perhaps the most surreal of his poems and certainly a long way from the anthologized O'Hara of first-person narratives. In "Second Avenue", O'Hara riffs off his experience of sights and sounds in 1950s Manhattan: "actually everything in it either happened to me or I felt happening (saw, imagined) on Second Avenue,” wrote O'Hara about the poem. The result is a pastiche of narrative, documentation, autobiography, literary references and mythology, provoking a constant slippage between street imagery and the surface of language. O'Hara's opening lines from "Second Avenue":

"Quips and players, seeming to vend astringency off-hours,
celebrate diced excesses and sardonics, mixing pleasures,
as if proximity were starting at the margin of a plea..."

are echoed in Gordon's opening lines:

"Beans and pumpkin, seeming to lend ingenuity
to the otherwise concrete garden, coil up lavishly
out of immigrant yearning mixing pleasure & labor as if
vegetables were hovering at the margin of a curry."

Sullivan's accompanying cartoon style is similarly eclectic, ranging from documentary snapshots cropped from the street to quirky characters that could have been culled from the newspaper's funny pages - that is, from serious comic book "art" to self-consciously amateur doodles to surreal collages combining both. Each frame is unique with little narrative flow, producing an effect in images that complements Gordon's fragmentary poetry both in its techniques and its subject matter. As with O'Hara's "Second Avenue", there is a slippage between documentation and imagination, but here O'Hara's Abstract Expressionist surface gives way to Sullivan and Gordon's poly-vocal collage.
In Elsewhere #2, Sullivan and Gordon distill fragments of the sights and sounds of a cosmopolitan city - snatches of Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Urdu and Bengali appear in Sullivan's cropped signs and advertisements, as well as in Gordon's text - linguistic details that highlight the heterogeneity of 21st century Brooklyn. Taking a step beyond O'Hara, Sullivan and Gordon retreat from autobiography almost completely and let the streets speak in their various languages, the roving consciousness of cartoonist and poet shaping the rush of New York's immigrant topography. They evoke an "elsewhere" New York, the hub of a global network characterised less by financial flows, than by flows of languages and cultures.

Elsewhere #2 seems to be a continuation of an ongoing project by Sullivan, begun in Elsewhere #1 (2005). Subtitled "Japanese Notebook", this comic book was composed during a trip to Japan. In it, Sullivan appropriates and transforms images from the streets of Japan and combines them with fragments of Japanese-English, the language typically found in advertising and packaging, or on signs and t-shirts. This mutant version of English, reowned for its butchered syntax and sentimental phrases, exposes the awkwardness of a non-native speaker, but also produces unexpectedly evocative and humorous results (that could even be described as "poetic"). Sullivan uses saccharine lines such as "There's always someone doing one's best" juxtaposed with a cartoon of a cute talking cellphone character, or just plain "bad" English lines such as, "I can give a rainbow the smailing or come across as one's mind." As well as tracing along the edges of language where it frays into nonsense, Sullivan's poetry here highlights the hybrid nature of English, a language in constant flux, contested (literally, in this case) from "elsewhere". Both the imagery and the text are again appropriated from vernacular culture - Sullivan quotes the language of the streets rather than "high" Japanese art and literature.

Sullivan and Gordon are well-known for their co-founding of the 21st century literary phenomenon known as "Flarf". While there has been much commentary on Flarf already (see links listed below), what seems to me to be most interesting about Flarf is not its ironic silliness, the search-engine methodologies or fetishization of technology that critics have thus far focused on, but the possibilities of new mutant languages and hybrid forms that Sullivan and Gordon suggest in Elsewhere. The collaborative nature of much Flarf work and its virtual community dedicated to creating and proliferating such dissident languages in a highly conservative culture are also heartening.

Indeed, Flarf and its exponents are not all fun and games. The cover of Elsewhere #2 is particularly politically provocative in an American context (see above), and though it may immediately make one think of wars currently being waged abroad, the setting is not the streets of Kabul or Baghdad but of Brooklyn. To make the local-global connections clearer, Gordon writes later in the comic book: "Who is "they"? The Westerners, of course, the tumbling vipers aware of history as rods stippling the dip of an imperialistic road map." If these are reminders of contemporary American military operations overseas (elsewhere), the book's focus is actually more specifically local, providing a glimpse at the "elsewhere" within.

The "melting pot" is a common cliché used to describe New York City. The term, popularized during the first great wave of the city's immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, held the promise that the hordes of Irish, German, Italian and Eastern European immigrants could be stirred up in the pot and come out as Americans. The melting pot is also an image that serves to conceal New York's ingrained ethnic and racial tensions. The second wave of immigration in the late 20th and early 21st century, predominantly from the Middle East, the Caribbean and Asia has once again brought the melting pot cliché to the fore. The paranoia evoked by 9/11 seems to have exacerbated the tension between an image of unified America ("United We Stand" says the bumper sticker) and the New York reality - less a melting pot than a cultural mosaic of disparate immigrant communities with no common culture, disconnected from each other and from mainstream (that is, predominantly white middle class) America. In contemporary New York, as in America generally, English is struggling to remain the common language and "American" the common culture.

Sullivan and Gordon bring to light these tensions with their provacative "elsewhere" at the heart of New York. Their poly-vocal English is constantly disrupted from without: "suspended by telephone wires from moons in alternate cultural systems: electrical analysis of pistachios, desi kulfi, tortillas at the good luck deli." And this kind of acknowledgement of American cultural heterogeniety seems extactly what is needed in an remarkably insular mainstream culture. In Elsewhere, the without is in fact, within, the elsewhere is here - all we need do is begin to listen to voices like that of Iraqi pop star Kazim Al Saher, "his chorus forever tracing the marvelous alarms of the sonic, the doum and the tek and the doum doum tek a tek doum tek a tek."

Further links:
Rick Synder, "The New Pandemonium: A Brief Overview of Flarf", Jacket #31 (October 2006)
Flarf feature in Jacket #30 (July 2006)
Gary Sullivan Elsewhere (blog)
Nada Gordon ~~ululations~~ (blog)
My own appropriations of mutant Asian Englishes, Book of Poem!, reviewed by Timothy Wright in Cordite (2005)