Conceptualism as affect: or, a defense of both at once

MOMA's poet laureate Kenny Goldsmith appeared on Stephen Colbert this week, dressed as a peppermint stick wearing a full beard, looking a little bit--come to think of it--like a pinker Mark Edmundson. As an outside resident of a certain stripe of the American poetry world, I know that the contemporary conflict between conceptualism and flarf determines a lot of what gets said about poems these days. As a resident of Hawai`i, I find this annoying, as that conversation seems so far away, so noisy in its insignificance to what goes on here. This conversation takes on increasing bandwith as it enters the abhorred and yet coveted mainstream (even if, as Colbert would point out, it's only the mainstream of basic cable). Recent take-downs of conceptualism have appeared in in Boston Review, in Lana Turner, and in The Rumpus. In his essay, "Against Conceptualism: Defending the Poetry of Affect," Cal Bedient writes about conceptualism as if it opposed life itself: much current poetry, he argues, "neglect[s] life values, which include a trembling web of receptivity, sharply interested observation, the ability to make instant adjustments, and organic developments within a constantly changing context, all properties as important to lyric poets as to cats." Kent Johnson and Amy King attack Conceptualism for attacking capitalism, even as its current practitioners use high level marketing techniques. Consider the suit. Johnson goes so far as to call Conceptualism "the right-wing poetic avant-garde." Amy King, noting that she and other poets often employ methods "trademarked" by flarf and conceptualism, writes: "I want to call attention to the claim these groups purport to block capitalism while intentionally employing capitalist techniques (i.e. media-style sensationalism to garner notice, sound-bite saturation, prolific self-referencing, reducing all other modes of subjective expression to exchangeable equivalences, etc.) to achieve and secure status within the capitalist structure. That structure rewards for adherence and perpetuation, regardless of proclaimed critique."

These attacks on conceptualism are smart, thorough, and persuasive. And yet how easy it is to neglect all the other "wings" of contemporary poetry, those that are determined by argument (feminist, anti-colonial), those that are determined by subject position (ethnic), and those that simply investigate language and world (zen, spiritual writing). But I don't want to set all these schools against one another. Nor do I want to attack Conceptualism, even when I harbor doubts about it in its pure form; printing out the internet strikes me more as a waste of paper than as a valuable project, for instance, even if old technologies like printers often become art. (This may be another way to say that I hereby renounce my claim to audience, as arguments pro or con are the coin of that realm.)  Let me do what I do when I edit Tinfish, namely enact a conversation between writers who otherwise seem to have nothing to do with one another. It occurs to me that my facebook news feed, which often displays odd moments of synchronicity, is telling me something. Lately, in among the links to attacks on conceptualism, I've been tracking the work of two fb friends who are writing dissertations, one on Hawaiian history (Ron Williams, Jr.) and the other whose M.A. thesis was on on mo'o (lizard) legends (Alohalani Brown). Something Alohalani wrote the other day suddenly resonates differently.

"I would happily spend the rest of my life gathering together installments of serialized moʻolelo in the Hawaiian newspapers and then typing them out as a way to acquaint myself with them. I just found another one that shows Kamehaʻikana as a moʻo, that makes three now. My list of moʻo is growing (155+) and the number moʻo on Oʻahu that I found in moʻolelo is now 60. Now to write out my prospectus for a possible manuscript on moʻo and see who would be interested."

That first sentence of her status line combines affect--"I would happily spend the rest of my life gathering together installments of serialized mo`olelo in the Hawaiian newspapers"--with what Goldsmith would consider a work of conceptual art--"and then typing them out as a way to acquaint myself with them." There is no separation in Alohalani Brown's mind between the act of copying (uncreative writing, as Goldsmith would call it) and the sensation of joy at discovering a hidden part of Hawaiian culture and history.  

That brings me back to Goldsmith and Stephen Colbert. Goldsmith was on the show to talk about his new book, Seven American Deaths and Disasters. Contra Marjorie Perloff's enthusiastic comment, "Seven Deaths is a real page-turner: you will feel you’re there, living through the horrific events as they unfold," Colbert went right after the version of Goldsmith's polemic that is intended to shock--the avant of his garde, in other words. "When I read this I feel like I'm some sort of time traveling aesthete who is coming in to sample other people's shock and tragedy. I'm tasting their disbelief and the way it's changing them forever... and it feels vampiric." Oddly, both these comments, the con and the pro, involve reactions to the book as an aesthetic event, one that has us turning pages, whether or not we want to.

One of the deaths and disasters is the John F. Kennedy assassination. That event was my first public memory; my mother told me at the door when I came home from kindergarten. Several years ago (it was probably on a significant, even-numbered anniversary) PBS replayed the entire day's television programming from November 22, 1963. I watched quite a bit of it; we'd not had a television in 1963, so I had no early visual memories of the event. The video itself contains no affect, of course, it's just streaming photographs. But I found myself feeling a lot of emotions, from shock to anxiety to sadness, as the newsmen (Huntley and Brinkley, were they?) found out that the president had been shot and then, later, that he had died. Of course I knew how the story ended. Of course I felt a bit like "a time traveling aesthete," except that what I was sampling was my own shock and sense of tragedy. This shock was at once memory (I had heard the news then) and something more than memory, something like an unfolding--in real time--of what has come to seem unreal over time.


Was PBS doing conceptual television? Was there a lack of affect? No, and no. PBS was presenting a document to its audience. The documentary was one that lacked voice-over, as voice-overs always emerge from out of the future of the event chronicled, and the past of the viewer/listener. It was like the skeleton to what would become a monster, an industry based on interpretations of the event. This document comes before interpretation. It's raw, and that's why it hurts so much, even now. How is this event, or this re-event, different from what Kenny Goldsmith is doing? I propose that it's not much different at all. Goldsmith is doing important historical retrieval, archival work in his presentation of these deaths and disasters by way of transcripts of radio shows that occurred when the fateful event took place. But he is not doing anything especially new or avant-garde. Like Alohalani Brown, Goldsmith enjoys recording the recording, retyping the newspaper, printing out what's on the internet. Like her, he is selective (in this case). Like her, what he finds evokes feeling, whether of shock, sorrow, or pride in a heritage that had seemed lost. What is at stake to each of them may be different, as Brown embarks on a recovery of Hawaiian mo`olelo, and Goldsmith is intrigued by how people talk when they experience American historical shock. But they both find emotion in the archive, and that is a not inconsiderable act. I've written elsewhere about trauma and the archive, in the context of Hawaiian history and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Emerson may have been right that poems are already out there. If they do not float in the air to be caught like butterflies, they live in our newspapers, our books, our YouTube videos, and in our daily lives. I do not see where Kenny Goldsmith ends and a documentary poet like Mark Nowak begins, or why historians like Brown and Williams, Jr. cannot be considered poet laureates of the Hawai`i State Archive. I find value in what each of them does. I feel what each of them does. I also want to read other kinds of poems, other documents, have other aesthetic and historical and cultural experiences. But I want them all, not just those that strike me as immediately significant. And I want them, not the contraption within which they are dressed up, like peppermint sticks or like any of the many -isms that we use to teach literature to our students. Anthologies of manifestos are as conceptual as manifestos themselves. And often they are less interesting than the particular works of art (original or copied) that inspire them. For all his peppermint shtick, I find Goldsmith and his polemics less interesting than the documents he's retrieved from the archive. I found his comments on Colbert to be more about finding the affect in our historical words (shock jocks trying to sort out 9/11 would be a fascinating test case) than about cleansing our palate of feeling. And I am especially taken by the joy I hear in the written voices of my friends in the archives.

The mo`o photograph is by Jonathan Morse; more can be found here.

OLD WOMEN LOOK LIKE THIS: notes toward a talk

The announcement goes like this:

Susan Schultz on Writing Alzheimer's

September 23, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Manoa Campus, Henke Hall 325

---

The University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Center for Biographical Research Brown Bag Biography presents a lecture, "Old Women Look Like This": Writing Alzheimer's," by poet, publisher, editor, and UH-M English professor Susan M. Schultz

The talk will go something like this:

I was invited to talk about my recent e-book, Old Women Look Like This, which is available through Lulu, and was published by the Argotist Press, edited by Jeffrey Side out of Liverpool, UK.

Quala-Lynn Young, at the Contemporary Museum, organized a tour for writers last year, which was followed a couple of months later by a reading of poems based on the work of four artists. Having written Dementia Blog, I was most taken by the portraits of old women by Elizabeth Berdann, for their fidelity to their subjects. Here are some of her paintings. Edna is the woman whose face appears on the "cover" of my e-book. Each portrait bears the first name of its subject, along with her age. Edna is 91. (Old people, like children, are quite concerned with their ages; "I'm 86!" one of my neighbors said to me recently. Her dog is 12, she also told me.)

Elizabeth Berdann's paintings of old women

The poem I wrote for the museum event was based on several of these paintings. As I thought about the ways in which old women are seen in our culture, I thought to do a google search, "old women look like." When I did it, the results were (of course) profoundly strange. I found sites on how to appear younger, sites on how to appear older, pornographic sites, and sites about men who look like old lesbians. So I decided to write the poem by alternating brief descriptions of Berdann's faces with text I culled from my google searches. Here is the search: note that the current search includes the e-book itself, which is at once flattering (if anything computer-generated can be said to be so) and odd.

This method of writing takes something from a poetic movement that has grown in the past ten years from a joke to the subject of conferences, papers, and loud arguments among poets. It's called Flarf. For some writing about flarf, see this link, Flarf.

Some significant moments in the verbiage about flarf:

--Gary Sullivan's definition of "Flarf" as a verb: "To bring out the inherent awfulness, etc., of some pre-existing text." He brings up heavy use of Google.

--Mike Magee: "The use of Google being extremely common, the flarf method resembles in some sesen: a) the use of a thesaurus; b) eavesdropping and quoting; c) sampling; d) collage / cut-&-paste . . . What makes the flarf methodology different, to my mind, is the willful democratization of the method: the EXTENSIVE and even sole use of Googled material."

The best book of Flarf, to my mind, is K. Silem Mohammad's Deer Head Nation, which uses this method toward a (farcical) critique of American culture, focusing on the deer heads that people put over their fireplaces. But I didn't want farce so much as a commentary on the way old women are looked at, so the tone of my poem alternates between the google search's shtick and my own rather less absurdist takes on the women's faces. Part of the poem came out in the Honolulu Weekly; you can see it here:

and a snippet here: "She floats there, her neck rooted to the soil of its own shadow. Women talk openly about their sex lives after 60; I passed two women who held hands the way I imagine widows do. There are men who look like old lesbians on [cracked.com], but on the plus side, I look a lot younger than my age, or those who become senior before their time. Rose (90) has wide astonished eyes, hair a white nest; absence where her neck should be; she is all heart at the heart of her frame."

The move is from a Romantic poem image ("the soil of its own shadow") to the on-line source material, and then back again to hearts. (Berdann's frames are hearts and diamonds, so the play is on the frame, as well as on the literary frame/cliche of "heart.") Some of my lines are less Romantic (one is about the frame creating a baseball diamond out of the woman's face), but they are never "flarfy," in the ways the google materials are.

[read the entire poem at the talk]

I began to think less about image than about narrative, the stories we tell about old people, the way in which our narratives often fail to fit their lives, because our stories are more about children and about younger people. When I remembered that Sandra Day O'Connor's husband had fallen in love with another woman in his Alzheimer's residence, and that O'Connor was pleased because her husband seemed so happy about it, I turned to the computer again and found a soap opera generator. I took some of the short scenarios offered up by the generator and shifted them into the Alzheimer's home to see what would happen. The poem begins with an old woman stalking an old man (there are so many fewer of them in Alzheimer's care than women) and ends with a shotgun wedding based on the birth of a grandchild. The ways in which so many of our narratives depend on biology (who is the parent of whom is assumed to be a question about DNA and not about adoption) is made clear in this odd intervention. (Another of the poems is based on lists of children up for adoption, except that I substituted Alzheimer's patients for the orphans.)

[I just checked my email and found an ad for Botox, to get rid of the dark circles under my eyes, RISK-FREE. I'm told that 89% of those who use this product get compliments from their friends about their lack of wrinkles and bags.]

Another kind of narrative of old age and death is the elegy, which celebrates a life as it passes on, substituting a transcendent truth for the transient messiness of a life. One of my favorite elegies is Wallace Stevens's "To an Old Philosopher in Rome," a poem for George Santayana. An honors student of mine, Gizelle Gajelonia, had written nearly an entire thesis out of poems by writers such as Stevens, which she willfully "revised" into poems about TheBus on Oahu. Her take on Stevens is "13 Ways of Looking at TheBus," after his own "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Unlike Gajelonia, Stevens never mentioned Mufi Hannemann and his rail system in his poem! So I thought I might do a revision of Stevens myself. Here's Stevens's poem about the dying philosopher; I'll read just the beginning and the end, but you can hear the high seriousness and beauty of his language.

I hollowed his poem out and replaced much of the language with parts of a recent report by the Alzheimer's Association (2010). To Stevens's "The threshold Rome and that more merciful Rome / Beyond," I countered with: "The threshold, ManorCare, and that more // merciful ManorCare beyond" and with lots of statistics about Alzheimer's sufferers and their caretakers. My poem ends:

monthly check (to the tune of $6,000) for room and board and hair styling

and medical care. It is a kind of total disruptiveness at the end with every

visible thing diminished and yet there is still a bed, a chair, a common room

for conversation, a nursing station, and a nook with benches for sitting on:

The moving walkway is now ending. Watch your step.

Stevens is also obsessed with the ordinary things: the bed and the chair come from him, as they also come from my mother's Alzheimer's home. But his "total grandeur at the end" becomes "total disruptiveness," and the threshold of heaven is reduced to a "moving walkway," or a kind of temporal treadmill that the very old move on in their own version of timelessness. Not transcendence, but a different (imitative, fallen, non-Platonic) version of eternity.

The poems that work the best for me are those I wrote in response to the standard comparison of old age to childhood. I have a mother who is 92, and children who are now 9 and 11, so I feel qualified to test the simile. So I began rewriting the children's stories I encountered as if their heroines were not children, but very old people, people with dementia. One such piece I based on Are You My Mother?, a book about a small bird who is looking for its mother. The bird asks all sorts of animals if they are its mother, but they all tell the baby bird that they look different. "I'm a cow, not a bird," would be one response. So the bird finally finds its mother bird, and all is well. A Mother for Choco revises that story for adoptive children. In this story, it matters not who resembles whom, but who loves whom. So the orphaned baby finds that her mother is a bear and that mama bear has other children, including a pig. I made my own mother the central figure in this piece, which I'll now read. "Are You My Mother?"

Another of these pieces is based on a news story about the first black woman elected to the South Carolina legislature (in 1974) who died alone in her house of hypothermia. She was suffering dementia, but would not allow anyone to help her. So I rewrote the opening to Pippi Longstocking to be about her. Here's a description of Pippi, for anyone who might conceivably have missed her. Pippi is all those things we admire: she's independent, naughty, answers only to herself, and she has lots of fun in her solitude. She's like a wacky pig-tailed Henry David Thoreau in a way, except that she also has friends.

My rendering of Pippi changed drastically when I moved Juanita Goggins into Villa Villekula, Pippi's residence. Here's that piece; much of the language comes from the Pippi book. As you can hear, the narrative of joyful self-reliance goes bad when Pippi is replaced by this old woman who suffers dementia. She needed to rely on others, but could not. They refused to knock her door down, and so she died in her house, the good American's castle.

I don't necessarily want to end on a despairing note, although there are plenty of those in the world of Alzheimer's patients and their families. But I hope that the playfulness of the poems, their forms, the waywardness of their narratives, also gestures toward the humor that can be found in a day at the Alzheimer's home. It's a humor based on the play of minds that can do nothing except play. The last time I spoke here, about my book on my mother's dementia, I made a bad metaphor. I said that Alzheimer's was like a neutron bomb, which destroyed everything but the body of the building or the person. Someone came up afterwords to remind me that Alzheimer's patients are persons. I hope that this project has gone some distance in reaffirming that sentiment.

I would love to hear responses to the work, and to take questions about it.