In Praise of the Blatantly Poetic—P.P.S: Do You Copy?

Christian Bök's "Protein 13." Part of Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. There's actual poetry here. Great to see.There’s been another argument. About lyrics, I think. Involving someone named Major Perloff? A sniper? At least very selective and narrow in scope. Also involving obnoxious suits and imprecise talk of “poetic capital”? Archivists who think they’re the first person to find out it’s weird to transcribe spoken or recorded language talking down to poets like they didn’t already know that?It doesn’t matter. Leave it. The baggage is weighing us down and ideology is boring (but thank you Amy King for dwelling on this for us and shutting it down). It’s like listening to academic economists argue on the basis of their deeply-staked abstract theories that disallow the entrance of fresh air or light. I thought I signed up for the poetry class, what the hell?Anyway, poetry goes on. One instance of that will occur this Thursday at the Power Plant Gallery. The event is called P.P.S: Do You Copy? and is billed as “an evening of readings in dialogue with Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art,” an exhibit at the Power Plant. Sounds pretty “experimental” right? Sure, but first of all that word means nothing unless all poetry is considered experimental, and second of all these particular experiments promise to be pretty cool.Here’s why I wish I didn’t have to miss this event: because unlike those who want to copyright certain compositional techniques, P.P.S. will feature poets using those same techniques, among others, but to ends worth pursuing. That is, they use found material, fragmentation, destabilization, etc., not just for the sake of unsettling some pipe-smoking, lyric-exclusive straw-poetics for their own gain. Instead, they use these techniques to—gasp—make poetry they think people might respect, read, enjoy, or otherwise get something of substance from (you might even have fun!). You know, like how poetry’s always done it. That’s what I call “blatantly poetic.” Not that the Flarf and Conceptual schools, and the like, are incapable of making good work (some are involved with the exhibit), but the discussions they start so often seem to get away from that goal.I admit only a passing familiarity with a couple of these poets, but what I do know makes me wish I could attend Thursday. Hearing new work from Gary Barwin, Jenny Samprisi, M. NourbeSe Philip,  Sonja Greckol, and Adam Seeling is worth the price of admission (if there was one; it’s a free event). But I’d be willing to risk it based on the event’s organizer and host, Margaret Christakos, whose work alone blows up the whole argument between Perloff and company. Christakos has written in most conceivable modes: novel, found poem, procedural poem, as well as from the good old-fashioned lyric “I.” I’ve reviewed her excellent meditative lyric collection Welling, but that collection was a turn for a poet who is generally all over the place formally (and it's quite lively in its own right).

Margaret Christakos having fun at Art BarIn fact, I imagine very few people like all of Christakos' work because it varies so widely. What Stirs, for instance, is at best a distant formal cousin of Welling. But they share one very important element: an honest pursuit of great poetry. Take “Something Inside Me” from What Stirs. It uses a lot of found material from Myspace profiles—language including the title phrase—and riffs on Cher’s “I really don’t think you’re strong enough” lyric. Cagily, Christakos only acknowledges that “‘Strong Enough’ reminds me of a phrase from the song by Cher. Everything on the internet is already ‘something inside me.’”Christakos’ half-acknowledgement of the sources of “Something Inside Me” reveals what raises the poem above the simple cut-and-paste or transcription methods of some other poets: she is owning the material instead of letting the material own her. At first, the poem seems playful and funny, like a send up of internet confession and pop regret. But as the poem progresses its real project emerges: this is a poem about genuine loneliness, about how even in the seeming banality of a plastic auto-tuned Cher ballad or in the public echo chamber of social media human beings remain human beings, as given to poetic sentiment as ever, whether that stems from loneliness, outrage, boredom, fear, intellectual curiosity or sheer glee.The ways to get to those sentiments are as varied as life and the sentiments themselves. They have to be, if art can still be said to respond to any real need. So while on the surface a poet like Christakos might seem to have done a bunch of different types of things, they’re all just different routes to the same ends.To put it somewhat biblically, in a better world the lyric would lie down with the conceptual and both would be dissolved in the same human need and appreciation. In her work, Christakos has shown the way to make that happened. Even if you find her oeuvre uneven, you must say she’s dared to take risks. It’d be nice if academics and critics followed suit and came to their work with a more open mind. Don’t hold your breath on that one. In the meantime, though, there’s plenty of promising work out there to discover, such as will be featured at P.P.S: Do You Copy?