Cook Review (1)

OK, here are some thoughts about excess, in part brought on by Juliet Cook's perceptive review of Lara Glenum's brilliant book "Maximum Gaga" (which I published):

I like a lot of what Juliet writes in her review, for example her suggestion about post-human body and so on. I think some of my comments in this post will elaborate on Cook's prompts and some will disagree with her.

In different to Stan Apps, I like the way Cook writes the review. As I noted there is a "confessional," or unauthoritative feel to it that I like. That's why I like to write my ideas on this blog, because I feel I can throw in things even though I haven't standardized them yet etc. In some regard, the form of the review is "excessive" (a term I will come to soon).

One thing Cook doesn't like about the book - or perhaps feels suspicious about - is the "gimicky" quality of some of the writing, elements she doesn't feel are "integral" to the piece. She expounds on this by writing:

"I tend to be interested in poetry … that borders the grotesque. Poetry that borders the pornographic and is visceral with a voluptuous horror. Poetry that experiments with such borders without dissolving into nonsense or total absurdity. Sometimes it’s a very fine line and I tend to be interested in flirting with fine line." Cook's problem is when Lara exceeds that "fine line."

And exceeding that fine line is defined thus: "It is not the over-the-top disgustingness of the content that occasionally seems to have gone too far. When I suggest that it has gone too far in places, I am speaking of a sense that the poet has lost some control of her own content."

What is transgressive is not the meaty imagery but something about the structure that seems out of control, and descend into "nonsense" and this is "gimicky."

I think this actually ties in with our discussion about Decadence a while back, a discussion which was prompted by various people claiming that some stylistic tics of contemporary writing were "decadent" because they were not true or integral to the "meaning" etc. (Or perhaps it's the reverse: form cannot control the content as opposed to being excessive. This also related to our discussion with Corey about Reines and Lara while back.)

These two are of course connected. The grotesque body is an unnatural body, a body that is not integral, a hybrid body, a decadent, artificial body that threatens to undo our very fundamental notion of what is natural and unnatural (the body is of course always the site of the natural - urges, feelings etc). This is why Par Backstrom in his article about Michaux talks about "language grotesque" - how Michaux's bodies and his "nonsensical" language both work like the grotesque.

This is interesting to me because it shows the connection between what Cook likes and doesn't like about Lara's work is very close, perhaps the same thing. That is she likes its formal transgressiveness until this impulse goes "too far" and becomes nonsense, and importantly "grotesque."

In his comment below, Ron K. makes a similar point: "Juliet Cook is, it seems, a fan of excess. But she wants the excess to be orderly, organized, "splayed out for a reason.""

The "reason" is key here. "Excessive" is of course always relative. Excessive to what? To whose standards? And also: when is something nonsense. It is interesting that in the comment field Juliet says she doesn't like "Dadaism." Dadaism for her represents what it represented to people in the 10s and 20s: some kind of state of utter randomness.

In more recent times in America, this is what "language poetry" has come to mean for a lot of people. For example, the entire framework for Cole Swensen's "American Hybrid" is based on the notion that there are simplistic poets who write utterly clearly (Quietists) and hardcore language poets (not Lyn H or Susan Howe etc) who write pure nonsense. But notable the hybrid is here the opposite of the grotesque hybrid - it is not inbred, it is healthy based on its multiplicity ("more is better" as my pal Juan always said at lunchbreak as he loaded on the fixings on his hot dog when we worked as landscapers in NYC.)

A related topic: Marjorie Perloff's high modernist concept of pure "indeterminacy." This is the flipside of the coin and, in its reductivenesss, I think provides Cole with the strawman she needs to make the argument for "the hybrid" (which of course is not grotesque at all - never grotesque - even Alice Notley has been purified in that selection!).

There is of course no Pure Nonsense. Just frameworks where certain things don't make sense. For example Joseph Hutchison apparently didn't know anything about unicorns, so according to his framework, the Blatny poem I discussed below did not make sense. Importantly, he conceived of it as "avant-garde tic" - that is, he's using that same rhetoric of "dadaism" as writing that is nonsense and, importantly, a "tic" - in other words "gimicky" or decadent.

Further, nonsense is always part of society; chaoticness doesn't take the text out of the social. For example, this is why Dadaism seemed so threatening to people in the 20s (that and the fact that it had the aura of "Germany" ie communist).

I need to go now but I will pick up on many of these loose threads later or tomorrow and I will also expound on some of Cook's ideas of "post-human" and how it pertains to the grotesque. Stay tuned.