[Since it came in rather late in the "gurlesque" thread, I thought I would repost Arielle's comment:]
I mostly want to stay out of this conversation, but one point needs clarifying: I came up with the term and notion of the Gurlesque; I do NOT consider myself a Gurlesque poet, mostly. Some of my work veers that way; much of it definitely does not. The Gurlesque is (some of) the critical work I do, not the creative (by and large). So you might be understandably confused about the term indeed if you were to look to my own work to define it (as it seems some are).
But also, just as I have some pretty Gurlesque poems and other not Gurlesque poems, some of the folks Lara and I talk about in our antho are Gurlesque in one project and not in another. I don't exclusively write one kind of poetry--in fact, the pregnancy stuff Seth heard in Iowa is creative non-fiction, not even poetry, and is a political project. It's unlike any other creative work I (or Rachel) has done. Just a note to say it seems a little silly to completely define any one artist by any one work--and this was never my intention by coining the Gurlesque term, nor was it my intention to limit the term to one gender or one nationality or anything like that. I was/am just mapping a constellation I see happening, and trying to figure out where it's coming from as far as I can tell (hence the focus on the USA; I claim no in-depth cultural literacy about most other countries) and am interested in the expansions and exceptions everyone is suggesting.
But also, finally, there's nothing inherently "normative" about pregnancy any more than there is about sequins, drag, abortions or what have you, in terms of poetics, as far as I'm concerned. It's what you *do* with the content, not the content, that counts. And, too, believe me: pregnancy, a state in which you grow a live being inside of your body, and a time which is full of blood, excretion, discomfort, etc., can be pretty darn grotesque, not to mention burlesque!
At first I just got testy about Patrick Durgin's comment and left a pissy comment on the blog. I'm sure Lorraine is genuinely intrigued by this issue, and, as Mark points out in the comment field, it's perhaps possible to equate a certain "hidden-ness", as exhibited in the Gurlesque, with suburbia (Amy and Any having objected to the lack of overt queer sex in the anthology).
But I'll try to explain the reasonsis for my initial testiness (of course it will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, I'm a pretty testy person, just google "johannes + Max"), and why I think this post is interesting.
For the record, I don't know where anybody in the anthology grew up, but I do know that Lara grew up in Atlanta as an at-times homeless teenager, so at least one of the editors did not take her cue from suburbs.
My main argument I think is not with Lorraine so much, but with Patrick's comment: I think the key here is that this idea that the Gurlesque is lacking. And what they are lacking is the genuine knowledge, the kind of authenticity you gain by being a member of a community - urban here standing in for a kind of center, the suburbs for a distance from the center, a fakeness, a dilution of the real. This for me echoes a lot of the community-obsessed criticism of contemporary poetry. The gurlesque is a wax museum, in other words. A prosthetic poetics. Again, the fact that Lara was homeless starts to seem important here, in a way I never thought I would think it would be.
While Lorraine makes a sociological inquiry (which I agree, could be an interesting way of looking at the aesthetic), Patrick Durgin equates "suburban" with some kind of aesthetic sensibility, divorced from the demographic. Some poetry is just "suburban" (independent of where the poet grew up). Ie it's kitsch. These poets don't have the specialized knowledge of real Riot Grrls, they are mere suburban imitations. They're not truly Kathy Acker, just weak imitation. Here again we have the kitsch rhetoric of that dude who said that Lara's poetry was like Marilyn Manson and Hot Topixx stores: the fake, the tasteless.
I should also note a curious tendency in these discussions. It's important for Patrick to claim that the Gurlesque is not enough like Acker; a while back someone on this blog commented that it is too much like Kathy Acker, ie just imitation, repetition. This strange dichotomy seems to repeat itself: it's both too much and lacking. It's just like translation: both excessive and lacking. (Just like translation.)
If it's true that the gurlesque poets are suburban and used to shop at Hot Topix, then perhaps we could argue that it has taught them a good deal of skepticism toward High Taste and Good Moral Standing, taught them not to follow the High Modernist/Clement Greenbergians in automatically define the good in opposition to mass culture, something Official Experimental Poetry Culture has long done.
Or - since I know that Lara did not grow up in the suburbs - it might be that what strikes some as "suburban" is in fact a kind of rejection of the "high taste" of authenticity, an embrace of the inauthentic, or - as I argued in my article about the Gurlesque in Calaveras - what Kaja Silverman (discussing Godard's Weekend) calls "anal capitalism." Everything has become shit, exhausted.
In other words: The gurlesque already embraces this inauthenticity. It embraces kitsch.
One thing about queerness and Sleater Kinney: I remember when they became popular. I was in college. It was the 1990s. My ex gave me a tape which had the latest Social Distortion on one side and Sleater Kinney on the other. I wasn't into it (at this point I was abandoning Social D and such, I was mainly listening to hip hop). But here's my point: It seemed like identifying someone as "queer" at that point seemed strangely redundant. At least in Mpls where I was living. Boys were wearing dresses, girls looked like mountain climbers.
At the U of M we had a special department devoted to Foucualt (I think it was called The Department of Sex and Knowledge or something like that, I think it lost its funding in the late 90s). My thesis advisor and a huge influence on my thinking about literature was this professor, Andrew Elfenbein, who mixed a very close close-reading approach (including an emphasis on metrics, which I still bust out when prompted) with queer theory, New Historicist/materialist and Foucauldian explorations of Gender and sexual politics. (When I look at Elfenbein's CV, it alone predicts so much of the direction of my poetry and opinionating - sex, disability, costumes, Romanticism.)
Why does this matter to the Gurlesque? I think rather than 'suburban' influence, I think the influence of 1990s queer theory was probably a huge influence. Then you exit the U of MN and what you find is that gender is not at all fluid! There are in fact very real gender roles and horrific enforcement. It sucks!
So in that sense Patrick may be right in talking about the influence of college rather than suburbs (Of course, Kathy Acker had an MA as well, lets not forget - and this is the problem with a lot of the knee-jerk anti-academy sentiments; it can actually be quite awesome).
Since there has been so much confusion about the concept of the Gurlesque (for example over at the Lemonhound blog site and over at Seth's Suburban Ecstacies), and so many people have asked me about it, Lara Glenum wrote me the following little bit to explain it a bit:
To start off, I should say that the Gurlesque is an entirely descriptive project, not prescriptive. In other words, Arielle and I are describing a set of aesthetic strategies/tendencies being engaged by a fairly disparate set of poets. We are not spearheading a movement or branding a product.
The Gurlesque describes an emerging field of female artists who, taking a page form the historical burlesque, perform their femininity in a campy or overtly mocking way. Their work assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends. The theoretical tangents germane to the Gurlesque that I’m exploring in my critical writing include burlesque and camp, girly kitsch, and performance of the female grotesque.
Many people associate burlesque with its 1930s incarnation, the strip-tease, which was a far cry from the early years of the burlesque theater—the 1840s to the 1860s—which were pioneered almost exclusively by troops of female actresses under the direction of other women in Victorian London. Their dance hall repertoire was an antecedent of vaudeville, only much more socially explosive. Robert C. Allen, in his seminal work on burlesque, Horrible Prettiness, surmises that burlesque “presented a world without limits, a world turned upside down and inside out in which nothing was above being brought down to earth. In that world, things that should be kept separate were united in grotesque hybrids. Meanings refused to stay put. Anything might happen.” Emily Lane Fargo writes:
"Burlesque performers also literally usurped male power by taking on male roles onstage.... However, female burlesque performers were never trying to present a convincing, realistic portrayal of a man onstage. Instead, they were utilizing their masculine attire as a sort of fetish object, in fact emphasizing their feminine sexuality by contrasting it with markers of masculinity… These practices, of course, ultimately emphasized the constructed nature of both genders, calling into question accepted gender roles themselves."
The effect of such “unladylike” conduct led at least one critic to deem burlesque performers neither men nor women but “creatures of an alien sex, parodying both.” And parody, as Baudrillard tells us, is the most serious of crimes because it makes acts of obedience to the law and acts of transgression the same, canceling out the difference on which the law is based. The work of early burlesque performers embody Judith Butler’s insistence that we “consider gender as a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning.”
If the burlesque is always about the body on display (i.e. the gendered surface of the body), the grotesque engages the body as a biological organism. To Bakhtin, women represent the quintessential grotesque: they are “penetrable, suffer the addition of alien body parts, and become alternately huge and tiny.” Grotesque bodies, male or female, are no longer “clearly differentiated from the word but transferred, merged, fused with it.” Mary Russo writes,
"The images of the grotesque body are precisely those which are abjected from bodily canons of classical aesthetics. The classical body is transcendental and monumental, closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical and sleek; it is identified with “high” or official culture… with rationalism, individualism, and the normalizing aspirations of the bourgeoisie. The grotesque body is open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple and changing; it is identified with non-official “low” culture, and with social transformation."
In Gurlesque poetry, human bodies and human language (and thus identity) are not closed, discrete systems. They are grotesque bodies/systems—never finished, ever-morphing, unstable, and porous. The body, as the nexus of language and identity, is a strange borderland, the site of erratic and highly specific (and language-mediated) desires.
There is no experience of “pure” culture or language available to us, no “pure” identity, no unmediated desire. The concept of the pure lies at the heart of Western aesthetics—the word “catharsis” comes from the Greek verb “to purify”—and women, non-whites, queers, impoverished, or disabled persons have historically been labeled as social contaminants. Gurlesque poets deny catharsis because they deny the aesthetics of the pure.
The scope of the Gurlesque anthology is, as several people have suggested, quite focused. It is not meant to take account of all modes of gender performance or to suggest that one mode is in any way more vital than others.
For me, the Gurlesque is a fairly specific aesthetic sensibility, and the poetry in the anthology is illustrative of this sensibility.
I have previously referred to the Gurlesque as queering heterosexuality. The anthology is trying to identify a new category of gender identity that is neither heterosexual nor homosexual.
The Gurlesque is as much indebted to queer theory and culture as it is to subaltern studies and the historical avant-garde (and the book is framed as such).
Gurlesque poets subvert gender stereotypes by performing them, but this tactic is nothing new. Many subaltern groups have done exactly this. What is perhaps new, though, is the emergence of an aesthetic sensibility that suggests an alternative way of performing gender, one that is neither heterosexual nor homosexual.
To me, the gurlesque is very much about performing the female grotesque. In "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde," Sianne Ngai rolls out an astute theory about how violence implicitly lurks in the aesthetic of the "cute." Ngai notes, "The formal attributes associated with cuteness – smallness, compactness, softness, simplicity, and pliancy – call forth specific affects: helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency." And further, "In its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is often intended to excite a consumer's sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle."
There are currently a number of women poets who locate "cuteness" in the realm of the female grotesque and, in extended poetic sequences, actively perform the dialectic between "cuteness," violence and female monstrosity (think Aase Berg's guinea pigs, Ariana Reines's cows, Anne Boyer's "Dark Deer," Danielle Pafunda's peek-a-boo violence). These poets redefine female "cuteness" as a trope of self-willed (or culturally-willed) deformity. By appropriating and violently animating stereotypes attached to desirable female behavior, these poets are attempting to make an register of derogatory signification to collapse. (There are certainly male counterparts to this project of gender-bending violence: Johannes, Tao Lin, Joe Wenderoth and Jon Leon, for example).
Cuteness, though, is prototypically the realm of pre-pubescent girls and their small, furry companions, which is the territory of Aase Berg's guinea pig poems. Berg's work radically upends the notion that women, young girls in particular, are free from sadistic compulsion and cruelty (Chelsea Minnis and Cathy Wagner's poems often do this, too). The term "cute" also surfaces when teenage girls (and even grown women) talk about men they're aroused by. To call a sexual object "cute" thus expresses a linguistic deformation – girls and women have traditionally been forbidden to speak about (or even experience) the stirrings of sexual desire. The demotion a sexually arousing man to the status of a puppy or a cupcake represents a phenomena of stunted female sexuality (which is only achieved through a kind of cultural pruning and binding through which women are divorced form their own sexual response). Cuteness, then, reveals a state of deformity or monstrosity.
All this is something that gurlesque poetry plays with and attempts to reverse, though not through Sharon Olds-style confession. Gurlesque poets, on the whole, don't believe in a stable, unified self, which is why their work is performance and not confession or persona (persona implies a person/self behind the mask). The gurlesque acknowledges its own artifice as well as the radical artifice of gender.
To close, I wouldn't say the gurlesque is strictly limited to the cuteness and violence thing, but its certainly a place that Arielle's original theory and my interest in the female grotesque overlap. (Hence, the birth of the Gurlesque anthology, which is due out from Saturnalia in 2009.)
* There's been some talk about men writing "gurlesque" poetry. The way I interpret "gurlesque" is as a sensibility, not a group. So of course there can be men writing with a gurlesque sensibility. Arielle didn't set out to define "gurlesque" poets; she showed the prevalence of a sensibility.
* About race: As I noted earlier when talking about Aase Berg and Kim Hyesoon, it's important to take note of cultural differences. Clearly Lara was very aware of the racial angle since the anthology includes a number of non-white folks (Kara Walker for example). The grotesque has an interesting and troubling past when it comes to relating to differences - long-nosed, mean-looking Jewish cartoon in Germany or caricatures of African-Americans, not to mention lynchings and Abu Ghraib.
* On her blog I noticed that Lorraine objected to Lara not mentioning Mina Loy and The Baroness. I haven't read the intro but I think Lara does write extensively about them. One of the most important jobs a term like "gurlesque" can do is in fact to engage is in reconsidering literary history. For example, the language poets rewrote Modernism to make Stein - rather than Pound/Eliot, or perhaps in addition to Pound/Eliot - the central Modernist, and radicalizing the reading of Williams. In the same way I think "gurlesque" rewrites Modernism, calling more attention to Mina Loy and the Baroness and radicalizing the reading of Plath.
I recently wrote an article about the Gurlesque for a new San Francisco journal called Calaveras, and that made me think some more about this poetry.
*
One thing that interests me about the term is the resistance to the term. When I first read it, I too disliked it. It sounds a bit ridiculous. Then I was drawn toward this ridiculousness.
A friend of mine said she didn't like it because it sounded pop culture, it didn't sound refined. This objection seems to jive with that "goodreads" review I like to quote when the reviewer compared Lara Glenum's work to Marilyn Manson. Not just pop culture, in that regard, but debased pop culture even. And I think both of these objections are correct: In its embrace of the kitschy and debased it seems to more than anything oppose the "good taste" that poetry is supposed to uphold.
*
New Critics, Cole Swenson's "American hybrid," Ron Silliman's "post-avant," the goodreads reivew or the Workshop Poem- all these rhetorical models seem based on the assumption that poetry should be somehow "high art" and not kitsch, tasteless. In her intro to the American Hybrid anthology, Cole argues that poetry should save language against the onslaught of mass culture.
Here's from the Publisher's Weekly review of Andrew Zawacki's recent book: "Zawacki's work is not for everyone—its density and opaqueness can frustrate. But he displays a rigor, earnestness and commitment to poetry as high art; seekers of those virtues will admire this book deeply."
In the end I think Poetry still plays the role of High Art (at least to those who read/write it.).
*
It was interesting to me the other day how Jordan Davis on this very blog argued that Flarf was "accurate" representation of the English language, opposed to "translatese" of other poetry. In addition to this running totally contrary to the original impulse of Flarf as "bad taste", it was interesting to me that he used the word "translatese" to suggest the dullness of other poetry.
Translatese is of course the term traditionally used for the kind of deformed, minoritized language resulting from translations, language that has been foreignized by the process of translation. As Lawrence Venuti is prone to point out, it is the term used to describe unsuccessful translations, translations that do not sound "native" (It is noteworthy that this is explicitly Ron Silliman's criteria for judging translations, proving just how elitist and reactionary his supposed "avant" aesthetics are.).
Translatese is debased language, impure language.
But also: it sounds silly, ridiculous, just the same way "gurlesque" sounds ridiculous. There's an inherent, sonic despicableness about both terms. (Another terms that sounds the same way: Esperanto.). And this connection I think shows the connection between an anxiety about foreignized, impure English ("majoritiarian" poetry, to use Deleuze and Guattari's framework, establishes official language, true language) of translation, and the "Marilyn Manson" (or "gothic") aesthetics of "gurlesque" writing.
Kitsch, minor lit, the gurlesque: all of these terms are seen are debased, as foreign, as parasitic, impure.
*
Perhaps a pertinent quote here is the one I posted on this blog a while back (taken from Daniel Tiffany's wonderful essay "Kitsching the Cantos").
Herman Broch: “kitsch is lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art.”
This seminal 1933 statement on kitsch makes a similar connection between the foreign and the debased, degraded. But similar views have been expressed repeatedly through modernity. Clement Greenberg called kitsch a parasite for the way it moves across national boundaries and destroys natural communities. Adorno objected both to kitsch and to impure German in poetry. As Tiffany notes, kitsch has been used throughout modernity as a negation of "art" (especially modernist art).
If kitsch is a foreign body, then the foreign body is kitsch.
(I already knew that.)
*
Another thing I find interesting about the term gurlesque is that both people who object to the gurlesque and people who favor it seem to want to expel *me* from it.
Both seem to want to say that I'm talking about something else entirely! This makes me really interested in this term! I'm a parasite within the parasite's body!
*
It's interesting to me how descriptions of kitsch and trash almost always come in lists. Whether it's Rimbaud's "Parade," Walt Whitman, Ginsberg, Clement (and Arielle!) Greenberg: The "poetic crap" (Rimbaud) always come in these long lists. It's as if there was an implicit notion of montage in the junk. No wonder Dada, Cornell, Rauschenberg etc etc made collages and assemblages out of this excrement. Our idea of kitsch is already as a pile of crap that we have to wade through. It lacks hierarchy or narrative. We have to wade through it. Just a bunch of excrement.
*
In a previous post about "hipsters" and kitsch, Bobby Baird left an insightful quote from Jacques Ranciere:
"Flaubert already deals with what Adorno will spell out as the problem of kitsch… Kitsch in fact means art incorporated into anybody’s life, art become part of the scenery and the furnishings of everyday life. In that respect, Madame Bovary is the first antikitsch manifesto."
This essay is called "Why Emma Bovary Must Die." She must die to keep art out of life. Ultimately, the fear of kitsch is this immersive aspect of it. The danger with Wax museums, novels, movie theaters, freak shows and other immersive experiences is that these works of art turns us into wax figures, puppets. Our bodies become denaturalized, become “foreign bodies.”
*
The question of course then becomes: what to do with all this trash?
Someone might say: It's camp.
But if camp, as Sontag famously put it, is the appreciation of the "awful," then it's not the same thing. Because most of the writing I see as "gurlesque" is never just an ironic appreciation of bad taste (which reinforces the bad/good taste divide).
In my article for Calaveras, I make a comparison to the 1960s underground cinema of Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith. I don't think of their art as "camp," but as something else. Both of these directors used a blend of lowbrow references (oriental costumes from the Silent Era, motorcycle erotics, pop music) and montage to create a gothic, fragmented body that is both unnatural and visceral, much like the Gurlesque writers.
In his book on the 1960s gay underground cinema, Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars, Juan A. Suarez describes the scandalous Flaming Creatues like this:
"In Flaming Creatures… there is no subjective essence to be realized, no interiority where the self’s truth lies dormant. Gender-blurring, polymorphous desire, and constant fetishistic substitutions present an unstable sort of sexuality, always en fugue through various bodies and body parts, and never incarnated in self-identical images."
Suarez further argues that the “bodies are stages for the reenactment of alien roles” and that they are “collages made up, like Frankenstein’s body, of pre-existing fragments – quotes and images that most often emanate from the stock of Hollywood fantasies.”
*
Sontag defended Smith from censors arguing that it was really, after all, "high art." But Jack Smith himself insisted that he was not high art, that his "moldy aesthetics" was far from high art. This is an extreme case of an artist embracing not just mass culture (which Warhol did very differently), but embracing unfashionable items (a practice which links back up with Surrealism through his mentor, Joseph Cornell). Suarez notes that what drew Smith to his muse, Maria Montez, were the “intense affects” of her performances. This and in Smith’s “taste for kitschy ornamentalism and emotive figurativeness… and baroque Catholic altars” we can see a rejection of the “form equals function” of modernism and, to return to the beginning of this article, the urge of many people involved in contemporary American poetry to police work they feel is “too much,” excessive.
In Smith's devotion to Maria Montez and his moldy aesthetic, we can hear a number of echoes: Of Arielle Greenberg's valorization of Stevie Nicks, of the Goodreads comparison of Lara G to Marilyn Manson (she's not just mass culture, she's unfashionable mass culture), of Silliman's rejection of the kitschiness of "soft surrealism" (moldy surrealism from now on!).
*
Suarez wants Jack Smith’s recycling to be a critique of capitalism, arguing that his work destabilized the consumer economy of capitalism. Kaja Silverman’s argument about another 1960s filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal movie Weekend (which refers to itself as a “trash film,” and which, as Harun Farucki points out, engages in a lot of “scrapheap” aesthetics of underground film of the 1960s) is perhaps pertinent to this argument. In her book about Godard, Silverman discusses Weekend in terms of “anal capitalism.” According to Silverman, the movie depicts a world of consumption, in which “the phallus has lost its privileged status,” because capitalism has rendered everything exchangeable. even gender, even body parts (a claim reminiscent of Sontag’s observation about the equivalence of body parts in Flaming Creatures). Commodities lose their value when they are actually consumed; her insight is that Weekend is a movie that wants to be consumed, that does not want to be a monument like high art predecessors.
* I see in these “anal yzes” also something of Georges Bataille’s notion of “unproductive expenditures.” That's what I'm thinking about right now. Also, his ideas of heteregenous matter (within the system of Poetry).
For some other ideas and close readings of Chelsey Minnis, Dodie Bellamy and Aase Berg, you'll have to read the magazine when it comes out.
The Gurlesque is about queering heterosexuality via a very specific set of aesthetic strategies.
The Gurlesque anthology is not intended as a catch-all for all queerings; it is a consolidation of female poets who, via the grotesque, artifice and camp, girly kitsch, and burlesque performance, etc. engage the pathology of heterosexuality by toying with the male gaze.
The crucial criterion for inclusion in the anthology was the poet’s engagement with these specific strategies on the page. A high premium was put on the use of artifice and formal exaggeration.
Queer poetics turn away from the pathology of the hetero, and that is a very excellent thing. Gurlesque poetics embrace and interrogate the pathology. This gesture also has its own political power.
My introduction to the anthology, which elaborates on the Gurlesque’s relationship to female grotesque, artifice and camp, girly kitsch, and burlesque performance, will be published online in Jacket very shortly. Curious parties can read all about it there.
I have a hard time taking seriously the claim that any poetry "moves us forward". But as someone who is finds the notion of "forward"-thinking problematic to say the least, I suppose I'm not in that "us." You guys continue moving "forward." I'm sure it will do your "us" a lot of good.
If the gurlesque has to do with the jouissance of the abject (which may not be true), then it's certainly not about moving forward. It's certainly not about being good citizens and all that.
I think one of the most insightful comments on the Gurlesque was made by my wife Joyelle Mcsweeney, who told Dodie Bellamy that the gurlesque was "the rejection of empowerment".
I'm curious as to why Chien Batard would be so offended by the Plath reference? Are you claiming that there is no element of camp/grotesque in these writers?
I'm also curious as to what he means by "this kind of poetry"? I think Arielle's idea was more of a vague notion involving camp and gender and the grotesque. It was never a movement, but a framework for reading some very varied poets. Lara G takes this even further afield by including someone who isn't even an American (Aase Berg). I think it's not even just women; I can think of several men who might fit into this general notion.
None of this commentry really deals with the poems in any specific way; thus it's hard for me to know what you really think that kind of poetry is.
Another Note: I'm thinking about this: What is exactly is that is so hard to "buy"? That there are a lot of poets working with the grotesque and gender and camp? Like I said earlier on this blog, Arielle's original essay was by no means set-in-stone stuff; it was a hunch, an inkling. It was never a "movement". That's for example why I've said that there are things and poets in this framework that I can't see together, but it's certainly a move in the right direction: to have a discussion beyond post-avants vs quietists and such.
The gurlesque anthology is out. Get it at SPD Books.
As for myself, I've finally been convinced that I was wrong about the gurlesque - what I wrote about it was not about the gurlesque, but something else. So the proponents and opponents of the term finally win: I take back everything I've written about the gurlesque. It was about something else.
Not Everyone in the Gurlesque Anthology Is Straight!
I want to clear up a misconception several people seem to have about the Gurlesque anthology: not all of the poets and visual artists in the Gurlesque anthology are straight. That's a fact.
I've hesitated to say this because I don't want to start making lists of who fucks who, but I do want to point this out.
There is a lot of cock-on-cunt action in the anthology, yes, but then again, the Gurlesque is very much about enacting the pathology of the hetero. Making it spasm.
Queer and Gurlesque are not Mutually Exclusive Terms!
Ana is insisting that I think queer and Gurlesque poetics are mutually exclusive terms. I do not. Not at all.
I initially said: "Queer poetics turn away from the pathology of the hetero, and that is a very excellent thing. Gurlesque poetics embrace and interrogate the pathology."
I assume a queer person can perform in either of these modes, Gurlesque or queer, both of which are available to them. The presence of queers and bis in the anthology is evidence of this.
Unlike Ana, perhaps, I do not assume a queer person can only perform in one mode.
About a decade ago Arielle noticed (as did I) a set of emerging tendencies in younger female poets who were very interested in using high artifice and formal exaggeration to unsettle gender norms, often by toying with the male gaze.
This is a very limited description, of course. The anthology itself is a larger description. The anthology is only one of many possible descriptions of the Gurlesque.
* * *
Amy, I think you and Ana have misunderstood what I initially meant by “embrace.” By embrace, I mean a very specific, physical embrace. The embrace of the cock. Of a field of cocks. As a performative mode.
One can do this whether one is queer or straight, as evidenced by the anthology.
That is certainly not all the Gurlesque is. But it’s kicking around in there pretty hard.
You have a problem with all the cock in the book. One can/should have a problem with it.
You were initially saying you felt there was no queer subjectivity in the book. Then you started claiming that there were no queers.
Given that there are queers, bis, and straights in the book, it makes me think you are missing a very specific performance of queer in the book. I think this is totally valid.
But I will say it again: my sense is that the Gurlesque is about queering heterosexuality.
My sense of this is intentionally provisional. I’m open to anything anyone else wants to say.
But our discussion also raises the question of who gets to call queer. Who can say what/who gets called queer and what does not. I personally find this a very rich and useful discussion. One that is long overdue, particularly in feminist circles.
Danielle’s comments about Brenda S. also raise the question of mobile sexuality, of people who sexually identify as one thing at one point in their lives and then later as something else. Who have morphed chronologically between one identity and another. Who may continue to morph. A number of such people are represented in the anthology.
* * *
Gurlesque is an inherently unstable term, and I have no interest in further stabilizing it or in defining who can and can be "in" it. It's not a movement. It’s a fraught nest of questions, even more than it’s a fraught nest of claims. Thanks, Amy and Ana, for bringing yours to the table.
There seems to be a lot of misunderstandings of "gurlesque" (and it appears I've only added to the confusion).
Gurlesque is not a movement (like Surrealism etc), it's a frame Arielle Greenberg thought up to read some of the most interesting contemporary poets in America (as possibly elsewhere).
I think the concept has promise, though it hasn't yet been made much more than a category. And if it includes both Mattea Harvey/Brenda Shaughnessy and Lara Glenum and Chelsey Minnis then it's too broad.
It seems the grotesque is a main element of this. And as in much recent history of the grotesque, an abuse of mass culture seems an essential part of it. The use of pop culture does not seem to be a simple parody (as often is the case) or nostalgia (perhaps even more frequent) but something more akin to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of Kafka's "minor literature" - Kafka doesn't attack Prague German but finds features that he exagerates in it. Thus the use of girly things (which I don't, as I stated below, know much about).
The grotesque and the gothic has throughout its history been associated with the tasteless, the un-natural and - since the 19th century - pop culture (which has been constructed as feminine and associated with prostitution) - there is something un-serious, low about the mode. And that makes a lot of people anxious - American Poetry still largely clings to the New Critical idea of poetry as "complex" and "elegant," the center of language and culture; somehow above the dirtiness of mass culture and capitalism.
I think "gurlesque" provides a possibly much more complex notion than Ron's "bad girl" concept. Ron seems to see no value in "shock" beyond the initial shock (just like Reginald Sheppherd sees not value in "avant-gardism" beyond some mythical first shock). A large part of that shock is a breaking of the formalist notion of the autonomy of the artwork. You can see that in how Minnis's book seems to have pushed Ron beyond his normally high modernist formalism toward a consideration of the social. And Arielle tries to work with this in her historical reading of these texts.
The shock is very important to Minnis, Reines and Glenum - but it's not Ron's idea of a first shock, the shock of bringing up a repressed reality. Rather it seems to me a self-consciously played-out shock, what happens to shock after the shock, almost a kind of boredom. So when Ron is disappoined that Minnis's shock is not frank but "coy" I would say he's right but that she's already a step ahead of him: she's playing with the notion of a played-out shock, a highly aestheticized (not "raw", not "true") shock. Sylvia Plath does something similar in the "striptease" that is "Lady Lazarus" - with its violence, pornography and tasteless genocide reference.
But I'd like to repeat that this is not a fully worked-out theory; it needs to do more yet. That's a strength.
In our conversation in the heart of the gurlesque in San Francisco, Joyelle said one of the most insightful things I've heard about gurlesque: It is the rejection of "empowerment."
I thought about this because of my comments below about this persistent obsession with activating the reader in "post-avant" theorizing. This is the democratic urge: we should all exercise our right to vote, we should all be active; passivity equals immorality.
(Also, see Aaron Kunin's essay in the forthcoming Action, Yes about models of citizenship and the gurlesque.)
To me a rejection of "empowerment" is not equal to "powerless", ascetic or some other form of nothingness. In fact the opposite may be power.
The girlhood thing: I don't think of it entirely as a withdrawal from adult society, but perhaps as a violence done to the notion of girlhood. And here Edelson's "No Future" with its call for queers to be on the side of "abortionists" and the "death drive" comes into play for me.
There is a fundamental belief in the social order behind the utopian thinking of the indeterminacy-promotes-active-reader BS. And I can't stand that kind of goody-goodness.
I have to admit: I don't know who the gurlesque poets are. My main ideas come from Danielle, Lara and Lara's writings on the gurlesque and her essay on Aase Berg in the new Action, Yes, and Aaron Kunin's essay on Cathy Wagner (also in the upcoming AY). I know Chelsey Minnis is one of them and Cathy Wagner is another. Elizabeth Treadwell? Her very title "Wardolly" seems ultra-gurlesque to me.
But I know there are several poets that Arielle calls Gurlesque that I am not interested. I can't remember which one.
I'm writing an essay that connects the Gurlesque, trash aesthetics, homosexuality and b-movies. Aase Berg, Chelsey Minnis, Dodie Bellamy, B-movies, gay porn, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Walter Benjamin, Bataille and Godard's "Le Weekend" star in it. I was surfing around on the Internet and I found this mini review by somebody named "Logan Ryan Smith" of Lara Glenum's "The Hounds of No" on "Goodreads." It's perfect, and I think I will start out my essay by talking about it.
Here's it is:
"Recommends it for: HOT TOPIC SHOPPERS If Marilyn Manson was a slightly more sophisticated writer, I imagine this book represents what he'd turn out. It's simply too much affectation, and I didn't buy it. It felt forced and faked."
I like this review in large part because we can in this little throwaway piece of policing snobbery see not only the prevailing conservative aesthetics of the American poetry establishment, but also, interestingly, an intuitive grasp of the aesthetics and politics of the sensibility of “the Gurlesque.”
We see, the ideal of poetry as elevated above American consumerism and mass culture; the illusion that poetry offers a refinement that allows poets and readers of poetry a way out of the tasteless machinery of the culture industry. We also find the common rhetorical trope (found most recently in Both Steven Burt's book "Close Calls with Nonsensense" and The American Hybrid - as well as in the lurid coverage of the Michael Jackson death) that "too much" is “affectation” and unnatural ("forced"); and with it the valorization of a moderate poetry that is somehow not fake but natural. This is part of an prevailing idea that true poetry cares for an interiority, protecting it against the onslaught of crass modern mass culture (Marilyn Manson, Hot Topics). And finally we see a very insightful comparison to Marilyn Manson, a gender-bending, gothic, low-culture performer who was the famous scapegoat of the all-American violence of the Columbine Shootings.
The fact of the matter is that Smith gives a pretty good encapsulation of the tendency or sensibility in contemporary poetry that Arielle Greenberg has identified as “gurlesque,” a wide-ranging group of poets who tends to be “veering away from traditional narrative, and each employed a postmodern sense of humor, invoking brand names and cultural ephemera.” In an interview with Danielle Pafunda, Greenberg describes this cultural ephemera as
… the super-saccharine romance iconography of a 70s girlhood; unicorns and rainbows socks and sunsets painted on vans, and then don’t forget the popular culture whispers of sexual “swinging,” or the trickle-down androgyny chic of glam and disco…”
That is to say, a sensibility which in spite of the established “rules” of poetry embraced the “forced and faked” nature of the crass and tasteless (Marilyn Manson for example), engaging with – rather than controlling – the “contamination of affect” that we find in a lot of mass culture, especially film.
This recycling of the tasteless has taken place before, most notably perhaps, in the Surrealism of France in the 1920s and 30s. As Walter Benjamin writes in his essay on Surrealism:
"[Breton] was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded,” in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them… No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution – not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects – can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism… The bring the immense forces of “atmosphere” concealed in these things to the point of explosion."
As Benjamin recognized early on (and theorists like Andreas Huyssen has expanded on since then) was the way the historical avant-garde opposed the disinterested art of introspection of the bourgeoisie by engaging with the burgeoning mass culture. What made Surrealism particularly interesting here is their use of the crassly out of style and lowbrow.
I think it's interesting that the wildness of the Internet tends to be seen as a way for anarchic forces to be brought into poetry, but mostly it has given platforms for conservative voices to police police police.
By the way: "Hot Topics" connotes un-stylish, slightly out of date right? There's a store in our mall.
I talked about that in my talk about "spasmodic" poetry in Chicago last week, and I hope to have a few minutes today or tomorrow to write about it here on this blog.
I'm discussing it tomorrow in my seminar on modern poetry - how it pertains for example to Chelsey Minnis or "gurlesque" poetry.
In particular I like this quote (where for "European" or "haute coutoure" you might say something like "Official Experimental Verse Culture" or some such, because it seems to say something about the way "gurlesque" poetry and other poetries that I'm interested in deviate from the standard "experimental" poetry mantra):
"And it is not just in terms of what the late film critic Manny Farber called “termite art” (“it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity”) that we can identify Rodarte’s aesthetic as American, but in all the improvisatory ways it de- and recodes a culture that is already impure and blended with crisis. If the typically European strategy is to construct avant-garde gestures around the inversion of established, legible codes (aristocratic or bourgeois), an American vernacular is corrupt in advance, the border between high and low long since dissolved. Here, it is less about turning the queen on her head than a matter of tracking mutations in the desert, where celebrity and nothingness have always shared a strangely productive cohabitation. Rodarte are perhaps closer in spirit to Roger Corman or Wes Craven than to the top men of haute couture."
I particularly like how she expands the concept to the visual arts. I would add Nathalie Djurberg to the visual arts segment (1:15 in):
One thing about the class that I like is that I haven't read several of the books on the syllabus (Pierce, Fisher, Ackerson-Kiely), despite babbling about the gurlesque so frequently. And I like the inclusion of the Harryman book.
A few more ideas (to add to my response to Angela's comment below), following a more thorough reading of the interview:
- I read the word "gurlesque" mainly as "grotesque" - as such my ideas what it represent goes through my canon of grotesque writers (Bakthin, Deleuze & Guattari, Bataille and the Documents group of Surrealists, Artaud, Aase Berg etc) and artists (Bellmer, Artaud, Hannah Hoch, Grosz etc).
- Kara Walker is key to my understanding of this idea. I love her.
- I made a link to Aase's and Matthias' manifesto from 1996 becauase it's a great example of a post-heroic (or post avant-garde) idea of subversion - they're not going to take over the welfare state, they don't speak from a grandiose outside position (as imaged by many contemporary American poets); rather they are going to find the grotesque inside the idyll, use the bodily metaphors of the welfare state to create zones of "lemur"-attacks.
- The trinketry of the grotesque - which I agree has to do with performativeness and gender - is not restricted to women poets. The last issue of Soft Targets was great for this - a class of mine made up a similar concept of "gurlesque" based on excerpts from the journal (Jon Leon, Ariana Reines, Lara Glenum, Nathalie Djurberg and some others).
- The trinketry also for me brings in Andreas Huysen's idea of After the Great Divide - how the historical avant-garde sought to change the relationship between "high" and "low" culture as part of its attack on the autonomous artwork - and Bakthin's notion of poetry as monoglossic (isolated, autonomous, perpetuating the illusion of a centrality to culture/language, "The American Poetry Wax Museum"). But yeah, I didnt have that childhood so I don't know anything about unicorns or Charley's Angels or the Patridge Family.
- The grotesque and (perhaps more so) the gothic have always been viewed as dubious because they have engaged with popular culture - they've been seen as lowly, feminine. Judith Halberstam's book on the Gothic, Skin Shows, talks about this dynamic pretty well.
