"It's simply too much..."

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.