Another Late Night
Monday, June 16, 2008
About once a month I find myself in that lizard-stem-driven state the internet inspires, where at two in the morning I'm googling myself and my friends and all my ex-girlfriends and the alumni of my old high school as well as weighing the merits of the greatest television cop show intros, looking up recipes for nostalgic, disgusting foods I'll never eat again but sort of want to, watching lizards talk bad about seahorses, or searching the Internet Movie Database for great but unappreciated minor actors and so forth. Eventually, and here's the point I'm trying to make, I wind up close to my vocation and wind up looking at poetry blogs. There are a lot of them out there, knitting away. Most of it is brutally out of touch and intellectual in the stupidest sense of the word: see if you can get through the following blog essay and its subsequent reader responses (or, really, any thread relating to the once-inspiring flarf movement) without wanting to take a long nap.
Still, names I know are mentioned, in rare instances I am mentioned in passing as reading with or having read with some more luminous name, and so I read, 2 in the morning becomes 3 in the morning, I find my hobby mirrored by the fruitlessly ambitious as a profession or a revolution (usually both) and myself actually caring about discussions of post-avant poetics or what is the proper motivation for innovative poetic strategy. At the end of it all I just generally feel as if I've been watching suicide porn for the last hour and want to lay down with my head beneath the water -- no thrashing, gently -- and die. In these perambulations, I always come back to two blogs, both of them a cut above the pack and both of them depressing, in their own way.
Joshua Clover's blog is interesting in part because his intellectual qualities are unperturbed by self-consciousness. He has a self confidence that can be profitably argued with, and an ability to reckon with the fact of popular culture -- the way it works, the way it sounds and feels, the way in which it is far more interesting than most poetry -- that bolsters even those ideological claims of his I can't allow myself to agree with.
Jim Behrle, on the other hand, is more complicated. Good luck finding the majority of his acidic little cartoons (Ron: "My answer to the boxers versus briefs question should be engraved onto the side of the Library of Congress" Curtis: "My thong is glistening with devotion!"), as he seems to erase all links to them as he goes along. The effect is funny, at first, then oppressive. The man is inconsolable -- to him, a crowded professional field is akin to apocalypse. For Jim, there are poets everywhere: poets spilling out of the cracks between the saturated wood, poets crawling between the tracks of the subway with the rats, poets of Zeus-like power observing him from the sky, poets serving their kids BBQ on engine-red picnic tables on perfectly manicured suburban lawns, and all of them have blogs, and all passionless, all watering down the sweet Coca-cola of the real with their bloviating. He's right of course, both about the number of poets (and bricklayers, and white-collar office workers, for that matter), and about their ineffectuality. But what does he want, for Robert Lowell to walk the Earth once more? Artists will never be great again, and I take that as a good sign. As many people as possible should play at art and sport, and should not bore us with their professional status or lack thereof. Otherwise, I can't see what politics -- or their weird proxy, blogs -- are for.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:57 AM,
