Con-Po

Flarfists and Conceptual Poets make claims about how digital technology has changed our lives, and they argue about how Flarf and Conceptual Poetry (F-ConPo) exploits this newly transformed era. And yet, I fail to see how what they're doing supports their claims. Why is googling a poem any different from walking around a city and capturing images, found texts, overheard conversations, etc, in a notebook and then later re-organizing this material into a poem?

More importantly, if F-ConPo is so interested in the influence of digital technology on composition, how do their efforts interface with other disciplines and efforts made by scholars to understand these new environments? Gregory Ulmer, for instance, and many others working in rhetoric, composition, and invention have devoted critical and scholarly work in efforts to understand the effects of digital technology on composition and literacy--or electracy, as Ulmer puts it--describing the effect of reading and writing in digital contexts. You'd think that F-ConPo would go further to describe their project and to show what their manipulations of digital environments might contribute to an already established body of knowledge.

As much as I admire Goldsmith's archival work at Ubu (and I think digital technology is suited extremely well for archival purposes), the following, posted today at the Poetry Foundation, is just childish when viewed in the context of Ulmer's--and others'--work:

Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions. Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

Much of this is class-A, car salesman b. s. Notice how Goldsmith defines the terms and doesn't leave room for other options or responses. "Why use your words when you can use someone else's?" As if "self-expression" remains the only goal in these contexts, a weird assumption many would refute outright.* The lack of care given to the articulation of these arguments closes conversation to others who might have something besides self-expression in mind as a goal for poetry. Perhaps the self might be put to the service of others in public efforts to negotiate contested political or social spaces. Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater comes to mind as just such a public and social art that negates the self-expressivity of the artist in order to address an audience and the shared concerns of a living environment composed of living people, printed words, and digital documentation (Toscano's project can be viewed through these different media and proposes a much more radical and satisfying approach to the complex and multidimensional spaces we inhabit collectively).

The assumption that words "are your own" is naive, too. I wonder who, writing anything worth paying attention to, really believes words are their own today? Why would F-ConPo want to include those people in its audience? We can't speak to everyone, so define and delineate an audience. The issue of property and ownership has been vetted for more than a century thanks to Marx--in that context at least, and Kenneth Burke has much to say, too, about property--where it begins and ends.

Anyway, a lot of these claims are bogus--probably all of them. And the fusion of the avant-garde of the past with the technology of the present doesn't contribute anything new, though it does, as Goldsmith says, "expand" the field. But how much more expansion can anyone take? Hasn't the last year shown anyone paying attention that globalism and expansion are over? Dead? Done? No doubt there will be new metaphors to describe how we are being fucked over by powerful systems (see Matthew Taiibi's recent article on Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone for recent examples), but expansion won't be one of them. All Goldsmith seems to be saying here is that poetry will continue doing what it's been doing but we'll get digital and google up information and write blogs. Well, uh, no kidding? Just like everyone else.

Until F-ConPo can articulate something that distinguishes what it does from others, I wonder who would possibly listen? At best, such efforts create a distracting show, while at worst, they eat up a lot of bandwidth and natural resources in order to promote a group of people who don't really seem to care about poetry, but about the social atmosphere and its manipulations--the market. A market based on an old model of globalization. Anyway, it's cute that Poetry Magazine let the unicorns enter the current issue. It's all simulacra now, of course--words pretending to be poems written by poets who pretend to be savvy about digital contexts for their compositions while ignoring ongoing conversations in other fields that might actually help define useful terms and strategies for poetry. Like so much in America, F-ConPo is an invention of a market for people looking for an easy tonic. The marketing plan is semi-genius, and has been successful, particularly as so many grad students get their rocks off on F-ConPo. Anyhoo, it's interesting to watch the anxiety level over Slow Poetry among the F-ConPo folk, and I wonder what this anxiousness says about their "projects," particularly as they seem to have little to say about poems.

*Indeed, I find it odd that F-ConPo actually amounts to just another expressivist program of writing, albeit sifted through machines a little. It's like they're into self-expression, but they want others to do the expressing for them in an ultimately narcissistic gesture on the order of hey, everyone, look at me!