Nobody's Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics

By Brian M. Reed

Since the turn of the new millennium English-language verse has entered a new historical phase, but explanations vary as to what has actually happened and why. What might constitute a viable avant-garde poetics in the aftermath of such momentous developments as 9/11, globalization, and the financial crisis? Much of this discussion has taken place in ephemeral venues such as blogs, e-zines, public lectures, and conferences. Nobody’s Business is the first book to treat the emergence of Flarf and Conceptual Poetry in a serious way. In his engaging account, Brian M. Reed argues that these movements must be understood in relation to the proliferation of digital communications technologies and their integration into the corporate workplace.

Writers such as Andrea Brady, Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith, Danny Snelson, and Rachel Zolf specifically target for criticism the institutions, skill sets, and values that make possible the smooth functioning of a postindustrial, globalized economy. Authorship comes in for particular scrutiny: how does writing a poem differ in any meaningful way from other forms of "content providing"? While often adept at using new technologies, these writers nonetheless choose to explore anachronism, ineptitude, and error as aesthetic and political strategies. The results can appear derivative, tedious, or vulgar; they can also be stirring, compelling, and even sublime. As Reed sees it, this new generation of writers is carrying on the Duchampian practice of generating antiart that both challenges prevalent definitions or art and calls into question the legitimacy of the institutions that define it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780801469572

Book preview

Preface: What Now?

---

That something was happening was not plausibly deniable.

—China Miéville, Kraken (2010)

But is it poetry?

—Marjorie Perloff, The Word as Such (1985)

Around the turn of the millennium, I began to run into poems that infuriated me. I had just finished graduate school. For six years I had lived and breathed modern poetry. My dissertation had required me to write knowledgeably about several hundred years of canonical verse, from William Collins’s Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands (1749–1750) to Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain (1981). That learning felt useless, however, when I started to come across writing that, while called poetry, at first seemed entirely unworthy of the label.

Much of this strange new work consisted of long stretches of what appeared to be found or appropriated text in no way altered or elevated to make it more conventionally literary:

Name: Chad

Hometown: Sioux Falls

Sent: 11:27 PM 1/12

I agree with Harold—you have a GREAT site here.

Name: Michelle

Hometown: Detroit

Sent: 8:48 PM 1/11

Excellent!!! Glad to see you have Gladiators…I’m looking for Roman Infantry. Do you have any ideas? My grandfather used to paint miniatures. I’m looking to do the same but have no idea how to start. If you think you would like to help me…drop a line.

Name: Coby

Hometown: Inverness

Sent: 11:51 PM 1/9

Your site is one of the most interesting I’ve seen on miniatures. I like it very much. Also the link to Elke’s carpets make me very happy…I wish you all a lot of success and fun!!¹

* * *

http://www.bmj.com/bmj.com (British Medical Journal)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos (The Sparc Open Access Newsletter)

http://www.myspace.com

http://nymag.com

http://nytimes.com

http://www.observer.com/

http://online.wsj.com/public/us

http://www.villagevoice.com/

http://www.youtube.com/

http://www.wikipedia.org/ ²

* * *

Counts 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9: Jane Doe #2: Barbara B.

On May 13, 1998, Barbara B. was fifty-eight years old, living alone on Elliot Lane, in Long Beach. By about 10:30 p.m., Barbara B. had fallen asleep with the television and light on; she woke feeling a weight on the bed, then a hand over her mouth. A man said, I don’t want to hurt you. Barbara B. testified he spoke in a whispery voice she probably wouldn’t recognize again. (RT 913–915) The man had Barbara B. roll onto her stomach, she said she had a bad back, he had her roll onto her back, her nightgown pulled over her head. She could not see, and didn’t want to.³

Such writing, as the last example shows, can be gripping and disturbing, but more often, as the previous two suggest, it features tedious lists and forgettable chunks of chatty slang. Why, I wondered, would anyone ever think to call these texts poetry? One could, perhaps, look at the first extract and lament a precipitous decline in treatments of warfare since the days of the Aeneid, and one could maybe claim that the second excerpt resembles a Whitmanic catalogue, complete with anaphora (http://…http://…http:). The final one could conceivably be placed alongside a range of intertexts, from Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece (1594) to W. B. Yeats’s Leda and the Swan (1924). But why think along such lines? The language here is unpromising and utilitarian. No marginalia or other explicit indications of authorial intent instruct audiences to engage in close reading or to play name-that-influence. When I first found poems such as these circulating on the Internet, I felt like a mother leaning over a crib and discovering a warty, lumpy changeling.

A second, related variety of twenty-first-century anti-poem initially struck me as even more objectionable, in fact just plain sophomoric. It, too, disregarded the most basic conventions governing what qualifies as good verse:

Take off your shoes, bitch

Base Mood, icky. Kitty Mood, BOOM BOOM

KITTY FUCK, SHORTY–I make for you a pizza dubbed kitty litter pizza.

(Whatever you do don’t eat from the Kitty Litter pizza…

Just had the stupidest idea–

Make KITTY order pizza!⁴

* * *

I Hate 2 Work.

But why are you such a wonderful person that you make me smile

everytime I get an e-mail from you?

Oh my Gosh, why are YOU so the schmoopy!

Your shoes are so cute⁵

* * *

Dear John Dryden, I know you were

a man who squealed like a dolphin

a man who simulated sex with a traffic cone

then wild sex with seals after that⁶

How, I wondered, could anyone take such empty antics seriously? Where I expected to find language heightened, to any degree heightened (Gerard Manley Hopkins) or the best words in the best order (Samuel Taylor Coleridge), I instead stumbled on the debased nattering and hard-hearted stupidity that I more typically associate with graffiti on bathroom walls, America Online chat rooms, and vitriolic right-wing blogs.

I confess that during the first George W. Bush administration I poked fun at these assorted un-poems when talking with colleagues in private and when advising students about what they should be reading. I was startled when the latter began to push back. The first rebels were independent-thinking upper-division undergraduates and charismatic incoming MFAs who had seen poems such as Rodney Koeneke’s Pizza Kitty on YouTube and who reverently passed around scarce copies of books such as K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation (2003) as if they were saints’ relics. I was mystified. These teenagers and twenty-somethings were voracious readers of postmillennial literature. They were articulate and well educated. Why in the world would they prefer anti-intellectual anti-poetry to the allusive, elusive, smart, elegantly indeterminate, and formally ambitious poetry that characterizes the highest-profile work of the early twenty-first century? Why not immerse themselves instead in the authors that I was recommending, such luminaries as Rae Armantrout, Mary Jo Bang, Frank Bidart, Joshua Clover, Ben Lerner, Donald Revell, Reginald Shepherd, Susan Stewart, Cole Swensen, and C. D. Wright?

As so often happens, the question contained within itself the answer. Certain of my best students were innately suspicious of the self-aware, erudite authors held up by culture czars and well-meaning professors as models for them to admire and emulate. The radical gestures of negation that most irritated me about post-9/11 anti-poetry—its blank indifference to literary history, its scorn for conventional markers of craft, and its disdain for polish and perfection—were in fact the very attributes that appealed to them. Moreover, they read these gestures as profoundly political in inspiration, that is, as calculated attacks on institutional norms and practices that not only shape literary careers but also preside over the formation of obedient, well-disciplined neoliberal citizen-subjects. Watching their nation plunge headlong into overseas wars on dubious pretenses, these youthful men and women were angry. They did not understand their fellow Americans who, although they might loudly express their dislike of their government, would never dare break windows, march without a parade permit, or endanger their chances for a glowing letter of recommendation. Here at last were poets whose outrages against decorum were extreme enough to give voice to their furious balked desires.

In other words, they perceived in their favored writers’ formal and thematic innovations a means of protesting against, even undermining, the social and political status quo. This, of course, is the classic definition of a literary avant-garde. As Matei Calinescu puts it in Five Faces of Modernity, while these anti-poets might be joyfully self-destructive, they also opposed an official culture that served as their contemporary cultural enemy.⁷

Since the 1960s, avant-gardism has a mixed, complex history as a critical concept. Can an authentic avant-garde still exist? Or can there only be shallow effete echoes of past movements and achievements? Can an avant-garde ever actually succeed in bringing about revolutionary social transformation? Does an espousal of vanguardist aims amount to enslaving art to the logic of the marketplace, especially the constant demand for new products and new fashions? Is avant-gardism inherently masculinist? Is it solely a Western phenomenon? The bibliography on such subjects is immense, beginning with Renato Poggioli’s Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia (1962) and including such landmarks as Peter Bürger’s Theorie der Avantgarde (1974), Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). One does not have to delve into the footnotes, however, to know that shock and resistance generally characterize the literary establishment’s response to an avant-garde’s emergence. And as someone who has frequently written about experimental writers such as Susan Howe, Ezra Pound, Tom Raworth, and Gertrude Stein—as well as edgy visual artists such as Félix González-Torres, Jasper Johns, Kimsooja, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer—I was surprised, and more than a little humbled, to discover that I had intuitively sided with tradition and reaction against the joyfully self-destructive activities of a nascent avant-garde.

Vanguardism in itself does not guarantee the creation of good or significant art and literature. Nor does a commitment to formal innovation somehow magically prevent complicity in murderous injustice, as the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917 demonstrated once and for all. Aleksandr Rodchenko, for instance, produced brilliant photomontages for the journal USSR in Construction celebrating the digging of the White Sea–Baltic Canal (1931–1933). Looking at his photos, though, one would never guess that over 200,000 people, mostly political prisoners, died during the project. Just because I had underestimated a lately-sprung-up-in-America poetic avant-garde did not mean that I had overlooked a worthy new development.

I finally became convinced of its importance during a semester abroad in Germany in 2009 while on a Fulbright Fellowship. I spent most of my time teaching queer studies and contemporary American fiction at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Technische Universität Dortmund. I also, however, had several opportunities to give public lectures about contemporary American poetry. My talk and PowerPoint slides were intended to be inclusive and nonpartisan. I had audio files that represented a wide range of twenty-first-century verse, from street and slam poetry to computer-composed lyrics sung by artificial voices. Nevertheless, everywhere I spoke—Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Universität Rostock, Universität Paderborn, and a crowded bar in downtown Bochum—the question-and-answer sessions were wholly dominated by queries about the avant-garde writers. Is this poetry? Why is it poetry? Can someone sustain this mode for more than a few months? The questions revealed sharp deep thinking, too. How would you connect this mode of appropriation with past varieties of collage? Do you see parallels in the laptop-composed music of Radiohead and the Gorillaz or in the sampling techniques of Boards of Canada? How does this aesthetic of incapacity and self-impoverishment compare to punk, arte povera, and performance art by Karen Finley, Kim Jones, and Paul McCarthy? Which particular aspects of contemporary American politics do these poets target, and in their haste to recycle others’ words are they losing the specificity of voice that, according to Theodor Adorno, makes the lyric politically valuable in the first place? How does this implicit attack on academic standards differ from what the Beats attempted a half century ago? In Freiburg, I spent four memorable hours drinking espresso beside a medieval city wall and answering question after question about poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (2003), a reprint of an issue of the New York Times minus the images, and Sports (2008), a transcription of a radio broadcast of the longest nine-inning baseball game in history.

This book grew directly out of those intense conversations. Indeed, I drafted about a third of the manuscript while still living in Bochum at the Internationales Gästehaus, auf der Papenburg 14. German eyes and ears helped me better appreciate the sophistication, idiosyncrasy, and value of these oddball contemporary American efforts to find viable poetic strategies for dissent, critique, and utopian dreaming. They also taught me that these poems were exciting because, even if harshly critical of today’s consumerist culture, they nonetheless take for granted the thorough integration of computers and digital technologies into everyday life. In their diction and general sensibility, I learned, they thereby manage to convey a contemporaneity, a sense of immediately addressing the here and now, often lacking in more forthrightly lyrical, hence more old-fashioned-feeling, poetries. I particularly thank Christine Gerhardt, Lea Grote, Walter Grünzweig, Gabriele Linke, Sven Lutzka, Martina Pfeiler, Elisa Edwards, Miriam Strube, and, above all, Kornelia Freitag, a constant friend and collaborator since we first met at Stanford University in the mid-1990s. Collectively they made me realize the pressing need for a book publicizing the latest phase in the long story of American movements seeking both to revitalize literature and to transform the world.

My first chapter, In Praise of Obsolescence, begins by posing a simple question: Why continue to write print-based poetry in the digital age? After explaining how Web 2.0 is changing what constitutes labor and how employees interact, it illustrates the distinction between literature that strives to be au courant and ends up imitative of contemporary corporate culture—and poetry that resists such complicity by strategically embracing anachronism and obsolescence, particularly in its choice of medium. I contrast Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’ online animated film Dakota (2002), an example of what I call post-poetry that draws heavily on the precedent of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1970), and Rachel Zolf’s Human Resources (2007), a book that incorporates and scrambles Web-derived data that had ceased to be accurate even before she finished writing the text.

The second chapter, New Consensus Poetics and the Avant-Garde, pursues an extended analysis of Craig Dworkin’s Parse (2008) in order to situate contemporary avant-garde poetry in two ways. First, it illustrates continuities between Dworkin’s project—exhaustively parsing the grammar in a nineteenth-century textbook—and the concerns of 1970s and 1980s Language Poetry. Second, it shows how Parse differs from today’s learned, complex hybrid poetries, which make use of disjunctive and other formally disruptive techniques toward traditionally literary ends. Parse is uncreative and impersonal, and it locates possibilities for freedom not in passages of lyrical imaginative virtuosity (which prove one’s mastery of a vocation) but in passages of breakdown and incapacity (which reveal the inhumanity of the demands placed on knowledge workers by today’s information-based economy).

The third chapter, titled Mechanical Form and Avant-Garde Aesthetics, takes up the question of whether contemporary avant-garde poetry has any aesthetic merits, and if so, what kind. First, I discuss the current popularity of fixed forms such as abecedaries, ghazals, pantoums, and sestinas, and account for this trend as an example of the loss of historicity that Alan Liu believes characterizes the era of Web 2.0. Poets demonstrate their ingenuity, craft, and range by their mastery of mechanical form, that is, poetic forms that do not carry the connotative burden of hundreds of years of prior use. I then go on to discuss Goldsmith’s The Weather (2005), which collects almost a year’s worth of weather reports for the New York City area. Such a project is a reductio ad absurdum of the improvised forms and constraint-based composition popular within hybrid poetics. Goldsmith puckishly asks whether contemporary task-oriented poetry writing is closer to data entry than a marketable expression of creativity. In the process, he also produces a work whose slowly shifting patterns of repetition deserve comparison with large-scale minimalist musical compositions such as Steve Reich’s Drumming (1971) and Philip Glass’s score for the film Koyaanisqatsi (1983).

Flarf, Folly, and George W. Bush, the fourth chapter, poses the question: How has twenty-first-century avant-garde poetry responded to contemporary events in a tumultuous period of warfare, terrorism, and reduction in civil liberties? This chapter focuses on one circle of writers, the Flarf Collective, and presents their work, especially their experiments with the Internet search engine Google, as a historically specific response to the Bush presidency. I reconstruct the movement’s origins as a listserv in the months after 9/11 and, examining verse by Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Michael Magee, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, and Gary Sullivan, argue that their goal is above all rhetorical. By spotlighting the hate, intolerance, and viciousness that thrive online, they hope to prod their mostly leftist urban educated audiences out of the melancholy and apathy that were commonplace during the Bush presidency and inspire them to rejoin fights against racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia that never seem to end.

In the final two chapters I conclude my argument by devoting extended attention to two younger figures, Andrea Brady and Danny Snelson. Chapter 5, Andrea Brady’s Peculiar Dissidence, focuses on her long anti–Iraq war poem Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination (2010), which began as an online hypertextual collaborative work. Subsequently, disturbed by the distracted, superficial manner in which readers were interacting with the piece, she reconceived it as a print-based project. Like Zolf, she tactically embraces medium obsolescence as a means of criticizing changes to everyday life, including reading practices, brought about by the popularization of digital communications technologies. I pay particular attention to Brady’s incorporation of found texts into her verse. They disappear almost seamlessly into its weave. By way of Pound’s Cantos and Sergei Eisenstein’s film theory, I argue that, if collage and montage were central to twentieth-century art, literature, and music, twenty-first-century artists, authors, and composers wrestle with a new aesthetic dilemma, the uninterrupted, omnivorous 24/7 informational flood that today’s citizens must learn to navigate.

In the final chapter, Danny Snelson’s Disco Operating System, I discuss several works by Snelson, paying special attention to 1–100 #4 (2009), a poem available online as a digital recording. Strategic obsolescence takes a different form here than elsewhere in Nobody’s Business: Snelson selectively repeats and digitally remasters two earlier audiotape-based works by his mentor Charles Bernstein, 1–100 (1969) and #4: a portrait of one being in family living (1975). Revisiting the comparison in chapter 3 between Goldsmith’s The Weather and musical minimalism, I argue that Snelson’s poem departs from Bernstein’s precedent in ways that parallel earlier 1970s queer, black, and avant-garde challenges to Western musicological norms concerning rhythm, pitch, and continuity. I compare Snelson’s poem to Donna Summer’s futuristic disco hit I Feel Love (1977), a celebration of black female empowerment and a pre-AIDS gay anthem that profoundly influenced the next three decades of electronic dance music. Immediately prior to 1–100 #4 Snelson performs an excerpt from General Conference, a piece about growing up Mormon in Utah; 1–100 #4, I argue, is a follow-up and corrective, a dream of a queer utopian alternative to patriarchal repressive religiosity.

As I was writing Nobody’s Business, I made three difficult decisions. First, I consistently refer to the texts that I discuss as poems. At conferences and in readers’ reports, academics have repeatedly told me that they would have no problem with works such as Goldsmith’s Day if only they were called conceptual art instead of poetry. That label, however, is crucial, because it comes trailing a set of expectations and it situates the writing in specific institutional and discursive contexts. Refusing to read Day and its brethren under the sign of poetry is a way of containing the book’s weirdness and threat. I acknowledge that some avant-gardists do leave it deliberately unclear what the proper classification for their work might be. Tan Lin, for example, has published a book titled Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004, The Joy of Cooking: Airport Novel Musical Poem Painting Film Photo Hallucination Landscape (2010). Nonetheless, all the authors whom I discuss in the pages that follow are best known as poets, and their writing has been taken up, debated, and analyzed chiefly by poetry critics within such diverse venues as the website Poetry Foundation, the journal Open Letter, the e-zine Jacket, and Columbia University’s Rethinking Poetics conference (June 2010). I have endeavored to preserve the force and the challenge of encountering this unusual body of work within this particular milieu.

The second hard decision I made was to employ the term avant-garde throughout. In the past, following the precedent of Hal Foster, I preferred neo-avant-garde as a way of differentiating the original 1910s and 1920s era of breakthrough associated with movements such as dada, surrealism, and constructivism from the many post–World War II efforts to revive, extend, and adapt aspects of that earlier moment. Too easily, however, the term suggests that the later work is derivative or inferior, and within art criticism it also connotes co-optation, a relocation and containment of the anarchic energy of the so-called historical avant-gardes within museums and galleries. Why, however, must one buy into a linear narrative of rise, triumph, decline, and fall? As chapter 2 illustrates, other approaches to history and temporality are possible, including a zigzag branching storyline pocked with discontinuity and new departures. I do not believe that the authors I examine are mere ephebes or epigones. They deserve a chance to pursue the programs, aesthetic and political, that they have mapped out for themselves without our prejudging their destination. Although I have immense respect for Johanna Drucker’s case in Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (2005) against vacantly recycling avant-garde rhetoric, I also trust that a strategic espousal of anachronistic ideas can accomplish progressive goals. Why foreclose forever the possibility that formal innovation can achieve socially transformative ends? Similarly, although I make generalizing statements at times about the avant-garde or avant-garde poetics, I do not intend this book to be comprehensive or definitive. There are many outstanding writers, movements, and texts that appear nowhere in this book, and many of them propose different ways forward from what I am able to consider here. Moreover, authors change over time, and nothing prevents poets described here as part of the new consensus from later becoming patres and matres conscripti of the avant-garde. I welcome the inevitable future expansion, elaboration, redefinition, and contestation of what the phrase twenty-first-century avant-garde poetry might mean.

Finally, as I was writing Nobody’s Business, I realized that I could not limit myself to analyzing only poetry written by born-and-bred Americans. The English-speaking poetry world of today may still be chopped up into separate microcosms along the lines of nation-state borders, but authors, texts, and ideas do manage to travel widely and unpredictably. Karen Mac Cormack, for instance, was born in Zambia, moved to Canada, now resides in the United States, and holds British citizenship. Caroline Bergvall has Norwegian and French parents and lives in the United Kingdom but taught at Bard College in the United States from 2004 to 2007 and has performed widely throughout North America. As will quickly become evident, although I primarily concentrate on American writers, that focus becomes blurry at the edges, and the boundaries between the American, British, and Canadian literary scenes prove quite porous. One of the featured poets (Rachel Zolf) is a Canadian temporarily living in New York City. Another (Andrea Brady) is an American expatriate teaching at Queen Mary, University of London. Just as the digital communications technologies that play a central role in this book have promoted the process of economic globalization, so too the resistance to their power and reach almost unavoidably turns out to be transnational.

Every book is a collaborative endeavor. Throughout Nobody’s Business, knowledgeable readers will discern the influence of three pioneering studies of the relationship between labor, mechanization, bureaucracy, affect, and the production of art: Caroline A. Jones’s The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (1996), Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool: The Culture of Information (2004), and Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005). Other debts are more personal. This book would not have been possible without the support and insight of colleagues at the University of Washington such as Linda Bierds, Herbert Blau, Jessica Burstein, Laura Chrisman, Louis Chude-Sokei, Andrew Feld, Gillian Harkins, Jeanne Heuving, Monika Kaup, Charles LaPorte, Heather McHugh, Joe Milutis, and Kathleen Woodward. I am also grateful to former and current students such as Emily Beall, Brian Christian, Brittany Dennison, David Huntsperger, Angela Kim, Gregory Laynor, Nadine Maestas, Gawon Shin, Lisa Simon, Tim Welsh, and Catherine Wing. I thank Charles Bernstein for inviting me to contribute an essay, Grammar Trouble, to a special issue of the journal boundary 2, which later served as the basis for chapter 2. I also thank Frances Sjoberg for asking me to participate in the 2008 symposium Conceptual Poetry and Its Others at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Then there are the many poets, poetry critics, and poetry lovers who have contributed to this project as interlocutors, advisers, devil’s advocates, and friends, among them Robert Archambeau, Christian Bök, Stephen Burt, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Craig Dworkin, Michael Golston, Nicholas Halmi, Kaplan Harris, Matthew Hofer, Meta DuEwa Jones, Lynn Keller, Kenneth Goldsmith, Tan Lin, Vanessa Place, and Timothy Yu. I am particularly obliged to Michael Davidson, whose reader’s report for Nobody’s Business was generous, thorough, and wise. Finally, I must mention my mentor and best first reader, Marjorie Perloff, who encouraged this project from its beginning and followed every phase of its unfolding. Only one person has been more of an inspiration and more of an assistance, my partner since 1997, Charles H. Krysieniel. I dedicate this book to him.

1

---

IN PRAISE OF OBSOLESCENCE

He was the first sane member of our family. He thought that poetry is dead in this modern world.

—Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity (1990)

In Lyric Powers (2008) Robert von Hallberg asserts without apology or qualification that poetry remains a vital art form in the twenty-first century: Poetry is quoted in public, even from memory, and read aloud among friends, as often by working people as by intellectuals. And of course it is taught everywhere in schools.¹ True, a half century of intellectual critiques has fostered among many academics a strenuous suspicion concerning verse.² Inevitably, the prestige of lyric poetry has been eroded, but, von Hallberg predicts, this too shall pass, just as throughout literary history…skeptical, agnostic periods have been followed by reassertions of the highest claims for this art.³

The optimism of this claim is startling. More typical are arguments that poetry is obsolete, persisting, if at all, as a marginal, residual discourse. Famously, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), the media studies scholar Friedrich Kittler argues that breakthroughs in communications technology killed the lyric poem by the early twentieth century. He labels verse a mnemotechnology that first developed to make the storage and retrieval of information more efficient under oral conditions. In the era of print, poems transmitted by the medium of the book were still supposed to find their way back into the ears and hearts of their recipients. Once the gramophone was invented, however, rhyme and meter became superfluous, no longer necessary to endow words with duration beyond their evanescence. Furthermore, Edison’s talking machine store[d] the most disordered sentence atoms and its cylinders transport[ed] them over the greatest distances. The consequence: The death bell toll[ed] for poetry, which for so long had been the love of so many.⁴

Von Hallberg’s contrasting, upbeat tone stems from his faith that poetry occupies a temporality different from the cycles of innovation, popularization, and senescence that have characterized the history of technology in the West since at least the mid-eighteenth century. Poetry, he states, is a deeply traditional art in which texts and ideas persist well despite time’s passage. A writer such as T. S. Eliot, he points out, felt unconstrained by historical distance. He drew higgledy-piggledy from Edmund Spenser, the Bhagavad Gita, and a prodigious array of differently dated intertexts. Poets today, if they write quality verse, should be honored as participants in a long, continuous, uninterrupted story stretching from Pindar to Robert Pinsky.⁵

Neither Kittler nor von Hallberg has much patience for a third possible position, namely, that poetry is subject to change over time, and sometimes quite drastic transformation. It can adapt itself to new circumstances—including the invention of new media—by adopting new guises, pursuing fresh goals, and disregarding old limitations. What the Italian critic Francesco de Sanctis wrote in the nineteenth century still holds true today: Unfortunately…poetry is dead. Or rather…what is dead is one of [its] particular ways of being. Poetry, he concludes, is not dead but only different.⁶ Emblematic of this approach to contemporary writing is Marjorie Perloff’s classic study Radical Artifice (1991), which asserts that since the 1950s the advent of an electronic culture has made it impossible to continue writing serious work in the style of previous generations. From now on, she announces, like it or not, poetry has to position itself…in relation to the media…that occupy an increasingly large part of our visual, verbal, and acoustic space.⁷

I agree with Perloff’s thesis, up to a point. There is no ironclad law forbidding contemporary poets to make use of locutions, models, and genres that predate television, radio, or the gramophone. Poetry, as von Hallberg puts it, is retentive, and its preservative capacity permits authors to revive very old beliefs, theories, and practices.⁸ Alan Liu, though, is also surely correct in Local Transcendence (2008) when he argues that this aspect of poetry can make it look outmoded, even atavistic, from the standpoint of people accustomed to life in our postindustrial New Economy. Citizens in the technological society of the present, caught up in its frenetic rhythms of innovation and expiration, cannot easily translate such