Hello Gnoetry

Chad Hardy, Patriot

GNOETRY: A sort of cousin to the now ubiquitously discussed flarf, but also its own thing. It has also been the sometime activity of a few friends here in Lafayette (one pictured left, in business casual).  Some of outcomes published on the somewhat newish Gnoetry Daily have been tremendous–funny, restless, bumpy, perverse, etc.

At the heart of Gnoetry seems to be the effort to remove the ego by working purely with source texts and removal of the processes of the subconcious from the selection of text fragments.  Not flarf, not erasure–a software generated auto-collage of  sorts. What I appreciate about the Gnoetry Daily is that a lot of what’s up there is work in progress or is accompanied by notes on the process and source texts.  It feels loose, like you’re sitting in on a kick-ass band practice.

Eric Scovel works purely with The Heart of Darkness in his online chap a light heart, its black thoughts. Many of its concerns are the same ones that were near and dear to my heart when I was writing Pigafetta–re-examining colonialism by subverting the intentions of a text, exposing the failures of the Western consciousness in encountering the Other.  Stuff like that and some other things too.

While Eric works with one text in a light heart, other poems put several texts through the digital grinder.  Here’s something from Chad’s “Katrina Bikini”

HIS ARM WAS MISSING, AND HE NEEDED HELP

His arm was missing, and he needed help
to mitigate and to accept, etc. For those

who stayed, dressed like dogs, who wore crosses
and spurs, found that the answer was lying prostrate

on the freeway every day: the embryo
body posture, the image of death, flag floating from a trash

can. He leaned over the dusty counterterrorism, and
the volleys fired through the womb, overcome

with militia and praying mantis. His wife
was even reflected in miniature. He asked

if she understood what was happening down
there. In the dark. That some Will Smith would be

the official relief effort. The scale
of mental health crisis. There is no way to follow him.

In a trance, working in that morgue where all the
lights had gone was Bush’s vision of our slaves. Life

spilling out of department of health, part of the cleanup
by Murphy Oil of a deer, turkeys, ducks, snipe,

two children, a few plastic bags, vomit and piss.
The most powerful developers have relentlessly

attempted to turn the blame, to send it
into these animals. We are looking

at the mercy of criminals. These are the extravagant
visions of them with almost no working radios,

vision blurred and distorted the identification.

What Beats A Dead Who? Edson And Repetition

A great discussion of Russell Edson and why he is rarely considered as anything more than a funny weirdo by the academy cropped up on Exoskeleton. It made my brain tingle. And then my fingers went:

I spent a lot of time thinking about Edson as part of boards-esque exam I had to take a few years back.  Previous to the exam I had read a lot of Edson and leading up to it, I read more.  I came to a meeting with one of my advisors—who I respect the hell out of—ready to talk about transformation, violence, allegory and the domestic space in Edson.  My advisor wanted none of it. She was like, “It’s funny. Let’s talk about that.” Talking about how he accomplishes the humor in his poems was fine and I was definitely ignoring that aspect of things in trying too hard to make him subversive, but it was clear that my advisor didn’t want to see Edson’s work as anything but funny.  Also, waxing academic on why something is funny is a gruesome, fun-sucking task.  As for his arrested development, it certainly is tempting to see Edson as a one trick pony.  For my part, I do find his work deeply repetitive—but purposefully so. Edson is clearly concerned with repetition within poems and without, and at some point, mid to later career, a significant number of his poems started boiling themselves down to mechanistic word for word repetitions. The incessant repetition of actions and dialogue, often word for word, dares the reader to put down his novel The Song of Percival Peacock, and I think, poem to poem, book to book, Edson dares you to be done with him.  It’s the fact that people want him to change which, I think, explains he hasn’t gotten the attention he deserves.  This is, roughly, what I gleaned from Johannes post and the cluster of comments surrounding it.

But this still doesn’t quite explain why he resists change. His poems offer clues—transformations occur in them aplenty, but these transformations are rarely magical and are more often arbitrary, incomplete, and absurd. He affirms impulse to change then lampoons the consequences of this impulse—finding no revelation, connection or communication between his characters.  And no revolution—the transformations that take place in private are always met with resistance in the social sphere.  The moments of beauty in Edson occur in isolation, with the individual traveling into his or her own subconscious. In this sense, change reveals existing power structures, and while it is often very funny, it is hardly ever liberating.   In “Out of Whack” when the Queen puts on the fallen crown she becomes the she-king.  Her gender is made ambiguous.  In a sense she is liberated from gender, empowered.  However, the King cannot take this indeterminacy, calling her a “perversion” and “a lesbian.”  In “An Animal, or What Happened in a Wood,” an animal transforms into a man in the eyes of a woman and it is at this exact moment of recognition that the animal is treated with the violence reserved for those we love as the woman starts beating the animal and asks, “Where is your father?”  There is an inversion of expectation here as there is no virtue found in attaining humanity—it only opens the transformed thing to unexpected kinds of violence.  Transformation, change, in Edson is rarely escape. Sometimes it isn’t even change.

I’m not trying to say that rote repetition or displaying a self-awareness of one’s own repetitiveness is a virtue in and of itself. But if there’s anyone who should be able to get away with it, I think it’s Edson.