JP on "deal with me," BBRRRRAP!
Bbrrrrap! (the force is strong in others)
I don’t shake, I detonate. See
I can pile up words like casings
in a bullet factory. See I can
twist your ear with a swish
of jawbone. A cotillion of lashing.
An affront of debutantes. I don’t
give a fuck, I keep them all for myself.
I break it smooth: the force is strong
in others, the mysteries beat firm in
the breasts of any John, but Tenderheels
I will workmanlike my way into your
softest tissues, will pound the raw meat
of your feet into crunked trochees, shatter
this tartare tertiary terroir until it speaks
in the voice of all joyous aberrants! Bbrrrrap!
goes the bass-loud glade! Bbrrrrap! goes the
drumbomb in your heartspace! strongarm
the yellowpages if you want that fancy stacking,
here is just the sound of explosions and sega chimes
ringing brash in the long dark. pray only
so your knees get hard enough to get down.
write only so the pens get stabbier – see
the bloodshed we dream with graph paper!
Bbrrrrap! I detonate! Bbrrrrap! I ink burst!
Keep your eyes where my hands can see!
So, the poem might be rough, but it's relatively fresh.
I think I utilize the declarative to regain some sense of perceived agency in my art. "Poetry" lately has come to be sort of it's own independent spirit, existing apart from the poet, existing as the author of the poem in the larger critical discourse. The poet / author (because I think the declarative urge exists in all writing) is viewed as merely a function of capital P Poetry, which the author then just has to slot into. The discourse I see exists mostly in "prose on poetry" books, from Dean Young, Tony Hoagland, Longenbach, any number of blog posts, any number of introductions, etc. The idea is that the poet's job is just to make herself available and open to the greater force of Poetry. It establishes Poetry as something alchemical, elemental, constant, something the writer must train themselves to serve correctly.
This bugs the FUCK out of me. I've had lots of teachers with this opinion, and met a lot of writers with this opinion. It seems to me a deeply messed up way to train someone in an art - the ART has more agency and will than the artist. I acknowledge the issue I'm talking about is pretty theoretical, but I think I see it in the patterns of writing I've been reading lately. A type of smoothness, an accretion of images to transmit something emotional, but without any of the messy, ill-prepared stuff that goes along with these emotions. Given the volume of it I've read in the past year, it feels a lot like writers slotting themselves into some type of poetry, rather than bashing out their own agency. I fully acknowledge that that's pretty judge-y of me, but there you go.
Also, the culture I've been taking in since adolescence is obsessed with respect and acknowledgment - hip-hop, rock, pop, video games, performance art - all might be "about" something beyond impressing, but ultimately Rihanna wants you to know just how fucking amazing she is, Kanye wants you to know that besides being the greatest rapper alive, he's also the realest person alive, and every video game wants you to feel like the master of this universe, even if that means encouraging a sort of manic, tapping A next to every single wall kleptomania in the gamer. And I think this OK. I think attempting to express uniqueness is valuable, it allows a carving out. And then attempting to create something artistic out of this space, out of the expression made, is valuable and awfully difficult. It's like inverse-confessionalism - it's not necessarily about me, but rather about how different I am than my surroundings, the insufficiency of category, and the power given with agency.
Basically, I'd rather see someone demonstrably showing off then demonstrably being a passive vessel with their writing. I think. I'm still sort of working this out. Feel free to let me know if you think this is stupid. I just think that there's value to it, bad and all.
I'ma read all of what you wrote again several times, and I'm still working it out too, BUT my first reaction is to this climax:
ReplyDelete"Basically, I'd rather see someone demonstrably showing off then demonstrably being a passive vessel with their writing."
In its obvious rightness and occasional foreseeable wrongness, I'M FEELIN THIS.
Thanks Kate-
ReplyDeleteYeah, i'm kind of making a HUGE false dichotomy in that line - there's other types of writing besides passive and bragging. just, if those are two extremes of self-engagement, I'd prefer the one, but there's obvi tons of writing that does neither. so, sorry for that!
I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts Kate, especially w/r/t your last sentence.
Thanks for commenting!
It seems that competition for recognition (poetics of self-aggrandizement) could also have a dark side. Writing that is coy or overly clever serves the same purpose as the boast: the elevation of the author. The difference between the boast and the coy lyric is the agent of praise. At the risk of making my own false dichotomy, I'll put Kanye West against Grand from Camus' The Plague. Grand writes and rewrites the first page of his novel in progress so that if a publisher finally reads his manuscript, the publisher will say to everyone in the room, "Gentlemen, hats off." I pitied Grand. Kanye, on the other hand, makes his own crown then wears it. The latter, by combining artist and arbiter is more interesting because the art becomes self-informing. This is where is see the agency in BBRRRRAP. Muhammad Ali, to avoid appearing foolish and deserving of scorn or pity, needed to back up his boasts of greatness with ability because he was also subject to an external set of rules and judges who could determine, with the appearance of fact, whether or not he was truly great. A boast carries a different weight in writing because writing, despite the best attempts of Hoagland and Young, lacks this objective rubric. You are great because you say you are.
ReplyDeletethanks for posting rad!
ReplyDeletegood shit. So you're saying that the boast is positing greatness, whereas the coy is asking for the reader to recognize it as such. Word. Like it.
Where I might disagree is 1.) I do think there's worth to the boast outside of sheer ability or self-informingness (yay 9AM) that goes beyond just mucking about - that demand of recognition seems potent in poetry, because not only is it gunning for the audience and fellow writers, but also for the abstract institution, and depending on the disposition of the writer, it could be a appeal to Poetry or a "I'm bigger than you" type piece. And most of the writers that I love are a bit bigger than the genre authority tag.
2.) I do think there's an objective rubric, albeit a diffuse one: everybody who came before you. And like Kanye in hip-hop, you don't need to be better, you've just gotta be new. Which is damn near impossible, but that's the sun that's shot for. And I'd hope that, for any writer, newness is what's being shot for, a new clarity of expression. I know some don't believe that's a necessity, but I feel if you're not pushing yourself and pushing against what you've read, you're not really trying then, are you?
maybe this is a function of the boast too: removal from the mass. no one can catch me, because I am the new. That's a bold one. maybe a bit too on the nose.
So many of my thoughts on this have already been vocalized, but I'll put them here for others to read and argue with/comment on!
ReplyDelete1: Are you mixing aesthetic approach and content? It seems like the Young/Hoagland passivity is an approach to writing, and would not necessarily entail a poem that seems passive; I think it would be entirely possible to preach the "passive" approach while producing a very active/boastful/declarative poem. Whereas I don't know whether the declarative necessarily forms a school of thought on how to go about writing: the boast is definitely a style/approach/way into a poem, but not one big enough to have a whole book dedicated to it; it's more of a tool (or an arrow in your quiver, in the words of Rad Thie); in the end, doesn't there have to be something in the poem that goes beyond boast? Not that I'm saying your poem doesn't have that, it definitely goes beyond just boast; I think the quality of language and sound within BRRRRAP! (enough Rs?) definitely fulfills the promise the boast makes. Anyway, does all that make sense? I guess I'm just confused; I don't necessarily see passive approach/declarative poem as a straight dichotomy.
2: Anyone who claims that they have to passively give in to the great "Poetry" to write a poem is either lying, or buying in to a ridiculous myth about creativity. Of course, there is agency in everything a poet does. Sometimes inspiration is mysterious, but most poets don't stop at inspiration. They rearrange, they cut, they look up synonyms in a thesaurus, they decide where to break a line, they give their inspiration shape through form.
When I first read this post, possibly because I am in the middle of *The Second Sex,* I was immediately thinking of this issue in terms of gender. I know this is not at all where you were coming from on the issue, but I categorized the passive approach as the traditionally "feminine" and the declarative poem as traditionally "male." I was thinking that a woman, because she writes from a place where passivity/softness/yielding is expected of her, might be able to make much of the passive approach or style by turning it somehow on its head. I don't know how exactly. But concealing teeth in passivity, somehow. If that makes sense.
This gender categorization also made me realize that in none of the arts is the creative process so mystyfied, as something that the artist passively gives into, as in poetry. It comes up in some of the other arts, sure, but not nearly to the same extent. I think poetry has always had a bit of a "feminine" image. Most of the great English poetry was written for and about women. Woman is the inspiration for the love poem/sonnet, and she is the intended audience, at least insofar as the poet/speaker is seducing or addressing the woman (I think it's debatable that women/the woman in the poem actually are the intended audience, at least back in the day when our homies Shakespeare or Keats were writing; the primary motivation may have been literary fame and not mere seduction, or they wouldn't have published, and in that case other dudes were probably the *really* intended audience).
Simone de Beauvior actually touches on this; that historically, man's creative impulse was actually a desire to tap into the mystery/darkness of life or nature; this mystery/darkness was also a trope of femininity, like passivity/yielding. Hence, we get the Muse, the feminine principle which inspires men to create (and Kalliope, the "chief" of the Muses, was the muse of Epic Poetry). So this alignment of poet/Poetry is a really, really old thing; and also kind of a sexist thing. Because, in the end, the poet gets the glory of the masculine world, while the Muse (to whom he supposedly owes his creativity) remains a mysterious, agency-less entity.
Verbal diarrhea over. Thoughts?