Kill List relies on a mechanistic form; it’s hard for me to understand why, in order to access some fairly minor and familiar ideas, and given the possibilities of language and argument, one would prefer its approach. Champions of social mediated poetics sometimes sound gleefully dystopian about such loss. “We’ve all been flattened to virtual handles and data,” they say, “so literature should be similarly flattened.” We could catalog what I’m calling flatness, in contrast with, um, poetic language I prefer. There is the flatness of detached affect. Wry deflection. “Sincerity” that presupposes boredom and the inability for nuanced response, extrapolating the old anti-intellectual belief that language is more authentic when it’s most simplistic. As in some of the prose of Tao Lin. As in some types of “alt lit” or online fiction. There is the flatness of pious conceptualism. There is the flatness of unqualified exuberance. Rote positivity. Central to some writers’ online personae. And to their writing. Especially when, as in some of the work of Steve Roggenbuck, the writing is inseparable from the persona, the brand, all of it only le meme. Upon encountering such shallow positivity, one might think of Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, describing those who “protect themselves” from the “uncertainties and disappointments” of complex love by “transforming the instinct into an impulse with an inhibited aim,” ending up with a form of love that, by lacking discernment, “forfeits a part of its value” and does “injustice to its object.” In any case, to say that because social media can flatten thought, simplify interactions, make all into data, favor a large and insignificantly ebullient network that’s reverent mostly to its own conventions, and therefore poetry should reflect that flatness—that seems like an injustice, a forfeiture of value. Zach Savich
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 18:19:56 +0000
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