As I mentioned in my last post here (goodness, was it really over a month ago?!), I’ve been reading a lot of online journals lately. I’ve tried spending some time with 21 Stars Review, and though I’ve enjoyed some poems there, I mostly find the issues to be hit-or-miss – some poems hit me really hard, right in the solar plexus (like Michelle Bitting’s “Reasons to Quit”), but others sail right over my head.
And, dangerous as it may be, I’d like to take a blog entry to focus on the latter.
The current issue of 21 Stars Review features two poems by Paul Baker: “Unit 8 and Purport” and “Unit 13 and Purport.” My initial reaction upon reading the first poem, “Unit 8 and Purport,” was “What the fff…?” (just like that, too, as my 5-year-old was in the room.) The “Unit” portion appeared to me to be a random assortment of words, followed by a seemingly unrelated prose poem that was, at best, surreal.
I was half right.
The journal allows for each author to include a comment on the poems s/he published in the issue. Paul Baker’s comment can be found immediately beneath “Unit 8 and Purport,” but I’ll post again here:
The source of each poem was a passage from a well known piece of literature in English, readily available online. I cut and pasted a portion of the work into Microsoft Word. For each passage I used Word’s search-and-replace function to replace each space between words with a hard return, creating a column of words. I then used Word’s “sort” function to alphabetize the resulting column. I then used the search-and-replace function to replace hard returns with spaces, creating new “sentences.” To avoid having the words in every passage proceed in alphabetical order, I chose a random point at which to “snip off” the latter part of the passage and to attach it to the beginning. In each case, the “Purport” section undermines not only the procedure detailed above but also the tradition of “commentary” or “synopsis”: each “purport” is an immediate, spontaneous, nonrational flow of ideas unrelated to what precedes it.
Ok, maybe it’s just me, but I had to read this several times before I really got to what he was saying: “I took someone else’s words and scrambled them up a bit, then I wrote something that didn’t have anything to do with those words. And then I called it a poem.” It reminds me a bit of what Harry over at Heraclitean Fire did with a poem for his old Poetry Wiki – he ran a famous poem through a translation program several times and then posted the results. It was interesting, but not great poetry.
So that digression brings me back around to Paul Baker’s poems. I sort of have to wonder – are they even poems? I know the definition of art is infinite, depending on your perspective, and the same can be said of poetry, but I really was sort of offended at first reading. I, and the other poets I know, spend several hours laboring over drafts of poems. We workshop, we critique, we revise, we send out revisions to our friends and mentors, we revise some more, we let the drafts sit, we revise some more, we lose sleep, we drink, we smoke, we revise again, and finally, maybe, we send it out to a journal somewhere. And now Paul Baker comes along and says these two chopped up, alphabetized bits of someone else’s work, plus a paragraph each of nonrational rambling, are poems? Yowch. Talk about deflating my ego.
Of course, I know it’s not that simple. And perhaps it’s simply that the poems are too cutting edge for me. Perhaps I’m missing something particular, perhaps this is part of a new movement of language poetry. But I couldn’t find much to connect with here. I thought Baker included some beautiful or extraordinarily quirky lines in the poems, such as the last line of the Purport of “Unit 8″:
We can however invite the pilgrims from across town to sit and enjoy our hospitality in exchange for some news from abroad which they quite enjoy telling.
And, quite aside from the poem as a whole, I rather like the way Baker plays with language in the Purport of “Unit 13,” repeating the “spare change” concept and twisting it into something new every other sentence or so. And maybe, just maybe, these prose poems might work for me without the Units – maybe if just the Purports were meant to be the poems? But on the whole, I left the poems feeling like I’d eaten a Starbust: chewy, sour, and not really that filling.
But I want to see what you readers think. Take a second to click over the poems, if you would, and then come back here and let me know.
“Unit 8 and Purport”
“Unit 13 and Purport”
Am I just not getting it? Am I being too narrow-minded? Have I completely missed the point, and I should lay down my pen now and forever? Or am I onto something here?
(And Paul Baker, if you ever read this, you can come yell at me in person for dissing on your poems at the Mad Poets Bonfire on Saturday if you like. I don’t mind. )
2 Comments
Michelle Bitting’s piece over at 21 Stars is amazing.
rachel, whatever you do, don’t lay down your pen forever. PLEASE. agreed? ‘kay, good.
now, for paul baker. he should certainly not lay down his pen either. the language in those purports was really exciting and i quite liked them. i didn’t “get” them… but i enjoyed reading them, alot. the units however, and thus the whole exercise, strike me as kind of pretentious. the explanation explains that these are from well-known pieces of literature, readily available on the internet, but does not name them… am I supposed to recognize the passages, even in their scrambled-ness? does the original, now scrambled, text lend any meaning or importance to the Purport that follows and/or the piece as a whole — and if so, wouldn’t it be a good idea to throw your reader a bone? and if not, then what’s the point? I mean, even if the point is the scramble, then we need to know what you’re scrambling, right??? i could totally accept that.
now maybe i’m rambling about something that’s obvious to everyone else, or mentioned someplace (i really didn’t see it), and so the point is moot. but i guess, for me i’m looking for some kind of a road map as to how to read these. i want to like them, b/c i so love some of the language in the Purports.
For instance, from the first line of the Unit 13 Purport: “in my mild pie the crust bakes across snapping. A cat can sit in sun but a son cannot cat along a cassidy.”
I have no idea WTF this means… but i don’t care, i don’t necessarily think its about meaning. at least not the meanings of the individual words, phrases, images. i love it nonetheless… but loving the sound & feel of the words for me isn’t enough if i don’t have a road map for how to read the poem (and I don’t mean some lengthy algorithmic explanation afterward). i think ultimately, at least for me, a poem need not “make sense” or have a “meaning” (whatever that is), but should maybe have a purpose that is at least somewhat understood by, if not shared by, the reader.
for me, its all about titles, or epigraphs, or something… call this poem “after Dickens” or whatever (as I said, I have no idea where these passages came from), and then Paul could do whatever he wanted… b/c I’d have an idea that he was f–ing around with some ubiquitous English language writer to test the limits of language’s randomness (there’s my super-imposed “purpose” for both of these pieces). But I need more than Unit 13. I need some pointer as to what I’m looking at and why.
to me, its analogous to looking at a cubist painting. if duchamp called “nude descending a staircase” “Exercise 7″ instead (and yes, i know that some of the more abstract painters did that sort of titling), then one might never see the brilliance of his vision and what he did. same with picasso. if you don’t know how to look at the art, then you can’t really see how beautiful it is. and it’s incumbant on the artist to help you see. otherwise, its just a wasted exercise. and here, i’m giving paul the benefit of the doubt that there is some point to these poems (and that they are, therefore, poems)… that there is something he wants us to see. if there isn’t a point, then its even more of a wasted exercise… and, i would add, not a poem.
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