Dissociation part 2: The Narrative Strikes Back

continued from part 1

Hoagland asks implicitly, and I wish to ask explicitly, of art that champions "a self-conscious lack of consequence," as much disassociative poetry appears to: What then does it exist to do? If you are trying to write something inconsequential, why even bother to write it? Hoagland asserts that one thing this vein of poetry certainly succeeds at is representing attitude (I think of punk rock here, and DaDa) more than anything else, an act all too common throughout American culture. So by seeking to convey the lack of substance that permeates contemporary culture, perhaps this lack of substance ends up permeating the poetry as well, to its detriment. What, if there is no substance, is the reader to engage with and enjoy?



Poetry, though it is able to contain much within the space between the title and the bottom margin, works through a progression. If music is sound arranged over time, then poetry is language arranged over time (and often space as well). We start at the beginning, we end at the end. Somewhere in that middle occur developments that make the ending mean something more within the context set up by the beginning. Sometimes (as with narrative) the development is one of dramatic tension, or a character arc, or the development can be sonic, or one of momentum, or something conceptual like signs of the apocalypse aligning. It does not have to be temporal, but the development is there. A poems that stays in the same place throughout the poem is boring, much like an entire canvases coated in the same shade of blue is boring. Titling the monochrome blue canvas "George Washington and The Flying Spaghetti Monster Order Takeout" may make us ask questions, may be clever, but it doesn't create an emotionally-on-fire, kicks-me-in-the-face setting, especially without the title. It stays on the wall, twiddling its blue thumbs, waiting for someone to call it brilliant.

Hoagland wraps up on a note I'll quote at length here.

"One can understand how disassociative poetry has become fashionable, celebrated, taught, and learned--it is a poetry equal, in its velocity, to the speed and disruptions of contemporary culture. It responds to the postmodern situation with a joyful crookedness. And one can also see why poetics that assert sensible order (which, admittedly, can be predictable and reductive) have fallen a bit from fashion: after all, the pretense of order is, in some way, laughable. Art has to play, it has to break rules, to turn against its own obligations, to be irresponsible, to recast convention. Some wildness is essential to its freedom [emphasis mine]. Yet every style has its shadowy limitation, its blind eye, its narcissistic cul-de-sac. There is a moment when a charming enactment of disorientation becomes an homage to dissociation. And there is a moment when the poetic pleasure of elusiveness, inadvertently, commits itself to triviality."

BOOM (happens inside my skull)

I think a lot of writers have moments like these, where they think they are on to some brand new idea yet to be explored with written language. And then they read something that tells them "Nope, it already happened. You're just behind the times. Read more." This happened to me with a post-apocalyptic neo-Orwellian urbano-spiritual dystopian novel I had written about a hundred pages into and then abandoned a few years ago. This happened to me with starting a rock band. This happens to me every time I wrap my limbs around some brand new polyrhythm or Afro-Cuban syncopation I think I have invented behind the drumkit, and then find the pattern in a pop song about a night at the club.

But this moment is different. I thought I was writing new stuff, in a new way, smashing postmodernism and its effect on identity together in the particle collider of poetry. Then I read this essay, and my reaction isn't that "Oh shit this has been done." My reaction was "Oh shit this is being done right now and its trendy in a passe way." I have inadvertently hopped onto a bandwagon that I didn't know was trotting through poetry culture. I have been writing "fashionable" poems, Abercrombie and Fitch poems, iPod video poems, Ugz poems, thinking they were revolutionary.

Crud.

As with all errors I make (regardless of magnitude), I like to learn from them. One of my favorite quotes by Dean Young goes something like, "You genius is your error." The quote asks us to allow ourselves to make mistakes, even epic ones, and to see what new territory the act of mistake-making allows us to explore, what can we take from the mistake that helps us evolve, and what about the mistake was truly kickass to do anyway. Who labels actions as mistakes? Sometimes ourselves, sometimes others. It's easier to reject others' judgments of our own actions, because they can never completely understand. Rejecting our own judgments is more difficult. Knowing you screwed up can be an opportunity to draw your attention towards values. What is it you value that makes you think this action was a mistake? And then we can choose to re-evaluate our long-held attitudes, or to make different choices in the future. Or to make the same ones. Besides, all actions seem like good ideas at the time.

So what will help me evolve from this? I think it is time to return to narrative.

It is time to become intelligible once again.

The new goal is no longer to represent Dionysus, but to get Dionysus to work for Apollo.

More on this later.

If this essay is an error, its genius is that I now have 2 or 3 more things to blog about next time.

Cheers,

J