After reading the following statement from Dorthea Lasky’s chapbook, Poetry is Not a Project, please fill out the short survey below and read the review of Collective Task that corresponds to your answer. Lasky writes:

“I would argue that a poet who has a project that he can lucidly discuss is a pretty boring poet, at best. I would argue that a poet with a project might not be a poet at all. Or at least a baby poet, not a great one…. I would argue that a poet who says he has a project probably has no sense of the idea of habitus and its intersection with the act of creation. Yeah. I think the term “project” has nothing to do with poetry.”

If you selected “Agree,” click here for a review of Collective Task.

If you selected “Disagree,” click here for a review of Collective Task.

Love thy neighbor, said the self-referential divinity, as thyself. This was commandment number two, the first being, naturally, the injunction to love the divinity itself with all one’s soul, heart and assorted parts. [1] Whereupon, seizing upon the ambiguity of the second commandment compared to the first, its highly contingent status, that is to say, recorded history began. I.e, war with a real track record. For, as another self-referential divinity has noted, “I want to be able to hate people.” [2] Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure [3] is a recombinatory injunction towards an open-minded version of the second commandment, one that leans on that as as both an inference of commonality and an ethics in kind.

This book has four sections: “Shoot & Weep,” “Book of Comparisons,” “Innocent Abroad,” and “L’éveil.” Each section engages a procedure and each procedure is relatively complex, as procedures go, and as described in the book’s “Afterthought.” For example, in a number of the “Innocent Abroad” poems, numbers are word values:

…in the online Blue Letter Bible concordance. For word values with consecutive repeated numbers (e.g., 7725), either the Hebrew letter or Arabic numeral for the repeated number is inserted and voiced. For word values that contain two of the same number, but non-consecutively (e.g., 5787), the Hebrew name for the repeated (Arabic) number is voiced (i.e., ‘five-seven-eight-sheva’). (Please see the Pronunciation Key on page 85.)

“Book of Comparisons” is composed of words taken from the work of an 11th century Andalusian Jewish scholar, who used linguistic comparisons between classical Arabic and Hebrew in his Biblical translation/exegesis. A source text ordering procedure is followed in the section, animated by a contemplation of Derrida’s statement on the similarity of the other as the ruin of pure ethics. The poems clustered in “Shoot & Weep” are a series of orchestral passages that address the unaddressed, including lists of names (“Grievable”) and ages (“Nominal”) of those unnamed and unactuarialized in another poem (“Did not participate in hostilities”); the section as a whole “emerges from numerous print and online sources of testimony, statistics, theory, fact and myth…”

Much of the work feels quite L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in its torquing determinations, such as the lingual-numeric visual embeds in “How to shape sacred time” (see “supra”) and the seeming straight-up language work of disjunction and allusion and a-subjectivity in “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer” (“Janco wore the Persian shaykh pants in the former mosque/Cum Café Voltaire, le geste gratuit/A protean state of mind where yes and no unsplit”). This langpo slant appears intentional, given the hyper-lingual basis of many of the procedures, and the excessive play of signifiers throughout the book, as well as Zolf’s working thesis that semiotics itself engages in a kind of neighbor procedure or at least can be used as a means of explicating otherness. (To put it formally: Semiotics = (We are (¬) family)}. [4] Too, as she again helpfully notes in her statement, she uses “the Lesbian rule,” so that “‘theory is accommodated to fact, and not fact to theory,’” (quoting Erasmus). And while I don’t think of Neighbor Procedure as a strictly conceptual work, for Zolf appears more interested in achieving a specific effect than in creating a text-based encounter, [5] I do think that the question here becomes in part whether the procedure employed in each piece is essential to that poem’s instantiation. As a general matter, procedural techniques seem well suited for political poetry because politics itself is mostly a matter of process, and war itself a mulch-making machine. [6] So langpo is then properly employed as a theoretical structure applied to the more concrete edifice of the “neighbour procedure.” The neighbor is textually complex, yet everyday available for deciphering and deconstructing—if one is willing to bust through the walls.

Still, my favorite pieces are those most materially transparent, yet conceptually elliptical:

Waiting Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Waiting/Interrogation Waiting Rest Waiting Interrogation Rest Waiting/Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Waiting Interrogation/Rest Waiting Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Waiting/Interrogation Rest Waiting Interrogation Waiting/Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Waiting Interrogation/Waiting Rest Waiting Interrogation Waiting Rest Waiting/Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Waiting Rest/Waiting Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Waiting/Interrogation Waiting Rest Waiting Interrogation Waiting/Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Waiting Interrogation/Rest Waiting Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Waiting/Interrogation Rest Waiting Interrogation Rest Waiting/Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Rest Waiting/Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Waiting Interrogation/Waiting Rest Waiting Interrogation Waiting Rest Waiting/Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Waiting Interrogation/Waiting Interrogation Waiting Interrogation Waiting Rest

The procedure replicating the essentially bureaucratic medium of torture. Or the coolly procedural the trace-erasures in Messenger, which background and mimic the slaughtering ghost-text that gives current murder meaning:

We took the covenant of the Children of Israel and sent them apostles./every time, there came to them an apostle with what they themselves/desired not—some (of these) they called imposters, and some they (go/so far as to) slay.

And while I’m not sure that Zolf intended the graph on page 74 (signaling the “L’éveil” section) to function independently as a poem, the simplicity of a latitude and longitude served up as crosshairs was as bold and irrefutable as Beckett’s 35-second Breath. Too, the not-said here became more flatly chilling than the subsequent poetic maneuvers of “Day Two, Day Three,” which have the good occupation grace to phase out—though commendably—on the line: “it’s in the DNA.” And like a genetic code, when the procedure works, the work does the work itself.

It should be noted, however, that all procedures are not created equal (“Innocent Abroad” feels fairly ham-fisted in its polemics, though arguably that’s what politics—and poetry—is often all about) and that each procedure comes out as sort of the same: war, especially between neighbors, is a rotten mashup of besidedness. The back-cover blurbs uniformly herald the polyvocality of Zolf’s treatments, and rightly so. However, Neighbour Procedure fumbles to the degree Zolf feels the need to explicate, to state directly rather than relying on the procedure itself as the polemic of the statement. [7] The list of names in “Grievable” is enough. I don’t actually need or want Butler’s epigrammatic “…feel compelled to learn how to say these names?” First, because the predicate of her question as a question has been clipped, thereby turning it to a statement, [8] and second, because it is that thing said out of a misplaced fear of not saying. And is the thing which absolutely does not need to be said. And the thing, which, once said, betrays its own truth: only the latent racist insists that humans are “equal.” Only them with a knack for oblivion would imagine oblivion. At the risk of offense, never again never again.

For all its glottal gymnastics, Neighbour Procedure left me with the spooked feeling that Zolf forgot that the commandment itself is the declaration against the neighbor. [9] (After all, we don’t expect the foreigner to understand, and disappointment is brother to desire.) So that the alignment of alphabets serves not a proof of a radical kinship but rather as the very reason for annihilation. To stop another from speaking, particularly when that other’s speech could be mistaken for one’s own, is the categorical imperative—this is how Eichmann correctly claimed himself a Kantian.

Judith Butler’s back-cover blurb included this statement: “There is mourning, rage and some brave and difficult effort to speak across traditions, languages, to avow loss, to expose the colder rationalities of occupation and war, and a linguistic fathoming of the ethics of proximity.” Butler’s blurb is right as reign, but rightness is not what’s wanted. What’s wanted is the willingness to be wrong. And to have been wronged. That’s what makes good neighbors. That, and, as I recall, a tall fence. We must be allowed to hate our neighbor.

This, to me, is the larger point. For it is at the very moment when you are confronted in your very own back yard (or at least a communal turf) with what you find inappropriate, insensitive, inane, incomprehensible and just plain stupid, that tolerance becomes actually pertinent. After all, what could be funnier than the slapstick of perpetual internecine warfare? The reason we must be commanded to love our neighbor is not to reaffirm a general fondness of those close-not-kin to us but because we are naturally predisposed to hate that which lies next door. After all, they bear witness to the all too human of us—our fights, our fucks, our fuckups. They see us in our crapwear, hear us yelling at the children. They know when we knock off a bottle a night or if we dearly love to roast meat. So that the second commandment makes sense—for the other bastard we’ve got the low down on is us, yet we put up with ourselves, more or less. In that regard, the first divine injunction is still the best, for it commands unconditional adoration of the neighborhood’s most brutally incomprehensible presence, the supreme motherfucker rumored responsible.

________

[1] Matthew 22:36-40

[2] Žižek, in one of his running remarks. (See e.g., http://www.hlrecord.org/2.4463/zizek-thinks-out-loud-on-ethics-and-ideology-1.577736.)

[3] The title refers to an entry technique deployed by Israeli soldiers in which Palestinians are forced to break the walls inside their neighbor’s houses, allowing the soldiers to move laterally between houses. (Nb: This is also how mini-malls are picked off in Los Angeles: first, find the empty store for rent. Break in there.) I am putting the actual crux of the book’s predicate conflict (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) in a footnote because either the site-specificity of the hostilities is important, or it’s not. If it is, as Zolf’s procedures insist, then you should be able to deduce the players by their signifiers. If it isn’t, as Zolf’s politics seem to suggest, then it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about Israel-Palestine, the troubles in Darfur, or the third Balkan war. This posits a larger ethical/aesthetic point: do we want historical precision in poetry, or is it enough to have the historical footnote as part of the poetic frame? The latter is the more common approach, predicated as it is on the idea that the poem will carry the day even if the Light Brigade does not. Thus, the universalizing/minimalizing of the “neighbor procedure.” On the other hand, can a poetry that leads with its politics stand to have the political marginalized? As an aside, is the footnote the textual equivalent of the psychoanalytic joke—that which betrays the entire mechanism of signification.

[4] Though maybe not. In an interview in the excellent anthology (you really should get this one), Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, ed. Kate Eichorn and Heather Milne (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009), Zolf says that she “wanted to foreground the poems in ‘Shoot and Weep’ as lyrics.” (196)

[5] To be blunt, I think Zolf does very much believe there is a right way to read this work, and it’s not in furtherance of further hostilities. A strictly conceptual project would have to surrender this overt orchestration, allowing for all manner of effects, including the potentially despicable.

[6] It’s all about logistics, as Daddy would say.

[7] In the Prismatics interview, Zolf says that she finds psychoanalytic theory “hilarious.” In that spirit:
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Lacan.
Lacan who?
Lacan for whom the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being the symbol only of an absence.


[8] When we don’t know, we ask. When we don’t know that we don’t know, do we ask rhetorically?

[9] In her Afterthought, Zolf quotes Lévinas as identifying “the neighbor” as “other” for the Israeli. According to Lévinas, the problem of alterity arises when the neighbor does something that may be unjust.

******
ADDENDUM (added 5/24/2010)
After the above was first posted, Rachel Zolf and I engaged in a short series of emails: she contested my reading of the text, I contested her contesting, and, in the end, we agreed there had been a good contest. Meaning that Zolf felt she had had not naively gestured towards some sort of contextual reconciliation, but rather exemplified the kernel of alterity that makes loving one’s neighbor not just a commandment, but an impossibility. Meaning that the clippings of raw content in NP pushed me into reading exactly that sort of harmonic gesture. Which then kicked up all sorts of other questions for me: was I wanting a totalizing reading because I was reading a book? Perhaps I had fallen for an imagined closure (like a shiny spot in the asphalt) because the thing before me came tucked in covers—or is a text always a kind of reconciliation? (Text qua text, as the frogs would say.) Or maybe the second commandment itself had wormed into the space behind my sockets and struck the need for narrative. And what about the second commandment? I went poking, and found, packed between my teeth, remnants of the notion that I’d been a bit cheap in my easy dismissal of Jesus’ injunction as played through NP’s poems. After all, it was a direct countermanding of the ten laws as originally delivered up on Sinai, and even if the second commandment comes straight from the horse’s mouth, isn’t there something essentially blasphemous in equating love of the unlovable next-door with love of oneself—the one who is the temple of the familiar, spiritually speaking. Or am I missing the point of that kernel: to love the neighbor is the only way to demonstrate the love that is otherwise the province of the divine. Loving God is nothing: God exists as perfection, even when it appears to us that He is a horse’s ass. I.e., re: God, what’s not to love? But insofar as the neighbor is other, ever other, and as other, is fundamentally unlovable—so that we cannot love the neighbor—the injunction to do so becomes the only path to human salvation. Because by loving the unlovable neighbor, we occupy and prove the place of the divinity just as the divinity proves itself by loving the unlovable us. So that hating the neighbor and loving him all the same—the penetration metaphor rears up nicely here—permits our individual redemption by way of the collective act (love of neighbor being inherently communal) just as Christ’s ultimate act was to redeem the lot of us despite our penchant for capital punishment. I’m speaking allegorically, of course, and this is not to be confused with truth, or even with immanence, but there is a line from the other to oneself via the divine which I’m a big enough man to say may be found in the ham-handed content traces in NP. (1) I.e., I am changing my mind: the polemics in Zolf’s book may be necessary because they push the point like a pin: hate the neighbor. The neighbor deserves to be hated. Just as yourself. And love the neighbor. Just as yourself. The two are not only not exclusive, they are necessarily tandem. I cannot truly love the neighbor unless I really hate him. The kernel is the hinge. As it turns out.

____
(1) I will state explicitly that the desire for salvation, which is silly, should not be confused with the desire for the desire for salvation, which is sad.

The project of shabbing and rehabbing the contemporary lyric has been an ongoing concern for some time; in her thoughtful essay, “New Definitions of Lyric: A Response,” Marjorie Perloff historicized the 19th and 20th century lyric, taking to task some of the latter century’s criticisms of the former for over-simplification. Like Adorno, who argued in “On Lyric Poetry and Society” that the famed universality of lyric “is social in nature,” Perloff maintained that much earlier lyric poetry was a site of thick social engagement: Blake castigating the uncivil order of his poor London, Wordsworth grappling with unreasonable death, “men speaking to men,” albeit in the presumptive panglot of the Englishman. But whereas Adorno, writing in 1957, felt this social function was primarily linguistic—language being the device that brings the subjective concept into objective material form (thus “the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism,” and great lyric a subversion by the bourgeoisie of itself:)*—Perloff, in 1997, looked to the matter of particular words as they were specifically socially situated and motivated (the universality of lyric being found in the ache of its very historical condition, which, like death, is “thus all the more terrifying in its finality”). In a her 2002 introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, Juliana Spahr echoes both Adorno and Perloff, finding “exciting” “how the social and cultural keep intruding and developing an aesthetic frame,” albeit her excitement is predicated on this female intrusion into the lyric, rather than something inhering in the poetic form. The historical difference being the conscious deployment of gender.

Like the new feminist lyric, the new masculinist lyric moves “away from an individual space towards a shared, connective space” (Spahr); the shared connective and collectives spaces manifest by these three poets smartly speak to the guyness of today, in bass and tenor voce. So that in The Black Automaton, Douglas Kearney plays two lyric games that ultimately harmonize: though his poems visually break down into those overtly lyric in form and those overtly concertized, these material structures are betrayed by their shared content. And shared content makes a container more or less constituent. The poems that appear concrete demand just as much lyric engagement as those that look like lyric poems from across the room. Maybe more so, for the concrete poems overtly impress upon the reader the necessity for really (and variously) reading, providing something like a graphic schema which here is something like the IKEA tool—useful for making but without IKEA-independent utility:

The formally lyric work overtly plays with the sound of sense (“the first black you met was on the radio. / this is true even if you lived with blacks”), but that itself is a false distinguishing sense, for in both structures, Kearney employs what’s called lyric in the out-there, the real world of song, some hollered, some spoken, some Disney. (“See, [it] can kiss the sky!” and “sissyyyyyyyyy” and ” ‘jus look at de worl aroun you right ere on de ocean floor’ “) Kearney has said that he is avoiding mastery, which may well be, but he is not shying away from virtuosity. Too, these games are games of hi/low, though we can slug each other into the hereafter over who (“Swimchant for Nigger Mer-Folk”) is zooming who (“In a Station at the Metro”). Kearney is an action poet, not of the obvious variety (e.g., the vidpoem or perf), though there is that—his performance/reading of his work is so atheleticized that, like Christian Bök or a male walrus, he fairly scares off any other would-be dominant males–but in the occupation of the shared collective/subjective conscious space.

In the Baudelaire section of The Arcades Project, Benjamin cites “on the allegorical element” one of Chesterton’s passages on Dickens, who wrote that he once habituated a coffee shop where the words “Coffee Room” were painted on an oval glass plate, facing the street. He was so miserable then that he noted that “a shock goes through my blood” whenever he saw the words backwards subsequent. Chesterton: “That wild word, ‘Moor Eeffoc’ is the motto of all effective realism.” Leaving aside the unfortunate juxtapose of wild and Moor, though leaning into Eeffoc, with its conjunctive and efficacious properties, so too does Kearney’s work employ literality literally. In comparison, James Wagner’s chapbook Geisttraum (Tales from the Germans) takes realism from another source and down another track. Wagner’s language is the religious American Middle West: plain, transparent and similarly constituent of its own allegorical surface. A sussurating surface that threatens always to slip under itself and away. (“Less than 600 people in the town. Four taverns. A fifth in the bowling alley basement. / He went with his grandfather to the bars. Either eating fried pork rinds or Charleston Chews”) Where Kearney’s masculinism is primarily concerned with the trauma of the perverse, with what happens when a male body is put in linguistic extremis, Wagner works with the trauma of the terse, the male voice that chokes on its own inability to vomit or scream (“The brother walking around with a fishhook in his finger. The brother walking around with his hand after slamming it in the car door. The brother on the ground from hitting a birdhouse with his head. The brother hitting the telephone poles on his bike”). The poems are written as sets of simple declarative sentences, mixing opinion and observation as these things have been traditionally conflated in historiography and masculine prose and prosody. Wagner’s writing about sexual abuse of a young boy or boys by a priest or priests is not written as outrage or injustice, just the greater outrage and injustice of the statement of fact (“The brother with the compound fracture out his chin”). Between Kearney and Wagner, one sings, the other doesn’t, but it is important to note that one man’s singing may make church, while another man’s choir is a site of sexual subjugation.

Another lyric effect is produced by the repetition/refrain in Steven Zultanski’s work. On the back of his Pad, Zultanski sets forth the book* as a “catalogue of my attempt to lift each and every item in my apartment with my dick,” calling this indexical gesture “a parody of masculinity.” It is that and more; the dick as ubiquitous, always plenty (“My dick can lift the white hat that reads ‘Shooting Center’ in blue letters from the top shelf of the closet”), never enough (“My dick can’t lift the Hotpoint refrigerator”), kept, contra Freud, but oh-so-Lacan, incessantly unhidden (“My dick can lift the book The Sex Which is Not One by Luce Irigary”). In blandishments that are the very image of a modern English major, dick serves as metaphor for capitalism (manifest in the dialectic of the single subject and the stuffed habitus of anyone’s apartment) and metaphor for psychoanalytic structuralism (manifest by the barred subject dictated by the Symbolic and Real phallus); i.e., dick = Dick. In all this good tits to the wind stuff, the dick acts as an obvious gag, itself an obvious joke, both gags becoming less jokey and more obscure in the dick’s castrated and animated enactments as the catalogue rolls on (“My dick can lift the girlfriend’s scrunchy peeking out of the blue bag”) and on (“My dick can lift the lift the ex-girlfriend’s light-blue ‘J’adore Bardot!’ t-shirt”) and on (“My dick can lift the eighty-eighth 18 x ¾” brad….My dick can lift the eighty-ninth 18 x ¾” brad…My dick can lift the ninetieth 18 x ¾” brad…My dick can lift the ninety-first 18 x ¾” brad”). The trauma of the masculine discourse in Pad is underscored by the incantatory properties of “my dick can” and “my dick can’t,” which ring as Echo to every Narcissus. (“My dick can’t lift the floor.”)

In her essay, Perloff came down in favor of the palimpsest as the lyric form of the then-moment; the “writing over” that doesn’t entirely efface what’s come before, but incorporates it as a way of going forward. Spahr found that poetic innovation in her collection of contemporary women’s poetry was a way for gender to re-inscribe the lyric; in hip-hop culture, biting both links and distinguishes one lyrical work from its predecessor. Kearney, Wagner and Zultanski’s poems are in part the voices of “men speaking to men,” but they are men who write over, with, and in, the speech of other men as they speak quite particularly in their own shared connectivity—one decidedly, and consciously, male.

______
* I am ducking for the moment Adorno’s later critique that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” though anything after Auschwitz which emphasizes the social, or collective, will has its own grounds for moral condemnation. And at this point, it seems more accurate to note that Duchamp, not Auschwitz, revealed poetry’s basic barbarism.

* As another aside, it looks as if the book is via print-on-demand (there’s that telltale fresh yet delicate sheen, coupled with a kind of blunt uniformity), which I liked as a dickish movement as well.

Boris by the Sea wears its materiality on its sleeve. By materiality, I mean phenomenology. By phenomenology, I mean phenomenologies. For Boris, our Everyman Agonist, checks off phenomenology as typology, tripping through the architectural (“He said to his right foot, Build yourself. And it did.”); the archeological (“He simply had no faith in the past.”); that involving particle physics (“It does a minute in 60 seconds.”); the philosophical and the psychological, as if there’s any difference (“Some day, he thought, I will die of this thirst and then what.”), the scientific per se (“It got dark. It used to be light.”); à la Merleau-Ponty (“Boris imagined a world in which everything was real.”); the Hegelian (“Is there anything real about Boris? Better to wonder, is there anything abstract about Boris?”); the Heideggerian (“And the thingness around us circles like crows as magpies.”); and, of course, that of more generic old men—”There was a there that was there, a real there there, and some folks were there, and you could basically have a drink there, if you were already there. He was there.”

And then there are some other characters less there than Boris, most notably Ivan, the Woman, and the Author. Ivan meaning John, but then again, not John but “John,” for like Kings of England, there were many significant Ivans strewn throughout Russian and otherwise Slavic history, some terrible, some just not so hot. Boris’s Ivan being of the loucher variety, the one that will bust in and bust up a writing, the one that refuses to keep out of the picture: “Ivan, standing erect in the doorway.” Meanwhile, he’s also the one who refuses to stay in focus:

In vain! cried Ivan, wherever Ivan went.

And so the story goes out with Ivan’s container and into a taxonomy of reverberations.

Meanwhile, the Author, who would wrestle with the subjective in that authorial way, struggles to understand what is happening with Boris, that is to say he would like to have a plan for understanding. Like some people have plans, and like authors keep plots. (Never noticing that the two primary functions of a plot are conspiratorial in the first instance and funereal in the second.) To wit: Author writes a “Note on If one is to write a children’s book” (instructions on writing that only advise as to illustrations, in which it is considered advisable to avoid any direct representation at all, particularly as to human because “Things are materialized thoughts,” and thoughts, as you know, like humans, run towards the conjunctive, which is another way to say the subjunctive, which is to say contrary to the current state of things. Current as in the sea. Meanwhile the Author later (“meanwhile” meaning “at the same time” meaning later in this sense—we are, after all, dealing with sentential structures in which things will follow other things) realizes “I can see it now. / Boris is angry,” angry, it seems, because “she can be next to him and nothing can be happening.” So while the Author wrestles with the seen and unseen and the sordid problems of representation, meanwhile, Boris remains indicative, which is at least known.* And that which is known may be the case, or may not be the case, but if it is not the case, it is known to not be the case, and, thus, it is the case that it is known. (“The author reflected upon this thought.”)

It is perhaps noteworthy that the indicative differs from the subjunctive in the third person singular of any verb in the present tense. And it is moreover the case that Boris is in the perpetual present tense. As who among us is not? (“In fact there was nothing to keep him from opening it. Nothing but the imagined threat of what he imagined might step out once he did it.”)

Meanwhile, there is also Woman* (“the least known”). Woman being the Lacanian upper case which does not exist, which cannot exist, that is to say, in any case, and so Boris’s Woman does not exist, as at least not for Boris, at least not in what’s colloquially called the here and now, anyhow. (“To Boris, she was neither rain nor shine. She was fake as wooden sheep, false as snowflakes, fraudulent as kitten sneezes.”) Now, meaning later. Meaning that it is only Boris that makes anything real (“Is there anything real about Boris?”), for if we’ve lost the subjective, it’s really just our own that’s gone missing, or turned up dead by the side of the road, having made that terrible mistake of picking up that nice young man, or turning down that well-lit street, of doing something, that is, or going somewhere, that was, that is to say, conjunctive, i.e., engaging in something changing versus something that simply goes on. Like the sea Boris lives by. (“Better to wonder, is there anything abstract about Boris?”)

The sea is, as you know, the Real, that excess that is neither Symbolic nor Imaginary, or rather hasn’t yet been slotted as Symbolic or Imaginary. Like the soft area between your toes, and how one might truly feel about Flaming Hot Cheetos. Well, you know it now. Though feel free to disagree, like Boris. He is phenomenological, but he is not a phenomenologist. That would involve enabling conditions, and Boris is low on those.

How old are we, really?

How close are we, really?

Boris by the Sea is a small square book with a lot of air, like one of Matisse’s window paintings; in all this extrusion, there is a concrete sense of something not there—not something that was and now isn’t, but something that purposefully is not. The space around any sculpture, for example. The way that things not said in a poem become the contours of that poem.

There is nothing particular about Boris.

He’s particular to nothing.

It is by happy determinism that Yankelevich is also the translator of Daniil Kharms (Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, Ardis (2007)). Kharms’ 1934 short prose piece, “On Phenomena and Existences #1,” recounts an anecdote about a great artist who, upon examining a rooster, determines that the rooster does not exist. The great artist’s friend laughs, pointing out that he can see the rooster “quite clearly. And the great artist then lowered his head and sat down, right where he was standing, on a heap of bricks. THAT’S ALL.” In keeping with the spirit of a heap of bricks upon which one might sit, in the Introduction to Today I Wrote Nothing, Kharms is quoted from his 1937 diary: “I am interested only in nonsense; only in that which has no practical meaning. Life interests me only in its most absurd manifestations.” Boris is likewise an absurd manifestation, but no more so than anything else, once you look at it, for I think I shall never see a thing as silly as a tree. That is to say, no more so than the wooden chair upon which Boris sits, then burns; no more so than chair, who, by virtue of being burnt “seemed also strangely satisfied, as though it had finally fulfilled its true purpose. And Boris had helped it do so.”*

There are no punctums but periods in Boris by the Sea. In this sense, Boris is his own history. And, by happy coincidence, I am watching (as we speak) A History of Britain: The Complete Collection: Vol. 1 and I do so wish it were so, that history flowed like DVDs, like chapters strung along like birds on wires that used to be used to telephone. History punctuated with the occasional exclamation point, like any ordinary war or a breakout peace, but mostly just featherhooked with commas, lightly flung. A history of Britain, like the seriality of Boris, is a belief in time as phenomenology, which, of course, makes it Real as the sea in which we drown like dogs, though meanwhile, that is to say later, we paddle.

Boris had an idea. Then he sat down and wept.

Just as Boris* makes me believe in the way that dark furniture does, in the way that people who believe sit on many substances without the need for further support.
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Just as * makes one drop one’s eyes to the end, for further clarification. Just as one would wish for further clarification.


Disaffection is often affectation, just as lack of affect it is the preferred sentiment of the overly sentimental. In other words, it is dangerous to write smart from the street and from the heart. One runs the risk of falling face first into Rimbaudean cliché, or worse, being applauded by those who don’t know better, and discounted by those who should. For the truth is that, as always, all is true: there are disaffected youth who stay disaffected as they become less youth, and there’s equal parts real pathos and cheap feeling in this, and the cheap pathetic part of real feeling, in that. Andrea Lambert’s poems hit these notes exactly. They are as raw as wheat paste, as sweetly sentimental as the handmade missing persons posters that sprinkle LA streets. Despite the occasional slip into over-stating the lower case, Lambert regularly manages to pull off a soft staccato sneer that skitters off into real unblinking delight. In the very fine “Symptoms,” the epidemiology includes:

Restlessness, difficulty falling asleep.

A sudden, intense interest in parlor tricks and tidying.

Obsessions; avocados—an intense desire for avocados.

I can eat when I’m dead.

A few chunks of memory, some moments of missing, and then, the inevitable what’s left:

The font should be Helvetica.

The sadness of the discontinued font.

The darkness of the discontinued font.

I can eat when I’m dead.

Like her title promises, Lorazepam addresses anxiety by inducing the five effects of a solid benzodiazepine drug: anxiolytic, amnesic, sedative/hypnotic, anticonvulsant and muscle relaxant. So there are funny art-school jokes, like “Grocery List,” a riff on Basquiat, where the fairly fey “Toothpaste (whitening orange zest)” takes the place of smack as a reassuring must-have. Other list poems have the sedating air of Nothing To Do, including the one-word pointless (“Powder” (“Ways to Self-Medicate”)) and the two-word pummeled (“List-making” (“Ways to Procrastinate”)), wedded to the fundamentally addictive (). Lambert is pure LA in many of these moments—smart without seeming so, unsettling as a step back, quietly comfortable in the abyss-adjacent. There is something about consistently good weather that should make you afraid, just a little, of what happens next (“Sell Nick on eBay,” “Get PhD” (“Post-MFA Employment Ideas”)).

Next in text is 720910-2155, the Swedish writer who opts to be known by government ID number rather than Christian or sur-name. This appears to be a bid for anonymity as well as a remark upon the anonymity of the bureaucratic variety (“What is personal about a number?” (“Straight Up”)), but I want it to be something more interesting, for what is less repetitious than a number, less impersonal than a personal ID? And, as 720910-2155 does point out, “It cannot be pronounced, but it can be read.” According to facebook, there is at least one other Vanessa Place, who lives in Dublin, and does not want to be my friend. She is smarter than I am, for she ignores her doppelgänger as I knock, unsmiling, at the door. Similarly unsmiling is 720910-2155, who writes on the pin-head of self-awareness, “Isn’t everybody trying to be a hero?” and self-abnegation, “Somewhere in all these stories there are elements that allow the reader to identify himself with a particular character to understand that the hero is simply somebody else, someone they probably don’t know and never will” (“State of Exception”). The prose pieces penned by 720910-2155 are thickly spread amalgams of theory and acts such as are found in playlets, or snaps as may be taken in anyone’s blue kitchen. 720910-2155 seems very nice, and very conscientious, reading Agamben into daily life as the unexceptional state, and calling out aphoristic dictates (“Go Beyond Conceptualized Thought”) and aesthetic/ethical theorems (“Benefactor/Beneficiary”) with the measured enthusiasm of exercise, regularly taken. When I went to southern Sweden a few years ago, I was surprised at how very much they loved Matisse. But I was there in March, and my surprise was literally cooled to complete understanding. Every place has its arenas where what is simply nature in another place is the breathtakingly artificial in another. And we love these moments of great artificiality because they serve as false and reassuring desublimation: in other words, California’s burnt (sun-and-out) laconicism is happiest when hysterical, just as Sweden wishes it were not so very Swedish.

He wanted to see what life could be like without continuously being reminded of the past. He wondered what his art could look like if he did not have a body of work to build upon. He wanted to see what would happen if the slate were clean.

In the pale and patterned IKEA-land, one wants burnt oranges and marine blues, and Cali bodies that know no boundaries: 720910-2155 and Lambert were made to mirror one another insofar as mirrors both reflect and project whatever light is cast upon them.

If one is to be concerned with the idea of freedom, one must consider one’s own perception of experience. The question is whether or not freedom is truly desirable at all.

Om man bryr sig om frihetstanken så är man tvungen att ta i akt ens egen uppfattning om det man upplever. Frågan är om frihet egentligen alls är önskvärd.

In the introduction, J.S. Davis notes that the concept for the project was criticized for its particular geographic selection, and for the notion of geographic selection itself. There also appeared to have been the occasion for some well-intended lecture on the need not to lionize any one geography. In short, I think someone argued that some other locale, that is to say, some locale that was more Other, would be better as an object for cultural engagement, that is to say, would provide more of an object lesson (“object” should, by rights, be capitalized). This is a stupid critique. Geography is history, as we all now know, and just as it is very important not to forget that Haiti has a history of the U.S. Marines landing to save the calamitous day and then forgetting to leave, so too is it important to be reminded of the palpable souls of less (to the post-colonial mind) exotic locales. Indigenous is as indigenous does, and we all want something. Want as in lack. We as in the gluttonous us. At a recent poetry conference in Oslo, I was told that a leading Swedish journal on art and philosophy had decided to publish only in English because there were simply not enough Swedish speakers to justify the native text. To see how art is, how culture is, how youth will wear down even as it is retread and prolonged past the point of bloom, it is also important to look at the poor us of the wealthier world. Not to pity its thick-waisted hungers or its fait d’ennui, but to understand that, Malmø to Echo Park, we hope to hope, and that in that, we hang by the same well-licked thread.


But there’s really no point to reading, or owning, Credit, except the purely consumptive point of reading or owning Credit. It is worth noting in this regard that according to Timmons, three copies have sold to date. Therefore, Credit, unlike most books, remains valuable only to the degree it remains unread and unowned. Its worth decreases with the number of copies sold, and, by the same token, its means of production, generally considered the most democratic model of publication/distribution, is a way of maintaining the book’s status as rarified commodity. There’s no print run of a thousand, bleating softly in their boxes, there’s not even a hundred cellophaned copies waiting patiently to be passed on to those with time and money on their hands.

To manufacture Credit, Timmons scanned the documents, redacting them the old-fashioned way via black marker. Mistakes in the OCR are left intact. This is a sloppy conceptualism, one content to remain, in some senses half-baked. Not conceptually, but materially. Less pristine fetish object, more object of conspicuous consumption, and one that is manifestly about the pure fetishization of conspicuous consumption. And so Credit is a conceptual success by virtue of its excess.

Conceptual writing has been defined by Kenneth Goldsmith as writing in which “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.” Craig Dworkin wrote that the test of this writing is “no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.” To these definitions, Robert Fitterman and I have added that conceptualism is a response to textual excess, and that conceptual writing is necessarily allegorical writing. In a 2004 essay, Hal Foster described archival (visual) art works as allegorical in both the sense of being melancholic and incomplete, and in the “strict” literary sense of “featur[ing] a subject astray in an ‘underworld’ of enigmatic signs that test her.” Timmons, whose book is arguably more art object than text object, is also overtly caught up in a play of excessive signs: he is credit worthy and a credit risk. His credit limit merits extension. He is over his credit limit. He has good credit. He does not want to hurt his credit. What is his credit history? What will his credit look like later? The allegory here is present-tensed and bloated and gleefully incomplete. Unlike Benjamin’s allegory of ruin, there is no ancestral epistemological whole to miss or mist over. Unlike Foster’s interpretation of archival art, there’s no sadness in the slinging of sign, for signs, as we all know, exist only to be slung. The allegory in conceptualism takes as given that signs sign, but cannot sign off. Not fully, anyway. Here, the question of signing becomes moreover acute as it is the act of signing that signals acceptance of an offer of credit, and creates the status of debtor. The signature, according to Agamben, is that which effects what it expresses. The signature serves as voucher for the sign: it (ac)credits the sign with signification. And this is how ontologies are made.

For just as a voucher is an act of credit, so is vouching. Timmons collected thirty blurbs for the book, including blurbs from Craig Dworkin, Rodrigo Toscano, and me. I did not read the book, look at a manuscript or pdf, or have any textual interaction beyond Timmons explaining the project in an email solicitation. It was the concept of Credit that I blurbed, just as it was the idea of Vanessa Place that was wanted for the blurb. My surplus value attested to the surplus value promised by the project. Similarly, most of the blurbs, mine included, suffered from their own lexical excess in the form of puns, digressions, over-use of exclamation points, plagiarisms, and other linguistic wallowings. This was in part due to playing with the idea of the project, and in part inspired by the excess latent in the topic. The credit given Credit was given in the sense of an inscription, like a film credit, like signing-off while signing-on. We did not credit Credit, but credited its credit. So that all parts of the apparatus of this book project allegorize the project of the book: blurbs are not blurbs, but are as integral to the book’s existence as its spine. More so, for the book exists more as a thing talked about than as a thing in-itself.

I have written before about the radical mimesis in much conceptual work, and this is almost that. Timmons pulls the punch a bit via his redactions, which were a by-product of the postering notion. An attempt at public privacy. As is, the erasures can be read (as Timmons would have you read them) as hiding the salient “juicy bits”: relative to the plus side of the ledger, the numbers are sexy, i.e., points of concentrated interest. How much is someone potentially worth? As interest-generator, that is. More interesting to me is that what Timmons suggests through his redactions is the manifestation of lack. Not in the more obvious way of individuation being less salient to corporate finance than numbers or of individuation being more interesting to fiscal failure than numbers, or even the surface discourse here about the public versus the private, and how our private parts have become financial, i.e., that the black bar no longer hides the phallus in an pornography but is the phallus in an economy. But in the way that the fact of a redaction suggests a hidden knowledge that may be recouped—which Timmons overtly concedes, having provided this knowledge in the appendices. This puts Credit as a piece framed in the Lacanian discourse of the hysteric: the subject, its truth forever hidden from itself, suppresses the fact of its desire as it asks the master, “what do you want from me?” But in this, the hysteric reveals the master’s lack of knowledge, for the shifting answers of the master betray the fact that the master does not know: more credit, less credit, payment, payment deferred. The dialectical movement of the book is in this way complete. It has to be, for capitalism itself is famously built on a dialectic. But the difference is the gap, the missing bits and the too-many pieces. For dialectics have become fundamentally undialectical: there is no synthesis per se, no Kantian reason d’être nor Heideggerian über-ergo but rather a freezing of the dialectical movement itself. This is the shipwreck of Mallarmé, a shipwreck necessarily bottled on the page. Stuck in the suck of its ebbs and flows.

I have gone through these interpretive machinations in part to explain Credit, in part because I suspect the reading of this kind of work differs from the reading of most poetry. I’ve not quoted from the book because there’s no line I’m interested in, no text I care to contextualize. Or rather, it’s all contextualization, and nothing but. In conversation, Timmons has described  the language in Credit as “fascinating,” and it may well be. The point is, I don’t care. I don’t care about the particulars of the language used in offers made by banks too big to fail or how deep my neighbor sits in the hole. As fond as I might be of Mathew Timmons, or as much as I might relish his suffering, he is no more the subject of credit than he is its author. Certain kinds of conceptual works exist in a perceptual bubble. You can’t engage with them, not directly, for any attempt to engage directly sucks you onto the abyss of textual excess. (The abyss, as I’ve also said before, is now a mountain. Benjamin and Nietzsche stared into the chasm and decried the lack. We, punier still, look up at piles of the stuff.) What they do is instigate by their instantiation, not by the content of their content. Unlike most writing, they are lesser containers of any particular epiphany or exegesis. In this sense, Credit occupies the position of a conceptual art object, existing as a point of origin rather than terminus. And while many may argue that the best writing does just that, this is not the best writing. This is the fact of something that has been stated. As in a credit statement. As in a statement of arrears. It does not matter what the content of these statements are because they are essentially and merely speech acts, so to speak. They trigger status and attendant discourse. Some of these kinds of work, while seeming narcissistic (such as Goldsmith’s Soliloquy) or banal (such as Robert Fitterman’s Sprawl) or the sort of art mocked in post-war New Yorker cartoons as the kind my kid could make, serve and defeat the primarily altruistic purpose of creating more texts, such as this one. For that matter, Timmons has not seen a color copy of his book. He doesn’t know what it looks like. But he does know what it does.