Poetry is Not the Final Girl: Joey Yearous-Algozin

Left to right: Trisha Low, Holly Melgard, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Chris Sylvester

So, Volume I of my book The Compleat Purge, The Last Will & Testament of Trisha Low is dedicated to Joey Yearous-Algozin, who "raised me." The thing is, I mean it. Like, literally, okay? From the fucking dead.

Because Joey's long term work, The Lazarus Project is a series of books in which he raises people from the dead. How, you say? Well, that's it.  Just by saying it. Because according to Joey,  the best thing that poetry could do (if it could do anything at all),  would be to "Raise grandma from the dead." The Lazarus Project does just that, raise people from the dead via the futile and laborious process of saying they come back to life; only they don't, because poetry just doesn't do shit.

Anyway, right smack in the middle of The Lazarus Project: MyDeathSpace.com, Trisha Low (that's me!) gets shot by her boyfriend outside of the Chinese takeout place called The Golden Wok, but Joey promptly brings me back to life. Thanks Joey.

Joey might have literally raised me from the dead, but he raised me in other ways too. With Serres, and Nick Land and Bataille, and Atrax Morgue, and Crass and burgers at the terrible Buffalo diner at 4 am in the morning and karaoke at Sing-Sing. We're part of the same poetry freak family you can gawk at in the photo above, fucking saturated in all our trash. We just want to make the most unattractive shit and be held accountable for it. Because family ties // family dies. And this gchat says it all:

TL: Let’s start with the most obvious, but also most telling question in honor of my favorite horror franchise, SCREAM: What’s your favorite scary movie? But also, why? Do you think this has any bearing on your aesthetic practice? And I do mean that in the most general of terms, since no one in this series identifies purely as a poet. Except for you, actually. What do you have to say about that.

JYA: You realize that’s like eight questions, right?

TL: Yeah, so what. Write me a fucking essay.  

JYA: Fine.

Honestly, I don’t watch a lot of horror movies. My favorite horror movie is Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I watched it at 11 or 12 with my friend Ben at a sleepover, where we rented a bunch of horror movies, snuck out, smoked stolen cigarettes and tried to get high on taking too much No-Doze, which is probably as sophisticated as my aesthetics gets. Also, that movie is terrifying and makes almost no sense.

Really, all I care about in poetry is something you can sometimes find in horror: an expression of ambient, flattened violence. The final scene of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for example, with Leatherface unmoored from any particular target, just swinging his chainsaw around. I mean, sure people die in the movie, but at that point it seems pretty incidental.

Maybe Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn’t the best example. Maybe brief moments in The Walking Dead, when the zombies become little more than part of the environment. There’s a scene where a character—I can’t remember his name—looks out the window of a car riding down the highway, only to see a zombie shuffling across a field. Through the zombies’ constant presence, the horror and threat of them becomes a basic fact of life. The rest of the series has dealt with the fallout from this reality. Of course, because it’s on TV it never reaches the truly reptilian level this scenario calls for. Probably, the perfect horror movie would consist of zombies eating each other in an empty field for an hour and a half.

I guess what attracts me to horror in general, and not just movies, is that its treatment of the body is wholly unredeemable. Ultimately, through the exercise of the genre, individual bodies can become impersonal. They become "almost-objects" to be cut or do the cutting. Through a process of impoverishment, the human is reduced to its material coordinates, something like an abstract grid on which these violent forces enact themselves. Or, at least that’s its utopian horizon. And that’s why the victimization of the killer and accompanying weak psychologizing of their trauma is as hollow as it is formally necessary. Not to excuse the killer and, in doing so, render them more approachable or sympathetic, but to foreground their arbitrary position in the closed circuit the form proposes: Both victim and killer are the objects of the same brutal forces.

Maybe that’s why more poets, or artists who identify as only poets as I guess I do, don’t pursue horror. I don’t know. Maybe a lot of poets are invested in an ethics of transformation and/or micro-community politics at the level of the poem that treats aesthetics as a medium for world building. But that’s totally insane. If anything, the poetic operates as unnecessary and excessive and, through its excess, articulates itself as annihilative and inhuman. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can just read Nick Land on Freud, who I’m basically stealing from right now. Or, just read Freud. You don’t even have to read him closely.

The other reason might just be that people don’t like it. And I get that. I really like music that sounds like construction equipment, but totally understand that some people like Taylor Swift or something.

TL: Ok I get it. So for you in a way the violence of horror becomes a formal quality in how it strips away, indiscriminately, all aspects of redeemable humanity, right? My nihilism (as you know) is utopic and operates within a field of saturated affect. And yours is totally devoid of desire. Which I think is fucking weird, tbh. But how does this formal flattening play into something like Lazarus Project or Troll Thread? Do you think the hyper-material violence in horror becomes different when it operates in a virtual plane? Does that make it more or less annihilative?

JYA: “Formal flattening” as a strategy developed as I worked on The Lazarus Project. At first, it was like some po-mo mashup of found sources and pop culture material—like the script to Friday the 13th cut with an interview with serial killer,  Richard Speck. I thought it would be funny if TLP looked like the poems I was reading in grad school and it was, at least to me. As the work progressed, all the formal variation fell away, in favor of a stripped down mechanism of resurrection, just writing that “So-and-so comes back to life” or “So-and-so’s body begins to move.” Eliminating the aesthetic component of the project allowed me to isolate the desire behind memorialization and remove its affective qualities. In the end, desire became just another machine to create a text, a macro working away indefinitely. A fantasy of an infinite text that would grow with each successive death; everyone’s name eventually feeding into it alongside our mourning made literal.

What’s interesting for me when this material—the description of people’s deaths, say—operates in a virtual plane is how it moves. Even long texts are easily transported and stored and their URLs can be shared across multiple platforms. It’s not any different than any other piece of data and our phones or laptops don’t care about what kind of .doc or .jpg you’re downloading. In a sense, this impoverishment reaches a limit point in the digital environment, since it enters the archive passively, but without sacrificing what you called it’s “hyper-material violence.” It becomes nothing more than death infecting information in all its terrifying flatness.

TL: ‘Formal flattening’ lol—do you remember that once you and I came up with this idea of the Stack n Snort (Gchat tells me it was 5/10/12?) I’m not sure how or when but it involved stacking the dead bodies of poets and flattening them into bloody pancakes so they looked like Christian Marclay sculptures and then burning and snorting the ashes of the whole structure? Idk what we were doing on gchat. But this is actually relevant because what the Stack n Snort does is create a never ending cycle of death. It’s just a chain reaction of death that then becomes entirely unremarkable, we end up reassimilating (snorting) ourselves as arid textual information. Even the archive becomes a textual wasteland, devoid of meaning. But why are you so attached to inhumanity? One could take issue with the fact that reducing bodies to information is really just a way of exercising an oppressive power. What would you have to say about that?

JYA: Oh shit! I forgot about Stack n Snort. What the fuck were we even on about? Also, I like how you tried to make it seem smarter with the Christian Marclay reference. Very curatorial.

TL: Whatever, I actually think the Christian Marclay was you. Anyway, idk I think we were talking about the Dead Boys? One of them did get snorted when he died, by his girlfriend, I think. I was always more interested in the bulldozer. Or accidentally snorting a bone shard or a tooth. I think I would be ok if I died because I got a brain hemorrhage from snorting someone’s incisor. I would be into that.  

JYA: But it would depend on whose incisor you hemorrhaged on, right? Or not. What would you care, you’d be dead.

Why the inhuman? We’re just lucky it’s still interested in us. That we’re still usable on some level, even as a kind of joke. Perhaps, the body reduced to its basic mechanisms—let’s not call it information—and its engine, desire, similarly reduced is the proper analogue for the laughter such a joke could elicit. Or that the operation presents a freedom in reducing the human to its limits, in that any goal would be lost in the absurdity of such an exercise. To actually experience the ineffectuality of language, its utter failings to produce anything of substance other than a continuation of itself. Maybe that’s worth something. Maybe not.

But as a means to exercise an oppressive power? If I had that kind of desire, I wouldn’t waste my time with poetry.

TL: You win, I guess, although there’s no prizes for winning. Only the end of the world. Do you think that’s the most basic difference between us, that I think poetry can still ruin lives, pettily maybe, because of/to illustrate its lack of substance, and you don’t believe in poetry at all, only platforms? Do you think this is because we both love listening to power electronics?

JYA: You’re making me sound like goth Tan Lin. (NB: Joey is definitely the goth Tan Lin)

I don’t know if I believe in poetry anymore. I haven’t really given it much thought. I used to give it a lot of thought before TROLL THREAD. Once we started that site it stopped being a concern. I got interested in making pages, you know, production over identity.

The power electronics connection is on point. I just read this interview w/ William Bennett where he says something about how he started Whitehouse to create a sound that could bludgeon people into submission. I can see that in both our work, especially in performance. Maybe the real difference between us is in the caricature we present. Where your work investigates this affective nihilism, mine plays at a psychotic aggression—Bestial Burden vs. Examples of Cannibalism, to stick w/ the power electronics theme. What I mean is that we both attack the audience, while simultaneously attacking ourselves, but we come at it from the different generic identity positions we’ve been slotted into. Accordingly, I like to read Purge as an accumulation of blown out and dead genres. Very much literature, but it’s legibility as such is a big FUCK YOU to leftist faux radical thinking.

TL: I think caricature is really horrific. The fact of the matter is that horror as a genre means those caricatures become expected. Whereas in poetry, there’s not enough of a convention that makes itself evident enough for the kinds of caricatures that you and I are interested in to reveal themselves as such. Would you say that you identify with the position of a serial killer? What would it mean for a poet to be engaged in the "dead genre" of being a cis white dude serial killer lol, if we're getting into reflecting, refracting, hypermaterializing oppressive power structures a la horror? This is a real question btw.

JYA: Remember when we all read at MOMA and I did that version of Jim Jones’s final speech at Jonestown? Where he convinces 900+ people to kill themselves. It looks like that. It looks like a photo of the dead bodies and parrots at Jonestown the morning after posted by stoopidtrooper on imgur.

Going back to movies, the genre of the serial killer is dead in the same way a zombie is dead. What’s perfect about zombie movies is that the individual zombie is completely unimportant. Identification—recognizing the loved one-cum-zombie—can only occur for a brief moment, before the zombie itself must be dispatched. For the most part, zombies are little more than undifferentiated violence, a continuous wave coming at the few who remain unaffected. As Evan Calder Williams points out, their hunger bears no relation to appetite. Theirs is a hunger that can never be sated, but shambles unevenly across the landscape, tearing into everything.

It is precisely this atmospheric violence, one that saturates and stains indiscriminately, in which the serial killer takes part or, rather articulates the serial killer as such that makes the latter interesting. What I mean is that the serial killer isn’t interesting in and of himself, but his participation in this deeper undercurrent of violence within American culture makes him interesting. He is as undifferentiated as gangsta rappers or internet trolls are. They fill out these forms or genres in ways that are prescribed exterior to them. But more importantly, they are all poisoned, shot through with that toxic magic of American violence. To reference a non-horror movie, this is what makes Gucci Mane’s lethargic performance in Spring Breakers so transcendent. Where James Franco is playing a role, Gucci Mane seems to move beyond representation into overdetermination and a kind of literalism.

But you say this doesn’t resonate within the poetry world? Fine. Don’t call it atmospheric violence and caricature, call it the commons.

TL: Do you think you’re poetry’s Jim Jones?

JYA: I wish.

TL: Poser.

JYA: <3 u

TL: Yeah whatever, big bro.