Some Scattered Thoughts on Poetry, Political Mood, and the Internet

Lately I’ve been writing semi-confessional poetry for the first time. Or, if not confessional, anecdotal, essayistic, and less oblique than other writing I’ve done, at least. It feels fairly vulnerable. It also feels very of a moment—I feel like so many poets I know are writing intensely intimate things right now, in fairly direct rather than obfuscatingly lyrical terms. I’m particularly interested in work that has an essayistic or narrative or documentary quality to it alongside other elements: Shiv Kotecha’s The Switch, Diana Hamilton’s The Awful Truth and God Was Right, Brandon Brown’s The Four Seasons, Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction, Steven Zultanski’s Honestly.

A few weeks ago I finally alphabetized my bookshelves after putting off doing it for the nearly three years I’ve lived in my apartment. It felt like an intensely nostalgic activity. I’ve had to get rid of so many books because of the space constraints of New York City apartments that I’ve really mainly hung onto things that are hard to replace and/or important to me and/or by friends—so my shelves are disproportionately small press poetry. This time I was struck by how much work I and all my closest poet-friends and then a much bigger network of acquaintances and writers I admired had made that was essentially about the internet, lots of it around roughly 2004-2012 or so.

Most of it feels really out of date—so out of date that I mostly noticed that what often felt like somewhat irreverent playfulness at the time now feels like it’s documenting a sort of golden age of the internet that is, sadly, long gone (as detailed here). The internet used to be a place for weirdness, experimentation, debate, writing that didn’t fit into academic modes easily—I’m reading Mark Fisher’s giant collected right now, for instance—as well as a sort of not-very-performative, cringe-worthy oversharing and documenting of daily life. One bobbed from individual page to individual page without knowing much of what to expect; now we continue to pour our writing and labor and photos and feelings out online but the sites on which they’re disseminated are owned by a few companies and are there to sell us things, and we’re heavily surveilled. I still love the internet, but it’s dystopian, and the most interesting things on it are increasingly reactive to/critical of the medium itself.

For instance: good meme accounts on Instagram are often good because they undercut what the internet is now. The mode of memes I like the most is a sort of performative hypervulnerability. Basically: sadboi memes about depression, struggles with addiction, anti-capitalism, and lots of failure around work, emotional intimacy, and sex. They combine oversharing and the documentation of failure; they’re the opposite of a LinkedIn account or a standard OkCupid profile. If people my age (I’m 36) and, even more so, people a bit younger than me have been trained from an early age to present themselves in super overachiever-y terms, and to be particularly intentional about how they present themselves online, meme accounts are basically jokey art about how shitty that mandate is and also offer a sense of solidarity around how shitty capitalism, heteronormativity, and various other vectors of oppression are. See the Instagram accounts of bunnymemes, korn_but_gay, teenagestepdad, and gayvapeshark, for instance. I often like this kind of meme, which I think of as being simultaneously current-internet-par-excellence and a critique of that same current, shitty internet.

Of all the different modes of super intimate poetry I see being published right now, there is a distinct slice of it that reads as being in the same mode as these memes—sadness, maybe drugs, failed love, etc., probably all in Brooklyn, described in sparse and writerly but fairly straightforward language, with a sort of coolness and vulnerability at once.

If performatively vulnerable memes push back on Instagram, Twitter, and the internet in general through the disruption of genre expectations—even if this mode is also organic to those genres and has been fairly absorbed—poems that coolly perform vulnerability are a bit too on-the-nose genre-wise. Lyric poetry has most traditionally been exactly about performative vulnerability—it’s its main thing, really. Moreover, in this case, something feels bad about it: the poems adhere to lyrical convention, but in this iteration the speakers are both myopic and shaped by the new, dead, corporate internet. The internet demands that we perform ourselves in writing constantly; there’s a certain semi-detached yet intimate voice we tend to use for that; that voice is now the speaker in poems pretty frequently. The shift from memes to poems feels unnecessary: we have to deal with the internet somehow, so we might as well write with that voice there. But that voice as a poem’s speaker feels unnecessarily myopic and depressive. 

Which makes me think again about alphabetizing my book shelf and looking at a lot of work that people did sometimes under the banner of flarf or conceptualism, but often without any named affiliation—work that was about the internet, and also about a lot of other things in relation to the internet, including the processing of information. One lesson I take from the Kenneth Goldsmith incident at Brown—in which Goldsmith read Michael Brown’s autopsy report as a poem—is, don’t let mainstream liberal, politically thoughtless art-world climbers who are interested in things like going to the Obama-era White House play a central role in representing and setting the public agenda for a much larger range of aesthetic practices. Somehow Vanessa Place is still out there publishing rape jokes even now. Looking at my bookshelf: a lot of work about the internet, copyright, found text, assemblage, and documentation does not have the sort of provocateur-ish vibe that Goldsmith’s and Place’s books do. But even among provocateur-ish poets, Place and Goldsmith are, I think, loud outliers—alongside perhaps a few others whose projects I think are truly fucked up—in their insistence on altering the speaker-function in poetry as a pretext for saying racist and misogynistic things.

One unifying feature that characterizes a lot of actually interesting conceptual writing (as well as Goldsmith’s and Place’s projects), though, is a detachment and coolness, especially in relation to the reader’s ability or inability to pin down an authorial voice or view. In my favorite  pieces from this moment, this occurs as a sort of hedging around authorship that specifically opens out to others; the sudden weird access that the internet gives to strangers’ lives, writing, and interior worlds—something that feels entirely natural to us at this point, but that was surprising in the early- to mid-aughts—is a point of potential connection. Robert Fitterman’s This Window Makes Me Feel, which Fitterman created from searches for the title phrase, was written in the wake of 9/11 and seems like a way to both reflect and route dominant affects in that moment. I distinctly remember hearing Rob read at Amherst Books when I was a beginning MFA student at UMass. His framing of the project was basically: if I have access to so many people’s feelings, through the internet, why would I write about only my feelings? This appealed to me along two axes. One: I was, in some fundamental way, someone who was hesitant to write about my own feelings. That axis is mostly a negative one; I think I’ve fixed it through aging and therapy. (But also: there are probably a lot of us out here who love writing and poetry and are also hesitant to write about our own feelings. This is a thing, right?) The second axis is better—I was, I think, interested in collectivity. I encountered Rob’s work just before I first got involved in the anti-war movement (and, subsequently, left politics more generally). It’s now easy to see how deeply dead the Left was in the early 2000s. I write this with total admiration and gratitude for people who kept it going in that period. But it was small and isolated and didn’t feel available as a place for one’s feelings of rage, isolation, etc. Fitterman’s concept for This Window Makes Me Feel and also his framing of it—if I can read all these other peoples’ feelings, why would I write only about my own?—feels like an aesthetic indexing and amplifying of the little spurts of collectivity offered, somewhat paradoxically, by the internet in this moment of total political isolation for many people. (I’m thinking again of Mark Fisher/K-Punk, actually.) Similarly, Tan Lin’s ambient poetics in BlipSoak01 and Seven Controlled Vocabularies weave in and out of different types of text, situating the personal amidst other people’s thoughts and words as well as other types of texts altogether, reworking the form of the book in relation to the internet. The best projects that eschew the conventional speaker-function are about relationality.

I still feel an orientation to the reaching-for-potential-collectivity that animates a lot of conceptual writing. But I no longer feel an orientation toward the coolness and detachment, though I think a similar detachment proliferates now in the meme-like poems I refer to above. Total earnestness felt almost nonexistent in the early 2000s, really—before Occupy I would say. That is: I look at my old work and many of my friends’ old work and recall that operating in any mode but a critical one seemed out of the realm of possibility. One could be ironic and/or one could critique. I know this wasn’t at all universal. But I also don’t think it was uncommon. Even as I got politically involved, it didn’t feel like I could speak in earnest in a poem about something interesting. The late 90s and early 2000s were a sort of dead zone in thinking the future vs. the current moment of hyperhistoricity (as Marissa Brostoff and Andrea Long Chu describe our current moment here).

When I was 24 or so, I wrote a whole book of poetry about celebrity culture and tabloids. I don’t have bad feelings about it or anything, and I think I was attracted to flarf and conceptual writing because something about a traditional lyric voice felt disingenuous to me in that moment. But in hindsight maybe the best thing that book was doing was indexing a sort of paucity of affective options, maybe at a personal level but also decidedly at a political level. The collective mood was one of jaded detachment; the Left was tiny; we didn’t know the future. Or rather: we thought we knew the future and that it was unalterable.

Later the historical circumstances would shift and suddenly it would feel alterable. A wider range of affects would become available through political activity and a shift in the horizon. (Not that right now is a happy political moment in any sense, but certainly the future does not feel totally pre-determined.) If the best conceptual writing reached for a cautious connectivity and highlighted the weird, incidental burp of online connection in a period of individual isolation, depoliticization, and ironic distancing, poetry today often reflects the wider range of affects made available by widespread political activity.

A thing seems like it happens more easily now: one can draw a line between one’s own affects and the affects of others, pinpointing the shared causes of anxiety or suffering or malaise, allowing the shared feeling to proliferate, allowing one to get absorbed in the shared-ness of the shared feeling. I.e., if we’re mostly describing the world in our poetry, the current world offers us the possibility of solidarity. Because of activist work and the rebuilding of a Left, as well as the destabilizing aspects of the myriad disasters occurring right now, a connectivity involving the self feels far more available than it once did; coolness feels out of key, especially the coolness of writing about oneself through the contours created by the now corporate internet. Our connections are right at hand. In 2009, Mark Fisher wrote:

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again. (Capitalist Realism, 81).

Conceptualism was, I think, a poetics keyed exactly to that dark night of the end of history, and the best of conceptual work was precisely about those glimmers of an alternative that could be glimpsed in the internet of the aughts. Now that social movements—Occupy, Black Lives Matter, teachers’ strikes, all of it—have tossed away the gray curtain, we no longer need the internet—particularly in its current mode of performative, cool vulnerability—to figure our ourselves and our solidarities.