Inpersonate
Poetry, Comedy, and the Damages Incurred
The following is a transcript of a lecture I presented at “The Works: A Literary Salon,” in Minneapolis, October 4th, 2011
Facebook is known as a filter in the sense that it is used to control our experience of the worldwide web. According to a recent article in The New York Times, the company is keenly aware of this, aiming to make use of technology which allows users to keep informed of what their friends are consuming, in order to “leverage peer pressure at a grand scale.” Facebook filters what we see and hear, but it doesn’t filter what we say. Only we do that. Whether or not we do is something I’m not here to argue, but ask you to consider in light of what I’m here to say, which two popular, predominant assumptions about poetry both challenge and support: The first being that poetry is a Faberge egg full of meaning, which in the process of being read is in fact carefully handed, almost whispered, from a speaker to a listener, like a secret, or a bottle of mercury. The second being poetry’s impossibility of being understood. The first was probably began by poets who once found themselves in the unfortunate position of having to account for poetry’s inability to inspire action — the poems were (thus) about being, not doing; the second was probably began by poets in need of defending poetry from science, in order to reclaim funding from the major universities. A third and ancillary assumption is that poetry, by extension of being deeply true and personal, is more or less ephemeral. For if we regard and laud poems as containers full of truths, we must also assume they are restricted to precise moments in time, when certain truths were true in certain contexts; moments from one poet to another of being, or having been, in the moment.
Perhaps you’re worried my point is to decry the fact that what we share online isn’t true, or at least isn’t the whole truth, but my sense of things is that, as writers, we ought to be putting on a better show. Perhaps because truth is not measurable or even discernable when it comes to poetry, which envelops our interest for the very reason that what it has to say cannot be stated any other way than how it’s said, without encumbering the poem’s sounds and rhythms, and the materiality of its language. To do so, to try and understand the meaning of the contents of a poem by treating them like purely logical or scientific facts whose validity depends on being able to endure reiteration via synonyms and syntax would be like screaming the name of a lost child in hopes that he/she will appear, in effect causing said child to stay put, in fear. This distinction between poetry and other forms of written communication reveals to us, as the poet and philosopher John Koethe (2009) points out in his essay, “Poetry and Truth,” that whereas science and philosophy are concerned primarily with a subject and the empiricism surrounding its authenticity, poetry has permission to concern itself with perspective on that subject; a privilege to which Koethe ascribes “consciousness”; a term that we’ve (or at least I’ve) come to associate with one’s “identity,” as if the two were fungible. And I suspect I’m not alone.
By interacting as we write (whether with the aid of editorial software, such as Will You. Type With. Me, or social media like Twitter), by being made even aware of the efficacy and ease with which we might, by belonging, in other words, to a community in service of commodities, we sacrifice, to some degree, our belief in who we are; that necessary, evolutionarily developed sense of identity uncompromised, as compromised, or mitigated, by our concurrent need for approval and acceptance by others, which we then strive to impress, in the form of someone, or something, put together, not unlike a text.
At least since the dawn of New Criticism, texts, whether apprehended by a critic or a reader, have been the basis for critical and subjective acts of interpretation, independent of performance. “The written form of a word,” as opposed to that of speech, “strikes us a permanent, solid object,” Saussure reminds us (as cited in Middleton, 2005, pg. 53). And yet, as Peter Middleton (2005) argues in his study of performance and consumption of contemporary poetry, “Writing and silent reading have helped create assumptions about reading that would not seem so obvious in an oral society” (pg. 67). Not the least of which assumes that “Staging, authorship… and intersubjectivity are constitutive elements” reserved for public readings by an author, rather than private readings of a text (pg. 59). While we, not just as “authors,” but as users of modern communication technologies, no doubt do as much, if not more, writing than speaking, both require us to interact and, as composers do, “anticipate performance” (pg. 59), not just of a text, replete with various proper pronunciations and inflections, but an attributable, spontaneous identity. “Texts need to insist on their distinction,” writes Middleton, “in the face of so much media artifice, and the simplest means is to manufacture authenticity through… the performance of the individuality of authorship” (pg. 78). Analogously, John Koethe, in a 2009 recorded lecture and discussion of confessional poetry at The University of Chicago, refers to “the guise of the truth-teller”; the job poets give themselves to behave and speak like poets.
According to a recent issue of InStyle magazine, in a section titled, cleverly, “Keep Almost Everything Private” (italics mine), 77% of social network users don’t restrict access to the content that they post about themselves. The premise here, and undergirding the excitement of social media in general, is that there is a correlation between who we are and what we say, or in the case of Heidi Klum, show about ourselves. “What’s on your mind,” Facebook’s home page asks, along with several recent ads for software, phones, and carriers, all enticing users to express their every thought, the moment that it comes. And therein, ossified by such demands/invitations on how one might spend one’s time, lies, if not our disenchantments, our begrudged assumptions about what social media has turned us into: Open books, whose every thought (as I’m sure most of us hear, or think, on a regular basis) isn’t worth sharing. My contention, perhaps “as a writer,” however, is that the contents of our thoughts couldn’t be further isolated or partitioned from our expression of them outward. For reasons having everything to do with who we are and who we’re not, yet.
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3. Be Discreet When You Tweet
Think twice before broadcasting your every thought on Twitter. As master tweeters Lady Gaga and Kim Kardashian know, thoughtful, humorous messages are what their followers want (2011).
For more on what I mean by that, consider this: By the time a human being is just three-years-old, she conceives of herself as an “extended” self. That is, she understands herself to have existed in the past and can envision her existence in the future. In Living Autobiographically, life-writing expert Paul John Eakin (2008) argues thus that our lives are themselves structured very much like narratives, spread out in our minds over an extended period of time. When I hesitate until the point of pressing send, I am, according to Eakin, living autobiographically, which, encompassed by a product of self-narrative, known as the “teller-effect,” allows me to present myself to myself at the same time that it allows me to construct myself by looking forward, which Eakin understands in evolutionary terms as a survival tactic. In order then to present the present, we tend first to perceive it from the vantage point of the future as a moment in the past. However circumscribed.
If we combine and take to heart the assumptions about poetry I mentioned earlier, if we believe it somehow represents the person the poet really is, we might say then that most poetry, in truth, is not poetic, insofar as it subscribes to metonymy and metaphor, which in equating “this” to “that” and “that” to “this,” projects its subject into the future, or at least a dually-apprehended and proclaimed present tense. Or, what we may term, the “metaphysical.”
The trappings of self-narrative, however, may reveal themselves as blessings in disguise. For while it may be impossible to write our inner lives, it is equally impossible, as Eakin’s research posits, not to live them “in the moment,” as the “teller” who we think we are, observing us at one remove, going so far as to put us in the place of others doing the same thing, can’t empirically exist, and in that sense, we truly are a character in our own life story, not only doing what we do, but saying what we only think that we don’t mean (an argument which stands enigmatically in contrast to Roland Barthes’ infamous assertion that the author lacks authority to speak with insurmountable and unbridled intention). While it is gratifying then to take part in the illusion that one acts independent of oneself, reserving for oneself a seat, not of honor, but distinction from the self made to “go public” and engage in ways that ring untrue or inauthentic, in spite of Kant’s great insight that consensus on what constitutes the normative grants concepts (and individuals) their authority, and in spite too of Foucault’s claim that in any culture there exists a fixed number of models of the self from which to choose, based on “available descriptions,” its efficacy as a means of producing and disseminating texts emblematic of authorial care, if not intent, is problematic (Eakin, 2008, pg. 97). As the poet H. L. Hix (2011) writes in the introduction to his book, Lines of Inquiry, “I am not now in the same place (literally or figuratively) as when I wrote… I understand poetry, its purposes and possibilities, differently now. So I stand by nothing of what follows” (pg. xii).
In a chapter on “circumambient orality,” Peter Middleton speculates on the potential of poetry to inhabit public space and, more critically, publicity’s potential to inflect poetry, regarding “the public performance of writing as speech, in which the ‘metaphysics of the logos’ is situated in a specific history, place and intersubjective relation (pg. 72). Such creative environments are of unprecedented import and availability in our age of social media, which all but requires texts as speech and speech as texts to improvise and remain agile, if anything, in light of being called upon to interact.
So, what of Kant’s assertion that the individual or act of speech must be agreed upon beforehand, since as Mark Zuckerberg (2011) is himself apt to admit, albeit in reference to strict, fact-based information, what we present to others is perhaps not our best side, but the side over which we have the most control (pg. B1)? Bearing in mind that response, as we can all attest, is second only to solicitation, when it comes to what is deemed of value in our Information Age, not necessarily in the form of political activism, as Time magazine (2006) would have “you” believe, but conjecture and opinion. From texting in requests for encores at the symphony (Clifford, 2009) to telling guests a bit about oneself on Evite, one responds in effort to announce that one contains within them multitudes; “an understanding of what may still be… a mark of our own promise (italics mine)… our own authorship” (Joyce, 2006, pg. 80).
How then can such foresight, such Lacanian predilection for observance of oneself in the context of performance come to terms with aforementioned popular notions of how written language manifests in public (i.e., as unfiltered inundations of too much information)? How, in other words, can self-consciousness hope to present itself? And what about those “multitudes”? What about the possibility of playing morethan one character in the story of one’s life?
Persona is a term assigned to poems written with the aid and adoption of a “voice” that is decidedly not the poet’s own, curiously ascribed to well-known writers and comedians, as well, especially in relation to the stage. If, as Eakin writes, “The brain’s narrative is not only wordless, but untold… a fleeting instantiation of subjectivity,” persona, too, deserves attention as a potential means of writing and appearing in “real-time” at the same time. For if we treat our lives as narratives, both off the stage and on, our tendency will be not to live more literarily, but to treat our selves as finished products, and to judge that product solely by its having met or exceeded (while never losing sight of) expectations.
Roland Barthes didn’t kill the author, just his clout. It is our job then to die, in effect by reimagining Barthes’ claim that texts themselves are meaningless, and expecting just as much, or little, as the case may be, from documents and presentations of the self, our self, which, as Hix’s remark infers, is really one of many.
To do so, we must first and foremost recognize that Facebook, and all social media, is itself a form, not unlike the poet’s sonnet or the comedian’s half-hour, and form itself a content (as cited in Eakins, 2008, pg. 107), and endeavor thus to challenge both the form and our use of it to enable and encourage the “experience of truth,” as Koethe puts it, since “the animating force of poetic speculation is… desire, rather than an ideal of impersonal accuracy” (Koethe, 2000, pg. 3).
Such “accuracy” is the apparent aim of several poets and comedians I won’t say more about. Rather, I would like to draw attention to the work of long-form, comedic poets, such as George Bilgere, Stephen Dobyns, David Kirby, John Koethe, and Mark Halliday, to name but a few, whose writing bears a likeness to the anti-routines of long-form comedians, such as Norm MacDonald and Garry Shandling, who in their spontaneity, and ability, as Shandling says, to not know along with us if the joke’s “a joke or not,” don’t pretend to be accountable to versions of themselves (Shandling, 2010). And too for characteristics of both forms, which, intentionally or not, emulate those of social media, including their insistence on the “I,” their occurrence in “real-time,” and most importantly, their struggle to coral each moment of consciousness into a comprehensive whole.
The long-form comedian then has the potential to pick up where the Romantic poet left off, in terms of his identifying consciousness as manifest, while not holding identity responsible for what he is or isn’t willing to admit; a luxury perhaps afforded by new media, which, unlike the first TV, no longer requires the performer or comedian to be everything to everyone (Rock, 2011). Similarly, these poets don’t appear to spend their poems asking how to best behave and speak like them. But instead seem to enjoy the process of discovering what’s funny and surprising and, in doing so, what’s not, as the following excerpt from David Kirby’s poem typifies.
“The first rule of improv,” says Conan O’Brien, in the 2011 documentary, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop “is act like it’s normal,” which seems a good rule of thumb for poets, as well, in the age of social media: “Act like it’s normal,” and in doing so, it just may be.
My poem “About Last Night” was recently published in Volume 4 of Raft Magazine. You can read (and hear!) the poem at www.raftmagazineonline.com
“About Last Night” is the first in a new series of poems about poetry that attempt to openly-discuss and openly-perform the fact that poems, perhaps not unlike texts and tweets, are not written in real-time.
Originally appeared in Volume 1, Issue 1 of Sleet
Originally appeared in Volume 2 of Todd Boss’ Flurry
Originally appeared in What Light Poetry Project on mnartists.org
A blog and app, regularly updated with everything you need to know about St. Paul. You can find my recent review of Bars Bakery here: http://stpaulspot.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/bars-a-lust-for/
My friend Jake’s blog that’s funnier than mine
The following’s what took place after I received a three-page show rider request form to play roughly the same number of minutes worth of music, in St. Paul:
Organization Name as you would like it to appear on SampleNightLive.com, in promotional materials and press releases:
Colin McDonald
Actual Name:
Colin McDonald
Please provide a written description of your performance from start to finish, including technical elements. How will your performance begin?
I’ll come on with my guitar and sit down and play music
How will your performance end?
I’ll stop playing music and leave
Closing bands (only the band that closes the show) play 4 songs and then have the option to play an additional song to play the audience out. Would you like to play the additional song?
Yea!
How long is each song (exact length)?
I can’t, I’m opening
Pre-recorded music is not permitted. There is a baby grand piano available for your use. Will you be needing to use the piano?
Not unless the tape stops
How long is each song (exact length)?
About three minutes
If you are singing OR producing live music how many songs are you performing?
Wait, I know this one…
If you would like your DVD returned, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope.
Which one did you take?
