4     TOWARD A POETICS OF HYPERREALISM

 

The rise of identity politics of the past have given voice to many that have been denied. And there is still so much work to be done: many voices are still marginalized and ignored. Every effort must be made to be made to ensure that those who have something to say have a place to say it and an audience to hear it. The importance of this work cannot be underestimated.

Still, identity is a slippery issue, and no single approach can nail it. For instance, I don’t think that there’s a stable or essential “me.” I am an amalgamation of many things: books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, televisions shows I’ve watched, conversations I’ve had, songs I’ve sung, lovers I’ve loved. In fact, I’m a creation of so many people and so many ideas, to the point where I feel I’ve actually had few original thoughts and ideas; to think that what I consider to be “mine” was “original” would be blindingly egotistical. Sometimes, I’ll think that I’ve had an original thought or feeling and then, at 2 A.M., while watching an old movie on TV that I hadn’t seen in many years, the protagonist will spout something that I had previously claimed as my own. In other words, I took his words (which, of course, weren’t really “his words” at all), internalized them, and made them my own. This happens all the time.

Often—mostly unconsciously—I’ll model my identity of myself on some image that I’ve been pitched to by an advertisement. When I’m trying on clothes in a store, I will bring forth that image that I’ve seen in an ad and mentally insert myself and my image into it. It’s all fantasy. I would say that an enormous part of my identity has been adopted from advertising. I very much live in this culture; how could I possibly ignore such powerful forces? Is it ideal? Probably not. Would I like not to be so swayed by the forces of advertising and consumerism? Of course, but I would be kidding myself if I didn’t admit that this was a huge part of who I am as a member of this culture.

Transgendered persons are trying to become the people who they are, not the ones they were born as. Transsexual persons too are in a constant state of remaking themselves, laboring courageously their whole lives to adopt new and fluid identities. I feel inspired by such fluid and changeable notions of identity.

On the Internet, these tendencies move in different directions, with identity running the gamut from authenticity to total fabrication. With much less commitment than it takes in meatspace, we project various personae with mere stokes of a keyboard. Online, I tend to morph in different directions: in this chat room I’m a woman; on this blog I’m a political conservative; in this forum I’m a middle-aged golfer. And I never get called out for not being authentic or real. On the contrary, I am addressed as “madam” or “you right-wing asshole.” As such, I’ve come to expect that the person I think I’m addressing on the Internet isn’t really “that person.”

If my identity is really up for grabs and changeable by the minute—as I believe it is—it’s important that my writing reflect this state of ever-shifting identity and subjectivity. That can mean adopting voices that aren’t “mine,” subjectivities that aren’t “mine,” political positions that aren’t “mine,” opinions that aren’t “mine,” words that aren’t “mine” because, in the end, I don’t think that I can possibly define what’s mine and what isn’t.

Sometimes, by the noninterventionist reproduction of texts, we can shed light on political issues in a more profound and illuminating way than we can by conventional critique. If we wished to critique globalism, for example, uncreative writing’s response would be to replicate and reframe the transcript from a G8 summit meeting where they refused to ratify climate control threats as is, revealing much more than one ever could by editorializing. Let the text speak for itself: in the case of the G8, they’ll hang themselves through their own stupidity. I call this poetry.

No matter what we do with language, it will be expressive. How could it be otherwise? In fact, I feel it is impossible, working with language, not to express oneself. If we back off and let the material do its work, we might even in the end be able to surprise and delight ourselves with the results.

Uncreative writing is a postidentity literature. With digital fragmentation, any sense of unified authenticity and coherence has long been shelved. Walter Ong claims that writing is a technology and is therefore an artificial act: “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word … Technologies are artificial, but—paradox again—artificiality is natural to the human being. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it.”1 Robert Fitterman, whose works embrace our shifting identities shaped by the forces of consumerism, posits:

Can we express subjectivity, even personal experience, without necessarily using our own personal experience? … There has clearly been a desire to engage or reclaim the personal. I am interested in the inclusion of subjectivity and personal experience; I just prefer if it isn’t my own. Today I have access to an unlimited number of personal utterances and expressions from the gut, or the heart. Why listen to my gut when I could listen to thousands of guts? … For writers coming of age in the 70s and 80s, the notion of multiple identities and appropriated identities is a sort of native language, a natural outgrowth of the multiple personas that have been engineered and then targeted by market strategists.2

 

Fitterman cites the visual artist Mike Kelley, who also frames the identity discourse in terms of consumerism: “Glam rock was a music that fully understood the commercial music world and accepted its arena of façade and emptiness, using the image of the drag queen as a sign of its status.… David Bowie adopts personas, throws them away at whim, and constantly reinvents himself for the market. He mirrors our culture of planned obsolescence. For consumer culture, it has been suggested, the constantly changing, chameleon persona represents empowerment.”3 Writing needs to move in this direction.

And yet, who isn’t moved by an authentic story? Surely one of the most inspiring identity-based narratives in recent history is that of Barack Obama. In a speech he gave at his family’s ancestral village in Kenya on the occasion of a school named in his honor, he spoke of pride from whence he came as well as of how Kenya imbued his grandfather with the values that would propel the Obama family to stupendous achievements in the United States: “He grew up around here. He was taking care of goats for my grandfather, and, maybe, sometimes, he would go to a school not so different from the Senator Barack Obama School. Except, maybe, it was smaller, and had even less in terms of equipment and books, the teachers were paid even less, and, sometimes, there wasn’t enough money to go to school full time. Yet, despite all that, the community lifted him up, and gave him the opportunity to go to secondary school, then go to university in America, then get a Ph.D. in Harvard.”4

America is full of such incredible stories. Another comes from the Armenian American writer Ara Shirinyan. He was born in the Armenian Socialist Republic in the USSR into a family that was dispersed all over the Middle East in the wake of the Armenian genocide. In 1987 his family moved to the United States with $1,500 and a few suitcases. His father went to work the second day after they arrived as a jeweler. His mother did the same as an antique rug restorer. They worked seven days a week and bought a house a year after they arrived. His father’s business grew when he began manufacturing jewelry, selling tons of kilos of it. By the time he retired, his business occupied an entire floor of a large building in downtown LA. Ara, a product of public and state schools, now has an international reputation and thriving career as a writer. He is very much involved with the close-knit community of Armenian Americans.

It’s moving story. Why, then, would he choose to not to write about it when he penned an award-winning book about nationalities? In his book Your Country Is Great, he’s taken the names of every country in the world, organized them A to Z, and Googled the phrase “[country name] is great”—coming up with mostly user-reviewed travel sites—selecting and sorting the results by nation. He then lineated the comments, with each stanza representing another opinion. The result is a multinational Baedeker of user-driven content and opinion. Unsourced and unsigned, the piece is by turns ugly and gorgeous, helpful and harmful, truthful and misleading, vital and completely irrelevant. By bringing a cool and rational methodology to these inherently passionate identity-based discussions, Shirinyan lets the words speak for themselves, permitting the reader to process the opinions expressed.

In his book, his home country Armenia is treated no differently than Aruba, the next country that appears alphabetically:

ARMENIA IS GREAT

armenia is great country

famous for its christianity!

 

Armenia is great, and Yerevan is a city

where people live their lifes to the maximum

I love you Yerevan,

I love your streets,

your sidewalks,

 

Armenia is great

everyone should go back

at least once

 

the new information on Armenia is great—

lots of good information—

I’ll have to remember not to give

anyone 2 flowers!

 

I also do not speak our language

Armenia is great though.

I have been there

and made good friends,

even though I could not

speak a word to them.

 

Tour to Armenia is a great success!

To Understand Our

Past,

Is To Understand

Ourselves.

 

renovated sidewalks, roads, and

unprecedented High Rise buildings

going up

the future of Armenia is great.

 

With such warm summers

and very cold winters

you will learn a great deal

about the history of Yerevan

 

Armenia is great

I love it, but I dont think

it is for me.5

 

ARUBA IS GREAT

aruba is great

its beaches are beautiful

and the people are great

 

Aruba is great for diving

and seeing marine life

with visibility up to 90 ft.

You will see sponge tubes,

gliding manta rays, sea turtles, lobsters,

The taxi service on Aruba is great,

but we like to pick up and go wherever

and whenever we want,

so the rental is great for us.

 

Aruba is great for sightseeing, shopping,

and a variety of water sports.

You should plan on renting a car

to explore the island.

 

Aruba is great,

not a drop of rain,

barely a cloud and yet

never felt too hot

 

Aruba is great,

that is where i went

on my honeymoon last year.

I love it!

There are many places to stay.

The Marriott is nice,

the Wyndham is nice.

 

Aruba is great for singles,

couples and families. Probably

the best miniature golf courses

in the world are in Aruba

 

Aruba is great for a honeymoon

for the following reasons:

1. No hurricanes

2. Predictable weather

3. Tons to do

 

Aruba is great.

If you bust out early,

be sure to go snorkelling.

They have a party bus

for bar hopping6

 

What does this tell us about Armenia or Aruba? Not much. Shirinyan foregoes a personal narrative to demonstrate a larger point: the deadening effects of globalization on language. Collapsing the space between the “real world” and the World Wide Web, his book calls into question: What is local? What is national? What is multicultural? Instead of accepting current notions of language as a medium of differentiation, Shirinyan persuasively demonstrates its leveling quality, demolishing meaning into a puddle of platitudes in a time when everything is great, yet nothing is great. It’s great if I’ve been there: global tourism as authority.

Shirinyan’s careful selection and juxtaposition of phrases makes this work a textbook example of how a writer might go about carving a technology-fueled postidentity writing practice, one that makes the reader wonder whether the author’s identity actually had anything to do with the person who wrote it. Yet it doesn’t shy away from employing the first person, using it strategically and liberally, but nonspecifically, producing a work that is at once fiercely nationalistic and, at the same time, surprisingly bland.

The French artist Claude Closky, in his book Mon Catalog , takes a different but equally dispassionate tact by listing every possession he owns accompanied by the actual catalog or ad copy which advertised that possession. For the piece, he simply , substituted the directive “you” or “yours” for a subjective “I” or “mine.”

An excerpt reads:

MY REFRIGERATOR

 

The usable volume of my refrigerator is far superior to conventional capacities, and allows me to store my fresh and frozen products. The meat compartment with adjustable temperature and the crisper with humidity control assure me a perfect preservation of my food. Furthermore, the fan-cooling makes and dispenses my ice to me as well as fresh water. Moreover, my refrigerator is equipped with an antibacterial coating that helps me maintain it.

 

MY CLEANSING GEL

 

To gradually mattify the shiny appearance of my skin, tighten my dilated pores and clean my blackheads, I have a solution: clean my face every night with my purifying gel with zinc—known to be an active controller of sebum that eliminates, without chafing, the impurities accumulated during the day. My skin is no longer shiny. The soothing power of zinc, reinforced by a moisturizing agent, softens and relaxes the dry areas of my face. My skin no longer pulls.

 

MY ONE-PIECE GLASSES

 

I tame the sun’s rays with my one-piece glasses. True shields against harmful UV radiation and too-bright light, I can also appreciate them as glasses, as they surround my face perfectly. I benefit from the panoramic vision of the enveloping impact-resistant Lexan glass. Filtering ultraviolet rays on all sides, they protect my eyes not only from the sun, but also wind, sand, and dust. The ultimate refinement: a small foam band contours perfectly to my face, assuring comfort and a perfect fit. Extremely lightweight, I enjoy wearing them in all circumstances. With their removable cord, I also appreciate them while playing my favorite sports.7

 

Closky creates a consumer-frenzied overload of language, a contemporary form of self-portraiture, voluntarily defining oneself not only by what one owns, but professing to let oneself be completely possessed by one’s possessions. Refusing to moralize, editorialize, or emote in any way, he’s propping himself up as the ultimate consumer, an uber-consumer. He doesn’t need to be won over, he’s already sold. If I tell you that I will not only buy everything you’re trying to sell me, but that I will embrace your products to the point of strangulation, what good are your pitches? Closky is one step ahead of the marketers and, by so doing, offers a linguistically based antidote to consumer-oriented capitalism.

In S/Z Roland Barthes performs an exhaustive structuralist deconstruction of Honoré de Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine.” In it he reveals how signifiers of class are expressed in seemingly innocuous statements about parties, furnishings, or gardens. His book gives you the tools to tease out these codes from any work of art. But what uncreative writing potentially allows is an inversion of Barthes’s project, a situation in which those normally hidden codes are brought front and center, comprising the entire artwork. Like so much advertising, music, film, and visual art, the literary discourse has been moved to the next level.

What do we do with a work like Alexandra Nemerov’s “First My Motorola,” which is a list of every brand she touched over the course of a day in chronological order, from the moment she woke up until the moment she went to sleep? The piece begins:

First, my Motorola

Then my Frette

Then my Sonia Rykiel

Then my Bvulgari

Then my Asprey

Then my Cartier

Then my Kohler

Then my Brightsmile

Then my Cetaphil

Then my Braun

Then my Brightsmile

Then my Kohler

Then my Cetaphil

Then my Bliss

Then my Apple

Then my Kashi

Then my Maytag

Then my Silk

Then my Pom

 

and ends:

Then my Ralph Lauren

Then my La Perla

Then my H&M

Then my Anthropology

Then my Motorola

Then my Bvulgari

Then my Asprey

Then my Cartier

Then my Frette

Then my Sonia Rykiel

And finally, my Motorola8

 

Nemerov doesn’t situate these brands in terms of likes and dislikes as opposed to Closky who “cheerfully” professes to “like” his humidity controlled refrigerator. There’s nothing here but brands. Nemerov is a cipher, a shell, a pure robotic consumer. Enacting Barbara Kruger’s famous sloagan, “I shop therefore I am,” she boldly creates a new type of self-portraiture: a complicit demographic, a marketer’s dream.

In 2007 Time Magazine questioned whether the $200 million gift that pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly gave to the Poetry Foundation could really change the way people feel about poetry: “The $200 million won’t change that; nothing, not even money, can get people to enjoy something against their will. What poetry really needs is a writer who can do for it what Andy Warhol did for avant-garde visual art: make it sexy and cool and accessible without making it stupid or patronizing. When that writer arrives, cultural change will come swiftly, and relatively effortlessly.”9 While there are a number of problems with this statement—by choosing Warhol, he’s hoping for a return to a specific cultural moment, which permitted Warhol to become Warhol: the sixties, a time that isn’t coming back anytime soon—his challenge does however make me wonder why there hasn’t been an Andy Warhol for poetry.

You might think that during the boom years of the George W. Bush administration, pro-consumerist poets would have come out of the woodwork. But no. Instead Bush’s poet laureates, such as Billy Collins, who wrote about fishing on the Susquehanna in July (though the poem is really about him not fishing there), or Ted Kooser, with his pastoral descriptions of porch swings in September, or Donald Hall and his nostalgic rural ox cart men, were hopelessly out of touch with what was obsessing most Americans (and most of the world): buying things. Ultimately, it’s not surprising that a Bush poet laureate hearkens back to a form of nostalgic poetry, unaware that they were performing a simulacra for a time when poets genuinely wrote about “true” American values.

The poetry world has yet to experience its version of Pop Art—and Pop Art happened over fifty years ago In spite of the many proposed alternative uses of language (concrete poetry, language poetry, FC2-style innovative fiction, etc.), writing in the popular imagination has by and large stuck to traditional, narrative, and transparent uses, which have prevented it from experiencing a kind of Pop Art–like watershed. While, for example, the New York school fondled consumerism sweetly, using pop as a portal to subjectivity—(O’Hara: “Having a Coke with you /is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irú, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne”)10—it never came close to the cold objectivity, the naked, prophetic words of Warhol: “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the president knows it, the bum knows it and you know it.”11

The July/August 2009 issue of Poetry magazine, published by the Poetry Foundation, kicks off with a short poem by Tony Hoagland called “At the Galleria Shopping Mall,” warning us of the pitfalls of consumerism:

Just past the bin of pastel baby socks and underwear,

there are some 49-dollar Chinese-made TVs;

 

one of them singing news about a far-off war,

one comparing the breast size from Hollywood

 

to the breast size of an actress from Bollywoood.

And here is my niece Lucinda,

 

who is nine and a true daughter of Texas,

who has developed the flounce of a pedigreed blonde

 

And declares that her favorite sport is shopping.

Today is the day she embarks upon her journey,

 

swinging a credit card like a scythe

through the meadows of golden merchandise.

 

Today is the day she stops looking at faces,

and starts assessing the labels of purses;

 

So let it begin. Let her be dipped in the dazzling bounty

and raised and wrung out again and again.

 

And let us watch.

As the gods in olden stories

 

turned mortals into laurel trees and crows

to teach them some kind of lesson,

 

so we were turned into Americans

to learn something about loneliness.12

 

Poor Lucinda is taken in by the oldest adage in the book—all that glitters is not gold—losing her humanity in the process: “Today is the day she stops looking at faces / and starts assessing the labels of purses.” The only way this young girl can learn her lesson is the way we elders/gods have learned ours: only after succumbing to the temptations, did we come to realize the folly of our pursuits. Ah, youth! The telescopic nature of the piece in the last stanza widens to give us—as a culture, as a nation—pause to think how alienated, lonely and how disconnected from humanity such encounters have made us. It’s a poem that has something specific to teach us; one that imparts true and wise values, wagging its knowing finger at the folly of youth.

By giving us snapshots of specific moments—pastel baby socks, underwear, Chinese-made TVs—Hoagland attempts to express in shorthand what Rem Koolhaas calls “Junkspace”: a type of provisional architecture that has given us malls, casinos, airports, and so forth. But trying to specify or stabilize anything in Junkspace works against the nature of Junkspace: “Because it cannot be grasped, Junkspace cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver; its refusal to freeze insures instant amnesia. Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection, only interest.… Brands in Junkspace perform the same role as black holes in the universe: essences through which meaning disappears.”13 Like an easel painter setting up outside the mezzanine-level entrance of J. C. Penny and trying to render the mall experience in oils, Hoagland chooses the wrong approach using the wrong materials: deep image doesn’t fly in this weightless space.

In the same issue of Poetry is a poem by Robert Fitterman called “Directory,” which is simply a directory from an unnamed mall, looped with poetic concerns for form, meter, and sound. Koolhaas tells us that Junkspace is a labyrinth of reflection: “It promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish, echo).”14 Fitterman’s listing of a mall directory purports to be as numbing, dead, and dull as the mall experience itself, purposely encouraging linguistic disorientation by reflecting rather than expressing:

Macy’s

Circuit City

Payless Shoes

Sears

Kay Jewelers

GNC

LensCrafters

Coach

H & M

RadioShack

Gymboree

 

The Body Shop

Eddie Bauer

Crabtree & Evelyn

Gymboree

Foot Locker

 

Land’s End

GNC

LensCrafters

Coach Famous Footwear

H & M

 

LensCrafters

Foot Locker

GNC Macy’s

Crabtree & Evelyn

H & M

Cinnabon

Kay Jewelers

Land’s End

 

Hickory Farms

GNC

The Body Shop

Eddie Bauer

Payless Shoes

Circuit City

Kay Jewelers

Gymboree

 

The Body Shop

Hickory Farms

Coach

Macy’s

GNC

Circuit City

Sears

 

H & M

Kay Jewelers

Land’s End

LensCrafters

Eddie Bauer

Cinnabon

 

RadioShack

GNC

Sears

Crabtree & Evelyn15

 

Fitterman’s list is reminiscent of Koolhaas, speaking about the Junkspace of the Dallas/Fort Worth airport (DFW): “DFW is composed of three elements only, repeated ad infinitum, nothing else: one kind of beam, one kind of brick, one kind of tile, all coated in the same color—is it teal? rust? tabacco?…Its drop-off is the seemingly harmless beginning of a journey to the heart of unmitigated nothingness, beyond animation by Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen …”16 Fitterman’s repeated nonspecificity mirrors the nature of global capitalism by giving us instantly recognizable name brands in a numbing stream. It’s as if RadioShack is interchangeable with Circuit City—and aren’t they, really? The effect of Fitterman’s poem is like the looping background of The Flintstones, where the same tree and mountain keep scrolling by again and again: H&M, Kay’s Jewelers, and The Body Shop keep repeating. And, as alienated or invigorated as Hoagland’s niece is purported to feel, running our eyes down Fitterman’s list of deadening stores gives us, the reader—first hand—the feeling of being in a mall. By doing very little, Fitterman has actually given us a more realistic experience than Hoagland, without having to resort to sermonizing to convince us of his point. The lesson of the poem is the experience of the poem.

The former United States poet laureate Donald Hall, in his poem “Ox Cart Man,” writes of a different kind of market experience:

In October of the year,

he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,

counting the seed, counting

the cellar’s portion out,

and bags the rest on the cart’s floor.

 

He packs wool sheared in April, honey

in combs, linen, leather

tanned from deerhide,

and vinegar in a barrel

hoped by hand at the forge’s fire.

 

He walks by his ox’s head, ten days

to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,

and the bag that carried potatoes,

flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose

feathers, yarn.

 

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.

When the cart is sold he sells the ox,

harness and yoke, and walks

home, his pockets heavy

with the year’s coin for salt and taxes,

 

and at home by fire’s light in November cold

stitches new harness

for next year’s ox in the barn,

and carves the yoke, and saws planks

building the cart again.17

 

Unlike Hoagland’s niece, who produces nothing and is, at this stage of her life, only capable of blind consumption, or Fitterman’s objectified view of consumerism, Hall presents us with an idealized, nostalgic picture that feels like something out of a Currier and Ives lithograph. This was a time when men were honest and did honest work; when a man not only grew, harvested, packed, transported nature’s bounty but also sold them. From October to November he worked hard, at once depleting and replenishing for the next season, in touch with nature’s cycle.

In a review of Hall’s Selected Poems, Billy Collins wrote, in the Washington Post: “Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines.”18 I’d argue that the “simplicity” of Fitterman expresses truths much closer to the everyday experience of most people than the morality-fueled sentiments of Hoagland or the nostalgic rustic rural vignettes of Donald Hall. And, in that, I think these are truly populist expressions: what could be easier to understand than a list of mall stores, reflecting most American’s daily commutes past and common interactions with our endless malls?

A common accusation hurled at the avant-garde is that it is elitist and out of touch, toiling away in its ivory tower, appealing to the few who are in the know. And I’d agree that a lot of “difficult” work has been made under the mantle of populism only to be rejected by its intended audience as indecipherable, or worse, irrelevant. But uncreative writing is truly populist. Because Fitterman’s uncreative writing makes its intentions clear from the outset, telling you exactly what it is before you read it, there’s no way you can’t understand it. But then the real question emerges: why? And with that question, we move into conceptual territory that takes us away from the object into the realm of speculation. At that point, we could easily throw the book away and carry on with a discussion, a move uncreative writing applauds: the book as a platform to leap off into thought. We move from assuming a readership to embracing a thinkership. By relinquishing the burden of reading—and thereby a readership—we can begin to think of uncreative writing as having the potential to be a body of literature able to be understood by anyone. If you get the concept (and the concepts are simple)—regardless of your geographic location, income level, education, or social status—you can engage with this writing. It’s open to all.

This mode of uncreative writing offers a poetics of realism, reminiscent of the documentary impulse behind Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart series where, in the guise of dime store potboilers, he took on the massive project of how best describe in full French life during the second French Empire. From farmer to priest to food markets to department store, Zola claimed that his work transcended mere fiction; his intention was “strictly naturalist, strictly physiologist,”19 a claim closer to de Certeau than to Balzac. Inspired by Zola, the new writing is a realism beyond realism: it’s hyperrealist—a literary photorealism.

It’s commonly said that you can only teach the avant-garde in advanced courses, but Craig Dworkin, a professor at the University of Utah, feels differently. He thinks that a text like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons works well at any level because you don’t need to know any Greek myths, literary allusions, old British royal history, literary tropes, or even have a good vocabulary. You know all the words, and there they are.20 Christian Bök, a poet and professor, describes his students as objecting to works like Tender Buttons at first because they dislike familiar language being rendered unfamiliar and feel that the whole point of their education is to make unfamiliar things readily understandable (not the other way around). He spends much of his time in class trying to show the students the wonders of the strange enigma that is Stein. He showcases, for example, that when Stein takes a familiar object, such as a pinbox, and describes it as “full of points,” all of which we find “disappointing,” she is in fact making a very simple, but subtle, point about the thorniness of something so “pointless” as poetry itself.21

In its self-reflexive use of appropriated language, uncreative writing embraces the inherent and inherited politics of the borrowed words: far be it for conceptual writers to dictate the moral or political meanings of words that aren’t theirs. However, the method or machine that makes the poem sets the political agenda in motion or brings issues of morality or politics into question. Vanessa Place is a writer who represents ethically challenging and unsavory legal documents as literature. She doesn’t alter them one bit, instead she simply transfers them from the legal framework to the literary, leaving it to the reader to pass moral judgment.

There’s a touch of Melville’s Bartleby in the work of Vanessa Place. As a beacon of stillness and silence in a frenzied workplace, Bartleby’s composure and strict sense of self-imposed ethics exposed the hollowness and habitualness of the busy routine that surrounded him. Like a black hole, he sucked everyone into him, finally causing a total implosion. Place is a lawyer and, like Bartleby, much of her work involves scribing appellate briefs, that task of copying and editing, rendering complex lives and dirty deeds into “neutral” language to be presented before a court. That is her day job. Her poetry is an appropriation of the documents she writes during her day job, flipping her briefs after hours into literature. And, like most literature, they’re chock-full of high drama, pathos, horror and humanity. But, unlike most literature, she hasn’t written a word of it. Or has she? Here’s where it gets interesting. She both has written them and, at the same time, she’s wholly appropriated them—rescuing them from the dreary world of court filings and bureaucracy—and, by mere reframing, turns them into compelling literature.

Place represents indigent sex offenders on appeal, no easy job. As she puts it: “All my clients have been convicted of a felony sex offense and are in state prison at the time I am appointed to their case. Because of my experience/expertise, many of my clients have been convicted of multiple offenses, and sentenced to hundreds of years and numerous life terms. I primarily represent rapists and child molesters, though I have also represented a few pimps and sexually violent predators (those who, after having served their sentences, have been involuntarily committed to state hospitals: I appeal their commitments).”22

After having published two fine successive experimental novels—one is a 130-page single sentence—her literary production these days consists of republishing statements of facts from her courtroom cases. An appellate brief is composed of three parts: a statement of the case, which sets forth the procedural history of the case; a statement of facts, which sets forth, in narrative form, the evidence of the crime as presented at trial; and an argument, which are the claims of error and (for the defense) the arguments for reversing the judgment. For her literary production, she only uses the statement of facts—the most objective and most narrative part of the brief.

Place does not alter the original document in any way other than to remove specific witness/victim information as necessary to protect those people’s identities. By re-presenting the statements as literature, she does not violate any formal ethical standards or professional codes of conduct: all her briefs are matters of public record and could be found or read by anyone. But it seems like she is violating some sort of unwritten rules of her profession in order to critique and expose the language in Bartleby-like ways. Place claims, “All of my clients are legally guilty. Most are morally guilty. As their advocate, I may be morally guilty, though I am not legally guilty.”23 By shifting the context from law to art, and by stripping the language of any legal purpose, we suddenly see these documents in ways impossible to see them before. The type of questions that this gesture provokes is at the heart of Place’s practice.

Language is never neutral, never stable, and can never be truly objective, thus the statement of facts is an argument in the guise of factual documentation. Even the basic rules for writing a statement of facts acknowledge this bias: “In the Statement of Facts … we are not allowed to argue explicitly. So what do we do? We argue implicitly. What is an implicit argument? Just as an explicit argument is one that explicitly states the because, an implicit argument is one that does not explicitly state a because in answer to the question “Why?” Rather, an implicit argument arranges and emphasizes the facts to lead the recipient of the argument to the desired conclusion.”24 For her day job, Place is intentionally writing an implicit argument; for her art, she is exposing that fallacy.

A published section of her four-hundred-page Statement of Facts—comprised of the documents from twenty-five cases—tells the lurid tale of Chavelo, a child-molesting uncle, and Sara, his niece. It wends its way for ten pages with graphic descriptions of sex interspersed with psychological impasses and heart-rending struggles to cope. In spite of the clerk’s transcript notes—the log of matters heard in court in the form of summary notations that continually interrupt the textual flow—a clear narrative written emerges, written in plain English. An excerpt reads:

Once, Sara’s mother noticed Sara’s underwear was wet and smelled of semen. She asked Sara about it, but Sara said she didn’t know how it got there, and walked away. So her mother put Sara’s underwear in the wash and told herself not to think about “this evil of what’s happening.”

The last time appellant touched Sara was at her house. (RT 1303) Sara’s private hurt when appellant touched her: it felt like “poking.” It also hurt later when she went to the bathroom. (RT 1302) Sara went to the doctor because her private was bothering her, “Like, when you put alcohol on your cut, but kind of worse than that.” (3) Sara’s mother saw blisters “like blisters that you get when you get on the monkey bars.” The blisters itched. The doctor asked Sara what happened, but Sara didn’t want to say. The doctor gave Sara pills to take every day for a month, and the blisters went away. They returned; Sara had to take the medicine again. The blisters again went away, and again returned. Sara went back to the doctor, and saw Dr. Kaufman. (RT 1306–1309, 1311–1313, 1318, 2197)

—————

(3) Sara complained to her mother about pain during urination; her mother gave her medicinal tea for three days. When the pain didn’t abate, her mother checked her vagina, saw a blister, and took Sara to the doctor. (RT 2196–2197, 2218–2221) Sara had never had blisters on her vagina before. (RT 2199)25

 

In reframing the work as literature, the first thing Place does is to remove the serif font required by the profession (“those little epaulets of authority,” as she calls them), thus casting the document as something other than that which belongs in a courtroom. But, outside of that, the statement is identical to the original, with everything from footnotes to the Clerk’s notations left intact. Wearing her double hat as both a lawyer and an uncreative writer, Place says “My job is information ‘processing.’ That is the job of all rhetoric, all language.”

Yet Place plays both angles—this is both real life and art—clouding my rosy picture of art and ethics. While Statement of Facts might strike many as merely lurid and sensational, to linger on the content is to miss the concept: it’s the matrix of apparatuses surrounding it—social, moral, political, ethical—that give the work its real meaning. And when you hear Place read these words, you realize that the vile content of the work is just the tip of the iceberg. What happens to you, the listener, during the reading is what makes what she’s doing so important.

Not surprisingly, it’s hard to listen to her read. I recently sat through a reading of Statement of Facts that lasted forty-five minutes. On-stage, Place dons the same outfit she does when appearing before a judge and reads in a low monotone, tamping down the wildly heated subject matter with a cool and mechanical delivery. Upon hearing the work, the first reaction is of shock and horror. How can people be so terrible? But you keep listening. It’s hard to stop. The narrative draws you in, and you find yourself listening to the small incidents pile up: doctor’s examination of the victim, the victim’s slow and painful admission that a criminal act has been perpetrated upon her, leading to the climax, where the appellant is finally arrested and it appears that justice, after all, will be served. After some time, this begins to feel like a Hollywood movie, replete with tragedy and redemption.

Andy Warhol said that “when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect,”26 and the longer Place read for, the more immune I became to the horrors of what she was saying. Like a detective, I began to divorce my emotional response from the facts, scratching my chin, logically trying to poke holes in her argument, passing judgments on each incident. Like Bartleby’s workmates, I found myself shifting my position to accommodate Place’s narrative. Unconsciously, I had been transformed from passive listener to active juror. She actually transformed my position as receiver of the work, spinning me around in ways that were very much against my will. I didn’t want to objectify my experience, but I did. Place used passive coercion, a sort of courtroom logic, to enact a change in me, the reader/listener, as she does to jurors every day. What I was experiencing was the legal system; to my horror, I was caught up in its machinations. As I listened to the litany of crimes, I found my circuits overloaded. As Place puts it: “I am considering information—even of a most disturbing variety—as linguistic compost. There is too much to consider, too many words, of both thin and thick content. It is too much to bear, and so we don’t. And still, I am asking the reader to bear witness, or to choose not to. Either way, they become complicit. There’s no such thing as an unbiased witness. There’s no such thing as an innocent bystander. Not after they’ve listened for a while. Never after they’ve stopped listening.”27

In the 1930s the objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff began an epic called Testimony: The United States (1885–1915) Recitative. It consists of hundreds of courtroom witness statements, which have then been lineated and versified.28 They’re short pieces, each one telling a story:

Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan asylum; at her first job—in the bindery, and yes sir, yes ma’am, oh, so anxious to please.

She stood at the table, her blonde hair hanging about her shoulders, “knocking up” for Mary and Sadie, the stitchers

(“knocking up” is counting books and stacking them in piles to be taken away).

There were twenty wire-stitching machines on the floor, worked by a shaft that ran under the table;

as each stitcher put her work through the machine,

she threw it on the table. The books were piling up fast

and some slid to the floor

(the forelady had said, Keep the work off the floor!);

and Amelia stooped to pick up the books—

three or four had fallen under the table

between the boards nailed against the legs.

She felt her hair caught gently;

put her and up and felt the shaft going round and round

and her hair caught on it, wound and winding around it,

until the scalp was jerked from her head,

and the blood was coming down all over her face and waist.29

 

Reznikoff’s tale feels like a folk song, a blues recitation, or a Dickensian tale, metaphorically intoning a timeless rite of passage. The short passage is ripe with sexual metaphor: the pubescent girl with long “blond hair hanging around her shoulders,” “oh, so anxious to please,” whose job is “knocking up.” The inevitable denouement happens when she feels the “shaft going round and round,” its symbolic deflowering, replete with the flow of blood “coming down all over her face and waist.” It’s a complex play of eros and thanatos, poetic and nuanced, expressed in surgically selected lineation and enjambment. It’s remarkably economical, painting a picture of an entire world in just a few lines, packing a wallop of an emotional punch.

Place, conversely, doesn’t deal in metaphor. There’s nothing subtle about what she does, adhering to Beckett’s motto, “no symbols where none intended.” We are horrified by Reznikoff’s tales, but they’re only a stanza or two, and we quickly move on to the next encapsulated tragedy. Unlike Place’s durational onslaught, Reznikoff permits us to keep our objectivity intact: we’re still readers—safe and distanced—witnessing tragedy. But we’re never forced to alter our position as readers or listeners in the way that Place compels us to do. Reznikoff’s work reeks of a world passed, and it is often easy to separate from the content, as opposed to Place, whose lurid tales continue to happen every day. In fact, Reznikoff’s poem lives up to its moniker as objectivist, keeping reader and author outside in ways that Place refuses. Hers is a poetics of realism: one so real that’s it’s almost too much to bear.

Place’s works have a lot on their plate and recall a legend of the Warhol years. When Warhol first showed his Brillo boxes in New York, to great controversy, at the Stable Gallery in 1964, an intoxicated, angry man at the opening approached Warhol and expressed his disgust for what he felt to be a one-trick, cheap shot gesture. He accused Andy of ripping off somebody else’s hard work. As it turns out, this man, James Harvey, was a failed yet earnest second-generation abstract expressionist painter whose day job was as a graphic designer for Brillo: he designed the prototype of the box in 1961. He was doubly felled by Warhol, once on account of his day job and in a larger sense on account of Warhol’s Pop Art rendering his abstract expressionist “fine art” obsolete. Place complicates the already-complicated Warhol tale by playing both the victim and the victor, outsmarting herself by taking her alienated labor and détourning it into a satisfying and challenging practice.

I recall a holiday dinner with my curious and bright, but very bored, cousin who is a lawyer. He was complaining about the drudgery of his job, having to write endlessly dull legal briefs day in and day out. Prodding him, I would say, why don’t you think of what you do all day as art? If you reframe those documents, they don’t look too far from many conceptual art documents I’ve seen. In fact, part of the practice of certain artists such as Christo is to include all the legal briefs that he had to file in order to, say, run a fence across miles of California wilderness. There’s a certain fascination with documentation and the dry authoritativeness of legalese that runs through much conceptual art and writing. “You could be a part of that tradition,” I suggested. I could have told him about the work of Vanessa Place. My cousin, although intrigued, demurred and continued being bored for many years henceforth.