There is a counterprogressive, dysfunctionalizing rupture in the assertive assurance of antibourgeois vigilant outraged experimentalism in the United States of Megacapitalism today. This rupture is the result of a rampant and repugnantly energetic opportunistic imitation of outraged antibourgeois experimentalism, whereby persons who don't reelyreely care about opposing the Texan depradations of the billionaire corporate power megastructure have entrepreneurially managed to purvey types of poetry not based in authentic radical engagedness as if these productions were contributions to the honorable resistance. The counterfeiting is in countless instances so insidiously meticulous – like the productions of megabudget corporate advertising firms – that it becomes torturously difficult to distinguish real resistant radicality (RRR) from mere ersatz showbiz arriviste aestheticism. This is a crisis to which I do not as yet have a solution, but I will set forth its stark parameters here so that those of us who reelyreely detest the greed-grid of commodificationist co-optation can "circle our laptops" and collectively adumbrate the outlines of a truly grimly serious antibourgeois response.

It was as long ago as 1998 when several of my friends and I first noticed the crisis looming. We were reading the latest issues of Edge, Contra, and Post-Post in our local organic alternative to Starbucks, when we began to realize a pervasive dismay crawling across our skins like commando teams of polluted spiders. Instead of the righteous satisfaction we usually felt at participating in RRR and supporting the courageously marginalized shadow-community of authentic outraged experimentalists, we discovered we were starting to feel as if some uninvited guests were quaffing the wine at our party, wearing black clothes newer than our own and tacky in some as-yet-undefined ways. To be sure, the journals in front of us contained poems of RRR, written by our email correspondents and friends and ourselves, poems deconstructively constructed via experimentalist defamiliarizing hyperfracture (EDH), whereby the hegemony of the corporate greed-grid is radically undermined for the sake of a future undoing of global capitalism to be achieved by terrifically "messed-up" language – good! – but these EDH poems animated by RRR were printed side by side with some poems by poets whose RRR credentials seemed dubious at best, poets five or even ten years younger than ourselves, too young to have credibly inhabited a maturely serious radical engagedness. What we sensed, though, that day in 1998, was not just a matter of the immaturity of these newly appearing poets, but a matter of the creepy insidious imitation of serious EDH, a mimicking of stylistic features so slickly skillful – on the technical level – as to produce poems outwardly extremely similar to poems of RRR. Turning the pages of Edge, Contra and Post-Post that day, we became so uneasy that poetry of RRR began to look like mere shallow opportunist aping of RRR, and vice versa! Suddenly it was all too possible to imagine a reader to whom all outraged antibourgeois language-inquisitional experimentalism might seem only trendy theatrical gamesmanship! What a disgusting vision!

And the danger we glimpsed that day in 1998 has mushroomed into the pervasive crisis of avant-garde culture that has incised the dysfunctionalizing rupture I began by noting. Serious poets of real resistant radicality today are under threat. We are in danger of disappearing amid waves of copycat pseudo-rebels who blithely co-opt our EDH poetics for the sake of careerist self-advancement. We can detect – in a kind of olfactory way – that such co-opters are not reelyreely against the appropriative insatiability of imperialism and the lobotomizing deceit of megacapitalism's airbrushing of reality into sellability. But how can we prove it?

The problem is exacerbated by our awareness that "critical demonstration" and evidentiary "proof" are a priori reifying hegemonic repressions. Nevertheless, it may be significative, and strategically progressive, if I here give an example of the insidious non-serious counterfeiting that has attained such nauseating kudzu dissemination among ostensibly RRR journals and presses. Therefore, though nothing could be more repugnant to me than capitalist "self"-promotion, here is a passage from my long poem "Whir of Blips (Repudiate)":

(eyeballs) (windshields) limited access
        nerves in contact
        energy untabulated
                                roomfuls of goofballs
my blip de-interlocks
                                quilted braids kaput

asseverated flaneur – dejecta and relic –
triumphalist afloat the grim prospect
                                in the desert with no phone

the taxi is accidental
no trace of my passage
illusion of depth (Felicia's crackers with no cheese)

that prefab Kansas goodness
sugar to defenestrate
                                but there is a waffling

but to whir toward light

I must place faith in the serious RRR reader, whose training in the struggles of avant- and post-avant refusal of imperialist commodificationist conventionality enables her or him to perceive the painfully engaged quality which animates the above passage. And I can confidently testify that this passage, and all of "Whir of Blips (Repudiate)," was written in an agonized fever of reelyreely grim resistance to the corporate greedgrid as it distorts the daily experience of individuals who fail to recognize their own co-optation. But of course, my certainty that the poem expresses authentic outraged antibourgeois resistance is based partly on my "insider" status as the author (insofar as we still use that very last-century term) of the poem. I know what the poem strives for; and my closest comrades know it. But what of a reader new to EDH, and new to the struggle against corporate global glutinous Halliburton imperialist capitalism (CGGHIC), who encounters my poem in the same journal with "Mineral Dry Heave (Ho You)" by Darnelle Smankey – how can we be sure that such a reader will detect the vast difference between the two texts? Here is a passage from the Smankey poem:

exhaustion yields recognition – electrical snaps
here is the soiled couch the professional sewage
Superbowl commentators fester
                                                jetsam of objectification
we recede
beneath the creamed repetitions (Alonzo scarfs the dip)
blocked from
walled from
                   on the tundra with no cell service
dis- non- irr-
                     mutated to mute on the bus

that brickbat Missouri smileage
flail
toward apartments of contact
lineaments immediated
                                    yet there is a succumbing to reference

bur to ravish you "you" yo

Admittedly the passage from "Mineral Dry Heave (Ho You)" displays a kind of surface glitter, and offers perhaps some initial pleasure in its fielding of implications. But we need to remember that pleasure is not the point in the RRR struggle against CGGHIC Moreover, the pleasure arguably offered by the Smankey passage is surely only initial pleasure, momentary, dissolving as soon as the reader ponders this production with the eyes and nose of someone reelyreely alert to the sly disguises adopted by co-opted consumerist language. I will not fall prey to the temptation of "demonstrating" the essential shallowness of the Smankey passage (surely the utterly predigested reference to "Superbowl commentators" does that work for me!). The point here is to realize the extreme danger created by Smankey-like texts, the danger that the unsuspecting reader – and this consumerist pleasure-addled info-flooded nation is full of unsuspecting readers including increasing numbers of those who in fact do read journals such as Edge, Contra, and Post-Post – will fail to detect that the Smankey is nothing but a cheap, easy, glib aping of a passionate outraged antibourgeois EDH text such as my "Whirl of Blips (Repudiate)." I don't suggest that Darnelle Smankey has specifically ripped off my particular poem – no, my point is much larger, deeper, more pervasive and disinterested than that! My point is that readers can be fooled. If real resistant radicality is to survive and even, with tremendous courage, thrive, we must find some way to prevent readers from embracing (and then perhaps imitating!) such copycat happygolucky opportunist pseudo-indeterminate dishings as "Mineral Dry Heave (Ho You)" as if such texts had anything to do with serious violation of corporate greedgrid hegemony.

Smankeyism is the ragweed of the avant garde. It is spreading at an astounding rate. I cannot name a single journal which I can now pick up with confidence that all the poems in it will embody RRR, though EDH mannerisms may appear throughout. (If there is one exception, it would be the journal which Ruth Whack and I have just started, Renegade Unsucker, the trial first issue of which is as yet available only by sending $12 to me at an address to be announced elsewhere.) As I have indicated, there is a strangely bilious disorientation that results from reading dozens and dozens of poems and sensing that only very few of them reflect bona fide rad-avant resistant engagedness (RARE) yet being unable to point out the substantive difference between those few and the many poems exploiting EDH as a merely aesthetic kind of play or entertainment. Aestheticism is collaborationist. Aestheticism derives from the notion that the "work of art" must be "pleasing" to an "audience" irrespective of its essential political vector. Where linguistic features of a poem are generated to satisfy aesthetic criteria, those features become nothing deeper than a marketing ploy even if we can't readily tell them apart from the disjunctive antibourgeois praxis of RRR poetry.

Needless to say, the healthy progressive response to this crisis is not an "openminded" picnic-spirited tolerance of all experimentalist hyperfractured work. That would be the slippery-sloped path to granola-and-strawberries bourgeois "I'm okay You're okay" paralyzing Prozac centrism. That must not be the fate of the avant (or post-avant) garde!

This crisis fertilizes bizarre thoughts. It is so hyperextensive that at some after-midnight moments I begin to envisage a future in which openly "saying" what you "mean" in a poem might become, by the kind of inversion or "emergency flipping" theorized by Belneuve-Farfelu-Crasse, the truly radical shucking of the chains of linguistic convention! I realize how crazy that sounds. I have not been sleeping a lot. Around 3 a.m. you can feel the city swarming with Smankeys, you feel they are awake at their computers, you feel they will become 90% or even 96% of the avant garde of tomorrow – opportunist interlopers whose writing, you suspect, ultimately accomplishes nothing (apart from their own ephemeral glorification) except for the amusement of a few people who refine upon their feelings till anything in the ununderstandable way will go down with them.

But those thoughts are poison and must be spat out. I spit them out. I am going to survive as an authentic unco-opted radical experimentalist. I am going to keep writing poems that evince a stance rather than a pose. What will this mean for my writing, exactly? I don't know. I feel a headache clamping down when I wonder, how much more can I disrupt the syntax which is (we know) the dominant Texan megacapitalist culture's crucial weapon? What have I not yet tried? Somehow, somehow I will dobisrobupt sobyntobax to a degree that says No to, and potentially terrifies, all the imperialist controllers in their power-lunch suits.

Meanwhile, the crisis I've identified persists. I have acknowledged that there does not exist, yet, a reliable litmus test to confirm a poem's engagedness in RRR. Until such a subtle test can be developed, we are left with the archaic concept of intentionality. That is, our response to a poem must, for now, come down to the question of whether we know for sure that the motive, the originating impetus for a given poem consists in the poet's desire to use EDH in the desperate struggle against CGGHIC. And the judging of this seems to be (as I have painfully admitted), for now, not a rational inductive rule-governed procedure, but a matter of smelling. Antibourgeois radical experimentalism today needs some extremely sensitive smellers. And frankly, the only ones I can recommend with confidence are myself and my friend Ruth Whack. (Ruth's nose occasionally misses a significant odor, but not often.) Thus I can make this provisional offer to the reader of this essay: When you want to find out whether a particular poem is reelyreely engaged, radical, and resistant (rather than chickenshittingly fecklessly playing around with the methods of radicality), send the poem to me and Ruth, c/o this journal, with $3 (cash only), and we will reply within three weeks. Take courage! We will never desert the cause.

Pleiades

Central Missouri State University

Editor: Kevin Prufer
Co-Editor: Wayne Miller
Fiction: Susan Steinberg
Essays: Eric Miles Williamson


Copyright © by Pleiades Press.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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