Orientational Poetics, or, what comes after “After Language Poetry”? (The Simulacral Lyric and the Post-Language Lyric Subject)

   

This essay departs from two essays by Marjorie Perloff, written at the cusp of the 2000s; “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany and Susan Howe’s Buffalo” and “After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents.” We might well have our issues with Marjorie Perloff, but it’s hard to deny that she was able to adroitly map complex poetic landscapes and histories in ways that tracked their organizing conceptual questions, though especially (perhaps only) when it was Language poetics landscapes. I’m turning back to these specific essays because they usefully articulate a kind of juncture I think we’ve returned to. By “we” I mean U.S. poets continuing to wrangle with the influence, questions, and tools of Language poetics and post-structuralist theory. Put differently, I mean those poets who attend to the question of the “semiological ‘interconnectednes’” [1] that “constructs the ‘reality’ perceived” [2] in and as the ground of the poem, and how that context or ground configures the contours of the kind(s) of language subject that can be constructed. Another version of this question might be: how might “the unresolved antagonisms of reality” and poetics history “return in artworks as immanent problems of form”? [3]

Of course, a lot of important developments have happened in U.S. poetics since 2000. These essays don’t even follow Perloff’s thinking to the end of her career, re: U.S. poetics developments. They don’t account for a lot of the Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, etc. versions of Conceptualism and their…issues. They don’t talk about Tan Lin, don’t address the internet, don’t reckon with …most of the developments of the last twenty-five years that strike me as particularly salient to what the contemporary experimental poetics landscape looks like now. I’m not saying any of these developments are unimportant or that they don’t bear on the way we read and make poetry. But I am saying that there’s a certain strong echo, to my ear, between a recurrent set of questions about how language/theory and feeling meet each other in contemporary experimental poetry I find interesting, and how Perloff is thinking, especially in “After Language Poetry,” about how subjectivity and emotion might work with post-Language poetics, and what considering this question seriously might offer.

This also isn’t the first time this question—the question of feeling and form, or poetic subject and its ground—has seemed peculiarly urgent and interesting, and its first return produced what I think will eventually be remembered as some of the most conceptually sophisticated poetry of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The blog drama of “the poetry wars” and the Language vs. Narrative conversation was before my time (early 2000s-10s), but I’ve talked to many older poets who remember it vividly, felt forced to choose a side somehow. The options: strictly syntactical operations to undo the capitalist perception machine, or narration of your feelings and/or childhood toward paraphrasable insight in lapidary verse. Pick one.

I admired Rebecca Wolff’s committed and clear editorial vision at FENCE when I was beginning to try to understand what contemporary poetry was in the mid-2010s. Per FENCE’s narration of its origin story, the journal/press started as a place between these entrenched positions: a place where poets who refused to simply join one dogmatic camp or the other might still be taken seriously. FENCE hit its stride, to my sense, as the home of the Gurlesque [4] movement of the 2000s–10s, or at least the most precise and tuned parts of it: early Ariana Reines, Chelsey Minnis, Catherine Wagner. The Gurlesque movement was interested in performed and ironized modes of femininity: it was politically feminist in a mostly white, mostly straight, but nonetheless energetically weird way. It was a poetics that definitely took up the Language stance that “language constructs the “reality” perceived…and that the subject, far from being at the center of the discourse…is located only at its interstices.” [5] but it was also deeply interested in the question of “voice” in a way that didn’t immediately square with the crystalline, anti-subjective credos of Language poetics—as Perloff puts it, “the critique of “voice” …must be understood as part of a larger post-structuralist critique of authorship and the humanist subject.” [6] It was messy, full of various kinds of affect, extravagance, cringe-inducing gestures, clumsily rendered and commodified forms of desire articulated in various and often conflicting popular idioms: it didn’t, on the surface, appear to have gotten rid of the “humanist subject.” But I think it actually got closer to doing so than almost anything else did precisely because it saw the fact that what we take for a person is made of (emotional) gestures, gestures that derive from structures and histories. It was one of the most interesting moments of poetics thinking of that period, one that has consistently gone undertheorized because, I think, it is simply a bit icky, a bit pink, a bit too tacky for most scholars to take it seriously, or to see certain aspects of its structural thinking. I wrote part of my dissertation about it: happy to talk about this to anyone who is interested.

But! The reason I’m bringing up the Gurlesque at all is because of how its best poets—and especially, maybe truly only Chelsey Minnis—were able to do precisely what Perloff argues Language poetics did with the lyric subject: to reveal it as constituted at and by the “interstices” of language. And Minnis did it in a way that allowed the emotional-gestural structures of her historical moment, as formed from her subject positions, to enter into her poetry through form in a way that few other things at the time did. Her work set a conflict between models of personhood into stabilized but indeterminable play that held the formats of subjectivity in visibility as formats inseparable from the subject they constitute. That’s to say, Minnis’s poetics produced a lyric “subject” always already formulated by gestural logics that preexist it and condition its possibility: the Gurlesque lyric “I” negotiates the formulae (the “grounds”) available to it as its primary mode of agency, often with a kind of ironic feral zeal that understands the doomed-ness of this form of liveliness. In so doing, Minnis constituted a lyric subject and mode of lyric poetics that prefigures what I’m calling the conceptual and/or simulacral lyric and the simulacral lyric subject. Such a poetics conditions a mode of reading that requires reflexive performance and orientational thinking. It is a mode of the lyric that offers lyricism and the lyric subject as genres, not by accident, but as intentional and self-conscious simulacra. In so doing this mode recapitulates, in varying forms, the Gurlesque insight that histories and formats, or the (con)textual forms of subjectivities, are sedimented into the gestures constituting what we take for human-ness. More importantly, these poems reveal also the power of the desire to be in relation, and mark a rethinking of the lyric form that more fully incorporates developments from Conceptual poetry and Language poetics in a way that renews both our ideas of what the “lyric” can be, and how we are able to think about conceptual work in poetry.





First, a quick detour through film. I want to propose that the way the lyric subject functions in poems by Steve Orth, Jennifer Soong, and Zan de Parry is like the way that genre functions in some recent films by Brady Corbet and recent-ish films by Michael Haneke, so I’m going to quickly outline this as a model, because I believe it will help clarify what I see in the poems.

Brady Corbet (b. 1988) is an actor, producer, writer, and director. His most recent work, The Brutalist, is what he is best known for, and in general I read him as an experimental artist who works with big-budget Hollywood aesthetics and genre film as materials. [7] He treats the genre contract as something around which modulatory structures can be developed: that’s to say, like Michael Haneke, he is interested in systematically playing with the degree to which his audience experiences absorption, investment, or reflexive awareness, the re-cognition I mentioned earlier. He moves the viewer between recognizing the structure in which they are participating, and absorptively participating in it. Corbet actually worked extensively with Michael Haneke, starring as one of the young pair of murderers/torturers in Haneke’s Funny Games (the 2007 version). [8] This movie, if you haven’t seen it, features two young men torturing and eventually killing a bourgeois family. The torturers move their victims’ levels of belief or hope, much as the film’s frequent fourth wall breakings (i.e. reversing footage, direct camera address by characters, etc.) move the audience’s level of absorption around in a way that of course recalls Brecht, etc., but in a way focused specifically on the capacities and genres of film. In an interview with Criterion about Funny Games Haneke described his motivation as coming from a desire to make his audience feel the ease with which the genre form was able to reclaim their emotional or belief-level participation in its process: he was interested in making them see or feel how quickly they were once again experiencing a “thriller,” no matter how often or how robustly they were disrupted from their absorption. To feel their own powerlessness in the face of genre, to some extent.

In Corbet’s films, the touch is a little lighter, the problem a little subtler, a little less structurally explicit. It’s more at the level of a kind of queasy uncertainty about what it is, exactly, that one is watching. The Brutalist is a three-hour filmic Kunstlerroman of a sort: we watch Laszló Tóth (Adrien Brody), a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect and Buchenwald survivor who escapes to the U.S. and becomes one of the greatest architects of his generation. He does so in the face of many obstacles, utterly committed to his artistic principles and sublimating his experience of a world-historical atrocity into aesthetic form with clarity and discipline. This is a genre: it offers specific and familiar kinds of pleasures: narrative clarity, linear development, a certain rhythm of setback and triumph, and affirmation of a certain model of The Great Artist, among other features. While watching I understood myself to be in a contract with a filmic genre where this was what was on offer for ⅞ of the film, and then, in its final wild and tonally baffling swerve, something else happened. In the final eighth of the film, which seems slapped onto the rest (which also ends rather abruptly), we travel many years into the future, to the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennial, where Tóth’s lifetime achievements are being celebrated. The film image is suddenly grainy, a bumping pop song plays, weird wipes and 80s material changes to the film stylings happen. It feels like we’re in an upbeat 80s infomercial about the biennial. Two actors are now playing reversed roles (which the audience is left to figure out), and one of them gives a triumphant and didactic speech explaining the 1:1 translation of the camp cells into Tóth’s architecture. Everyone claps. The film ends on a loud note of IT HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED, but the speed, sudden poppy bounciness, flatness, didacticism, goofy stylistics, and fourth wall breaking with the actor swap all undercut this resolution: the logic of the film had promised that the resolution would feel different, would be lit a certain way, would unfold at a certain pace, would have its grit managed but present according to a particular stylistic logic, a certain literary obliqueness would allow for complex character development, etc. And the resolution we get is the “right” one, but the terms are totally wrong based on the genre contract, and so the viewer is left puzzled and confused about the nature of the reality they’re in.

When I first saw this film, I thought that maybe it was rushed, or considered, nonsensically, that maybe some sort of production error had been allowed to persist. Was the film just…bad? Basically I was trying to find a material explanation for something I couldn’t account for on the basis of what I had understood to be the logic of the film.

Later, I watched Corbet’s 2017 film Vox Lux, another, but less grand and somber, sort of Kunstlerroman about a pop singer, Celeste, played by Natalie Portman. This film makes its problematics of relational negotiation much more explicit in a much more sustained way than does The Brutalist. The film begins with a sustained driving scene [9] and then moves through a  devastating and shocking sequence about a school shooting. The timing work through this sequence is incredible, fresh, unfamiliar in a way that makes the violence that happens unfurl in the awareness in a specific, unbearable, and viscerally stunning way. Not because what is shown is particularly gory or more extremely violent than anything else standard in contemporary Hollywood productions, but because of the particular timing, gestural, and camera-angle choices. Because of Corbet’s formal awareness, basically. But the film pivots quickly, and this unprocessably realist sequence is rapidly repurposed as the backstory of the young pop star Celeste, and the film begins a rather predictable narration of the girl’s rise to fame.

Everything about what follows is rather spectacularly genre-fied to the point that its own simulacrum quality is one of the most marked things about it. One has the feeling that a genre image precedes the specificities of the characters as humanist “subjects.” But the film isn’t accidentally a simulacrum; it isn’t a failed object: weirdly, there’s the feeling that it is AIMING for simulacrum. From Portman’s precise overacting in the second half, to the timing of some of Celeste’s conversations with her daughter (in one memorably long sequence, Celeste causes a scene in a diner while trying to relate to her daughter, then gives her a kind of sustained “real talk” about life while walking under scaffolding, and the whole time, very little is actually said, to the point that eventually the scene begins to feel structuralist, or reminiscent of work by the conceptual performance group Our Literal Speed). The ruckus in the diner, the relationship, the conversation, all of these are very precisely rendered as IMAGES of themselves. They are not meant to convince us that they are real. Corbet showed us at the beginning that he knew how to do “filmic real,” and then, in a precisely calibrated way, moves us away from it.

This is the peculiar brilliance of this film: it gives us images of images of films, which are images of images of life. The film operates as an autonomous image whose “originating” reality is ultimately irrelevant. [10] It knows this. It uses its tools to give its reader this awareness, to ask them to feel their own participation in the simulacrum as simulacrum: not a substitute for reality, but perhaps equally, if not more compelling, than “reality,” whatever that was, if it was, ever was.

I am not talking about genre hybridity or mashup genres or films whose genres shift around, etc. In its basic form, this is quite widespread, and ranges across HBO shows like Lovecraft Country to films like Takashi Miike’s Audition. Projects like Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal (2022–now) or Patrick Brice’s Creep (2014) are closer to what I read Corbet as doing, in that they foreground the readerly or viewerly orientation-negotiation process: their poetics is orientational. But what’s specific and interesting in the Corbet films is how they use high-gloss versions of fully realized genres to produce these effects, and how much they, and especially Vox Lux, are able to sustain the viewer in the problem of negotiating their own relationship to a simulacrum, their own implication in the power of genre to organize their feeling even when they knowit is “doing” genre. This tension between “knowing” and feeling is an aesthetic conceptual project of the work.

Steve Orth’s poetry is a useful first example because of its close relationship to Conceptual poetics, and its self-conscious modulation between a lyric confessional and ironic performative mode. It is “doing” the lyric confessional, but in “doing” it, it both is and isn’t. Closely related to work by Joe Wenderoth [11], Steven Zultanski, Holly Melgard, Brandon Brown, Ryan Dobran, and Jeremy Hoevenaar among other contemporary poets interested in how capitalist logics organize the subject and relation in language, Orth’s poetics sustain a very precise mixture of tonal and gestural clues that suspend the poems between ironic persona poetics and lyric subjectivity in a way that reveals the structures of both. The use of the “I” is a performance concept in his poems. Orth often uses an “I” whose orientation toward the world is held up ironically, even as its affective contours are often sympathetic, and its ‘life situations’ bear a remarkable similarity to Orth’s own [12]—his first book is, indicatively, titled The Life and Times of Steve Orth. Even when obviously partially ironized, Orth’s “I” nonetheless exerts a strong relational force, but is calibrated to disallow any conventional reading of the “I” as indexing a humanist subject with an interiority, the “interior speech” is not at all “overheard.” This distinguishes Orth’s work from other contemporary confessional poets like Jessica Laser, Elisa Gonzalez, or Rachel Mannheimer, for example, whose poems don’t seem to share these questions, or, at least, don’t seem to focus on problematizing the performance of subjectivity in language, even if they are thematically interested in what it is to be a person in the world, and concerned to devise elegant, deft, and precise contemporary lines and language-images. Orth’s poems’ complex dynamic of relational invitation, confession, and disavowal is what I think actually constitutes their poetics, which, despite their variable orientational/tonal cueing, can often seem totally formally unmarked.

For this reason, it’s often difficult to excerpt or quote limited passages of the poems in a way that convincingly shows what I’m talking about. So I’ll transcribe three full poems from Orth’s 2023 chapbook The Inflatable Ball.
 

Whole Foods Market

When there is blood on my hands, I stuff them in my pockets

I have committed so many crimes.

I have lived a life of arrogance and

without consideration of other animals.

I’ve stolen and betrayed

and made a fool of everyone who believed in me.

This does not torture me. No.

I am indifferent.

When I see your tears fall on your cheek, I feel so bored

I didn’t even take the time to notice

it was a neck I was a stepping on.

and that’s why it was me and not you

that was promoted

to Associate Customer Service Team Leader at

Whole Foods Market. [13]

Let My Crocs Rot in the Sun

I was covered with a liquid, especially water.
A gazelle too fragile to meditate,

a professor who caught lice in small claims court.

I arrived with a misleading neckline,

desperate for toast and nori,

hellbent on riding

the correct horse correctly,

letting my Crocs rot in the sun.

Let us now get drunk

On the sickest riffs to be played by a flute

Reimagined, with skin and intelligence.

I remember how you embraced me

& together, the lover & I

bring the freshest fruit salad you can imagine

to our beautiful friends

who play in a circle in the shallow end.

My Inflatable Ball

My inflatable ball sits in the corner of the room.

It’s large, round & teal.

When I see people bouncing on my inflatable ball

I get sick to my stomach.

“Don’t do that,” I think, but never say.

I just have to look away.

It’s just too much bouncing for my eyes.

It’s not that I feel as if they are being disrespectful

to my inflatable ball, it’s all that up & down motion

that makes me so nauseated.

But those moments seldom happen, to be honest.

Very rarely do people come over

& then they hardly ever sit on my inflatable ball.

They usually sit next to me on the futon.

& we stare together at the static inflatable ball.

& neither of us have much to say about it.

When I bought it, I thought I would be doing

stuff like crunches on it, so my stomach

would look hot. But that also does not happen often.

The crunches I mean.

There are not many crunches happening in my apartment.

But the presence of my inflatable ball adds to the air

that exercise is possible.

I don’t love or hate my inflatable ball.

I appreciate its roundness.

& I like its teal color.

I wonder if it would be possible to fuck

on my inflatable ball.

I imagine it. I bet the doggystyle position

would really lend itself well to…for that…to happen.

Yeah that would be pretty sweet.

Just doing it doggystyle, right?

Just like sex from behind.

& as a bonus, my inflatable ball is easy to clean.

You just spray & wipe.

& I can just deflate it too,

if in the future it reminds me

of an intimacy that I no longer wish to recall.

A past experience that ended with sore knees

& sexual confusion. But I will regret nothing,

because it’s better to have loved & lost on

my inflatable ball

than to never to have loved at all.

A lot could be said here, but I trust that you feel the funny tonal balance between ironized persona (i.e. an “I” the reader is cued to take as not the organizing consciousness of the text), and a lyric subject (i.e. an “I” the reader is cued to map onto what they take to be the particular spiritual finitude of the text’s organizing consciousness). The balance varies, and the poems cue the modulation in reader orientation by various means, ranging from loud and comedic rhymed cliché (“it’s better to have loved & lost on/my inflatable ball/than to never to have loved at all.”) to unsympathetic positions housed in intentionally unmusical too-long too-fact-heavy lines (“and that’s why it was me and not you/that was promoted/to Associate Customer Service Team Leader at/Whole Foods Market.”) to a kind of unimpressive and flat but surprisingly precise factualness that feels unironizable (“I don’t love or hate my inflatable ball./I appreciate its roundness. /& I like its teal color.”)—I find that as a reader I’m very aware that this “I” is cueing me to engage with my genre expectations of a 2024 lyric subject, and moves me in and out of relation to an imagined organizing consciousness in a dynamic and unstable way. I move between re-cognizing this, and being absorbed, performing the relational choreography the text asks of me, much like Vox Lux asks its viewer to continually negotiate their own relationship to its genre form.

Jennifer Soong’s recent poetry also reminds me strongly of Corbet’s work in its deployment of lyric modes: it deploys them, I think, also as genre, as intentionally realized simulacra of lyrical poems. What the lyric is is the subject of ongoing debate, of course, but I think the most useful line to follow here picks something up from Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins’s point that the terms of subjectivity in the lyric are generic [14]: that the ways we read subjectivity in poetry we take as lyric presuppose certain historically specific terms for the subject. I think Soong’s poems take a similar stance, and this awareness is part of how they produce their simulacrum effect: this effect is a significant conceptual work that the poem does. Soong’s 2024 book Comeback Death (Krupskaya, 2024) is in the vein of a kind of self-consciously high-gloss New Romanticism (inflected by various filters: for example Bay Area Language Postmodernism, or Ingeborg Bachmann’s version of Modernism, depending on which section you’re in): it is impossible not to read this “I”’s unironized “nightingales” and its expressed and syntactically belabored concerns with “sorrier troubles/always unrelating me to other men” as cues of a specific and careful kind.

Here is a larger quote in which this latter bit appears (as part of the “CONTEMPT” section, dedicated to Sappho [notably the ‘originator’ of lyric poetry]):

to this day I do not understand

though it seems I could

this unhappiness which without

I could not solve, yet with it am lost to

cleverer colors, sorrier troubles

always unrelating me to other men

Soong uses she/her pronouns, has a post-2010 PhD in English, teaches in a historically innovative poetics program (University of Denver), and wrote this in the 2020s. She knows what all these cues mean. Certain tics give the poem’s recent provenance away: these tics read like the too-long-ness of Celeste’s speech to her daughter in Corbet’s Vox Lux, or of Orth’s too-much-information Whole Foods manager lines. In Soong’s case, the calculated “off-ness” has the effect of rendering the stylized quaintness and gender presumptions of the verse available to sense as intentional, as marking the text as a simulacrum: an image of an image of an image of an image, whose original we’re not sure exists. For example the phrase “to this day I do not understand,” taken out of its context, reads easily as ‘of now,’ prosaic, unremarkable—something that might be said. (e.g. “To this day I do not understand why Alex does that!”) But staged as it is in a long poem with a careful prosodic matrix, occasionally antiqued syntax, and elaborately intentional spacing patterning, and paired with the stanza’s little reversals and obvious wroughtnesses (that “which without” and that carefully lumbering “yet”) and the belabored and odd “unrelating me to other men,” the combination gives a sort of uncanny quality: it’s a calibrated, precisely “off” imitation of a synthesis of many examples of a certain fuzzy image of a Romantic lyric poem. As Thom Donovan puts it in his endnote to the text, the “syntax often feels seasoned by cut-and-paste.” [15] 

Another example, this time from the middle section, “ENTR’ACTE[...] dedicated to Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino,” which adopts a lyric styling that borrows more freely and obviously from postmodern modes and includes bits like “thingmajig” or “O-type blood drama” or “spay”

I don’t mind losing time to gain my personage of love

what else do nightingales do?

speak into silence

I already know what it means to die

This grandiose and oracular pronouncement, one of many in this section, lands with a peculiar and nearly secondhand-embarrassment-inducing flatness. It isn’t, however, ironized: this much is obvious if one reads the poem as a whole. Unlike in Orth’s poems, Soong’s poems do not use irony as a tonal tool, at least not in a way the reader is invited to read conventionally. Simulacra are, however, hyper-mediated entities (one might say even entities constituted by mediation), and so do have to do with irony, insofar as irony has to do with distance and mediation. I am inclined to read these poems as including irony structurally, rather than affording it as a quality of the lyric voice, or the language-consciousness we often take such a voice to suggest. Much as we read Natalie Portman’s Celeste character in Vox Lux as a Type of Character, we are meant to read Soong’s lyric “I” as a Type of I, a lyric subject with reified terms for its subjectivity, whose very reification is what is felt most strongly. This is a Romantic subject who “fall[s] upon the thorns of life!” and “bleed[s],” but self-awarely, in 2024. It is “my personage of love” and not  “the person I love,” after all. The text points us back to Jackson and Prins’s insight that the terms of lyric subjectivity are historically specific, and makes the reader feel that, by getting the cues for I-thou relation slightly historically wrong, slightly glitched, slightly inconsistent. The lyric machinery reveals itself as machinery, but nonetheless the poem’s gestures toward relatable emotion do still work as invitations to intersubjective relation through language: they’re powerful just like Haneke’s and Corbet’s genre machineries are, even when repeatedly revealed as such.

Though to most appearances Zan de Parry’s book Cold Dogs (The Song Cave, 2024) would seem an unlikely comparison point for Soong’s work, I think that both works’ highly self-consciously genred relationships to the lyric get at similar questions, and help clarify each others’ projects.

de Parry, who often includes a note that he’s a “road dog for a tractor auction” in his author bios, writes in a stylized lyric mode that recalls Townes Van Zandt or Richard Brautigan or Ed Dorn: or other versions of a kind of psychedelic sixties-seventies cowboy figure. The “I” of these poems, like Soong’s “I” in Comeback Death, is an “I” whose terms of subjectivity are familiar the way a thriller film or a Kunstlerroman drama is familiar: it’s an “I” we feel as a certain kind of relational contract with familiar terms.

But this “I” is destabilized, much like Soong’s is, by gestures that draw the reader’s attention to their own participation in this genred relationship: by things that point up the simulacral quality of the text even as it, like Haneke’s Funny Games, repeatedly also draws the reader back into attuned participation in the terms of the genre form. The way it works in de Parry’s poems is somewhat different, however. If for Soong’s it’s usually a certain “too belabored” or “cringe” or “historically off” quality, or in Orth’s a line that we’re cued to read as in the voice of an ironized persona version of the “I,” in de Parry it’s often a kind of glitching or dissolution of the persona, or a moment when the language of the poem reveals itself as language rather than representational vehicle.

This quote is from “LEASH OF JOY”

I’m stressful today

Tripped over an erect mop

Cut my hand very bad

Literally shifted the whole meat

Here, the grammar is slightly and carefully wrong. “I’m stressful today” suggests correct versions (“I’m stressed today” or “It’s stressful today”) but actually uses the grammar of the phrase to tie these things together and confuse the referential or attributive movements the phrase might be read to cue. (The “I” is stressful? to who? also itself? What?). The more familiar grammar error of “Cut my hand very bad” makes this previous grammar error appear part of a network whose surface similarities (error) produce a connection which is itself also wrong (they are not being used to do the same thing). Then, “Literally shifted the whole meat” has a resonant kind of conceptual/grammatical problem as “I’m stressful today”—there’s a cut (dividing) that “shifted the whole meat” (one unit). Just like the problematized division of self and its stressful conditions, the cut hand appears to be both divided from itself and shifted as a whole: a confused whole, because “meat” is a kind of funny bulk noun: not evoking a closed entity (like, say, a hand).

So: we get a “vibe” or a character feeling through a mess of grammar distortions here: much like we get “Celeste is a bad-girl pop star with self-destructive habits but we love her anyway” through the weird mess of too-long conversations and bad extended final concert [15] whose oddness tells us to note that we are participating in the pleasures of genre, de Parry’s poems give us the familiar pleasures of Richard Brautigan’s lyric mode, but with a kind of carefully fuzzed or pixelated quality to the image.

In all three of these poets’ work, and in the recent work of a number of other particularly interesting contemporary poets and writers (e.g. Morgan Võ, Poupeh Missaghi, among others), Orth, Soong, and de Parry all offer the “lyric” on terms that renew the conceptual terms we have for thinking about it. One usually thinks of Conceptual poetics as wearing its conceptuality on its sleeve: being something one can articulate discursively, immediately. But what’s interesting here is how the poems resist that: their work is conceptual, but it works in the medium of experience, and requires a certain kind of reflexive awareness and performance on the part of the reader. Like the viewer of a Brady Corbet or Michael Haneke film, the reader of these poems is negotiating a reality and a relational mode, at all times, in these poems, and doing so on unstable and disconcertingly almost-familiar ground.

To be clear: I’m not proposing that we take up the “poetry wars” conversation again: I think that moment has thoroughly passed. I’m simply proposing that attending to what might be called the “orientational poetics” or genre reflexivity of certain strands of contemporary experimental poetry might offer new ways of thinking about how poetry now might metabolize, refract, and resist the logics of its environing historical and material world(s). Negotiating what reality is, or what one thinks the world is, what one thinks a person is, and how these concerns can play out in poetry, are old problems, but also problems that contemporary poetics, with one ear tuned to the changing world around it, might be sublimating newly into form.  






Notes

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