Review: The Poker / Submodern Fiction / Antennae

At this past year’s MLA conference, I split my time between roughly literary and roughly communication oriented panels. Highlights on both sides included Jena Osman’s presentation on journalistic found poetry and Peter Jaszi’s rather gloomy predictions for copyright and IP law in the 21st century. It was my first time attending the MLA, and I went primarily because it was here, in San Diego, and because I had a chance to meet and reunite with some cool poetry people, particularly the many on hand for the Harryette Mullen reading and (refreshingly unplugged) follow-up discussion.

Literature—at least the kind showcased at MLA—is a rather sad academic discipline that can’t get over its obsession with the literary artifact, be it book or poem or even authorial biography. I took up "communication" as a field of study a few years ago in part because I’d had enough of literary artifacts, or at least the production and study/fetishization thereof, even those produced by artisans engaged in a deliberate dismantling of artifact-producing categories and processes.

The discipline of communication has its obsessions too, among them the rarefied "object" of sociological or historical study. But in general these objects add up to a much broader, and I think more compelling, set of questions, procedures, policies, dances, and moments, and rarely do they look like artifacts in the way an Elizabeth Bishop or even WC Williams poem can in the hands of tenured lit/poetry professor. The difference in disciplinary focus might come down to that rather simple matter of range of coverage.

Granted, the lit world, as such, has its more flexible trench-workers doing their best to keep the concrete soft before pouring (a few of them on hand at the MLA). But building the monument is almost always the endgame of official discourse, so even the more wily experimental lit panels can end by offering up the same ritual of publicly witnessed foundation-setting. Okay, but that’s the business of lit so why rehearse the knocking of it.

Poetry journals are mostly epiphenomenal non-artifacts that live pretty short, snappy lives on the borders of literary studies and monument building. Great resources for watching the micro-work of literary communication transpire, poetry journals give up the artifact in search of the fact. Evidentiary objects—things in the Heideggerian sense of gatherings—poetry journals are great documents in search of dedicated readers-qua-researchers. The good-time of poetry and poetics, let’s say, transpires in the pages of good poetry zines.

Journals communicate, perhaps, in ways that books do not and cannot. Or at least that’s how I’d like to go about reading them from now on—as communiqés from the wilderness of poetry production which for the most part resist the hardening effects of artifact-obsessing. In that spirit, I was happy to receive Submodern Fiction 1, The Poker 3, and Antennae 5, three journals whose status as documentary evidence I would like to examine in a communication framework, assuming that’s a fair place to begin.

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Editor Mark Wallace opens the first issue of Submodern Fiction with a call for "alternative fiction to go sub-modern." So concludes an editorial that makes, along the way, some rather bold (if sweeping) statements about the current state of fiction publishing in the U.S. as well as the prevailing relationships between a "non-mainstream" poetry crowd and their fiction-writing allies.

SMF, Wallace writes, is "devoted to alternative forms of prose narrative" or a non-traditional narrative typically passed over by major publishing outfits due to its "postmodern" bent. Two forces conspire against such efforts, he suggests, namely the prevailing interest in, due to marketability of, realist/magic realist strains and what Wallace characterizes as the avant-garde rejection of narrative as the "essential enemy of socially engaged writing."

One of the interesting things about Mark’s intro is the use of "alternative" about five or six times to mark this "non"ish (non-realist, non-mainstream) kind of writing. It’s a tough job, obviously, to classify and label, for purposes of editorial framing, the kind of writing one is looking for particularly when the commercial activity of labeling and classifying is one of the things one hopes to resist/avoid in promoting an "alternative." What transpires, it seems, in trying to make room for work typically rejected for not being "X" enough is the dialectical call for "anti-X" to fill up its own space. The boundaries of the "alternative," however, are not all that clear, aside from this specified "non"-ness. An old problem.

Mark does suggest some positive values, such as "radical cultural critique" and (as above) "socially engaged writing," and I’m not too concerned about this (non)definition problem because the zine at least risks proposing its own alterity by steering headlong into the problem of sameness. Some may object than an appeal to the "alternative" is precisely what’s commonplace—even main—these days, so Wallace’s opening call depends a lot on whether or not a fiction writing/reading audience really needs or wants that altered space (or state) to work in.

In the end I must assume that what’s "non" is what’s there between the lime-green covers, and for the record those who have so far answered the call for "alternative fiction to go sub-modern" are Susan Smith Nash, Cydney Chadwick, Joseph Battaglia, Jefferson Hansen, Anne Bogle, Stephen-Paul Martin, and Harold Jaffe.

Maybe this list names some of the "natives" of this particular sub-set of alter-native writing, and they know who they are and know (they know) the particular genre knowledge required to identify oneself and one’s work either in or outside the range of this somewhat broadly stipulated "alter." Again, that’s cool. Communities, I’m the first to acknowledge, should know theyself, and that self-identification work is enough to both float the project and keep the "realists" out, which is obviously part of the project as well.

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Kaku!

Taking a break from writing this review, I went to see/hear Barbara Kruger and Jerome Rothenberg discuss IMAGE & TEXT over at the Vis Arts building (UCSD campus). The question of categories, as one might expect, held fast as a centerpiece of conversation.

"Kaku," J.R. noted toward the end of the talk, is the Japanese word used for both "writing" and "drawing." He wondered aloud how things might be different in the West if we likewise had only one word for that activity of moving the hand across a surface with a marking implement. Jerry evidently spent a few of his many years at UCSD trying—unsuccessfully in the end—to get "creative writing" moved from the Lit to the Art department. The disciplinary walls, he said, were just too hard to "punch through." (He did, however, hold a joint appointment [Lit/Art] throughout his tenure at UC.)

As his anecdote suggests (if obliquely), absent typically from discussions of "IMAGE & TEXT"—or choose your favorite binary—is the effect of institutional/administrative, even architectural, logistics on the ways we make sense of our various "kakus." I approached J.R. afterward to get the right spelling for this Japanese word, and he asked in passing if I was in Lit now and I had to confess that, no, I was in Comm—another disciplinary demarcation (I thought but didn’t say at the time) adding another piece to the image/text puzzle.

Because, as Lev Manovich, Vis Arts prof and ‘new media’ theorist, rightly pointed out in Q&A, it’s not just about image and text but also motion. And yet, getting back to this review, it’s also not just about image, text, and motion but also action or interaction. Communication is interaction is art, and this in reverse, meaning there are ways to think about art as communication that go beyond the justifiable claims once made by Lang Pos, among others, that poetics has suffered over the years from implicit and explicit reliance on the communicative fallacy—basically that good poems communicate their meanings in the way good pipes pump hot water.

"Half with loathing, half with a strange love," The Poker (3) communicates (partial list) Fanny Howe from On the Bus ("Turn back time!"); Dale Smith from Notes No Answers ("Shall we make it perfect?" and other pointed rhetorical questions); Dan Bouchard from Evensong (ratcheted-up intertext, pieces of which I heard read in NYC last year at the Subpress reading); Durand interviewing Kevin Davies; Alan Davies (from This Is Thinking, which it is: "A good poem deflates the ego. It breathes out."); Fanny Howe again on music, religion, poetry, and Henry Hampton’s "Eyes on the Prize" plus the camera as "social animal."

In the call for work at the back: "Essays by poets will be prized." (!)

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Antennae (5) is one of those nicely conceived mixed genre journals that pushes at some of those real/imagined walls separating poetry, art, performance script, document, lecture, and musical score. That really compelling examples of each are included in one issue is impressive enough, but also the works tend to start looking like each other, or maybe unlike themselves, as the thing moves along. That was the message I got, at least, as I paged through: Ridrigo Toscano, Dennis Barone, Sawako Nakayasu, Steven Timm, Matthew Goulish (whose "microlecture" alone is worth the cover price), Keumok Heo, Leslie Scalapino, and Patrick Durgin, among a few of others.

Antennae has something like an aura of occasion to it that I really like. I want to write something specifically for it, in other words, whereas on other days I’m wondering whether something I have might fit a particular journal or zine. Maybe the latter approach is wrong-headed anyway, but I wonder if there’s something to the journal/zine itself (its size, shape, texture, print run, smell, font, focus, etc.) that either attracts or repels active-interactive response of this kind.

I for one would like to see more of these operations where what seems to materialize, in the end, is a sense of invitation to communicate with the people and projects happening in the pages of the zine/journal occasion-object. Maybe that’s what all of them do, in theory anyway, and some obviously print that invitation on the inside cover,, but it’s clear to me that some do it more generously (even if not explicitly) than others.

And for the record I think these three—Submodern Fiction, The Poker, and Antennae—come packaged with really lively, effective invitations.

Bill Marsh