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“My feelings of anger do not interfere with my work. In order to have good health, I have to act in a pleasing way to other more powerful individuals. At times I think people are trying to annoy me. I feel more angry about myself these days than I used to. More people than usual are beginning to make me feel angry. I am so angry and hostile all the time that I can’t stand it. From time to time my feelings of anger interfere with my work. I feel that others are constantly and intentionally making me angry. I feel so angry that it interferes with my capacity to work. I feel unhappy about my physical health. My feelings of anger prevent me from doing any work at all.”
from “Avail”
in Last Instance
by Dan Farrell
Krupskaya, 1999
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“Avail” by Dan Farrell is a long poem that itemizes each response made by hospital patients when asked to fill in a medical questionnaire about their physiological health and psychological status. “Avail” provides a candid litany of woe, expressed in the flattened monotone of apathetic annoyance. The poem redundantly paraphrases the same few feelings of chronic discomfort and aimless irritation, as if to show that the discourse of complaint has its own unique genres of hackneyed expression. The statements may originate from a diverse variety of respondents, but the reader nevertheless feels tempted to attribute each of these sentences to a single person—presumably the poet himself.
“Avail” evokes the kind of ennui that might plague suburban slackers at the dawn of a new millenium. The poem presumes that, in the modern milieu, our anxiety has become a kind of mass-produced, mass-marketed commodity that we experience with obligatory detachment in the hope that such anxiety does not interfere with our ability to work. The poem suggests that the expression of such painful emotion has become so compromised by the confessional, if not narcissistic, routine of therapy that poets can no longer say anything truly authentic about their own emotional existence. The very act of trying to do so already functions within the generic purview of feel-good self-help.
“Avail” in effect parodies the adequate, but mediocre, style of lyrical writing often produced by graduates from the average, literary workshop. The poem suggests that the genre of the lyric has quite literally become a form that poets fill out, like an application, pencilling in the appropriate emotional responses somewhere in the blank space provided.
The conventional expectations of readership often demand that such poetry do little more than express the sentiments of its producer rather than produce a dissonance in its consumer. The reader almost begins to take on the role of a sociologist, filing away each emotional affidavit after having judged it accordingly for both its intensity and sincerity.
“Avail” questions the degree to which such emotional catharsis benefits the writer. The poem in fact suggests that the lyric may no longer avail us of its benefits because the lyric has now woven a veil that conceals other kinds of unusual feeling, thereby denying us the prohibited experience of other, more radical, more surreal, states of mind—ones that do not lend themselves easily to recognizable articulation. The poem attempts to analyze the creative, literary potential, inherent in such unpoetic feelings as prolonged boredom and lethargic disgust. The poem conducts its experiment in a mood of scientific detachment, as if to suggest that intense passion can only interfere with the completion of such work.

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