Your Blog is Great

Futurepost, the blog run by Futurepoem Books, has been featuring poets’ responses to their catalog. The project itself is an interesting one: if poetry books are not sold by traditional means of advertising, but by “word of mouth” and, in many cases, a sort of academic/theoretical/MFA-ical discourse applied to the book to make it legible, Futurepoem’s tapped into this brilliantly. They are initiating conversations around their books and thereby engaging in the difficult work of building a context for the book. Usually, as we all know, this is left to the poet to do by his/her self, by whatever means at or not at his/her disposal. Anyway, the most recent post is by Stan Apps, who responds to Ara Shirinyan’s Your Country is Great. Shirinyan’s book features poems composed of internet searches for the term “X country is great” (for countries A-G). It's kind of like flarf, but with a conceptual twist that more directly questions the role of technology in mediating space. Apps writes:

I heard that “everything is connected by internet” but the sad part is I have no idea what that means. What is this “everything” and how is it connected—the only part of this sentence I can understand is “internet.”

Ara Shirinyan’s book Your Country Is Great: A—G is trying to understand the everything that is connected and the manner in which it is connected. Shirinyan understands the internet already, so he uses it to try to understand the rest of the thesis statement.

Provocatively, Apps suggests not so much a reading of the book as he does multiple readings of the book, and refuses to assign to it any particular stance or good:

Some will argue that it’s too much work to locate their preferred ideologies and attitudes in Shirinyan’s epic—but they’re there. Read between the lines, and you’ll find your hobbyhorse peaking out at you through Shirinyan’s grand collage.