Brian Kim Stefans takes on Bank of America

Poet Marie Buck reviews Brian Kim Stefans’ digital pamphlet “Bank of America Online Banking: A Critical Evaluation,” which is not a work of poetry but just what the title says it is, an evaluation of the way the bank uses its website to misdirect and misinform the consumer. As Buck says, the pamphlet “argues that the great portion of the bank’s revenue accrued through overdraft fees is often the result of the deceptive and confusing nature of the online banking site.” However, the point of the review is not to recap the villainous tricks used by big banks, but to ask the question of how to read such a document as written by a poet. Buck claims that she originally assumed the work was some sort of conceptual writing project, which it’s not, though it will definitely be read by poets in the context, to some extent, of poetry. There are generative aesthetic potentialities hidden in this problem:

While addressing poets is not the primary function of the pamphlet, Stefans’s critique of Bank of America’s lack of clarity addresses poets as well: obviously, no one wants Bank of America to mess around with language in the way that it does on its website. We want straightforward clarity; that’s what the context requires. This suggests that perhaps we should do away with the implicit notion that there is some sort of principled stance in fucking with language, in avoiding straightforward, direct, informative language.

Buck goes on to say that Stefans’ review, precisely because of its status as not-poetry, has a thing or two to teach poets about how poetry might be written. That is, she suggests that poets could take the idea of hybrid forms more literally, and actually write in other genres while claiming the work as poetry.