Author Archive
Christian Bök
Cheers and Thanks
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Hello, everyone. Just writing to say that this entry constitutes my 60th post—and, alas, today marks the end of my contract at Harriet. I have enjoyed the bavardage with all of you—and for the last six months, I have very much appreciated the opportunity to provoke my readership more directly in dialogue. I certainly hope that the Poetry Foundation sees fit to replace me with yet another avant-garde troublemaker, since such a person stands to have a lot of fun causing mischief. I am going to end my tenure here with a few personal thoughts about my namesake—”the Book” (saying perhaps as much about me as about it…).
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Christian Bök
Late Review 04
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1. Write for skimmers
2. Write for peckers
3. Filter, impose, trespass
4. Include a link to the Code
5. Think hyper
6. Think branding
7. Think icon
8. Tell your visitor where to go
“How to Write for the Internet”
in Human Resources
by Rachel Zolf
Coach House Books, 2007
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Christian Bök
Late Review 03
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“A new weapon in the war against explosions:
EXPLOSIONS! Hearing aids may explode!”
from “Watch for Exploding Cells”
in Fake Math
by Ryan Fitzpatrick
Snare Books, 2007
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Christian Bök
Late Review 02
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“juicy baby
rubber fist
red jawbreaker
gluts opera-mouthed
palate heaves
lip popper
sloppy baby
gurgle slick
gloam limpid”
“Ballgag”
in Thumbscrews
by Natalie Zina Walschots
Snare Books, 2007
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Christian Bök
Late Review 01
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“Bad abba the endgame. In-
seminal doomdom alert:
pueblo naturans or
else. But the breadcrumbs are gone, and the
story goes on, and how
haply an ending no
nextwise has shown us, nor known.”
from “Tale”
in Yesno
by Dennis Lee
Anansi Press, 2007
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Christian Bök
Random Poetry 08
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“Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?
Now is the time that face should form another;
Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
And threescore year would make the world away.
Look, what an unthrift in the world doth spend
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.”
from 11,112,006,825,558,016 Sonnets
by William Gillespie
Spineless Books, 1999
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Christian Bök
Late Past the Post
Reginald Shepherd has proposed a definition for the term “post-avant poetry”—a term bandied about by poets without much consensus about its alleged referent, so I do not envy him his task, even though his definition has provided a scaffold for much subsequent discussion. Despite the currency of the term, I must confess that, since encountering the coinage in an early entry by Ron Silliman on his blog, I have studiously avoided the use of the moniker “post-avant” to describe any of the work by my peers, if only because I think that the overuse of the prefix “post-” in a lot of postmodern commentary never actually indicates the foreclosure of a particular, historical paradigm, so much as the prefix indicates our impatience that such a persistent, conceptual heritage has not yet been transcended—and thus we preemptively do so, long before we have yet constructed a much more innovative radicalism to replace it. I think that the term “post-avant poetry” thus signals a desire, among poets, for the obsolescence of the avant-garde, despite the fact that no other futuristic categories stand at the ready to upstage it….
Christian Bök
Hail, Ichneumonid Redux!
Commentary about the “ichneumonids” continues apace, and again I must apologize for belabouring this topic—but Reginald Shepherd still seems to be missing the point that, Bernstein and I are not endorsing any hyperbolic comparison between poetic conflict and social genocide—we are merely citing (both critically and ironically) the very fact that Fenza does! Fenza equates the avant-garde with a parasitic insectoid that threatens to eradicate literature, and he implies that such a cannibal intruder must be “stung to death” before it can contaminate or exterminate the hive of our culture. Shepherd might question his own claim that such rhetoric does not arise from “sheer malice” if, for such a hateful conceit, he substitutes by comparison, any marginal identity other than the avant-garde (be it gays or jews—or whomever…).
Christian Bök
Hail, Ichneumonid!
Competing, scholarly priorities have prevented me from contributing to these interesting discussions on Harriet, and I fear that my own comments might seem very late in coming. Reginald Shepherd has expressed anxieties about the acid tone in an article by the poet Charles Bernstein, who formulates a sardonic rebuttal to an article by D. F. Fenza (the executive director of the AWP). Fenza has written an absurdly paranoid diatribe against the avant-garde, equating poets of the Language Movement with a species of “ichneumonid,” a kind of wasp that can lay its eggs inside the live body of a caterpillar—a victim that then goes on to spin a cocoon, but that, alas, does not live long enough to hatch as a beautiful butterfly, because the horrible parasite devours its host from the inside out and then hatches forth from the cocoon instead, as a wasp. Fenza warns young poets to be wary of this threat that avant-garde theory might pose to their budding talents and their newborn careers….
Christian Bök
UbuWeb at AWP
I, too, have returned from AWP, exhausted by the experience. I fear that I have little to report of interest beyond the social gossip that such an occasion usually affords—but in the interest of generating some comments about audio-works of the avant-garde, I am going to include the links to the works on my playlist for the panel entitled “Listen to This”—a panel originally advertised to include Kenneth Goldsmith, the proprietor of UbuWeb, but that instead has included me, serving as his avatar. I believe that my selections evoke the spirit of his website, and I encourage you to check them out….
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