The Argotist Online has Jake Berry’s essay, Poetry Wide Open: The Otherstream (Fragments In Motion) online and a collection of responses to it including one by me at The Argotist Online.  Most of my fellow responders did a good job and are worth reading,  John M. Bennett’s was eswpecially good, its only flaw being is shortness.  More than half seemed fuzzy to me, and I disagreed fairly strongly with two or three, one of them Marjorie Perloff’s.  I’ve always considered Professor Perloff the only visible American critic who has written about poets in the otherstream, and she deserves credit for responding to Jake’s essay–great credit, for keeping aloof from discussions with or about marginals is almost a part of the definition of an academic.  She’s written very little about the otherstream, though, and only considered one small portion of it, language poetry (rather poorly, I fear).  She’s gotten the toes of one foot into the otherstream, but with her shoe still on, and seems entirely ignorant of those of us wholly immersed in it.  Unsurprisingly, I quickly wanted to attack her response.  The first thing I did was research the poets she mentioned as “experimental”–about a dozen–on the Internet.  Among them was Craig Dworkin.  I’d come across his name more than a few times but knew very little of him.  It turns out that he is, by my standards, an “experimental” artist–if we take “experimental” to be a synonym for “otherstream,” as Professor Perloff does, but I don’t, “experimental” having become, for me, a uselessly loose “polysemic” word for criticism.  Here’s what my search on Dworkin’s name got me:

Fact

By Craig Dworkin

Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%]: 47%): 53.7%. 100S Type Alkyd used as a binder (Reaction product of linseed oil: 50.7%. Isophthalic acid [C8H6O4]: 9.5%. Trimethylolpropane [CH3CH2C(CH2OH)3]: 4.7%. Reaction product of tall oil rosin: 12.5%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.5%. Pentaerythritol [C5H12O4]: 5%. Aliphatic C14 Hydrocarbon: 15%): 19.4%. Carbon Black (C: 92.8%. Petroleum: 5.1%. With sulfur, chlorine, and oxygen contaminates: 2.1%), used as a pigmenting agent: 18.6%. Tung oil (Eleostearic acid [C18H30O2]: 81.9%. Linoleic acid [C18H32O2]: 8.2%. Palmitic acid [C16H32O2]: 5.9%. Oleic acid [CH3(CH2)7CH=CH(CH2)7COOH]: 4.0%.), used as a reducer: 3.3%. Micronized polyethylene wax (C2H4)N: 2.8%. 3/50 Manganese compound, used as a through drier: 1.3%. 1/25 Cobalt linoleate compound used as a top drier: .7%. Residues of blanket wash (roughly equal parts aliphatic hydrocarbon and aromatic hydrocarbon): .2%. Adhered to: cellulose [C6H10O5] from softwood sulphite pulp (Pozone Process) of White Spruce (65%) and Jack Pine (35%): 77%; hardwood pulp (enzyme process pre-bleach Kraft pulp) of White Poplar (aspen): 15%; and batch treated PCW (8%): 69.3%. Water [H2O]: 11.0%. Clay [Kaolinite form aluminum silicate hydroxide (Al2Si2O5[OH]4): 86%. Calcium carbonate (CaCO3): 12%. Diethylenetriamine: 2%], used as a pigmenting filler: 8.4%. Hydrogen peroxide [H2O2], used as a brightening agent: 3.6%. Rosin soap, used as a sizer: 2.7%. Aluminum sulfate [Al2(SO4)]: 1.8%. Residues of cationic softener (H2O: 83.8%. Base [Stearic acid (C18H36O2): 53.8%. Palmitic acid (C16H32O2): 29%. Aminoethylethanolamine (H2-NC2-H4-NHC2-H4-OH): 17.2%]: 10.8%. Sucroseoxyacetate: 4.9%. Tallow Amine, used as a surfactant: 0.3%. Sodium chloride [NaCl], used as a viscosity controlling agent: .2%) and non-ionic emulsifying defoamer (sodium salt of dioctylsulphosuccinate [C20H37NaO7S]), combined: 1.7%. Miscellaneous foreign contaminates: 1.5%.

NOTES: “Fact” is an exact list of ingredients that make up a sheet of paper that has been written or printed on, hence the blunt title of the work. It’s a self-reflexive, deconstructed meditation on the act of writing and of publishing, with an emphasis on the materiality of language. Each time Dworkin displays the poem, he researches the medium on which it’s being viewed, changing the list of ingredients. It’s a flexible work in progress, sometimes manifesting itself as a list of the ingredients that make up a Xerox copy, other times listing the composition of an lcd display monitor. (Italicized portion my addition–BG)

Source: Poetry (July/August 2009)

This text presents an interesting challenge to my poetry-taxonomy-in-progress. It is not a poem, by my criteria. But it doesn’t seem to me to be evokature, either. That’s what I call prose that attempts to evoke images and/or emotions the way poetry does but has no lineation, or anything like lineation. What it clearly is, is a work conceptual art (which I consider inspired). For now I will consider it “conceprature,” a sibling of “evokature” (what “prose poems” are) and, like the latter, a subcategory of prose.

My pluraphrase (i.e., full expression of what a poem is, does and says) of it is inchoate right now, or less than inchoate. I’ll kick it into my under-consciousness, for now. With luck, it’ll turn into something I can work at least a tentative appreciation of “Fact” into. In the meantime, I have to acknowledge that a top-level member of the American Poetry Establishment has done a good deed for me (I mean Professor Perloff, not Craig Dowrkin, also an academic who has done a good deed for me). Not sure I can get over that.

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