(or the sources, syntax and paratext of "appropriation" poetry)
There is no one answer and no poem purporting to give one does What your hand finds to do do ( Jackson Mac Low)
At Zeitgeist Spam John Bloomberg-Rissman writes what I can only call "appropriation" poetry. I first saw the term (used synonymously with "recombinant") as a genre-category in relation to an online New York Times 'Books' review of David Shields's Reality Hunger, a work that (in the reviewer's words) consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix...
Bloomberg-Rissman's (B-R's) work is pretty much cut from the same "recombinant" cloth except that the product that's 'made' is decidedly poetic. It's the making of a "recombinant" poem— its origin, processes and artistic principles— that interests me. When I initially expressed some reservations at Geof Huth's dbqp visualizing poetics about a genre convention that had already been used, and that as poetic technique may have run its course, both Huth and B-R, sensing a faulty causal generalization, came to the defense of the artistic integrity of the work itself & not its place in any literary continuum. Among the artists who can said to be the putative originators of the text's "collage" style are Schwitters, Eisenstein, Tzara & Hanna Hoch so that the charge of unoriginality cannot be supported. Huth went even so far as to assert that "all writing is appropriation. It's merely a matter of degree and skill." A point that I accept but not without some qualifications. B-R's most recent publication Flux, Clot & Froth (FCF) is described by Huth as a "modern-day epic", and certainly no one is better qualified to describe the experimentalist quality of B-R's work. Huth says of it that[the poet] has harvested whatever sequences of words interested him and he has melded these into a single frame, a giant canvas, its mirrored surface hidden from us by the deftness with which he has woven these various and dischordant texts into a single song, as if from a single source, in much the same way that a river is enriched by the tributaries feeding into it even if it seems but a single rolling force of water to our blindered eyes I haven't ordered my copy of the book yet but I do have the archival gold mine that is B-R's Zeitgeist Spam blog, from which his poetical texts derive. Editor and blogger Alan Baker referred to it as a collective "spoof of the epic works of High Modernism".Text and blog are practically interchangeable. There are more than enough writing samples there to base a critical appraisal & appreciation of his work in general: in fact, FCF is Part I of an overall "Zeigeist Spam" project of which No Sounds of my Own Making forms Part II. It's been described as "an epic-length mixtape composed of thousands of algorithmically/intuitively-derived fully annotated oft-mangled bits of écriture/parole", and B-R as the "poet of mixmastery, [who] dis-complicates a vastness of textonality, meticulously cites each source, then honors the poundage of forebears by locating a fresh, consistently revealing work, flush with ripening seeds." Praises every bit as purposely "oft-mangled" as B-R's own impressive project. But technically and artistically what is at play here? How is the "appropriation' poem constructed and to what poetic principles (however they're defined) does the making of a poem pay court here? Does even the label "appropriation" apply? The "project description" given at B-R's blog even playfully parodies the work as "cutnpaste" (in reply to the critic) as if to concede the point of its obviously collagist, radically recursive and "writing through" technique. It is a "choice-determined" experiment in the tradition of Cage, Duchamp and Mac Low. The question is, to my mind, whether FCF can be experimentally successful (as Jerome Rothenberg puts it) "without any sacrifice of coherence or feeling or intelligence & in a voice that remains unified & “personal”. Sheila E. Murphy has even called it a "transcendent work". And therein lies the question and perhaps the ultimate test of the viability of an "appropriation" poetics. Can a sense (even an organic sense) of a poem's viability be maintained, and even of the poet himself who sets out to breathe life into the fragments from which he creates? I believe the "Zeitgeist Spam" experiment succeeds on both counts. Without the FCF text it's necessary, of course, to work with Zeitgeist blog, the fons et origo of Parts I and II of B-R's epical work; and "In the House of the Hangman 307" ("307") is the particular blog text I choose for a closer look at what I see as the sources, syntax and paratext of B-R's "appropriation" poetics.To begin with, the sources are clear: the poem is a vast "appropriation" of the words, phrases & constructions of other writers. (I will fight the Marxist temptation to disclose the seamy connotations of that term.). B-R's primary text is a labour of patient gathering as well as a desire to give new life to the products of an already existent artistic life-world always ready to hand. If "307" is the text, its sources comprise as large or as small a sum of all the acknowledged sites as the poet's cared to visit, a collagist-poet who is ready to display the order of what's an otherwise seemingly scattered "sampling".
[Note: Sources: photo embedded in “Upcoming Aperture Events! including…Trevor Paglen, Jill Magid, Bruce Davidson, William Christenberry!”, at Aperture Exposures Blog, 6 Dec 010; JBR; “Another Day, Another Kid In A Claw Machine”, at daddytypes, 11 Dec 010 (“‘When we got inside there was the cutest little girl in a pink outfit sucking her binky inside with the other toys,’ said Moon Run Fire Chief Paul Kashmer.”); Christopher Carmona, “Going To The Yonque”, as quoted in Michael Sedano, “YA Review: Of Dreams and Drums. Aztec Days Coloring Book. On-Line Floricanto Dec 7 Arizona”, at La Bloga, 7 Dec 010; “‘Lollapalooza Soundtrack’ by Purkinge”, at PennSound Daily, 10 Dec 010, etc etc Blog articles, soundtracks, & excerpts, tv ads, mashups, & intros to academic articles, with even bits of song lyrics reported to the poet by others, etc. all comprise some of the primary sources for the final recombinant "307" product. In a word, B-R is compelled to try to make a claim not so much for inspiration or spontaneity—the old confinements that "appropriation" poetics tries to "read through"—as a sort of methodical (though ultimately chance-directed) inquiry into untapped sources of meaning. This is presumably the "transcendent" quality attributed to FCF by Murphy. Sense derives ultimately from the syntax of poetic experience & that (as I read B-R's "Zeitgeist Spam" project) seems to come about as a result of the conscious interweaving of two creative principles at work, at the same time, in every poem-making: in the "307" verse, in other words, can be detected aggregative and synthesizing moves by which random elements (words, sounds, phrases, etc.) can be fitted into a single poetic design. By syntax I mean a system of pattern-recognition whereby poetry production is answerable to codes of learned, essentially recombinant 'reading'. A few examples of how to read the "appropriation" poem will be sufficient. If we consider the first block of text from "307"(copied here in its entirety), even giving it the traditional 'verse', or 'strophe' name for convenience, As Jill Magid writes in neon, “I Can Burn Your Face.” Who’s the I here? Another Day, Another Kid In A Claw Machine. I’m going to buy me a satellite, gonna pay the man five dollars. He says he wants Incan gold, I tell him I’m not Incan. I wear a skirt, a random party girl says, “I'm glad you're man enough to wear that.” The “piece of white bread” the man ventures in search of might be sustenance, in the form of work. In The Road, when Mortensen’s character wonders “how would you know if you’re the Last Man”, Duvall’s character responds “you wouldn’t, you’d just be it.” I don’t hate sustenance, I hate white bread. Little girl wanders market softly singing reindeer song: “And what's fate saying? / If fate’s saying anything, neither farmer nor squirrel can make it out.” The noon air, a cold compress. I am making you breakfast. We could leave this apartment and be in any city. I’ll bring you the avocado tree stolen from my neighbor’s yard. I fear my mouth is full of poltergeists. I was there when Adorno wrote Horkheimer, “I’m going it's clear that reading is reducible to a search for levels of correspondence between poem & textual antecedents, with each verse line (such as "As Jill Magid writes in neon, 'I Can Burn Your Face.'") keyed to an exact source text, which in this case happens to be Aperture Exposures Blog, a photography blog for Aperture magazine. (At times, the sources are print publications such as Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond or online audio archives such as PennSound Daily or even song lyrics such as the "Little girl/reindeer song") The Monday, December 6th post also happens to announce, among other things, a "provocative new panel discussion" whose aim is to "explore the use of contemporary digital technologies in explore (sic) the relationship between images, surveillance and power." Above this advertisement is a neon illustration of the statement "I Can Burn Your Face". All of which serves as part of a loosely associated body of poetic material that runs throughout the entire first verse stanza and from which the poet makes his first word-selections for the opening verse line of the "307" poem. The third verse line, "Another Day, Another Kid In A Claw Machine" is likewise keyed directly to its source-source, in this case a blog for new dads entitled daddytypes. It, too, displays the same aggregative power as a source of the poem's textual parts. However, inserted between the first and third verse lines is the question, "Who's the I here", with the personal pronoun italicized. The fact that it doesn't seem to be derived from any listed source gives it a more than combinatory power. Here's a sign of an active synthesis at work able to reflect on and suggest links between the disparate parts, making of the poem an orderly and connected structure in its own right. The I question is perhaps the poet's own contribution to the "images, surveillance and power of digital technologies" debate introduced in the poem's first line. In any event, it certainly does offer just one of a number of other ways in which to fit disconnected fragments into a single coherent "307" poem. Some patient affixing of sources to the remaining "307" verse lines will suggest other key meaning-makers in B-R's poem The La Bloga site is the direct source of the lines from "Going To The Yonque" poem by Christopher Carmona: "I’m going to buy me a satellite, gonna pay the man five/ dollars. He says he wants Incan gold, I tell him I’m not Incan." Again, straight aggregative work. But soundtrack and print periodical references, appearing one after the other, must serve as the origin of the next line "I wear a skirt, a random party girl says, 'I'm glad you're man enough to wear that'" etc. Though I haven't bothered to verify the sources, even in their absence from the visible text they serve as structuring principles & can lead towards a unified presentation of the poet's materials. The "La Bloga" and the Duvall "Last Man" samplings from the Larval Subjects blog serve as brackets for non-verifiable text lying in between. The poet's direct (unprepared and unfounded) intrusion into the text ("Who's the I here?") now combines with visually absent sources to give at least two ways to read the "307" poem. (Since I'm more interested in methodology here, interpretations of the poem may form the topic of a future blog post) The question finally arises whether the listed sources in B-R's poem form a paratext: another entirely interestingly contrastive or complementary version running concurrently with the putative primary "307" text. The question is not a fanciful one: certainly no more so than the idea of a "Zeitgeist Spam" project. Acting as more than just a series of references for the main "307" poem, perhaps the collected Sources can be read as another poem. Wikipedia (citing Gérard Genette) gives the standard definition of paratext as "a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that ... is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it". In the spirit of Genette's definition, B-R's Flux, Clot & Froth comes with a Volume II in which appears the "apparatus" (as Huth calls it) for the entire series of endnotes. It would be interesting to look at even a small part of the appropriation poem "apparatus" to determine where that transition (& transaction) between "307" and its Source lies.