by Dorothea Lasky
Ugly Duckling Presse 2010
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

“…from the earth into the brain”

When I agreed to review this chapbook, I had no idea quite what I was in for. The book is very small—a single pamphlet stitched signature—and the entire text only takes about twenty minutes to read. But I’ve found the text to be significantly more compelling than its tiny size might suggest. I have been working and reworking this review, and it’s ultimately split me into two reviewers. The curmudgeon in me feels compelled to respond to the argument, to dissect it, locate it and respond to it. The poet in me feels compelled to point out the pleasures of the text, to celebrate them. I’ve tried to do both at once, and I seem unable. So here I am as two reviewers. Perhaps you can put both of me back together. But order the book. Share it with your friends. Teach it to your students. Show it to your teachers. You won’t be sorry.

The Curmudgeon’s Review:

Poetry seems so frequently in need of rescuing that one might be forgiven for thinking of Poetry as a damsel in eternal distress, a sort of Nell Fenwick forever being tied to the railroad tracks by an endless parade of Snidely Whiplashes. Dorothea Lasky is the latest Dudley Do-Right to come to Poetry’s rescue. This time the evil villain is “projects”—both the poets who write poetic projects and the readers who think of poetry in terms of projects.

The argument of Lasky’s manifesto is two-fold, and fairly straightforward: 1) We’ve come to conceive of poetry as something to discuss and contemplate, rather than something to do or love. 2) Poetry is defined by the experience of uncertainty and non-linearity, and since a “project” is linear and certain, a “project” is anti-poetic. If the first part of this argument sounds familiar, it’s because it’s fairly close to the case Susan Sontag put forward in “Against Interpretation.” The word “project” for Lasky functions as an analog to Sontag’s “interpretation.” Talking about the thing is no substitute for the thing itself. I think that Lasky would solidly endorse Sontag’s conclusion: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Lasky is diagnosing a slightly different malaise than Sontag, though unlike Sontag she puts herself in the position of having to define the art she defends. Still, the conclusion is the same: learn to love the poem (artwork) itself.

Lasky’s prose is lucid and chatty, and with the exception of a footnoted reference to Vygotsky, never explicitly theoretical or erudite—despite the clear intellectual underpinnings of her thought. It is refreshing to see such friendly and smart prose that makes moves indebted to the last forty years of literary theory without ever having to weigh down the prose with that history. But I found the conversational tone cloying. From the first page:

I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain. I think a poet intuits a poem and a scientist conducts a “project.” I don’t know. That seems wrong, too. Poets and scientists are very similar in a lot of ways.

I greatly enjoy Lasky’s prose style, but her insistence that we’re watching an unrevised monologue in process (“I don’t know. That seems wrong, too”) irks me. It suggests a blurring of the poet and essayist’s tools, and that might make sense if she weren’t at work distinguishing poetry from not-poetry. She seems to stylistically pop her gum because she wants her audience to underestimate her. Lasky is incredibly gifted, but I could never fully settle into the charm of her prose without disregarding the thread of her argument. And I could never fully embrace the argument—despite the fact that I agree with its conclusion.

Lasky identifies two senses of the word “project.” The first sense is to understand poems as having goals or effects that we name as the poem’s “project.” While it is true that to speak of Emily Dickinson’s “project” might be to reduce her work to a single goal, that goal is not exclusive. Should one really not read Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson because she seems concerned with a particular “project” of Dickinson’s? How different is “project” from “lens of analysis”? It is true that in the last century, critical texts have often come to vie with the texts they analyze for primacy—but does anyone really think Eve Sedgwick has more readers than Herman Melville? Usually, primary and secondary works exist in symbiosis. Yes, bad criticism is reductive, but to isolate a single goal within a poetic body of work for analysis hardly seems unfair or undesirable. Sedgwick sends you back to Melville, and Melville sends you back to Sedgwick. You don’t suffer a loss with each analysis—you enrich your experience. Thinking of a work as a project doesn’t limit you from seeing it as a different project (or a multiplicity of projects) later. And I suspect that I’m not the only reader who has been sent to a primary text in order to understand a secondary text—at which point the secondary text does the primary text a great service. Identifying a project can be a way of finding readers for the poem itself.

The second sense of the word “project” is as a generative method for poets. In the example she gives of a project, a poet friend of hers goes to an art museum every day for a month and writes about one artwork per visit. At a reading, she hears him read the poems and they are bad poems. But he writes an essay about the project, and the essay is a good essay. Lasky is frustrated that after the reading the poet is congratulated for his essay and for his project, while the poems go undiscussed. “No one talked to him about his poems,” Lasky writes, “His poems were not important to his project. His project was important to his project.” But here the problem is bad poems, interesting essays and the economy of attention. The project is the symptom, not the disease, though I share Lasky’s frustration. Lasky even goes on to name poets and movements whose projects have yielded poems she loves. Her assertion, “just because you have constructed a project does not mean you have written a poem,” seems unassailable to me. But Lasky has now put herself in the position of having to define capital P poetry in order to distinguish between the good results of fertile projects and the sterile projects that yield nothing in the way of real poems.

The argument for “real poetry” ultimately falls flat as well because Lasky insists on the attention of the reader—and poetry, as James Longenbach reminds us, cannot be judged by the number of readers. It also undermines her book. If, as Lasky assures us, “Real poetry is a party,” she bears the burden of demonstrating why the essay or the project is not a party. In her anecdote about the art museum project, she has perhaps turned up at the wrong party, but everyone else seems to be enjoying themselves. In her anecdote, she alone seems to be concerned that the poems are bad. Why can’t a project be a party? Why can’t talking about a project be a party? If the joy in poetry is the pleasure of the reader, why deny that pleasure to the audience for an essay?

She’s on sturdier ground with her argument that “Poetry has everything to do with existing in a realm of uncertainty.” But will this exclusively define poetry? Many memoirs vividly evoke the uncertainty that the author experiences concerning his or her own life. Lasky later narrows her definition, insisting on the non-linear and uncertainty of poetry as its defining features, but as is always the case when pinning down the “poem”—which is perhaps the obligation of anyone who chooses to confidently speak of “Real Poetry”—this may be more definitional of lyric. And after at least a decade of the “lyric essay,” it’s hard to reserve those qualities for poems. And once she gets to the idea that, in real poetry, “the issues of the self become one with the universal” she has lost me. Certainly this idea of the “universal” is appealing and commonplace, but it’s ultimately an empty term. It simply means that it’s supposed to have a widespread appeal, and we return to the economy of attention. I understand the appeal of the word “universal” but it always feels like a way to expel the people who don’t like what you like from the universe. It’s a mystification. And again, assuming that the “universal” is indeed an useful category, wouldn’t memoir also be a place where the issues of the self become one with the universal? You can say that a poem should not mean, but be, to quote a similar formulation against the project-ization of poetry, but there’s not a lot to say after that. It’s the end of a conversation, not the beginning.

Lasky does acknowledge that there are projects that have yielded results she adores. She calls on Flarf as an example of good poems in and of themselves. Flarf began as an attempt to create the worst poetry the poet could generate. It was a hoax to reveal the editorial absence at the center of a crooked poetry contest. Necessary to the pleasure of lines like “Yeah, mm-hmm, it’s true / big birds make / big doo!” is the recognition that this is terrible poetry—that this could never ever be mistaken for “real poetry.” K. Silem Mohammad’s “Sought Poems,” something of Apologia for Flarf (or the strain of Flarf based on Google searches), makes the same point as Lasky. As Mohammad demonstrates the process of refining a search into a poem, he is clear that the poem does matter; the poem is the end result.

Lasky is continually appealing to a certain kind of common sense that feels too easy to me. If reading the poem is degree zero, and discussing (or reading about) the poem is degree one, then you can praise pleasures of reading at degree zero, but I would hope not at the expense of degree one. Lasky kept reminding of me students who keep wanting to know why they can’t just enjoy the poems. Well, you can, but you didn’t need to come to class for that. And if the existence of secondary texts destroys your enjoyment of primary texts, it’s within your rights to ignore them; it’s not within your rights to call for their destruction or arrest.

The Poet’s Review:

In identifying something of a malaise among contemporary poets, Lasky insists on the fecund pleasures of poetry, and pushes back against the way in which poets seem to think in terms of grant applications rather than poems. As Lasky points out, once the poem is not the primary unit of value, the “project” is a dead letter, the skin that covers a rotting corpse. As you might guess from this metaphor, the poem is suffocated by the project. Once you talk about the poems instead of reading them, the poem starts to die.

Lasky’s lyric essay blurs the lines between the poetry and prose, allowing herself to think out loud, retrace her thoughts, hedge her conclusions and generally play around with the ideas. Lasky’s prose is lucid and chatty, and by bringing in a poet’s tools, she undoes much of the division that she seems to be setting up. From the first page:

I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain. I think a poet intuits a poem and a scientist conducts a “project.” I don’t know. That seems wrong, too. Poets and scientists are very similar in a lot of ways.

Lasky—like William Carlos William’s in Spring and All—sets out to find the boundaries between poetry and prose, but ultimately finds that line impossible to trace. It’s not a line at all, but almost a no-man’s-land or demilitarized zone that one can enter but at great risk. Lasky never calls out for help; a single reference to Vygotsky indicates the erudition at work in her thinking. Like a poet, she metabolizes the thought of others, rather than directly citing it or quoting it. Like a poet, she foregrounds persona and monologue, collapsing the division between thought and emotion, between argument and monologue. Like a poet, her writing embodies (rather than expresses) her concerns, showing that prose and poetry have fuzzy boundaries, finding herself in the poetic terrain of uncertainty even as we watch the persona struggle toward a conclusion.

Lasky considers the project as a double dilemma. The first part of the problem is that people replace the poem with interpretations of the poem. As everyone knows, this is a problem. Having someone recount the plot of The Merchant of Venice is not watching The Merchant of Venice. Discussing Elizabethan thoughts on Italian communities built on same sex desire and their representation in The Merchant of Venice is also not watching The Merchant of Venice. Fair enough. This is old hat. But, the second part is far more interesting—the current vogue among poets for writing “projects.” But Lasky never gets specific. She never delves into the poets one might accuse of writing projects (Anne Carson’s Nox? Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris? Jeffrey Conway, Lynn Crosbie and David Trinidad’s Phoebe 2002?) because she’s only really concerned with bad poems. She only offers an anecdote about bad poems that come from a good project because she’s not interested in naming names. She knows that if you’ve picked up this little chapbook, you’re probably already a poet, you probably already have standards. The point is not that you shouldn’t have a project, the point is that you shouldn’t let a project fool you into forgetting your standards for a poem. Lasky even goes so far as include Flarf as an example of a project that has yielded poems she loves, which further undercuts the possibility of ever really defining poetry. The genius of Flarf is that you can’t really tell in advance what’s a cheap joke and what’s a lasting poem. Gary Sullivan’s “Yeah, mm-hmm, it’s true / big birds make / big doo!” is so satisfying because we get to congratulate ourselves on being able to tell good from bad. We know that it’s bad, and yet it’s so gloriously bad, we can’t stop going back to it. It reminds us that sometimes the scale of good to bad is structured like Pac Man’s maze—sometimes you go off one edge to find yourself on the other side.

Lasky’s speaker maintains that her primary allegience is to the uncertainty of poetry, and by playing out that uncertainty in the prose, it’s fairly clear that this work is a prose poem itself. The drawings that accompany the prose seem to be from a children’s book and show melancholy children in what seems to be a summer camp, until you realize that they’re chowing down on a recently killed buffalo, hyena style, and carrying around knives. The pictures heighten the sense of play, and warn the reader to enjoy the essay, and not to get overly concerned with the argument. After all, a curmudgeonly reader could spend weeks and weeks writing a ridiculously long essay trying to figure out what distresses him about an argument that ultimately tells him what everyone already knows: Poetry is not a project. Poetry is about pleasure. A poem is a poem… what else is there to say?

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