Benjamin Friedlander describes the generally hostile reaction of the Buffalo Poetics Listserv when he began posting his “Anti-Hegemony Project,” which consists of contributions to the Listserv that discuss the vaunted Language poet Ron Silliman. Friedlander's posts contrasted with the usual Listserv traffic at the time, but not in subject matter or critical appraisal of Silliman; like much normal Listserv discourse, the “Anti-Hegemony Project” expresses both positive and negative reactions to Silliman the poet and personality. The primary uniqueness of Friedlander's posts is their style: the syntax and language of the Silliman posts are lifted directly from chat rooms devoted to fans of the pop singer Madonna (“I am normally a Silliman fan to the max, but I think I am slipping. What is the story on him and Lyn Hejinian being terrorists?”¹²). Friedlander, in his introduction to “Anti-Hegemony Project,” posits this question: “ Could it be that the [Silliman] postings [. . .] wounded the vanity of the List as a whole, and not merely the figures named directly?”¹³ Friedlander proposes that because his posts appear to treat an intellectually prized poet and poetic movement as, in his words, “adolescent twaddle,” the posts were seen as a threat. Like Flarf, Friedlander's project addresses and attempts to counter a certain insularity and preciousness in the poetic community. “We have in the [Anti-Hegemony Project] the bold, vigorous, and semi-lucid prose, the biting sarcasm, the pungent opinionation, and the unscrupulous directness of the world beyond poetry.”¹⁴ Implied in both Friedlander and Mohammad's projects is the necessity to bridge the distance between the world of poetry and the world beyond poetry as both are commonly conceived. In Mohammad's view, “ [Mainstream poetry] would have to be aggressively public, perhaps--distributed via mass mailing or spam messages, say. It would have to be as shameless as television . . .”¹⁵

In this formulation, the epiphanies, values and insights presented in this new mainstream poetry would figure to be radically different than the world presented by the discourse on the Buffalo Listserv and/or the world presented in a poem like Mary Oliver's “The Dipper,” which ends:

And still I hear him—
and whenever I open the ponderous book of riddles
he sits with his black feet hooked to the page,
his eyes cheerful, still burning with water-love—

and thus the world is full of leaves and feathers,
and comfort, and instruction. I do not even remember
your name, great river,
but since that hour I have lived

simply,
in the joy of the body as full and clear
as falling water; the pleasures of the mind
like a dark bird dipping in and out, tasting and singing.

The simple world as presented here is perhaps enticing, a pastoral world “full of leaves and feathers,/and comfort, and instruction.” But it would indeed seem odd to argue for this as language or a world that can be labeled mainstream or ordinary—there's not only an assumption of an unusual degree of safety and comfort in these lines, but also an assumption of ample time for both leisurely experiencing nature and contemplating its importance.¹⁶ There's lyricism and emotion here but it is the lyricism and emotion of a relatively rare level of comfort, of an arguably naïve purity.

 

 

n e x t

 

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¹² Benjamin Friedlander. Simulcast. 105

¹³ Ibid. 43-44

¹⁴ Ibid. 44

¹⁵ “Towards a Mainstream Poetics.” http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html

¹⁶ This observation about Oliver's poem is stated with the knowledge that it takes a certain degree of leisure and privilege to have the time to run Google searches and create Flarf poems.

 

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