Against///Impression

Geof Huth, "Almost y" (Williamsville, New York, 3 October 2011)

Garden Place Hotel, Room 159, Williamsville, New York

For the second night in a row, I'm writing a blog entry based on a note to Gary Barwin. Part of the reason for this, I assume, is that Gary interviewed me on Saturday for Jacket2, and his questions (which showed an interest and understanding of what I'm trying to do as a poet) have made me continue to this about my ideas about poetry and the project I envision for myself within the realm of poetry.

I think my involvement in poetry is wide in scope and actually radical in a few ways off-putting to many. (I base this latter point on evidence from poets themselves.) I find this apparent radicalism interesting because the new conceptualists' conceptual work overlaps mine only marginally, but they see themselves as the true avant-garde. I just don't even believe in the avant-garde myself. My concerns are too broad in scope to allow the concept of the avant-garde to serve as an external limitation to my work.

This year at the Text Festival, my friend Christian Bök gave my friend derek beaulieu some of his own time in the evening performance so that derek could read a conceptualist manifesto. It could have been called "Against Emotion" (in place of "Expression"), because he argued against the millennia-old lyric on the basis of the sheer accumulated mass of such poems (which is too simple an argument for me: audience interest may flag with extreme volume, but quality still must be assessed individually [and I say this heavily aware of how weak the lyric impulse in poetry has become as an engine for creating good poetry]) and because the poet's own emotional concerns are of no real concern to readers (but, to the same degree, so are the poets' intellectual and conceptual concerns, and personal concerns can, of course, become generalizable—also, I think the pure lyric is perceived where it does not, in fact, exist: some speakers in poems are simply not the poet, being merely esthetic and rhetorical creations, even if they serve as the mouthpieces and touchstones of the poet).

So why all these words? Because derek was truly angry in his denunciation of the lyric and its emotionalism. Because it was emotion that drove his intellectual concerns. Because emotion in humans derives from the intellect. And because I, who often write ostensibly cold and intellectualized poems, see emotion as another effect of language, along with its sonic and visual characteristics, emotion being part of the raft of rhetorical features of language. And I don't want to give away the tool.

The last poem I performed in St Catharine's the other night was a longform spoken sound poem, a dramatic piece spoken in Unglish (my current name for the glossolalia I use in my otherwise wordless sound poems). In this last piece, the message (assuming a work of art can be reduced to such a categorical nicety) was that language is bigger than we like to admit and that poetry can (and even maybe should) incorporate these possibilities into its toolkit. These include gestures, facial expressions, even gross (as opposed to fine) movements of the body, and these are often markers of emotion as well. People could understand most of what I was saying even though I was speaking gibberish, and that gibberish was essential to the meaning of the poem. Also, the expression of emotion and the creation of the same in the audience were essential to the success of this performance poem—the audience had to become part of the poem, performers in the poem (by repeating sounds I told them to repeat, by reacting emotionally to the performance).

Again, why am I going on so long about this while I'm tired and typing with one finger into my iPhone? Because I don't want to be limited by the restrictions of my own vision. Because my project is always to be bigger, not smaller, and not ever to believe that there is one true way.

I am not religious, and I will not make poetry my religion, even if it is my life.

ecr. l'inf.