Tao Lin and Gabriel Gudding (joint review)

Tao Lin : I'm Tired (juked)
Gabriel Gudding : Lyric (from A Defense of Poetry)

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I read a review in a paper I usually love, the Boston Review, which began, essentially, "there are three books here, one of them is great, two of them suck, and you'll have to read the review to find out which." That is unfair. This is a preliminary to saying that I am about to say very negative things about both Tao's and Gabe's poems here. Tao's poem you can read online, Gabe's you can read in his new book out by the Pitt press.

I actually admire both Tao and Gabe as writers quite a bit. I also read the eponymous poem of Gabe's A Defense of Poetry today, along with "Lyric", which we'll discuss below. I read them in the atrium of Myopic Books (sorry, short of cash this March) and I thought "Defense" was brilliant. I read Tao's interview with his roommate and thought its obsessiveness rivaled Dostoyevsky's Notes in artistry. I'm aware that Tao might not think of it that way.

But both of these poems are sheer rubbish. I don't usually review things I think are sheer rubbish on rhubarb, because there's not much more you can say about rubbish except that it's rubbish, possibly sheer. I'm doing it now, though, because I think the ways in which these poems fail outline some of the pitfalls of a new kind of poetry that in general I think is very exciting.

I'm talking about a raw, associative kind of work that is struggling to lift poetry up out of the Poetry Magazine pretentious italics and historical references and put it back into some kind of living, breathing form. A lot of the poets I've reviewed recently are doing this. Maybe it's the anti-Pallunurian, or maybe I don't understand Thomas well enough. Gabe I know is doing this, successfully; Tao may be, but I haven't read enough of his work.

There is a filp side to this kind of energy, which I'm going to come out and name as a macho, masculine, fuck you, attitude that is not only posturing, and not only aware of its posturing, but also smugly aware of its awareness of its posturing. In other words, it fails, it becomes as safe, as uncontroversial, as "normal", as accomodating, as consumer-friendly, as anything you might see in Ruth Lilly's pages. It's the same attitude that I see when Matt Rohrer says "Bill's voice is freakishly confident. I like that, and I like Bill's poems because -- I don't know about you -- but I don't have a lot of time to fuck around".

I'm also going to come out and say that this is a boy's game. I haven't seen female writers do the kind of thing Gabe and Tao are doing here, and since this is a blog, I'm going to come out and say why.

I think in the same moment that they are pretending to, adopting, the voice of someone who is sufficiently unintelligent and inarticulate that they should be "harmless", they actually feel a thrill of power. The experience of reading these poems is the same as the experience of watching a white kid lip sync the N-word while listening to rap on the subway. It not only makes you cringe, it makes you angry.

It's a refusal to directly confront the self: the articulate self. Both Gabe (teacher, Normal, IL) and Tao (a recent NYU graduate) can tack on an ablative absolute or a twenty-dollar word just as well as the rest of us. That is part of their lives. That is part of their linguistic perception. As far as they try to run from that, it will always be there and if they are writing a poem they are going to have to turn and face it at some point.

Not that they have to write with the $20 word or the elegant construction, but that they have to face up to the coloration of their perception by that ability. Otherwise they are lip-syncing an imagined Other.

In their drive to purge their poems of any kind of device, they of course fail: their poems are riddled with devices, repetitively and dully deployed. There is, for example, in Gabe's poem that kind of portmanteau creation that could be Germanic but is really just an unfunny version of Strong Bad from Homestarrunner. At least Strong Bad is funny.

Meanwhile, Tao's verbal device -- apart from the occasional apostrophe to the Pulitzer Prize or a snippet of telegraph-speak -- is to ventriloquise the spoiled child, cursing and wailing alternately. It's a ridiculous performance; I'll never demand that poets speak through a mask or pretend they're not there, that some "speaker" has taken their place, but at the same time there is nothing here but raw, embarassing id -- and, again, the ego looking down at it. And, again, the ego taking sideways glances at itself looking down.

Neither performance works. Neither is compelling. Both are profoundly offensive, irritating and would -- were Gabe and Tao not clearly serious, deeply-feeling talents -- be utterly dismissable.