Dorothea Lasky’s Project

Dorothea Lasky
Poetry Is Not a Project
(Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010)

This pamphlet is small (5" x 6"), short (24 unpaginated pages, including six entirely given over to title or section headings), and beautiful to behold. Its blue covers with embossed (yes, embossed!) title, author and press names (the latter on the rear), and illustration, are gorgeous. And the book’s hand-sewn too. The folks at Ugly Duckling sure can make a damn good-looking book.

The purpose of Dorothea Lasky’s pamphlet is to convince you that poems are intuited, and that poems that are projects – those in which “everything is set out before [the writer gets] gets started” – are (and here I condense a bit) “pretty boring, at best,” have “nothing to do with poetry” and “may actually be very toxic to the very notion of poetry.” She explains her views in a four-part essay. Each section is between a page and one-half to four pages long. There’s generous spacing between the lines, so it’s a relatively quick read.

Lasky I think deliberately keeps her text short and the presentation airy, so as to more effectively present her didactic prose. Not a bad strategy, but here what she writes, the criticism she levels at poem-projects, is absolutely and entirely unconvincing. As in stop, do not pass go unconvincing.

But you knew I was going to conclude that, didn’t you? I just celebrated Joan Retallack’s new book, which focuses on poems largely made from methods, methods determined in advance. I’ve celebrated plenty else that has a similar generative heritage, including Kenneth Goldsmith’s Sports, Nathan Austin’s Survey Says, Susan Howe’s Poems Found in A Pioneer Museum (scroll a third of the way down the page there), and Clayton Eshleman’s “Tavern of the Scarlet Bagpipe,” his poem-project concerning The Garden of Earthly Delights.

And I could go on (I must go on). Someday I need to rave – long and loud and clear – about Jackson Mac Low’s French Sonnets (Tucson: Black Mesa Press, 1984; 2nd edition Milwaukee: Membrane Press, 1989), a book – forever young – of pre-determined method poetry. Mac Low’s project systematically substitutes, for the words of certain Shakespeare’s sonnets, the words found at the tops of pages in the English section of a French-English dictionary. And so,

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

the opening line of Sonnet XVIII, becomes:

Shamefulness Hymn companionableness thanksgiver tissue a summer-wheat’s dead?

and reading that I just laugh, and hard, and think too, and then think and laugh again and every time I re-read it (and the lines that follow, of course) Mac Low’s poem renews itself. There’s always more or something else to “see.” And that's how it is with every poem in the poetry-project, the poetry-project for the ages, that is French Sonnets.

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Lasky’s pamphlet, her critique of poem-projects, would be unconvincing I think even if you do not share my enthusiasm for method-poems. Her discussion of her views just doesn’t make it.

The weakness of Lasky’s explication is perhaps most profound in the second section of Poetry Is Not A Project. That section’s titled “An Example,” and Lasky heralds its arrival by putting the sub-head all by itself on a separate page:

Lasky then begins the section with two sentences that I found very, very promising:

Reading this, you are probably looking for an example right now of what the difference is between a person who is conducting a project and a person who is writing a poem. That’s fair – to want an example.

After some elaboration, Lasky repeats her point in a stand-alone, single-sentence paragraph:

But perhaps a real example would be good.

And by this point I was excited as heck. I really was, and I think any reader would be. Lasky sets it up, repeatedly, to really get into it. Three times she says she will make her point about poem-projects using a real poem, an actual poet. A specific, particular, on-the-page example, to provide in prose, in support of her views, an object lesson of Dr. Williams’ “no ideas but in things.”

But nope, and what a let-down. Lasky’s “example” is as sharp as a deflated balloon. She names no names. There’s no poem or poems, no specifically identified poet(s).

Instead she refers to “an acquaintance” who “happened to be a poet” and was “working on a project where his goal was to go to “the local art museum every day for a month and write a poem about a different piece of art each day.” As it turned out, Lasky “did not like” the poems. It seemed to her that “everything that mattered was in the idea” of the project.

This is not okay by me, not in the least. ¿Dónde está la carne de vaca? Lasky provides only an airy nothing, a thing unknown. Her double-vague “example” – no poem, no poet – doesn’t convince me, and I can’t imagine it convincing anyone, of much of anything. No saxifrage splits the rocks here.

Lasky in this same section then hedges, big-time, on her dismissiveness of poem-projects, and it really gets confusing. She writes that many of her idols in poetry “used projects as generative forces” in their poems. She mentions her love of, among others, the “experiments and exercises” of Language, surrealist and Flarf writers. She insists that in these projects, “the poems were the most important parts of the whole thing. If a project does not get to a real poem, then it is not important to your work because it generates nothing. The problem I’m pointing out in this pamphlet is that just because you have constructed a project does not mean you have written a poem.”

This all leaves my head spinning. In failing to get specific, then backtracking on her critique by saying that a poem-project’s okay if it results in something she calls “a real poem,” Lasky’s already deflated balloon sinks to the bottom of a muddy puddle. It makes me want to drop her a short note.

Dear Dorothea Lasky:

Name names. Say which poem-projects have “nothing to do with poetry”, and which are, to again use your term, “real.” Argue with particulars to show which poem-projects are “pretty boring.” Illuminate via details your view that poem-projects are “very toxic.” Wake up, please, and smell the saxifrage.

Sincerely,

Steve Fama

Until these or similar suggestions are followed, dear readers of the glade, I must advise that you just move along. There’s nothing much to read in Poetry Is Not A Project.

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But there’s one more thing, and it’s important. I think Lasky herself writes poetry that is a project, and that her project – which happens to be one of the oldest in the poetry-book – sets out about as much before she starts writing (is just about as restrictive, in other words) as any other project that she criticizes.

Do you know what I mean? I’ve read Lasky’s two large collections, plus one of her chaps, and her project is undeniable. Take a look at Black Life, published earlier this year by Wave Books. In the poems of that book, the pronouns “I” and “my” and “me” dominate. Dominate.

“Ars Poetica,” one of poems in the book, may be particularly (though not especially) spectacular with regard to personal pronouns, but wow is it telling (especially given its subject matter). Its 30 lines include 29 personal pronouns. Similar is “Tornado,” another in the book and which The New Yorker published in February. In its 30 lines, “I,” “my,” or “me” appear 23 times. Here are the first-person pronouns from these two poems, lifted from the text and arrayed as prose:

I me I I my me my me I I m my I I I I my my my I my I my me I I I I I.

I I I my I My I I I I I I I I I my me I I I I I me I.

Get the idea? (Extra credit if you answer with the homophonically appropriate “Aye, aye.”) The first person in these poems, by the way, is not the slippery sort sometimes (often) encountered in, say, John Ashbery’s verse. This “I” channels, reflects, is, the (quoting now from Poetry Is Not a Project) “internal world” of Lasky, her “self” trying to connect with, the universal.

Some might say this kind of personal lyric has been done to death over the last how many centuries, but no, I think such poems can still burn, if done right (and I’ve written enthusiastically about such poetry). But regardless of that, these “I, me, my” poems are a project, make that a Project, and Lasky couldn’t be more devoted to it.

It puzzles me to no end that Lasky refuses to acknowledge that she has a poetry-project. She instead insists that hers is an intuited “wild party” poetry that arises from the “realm of chance.”

Say what?!! Hold on! Let me say it again. The personal lyrics that Lasky writes are the oldest poetry-project going. This poetry-project constrains and limits her verse no less, and some might say even more than, any pre-determined procedure. It restricts the energy and voice to a certain pitch and focus and requires, in poem after poem, all those personal pronouns, which anchor everything within their self-centric radii (and dig how that plural form reflects the subject here!).

Acknowledged or not by Lasky, her personal “I, me, my” lyric approach pretty much means that pretty much “everything is set out before [she] gets started,” very similar to the way it is in the poem-projects she criticizes. As such, she ought to be careful when she suggests that poetry-projects might be “very toxic to the very notion of poetry.” Compare or consult here the pot and kettle, the goose and gander.

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The colophon of Poetry Is Not a Project states that Ben Fama guests edits
the Ugly Duckling Dossier series in which the pamphlet appears.
Although we share the same relatively uncommon surname,
Ben and I, so far as I know, are not related.

Not that there’d be anything wrong with that!

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