MOHAMMAD VS MESMER



By the lights of many in the American poetry world, K. Silem Mohammad and Sharon Mesmer are the leading poets of our day, though it's hard to find anyone who will declare them equally great. (I'm an exception.)

Their careers are intertwined by biography and circumstance. Both are Polish; Mesmer, who is forty-seven, left Poland with her family when she was twelve; Mohammad, forty-six, was born to a Polish mother and Yemeni father in Salinas, California, in 1962, just before the Walmart went up. They met at the seminal Boston Poetry Marathon and, beginning in 2001, collaborated in a brief, trenchant movement that responded to post-9/11 America with raw poems drawn from Google search returns, including language originally posted to blogs, bulletin boards, and other desultory sources, which Mohammad adapted with deadpan gravity and Mesmer with sardonic élan.

An uncharacteristically jokey poem by Mohammad, from 2007, narrates them sharing a bed in Austin. (Their host for a reading there had provided scanty accommodations.) They ascended to prominence in the early twenty-first century—stunning American poetry circles, which had been largely oblivious of creative doings on the Web—as twin masters who dramatically expanded the resources and resonances of flarf, a poetry dismissed as moribund by most of that time's avant-garde. Each has made sonically glorious, conceptually seismic poems. Both live and work online.

But their differences are profound. Mohammad, reflective and deliberate, is a family man of temperate tastes and orderly habits. His writing studio is one of two elegant rectilinear buildings—the other is his house—in a large, walled, lushly gardened compound in rural Oregon. Mesmer, restless and impulsive, is an unreconstructed bohemian, inhabiting cluttered expanses in a shabby industrial building in Brooklyn.

The question "Mohammad or Mesmer?" is a common icebreaker, and a self-revealing test, among poetry students far beyond the United States. To embrace both is to incur a mental civil war, to be of two jealous minds, between incommensurable sensibilities. Temperamentally estranged—Mohammad's decorum nettles Mesmer, whose effrontery exasperates Mohammad—the two have long been barely on speaking terms.

Their career trajectories have lately crossed again, at a peculiarly lofty nexus of poetry and "the social": commissions for books by prestigious presses. Breathalyzer, an 80-page collection by Mohammad, was published last month by Edge Books, a graying bastion of avant-gardism in northern Washington, DC, which was launched in 1984 and finally folded this month (when it published, for the second time, the poetry world's most respected white male practitioner, Kevin Davies). Breathalyzer is Small Press Distribution's best-selling book of poetry of all time, according to a recent poll.

In Cumberland, Rhode Island, eight sequences by Mesmer—five about diabetes and the rest, mostly short, in translucent Googled slices—will soon appear on SPD's Web site, the seat of American poetry's canonical state—gateway to the country's public and private colleges and universities, where most books of poetry are sold—and historically a cradle of the institutionalized avant-garde.

Neither poet is a believer in the avant-garde as such. A Stanford University critic, Marjorie Perloff, has termed Mohammad "a professed academic with a strong leaning toward mainstream poetics"—a characterization that the poet condoned with a sly smile, when I saw him in New York. His three children with his third wife, Sabrina Mohammad, also a poet, were added to the flarf list last year, and two of them "now preach to the choir." The induction ceremonies "made me cry," he told me.

The erudite Mesmer is deeply versed in poetic tradition. She said, "It's not necessary to believe in an avant-garde poetry. Poetry for two thousand years has influenced religion, architecture, philosophy, society." Something of a serial monomaniac, Mesmer evangelizes for whatever interests her.

An alchemical romance of elements enters into her choices of search terms and their results for her Combo book, Annoying Diabetic Bitch. My notes from our conversations bristle with mentions of Mary Oliver, cyborg prostitutes, squid, assclowns, fascist girlfriends, and other unassuming stuff, which she regards as poetic intensifications of the "mothering" substance—the materia—of the universe. Her own poetic bias is pan-aesthetic. "I can accept the power of poetry as moral righteousness," she said. She conceives her Google poems as symbols of the creation, conjoining base matter and celestial light.

There promises to be little, if any, furor over Mesmer's poetry in New York, where feelings about poetry are tepid—in a city of 8.2 million people, the Poetry Project, its liberal-minded senior minister, Stacy Szymaszek, told me, has only about eleven hundred congregants. And modern Google sculpting is amply precedented in the area: there are rather archly showy examples by Kenneth Goldsmith, a nephew of Ed Friedman, on the Project's Web site, and by Linh Dinh, in the Newsletter, the Project's house organ.

But controversy lingers online, where, despite the public's acceptance of Mesmer's Googled work, cynics have derided Mohammad's as "pixels" of "racialized confetti." More seriously, a Brooklyn Rail columnist recently complained that it "belongs in a mosque," adding, "If we are going to have a new poetry, then it should be one that reflects our faith, not just any faith." He would seem to have a point, his doubtful reference to Islam aside. Breathalyzer does feel ecumenical. The literally paradoxical, if not quite heretical, results of this book, and Mesmer's ADB, pose a question of whether, in America today, poetry on celebrated poets' terms has risen to equality with the avant-garde or if the avant-garde has sunk to the level of mere poetry.

Six inches wide by nine inches tall, Mohammad's Breathalyzer admits a wash of aureate illumination onto the cover's gloomy immensity; at other times, its glossy surface glows or shimmers. The poetry was written from eleven thousand five hundred results of Google searches of "exorcist voice," which, once distilled, have been divided into lines of nearly equal length. Each line is then retyped into Google and the results flattened into stanzas, giving it an uneven texture, with thought-refracting ripples:

I've been having this dream where I am driving around
my old neighborhood doing the exorcist voice
surviving day to day and pondering how time disappeared

it goes something like this I now present the exorcist
it's the exorcist the exorcist opens her mouth
I'm a different kind of exorcist

The book replaces the less satisfactory A Thousand Devils, which had, in turn, replaced his first full-length outing, Deer Head Nation. (That seminal title has all but gone into a third printing, and its substantial survival is a lasting wonder.) Mohammad had been asked by Edge's founder, Rod Smith, for thematic imagery, perhaps memorializing one or both of two twentieth-century avant-gardists, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, who died at the hands of the Nazis. Mohammad tried working from the results of Google searches on "Nazi executions"—which returned accounts of shootings, hangings, and gassings—but decided that the idea was grotesque. Certainly, it's not easy to conceive of poetry being expressed post-Auschwitz.

Mohammad says that he was about to abandon the project when he happened to lay the results of a search on "exorcist voice" next to a photograph of a man submitting to a Breathalyzer test. "I said, 'My God! Fantastic!'" he told a reporter. "I thought, This is the only thing." (Mesmer, in her apartment, demonstrated the potency of cover design for me by plopping her titles—rounded, in a bold san-serif—onto miscellaneous surfaces, including fabrics and floorboards. All became instantaneously holy.)

Mohammad's chief model was his own serial poem "Deer Head Suite" (2002), in which each of a thousand and twenty-four Google searches, in a graduated spectrum of hues and tones, appears four times. It was composed by chance. (Chance is "more clever than I," he has said.) Mohammad likewise randomized the series within poems that mirror one another at intervals, like the rhymes in a more traditional verse form. The result employs seventy-two repeating words that he deemed consistent with acts of U.S. aggression dating from 1862 to 1962 (the year of his birth), and close enough in tone to avoid spots of disrupting opacity and glare:

Leader of the Nation of Islam
… says he experienced a vision
… he built himself a den out in the attic
… of their three-door garage
… he looked down at the deer's head
… its tongue fascinated him
… after a few more seconds the deer head exploded
… and colored the ceiling red and full of brain

"It is loud, wet, and cold, but there is no other possibility for poetry at present," he told me.

Laying the first line, "Advances in broiler industry slag," beneath the title, "Sonnet in Favor of Literary Narcissism," Mesmer swiftly added seven more lines describing "shriveling." Mined phrases melt into and fuse with the overall surface:

Advances in broiler industry slag
suggest a style of extended and heightened shriveling.
Socrates claimed to open up meaning
even as he shriveled under clams of corny, heavy-handed machismo
by Filipinas of the diaspora,
something I myself discarded in favor of my maiden name,
now hyphenated with my husband's name,
Walter Pater, who encouraged narcissism for negotiations of tragic desire.

For the second stanza, an abundance of techniques will be employed, including the oldest: the mixing of race clues—such as "Tighty" with "Whitey"—with an echoing effect:

Tighty Whitey sang our theme song—
dare I say, anthem—
for multimedia integrity.
They'd never, you know, record a song with really spotty tuning
and then just slap a reverb effect on it.
Straight professionals, those guys.

(That was her predominant practice until about 2006, when she discovered that brushing a coat of irony over first-person reportage was an act of minstrelizing.)

Other poems will be "flash-mobbed" (clear statements fused with opaque ones, which are scraped away to various results), "n+7ed" (replacing one word with another of lesser quality), "sandblasted," and a little-known flarf procedure called "Schwarz-a-lot," the manipulation of words beginning with "sch" by sending them multiple times through an online translation program, such as Babelfish. Mesmer, whose first job as a teenager in Ohio was as a Devo roadie, enjoys making demands on poetry. Having performed her demonstration, she picked up a cloth and wiped her computer screen.

Flarf is a confusing poetry form—if it is a poetry form, given that
its effects blend, or vanish, into functions of documentary and
collage. The newer it is, the better it is, for the most part.

Literary evidence dates the use of collage by poets to the early
twentieth century and the beginnings of the Modernist era. The first
surviving whole examples are from 1904, in Germany and France.

The major theorist and first great patron of the development, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), promulgated a neoplatonic doctrine: lux continua—the unbroken light. "Onward from the material to the immaterial," Eliot wrote. He justified the medium's sensuous allure as a foretaste of the New American Poetries, which would be bejewelled, as he foresaw it, with "objective correlatives; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of each particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."

But the fragility of poetry—subject to mishaps of war, neglect, accident, and foolish interpretation, in addition to the long, catastrophic rampages of Protestant malice—insures that we know only a fraction of what was achieved during the era of the late Romantic and early Modern.

Despite certain tours de force by contemporary poets—the most graceful and gracious being Tan Lin's blipsoak01, with its succinct linear motifs—collaged poetry now serves mainly as a practical and pretty expedient for places where other language is wanted, but not another view, or where prettiness is an end in itself.

There's no disgrace in that. Poetry designers concentrate on the sonic pleasures of the medium using traditional means, including Christian Bök's revisitation of OuLiPo. In work by Brian Kim Stefans, among many others, collaged language contributes a ceremonial dignity—an anodyne tincture of churchiness—to secular environments. I've seen designs for a promising new project, by the Canadian minimalist poet Victor Coleman, to be installed in the complex of a new federal courthouse in Buffalo. (Canadian expertise is the field's gold standard, by general consent. Mesmer acknowledged that her choice of a U.S. publisher for a Canadian form was politic, adding that the ardent Magee has given her no cause for regret.)

Collaged poetry, including that of flarf masterworks, is hard to contemplate. It is hard even to read. Our brains are wired to make sense of meaning shining through words, not falling upon them. When presented with variable sources, we automatically select the most meaningful, consigning the rest to shadow.

Effects of collage-ignited language swamp those of traditional composition and depicted imagery. What do we actually absorb amid the singing marvels of Mesmer's "I Chose the Wrong Power Animal" or Mohammad's "Do We Need Goddess Language?", to cite perhaps the finest from each of these recent books? ("But that's kitschy!" Mesmer scoffed, when I mentioned "Goddess Language.")

My own keenest pleasure in flarf occurs at first glance—a "Wow!" moment, like the here-and-gone dazzle of fireworks. To be sustained, the experience calls for an organizing idea, a ruling fiction, making disorientation meaningful.

Mohammad and Mesmer have addressed that need, in ways both hypermodern and attuned to Gothic wisdom. Mohammad's Edge book delivers an incessant first impression. You are always just beginning to behold it, in a mental state that is at once unfocussed and undistracted. Persisting, you may sense slight changes in the day's light—tiny, barely registered visual thunderclaps:

I think I know what you're "trying" to say,
but I'll answer what you actually "said"
boundary estuarys are entrusted precisely
that the hat projector Manama parachute
team parachutes projector undo scarab
"has anybody seen an empire?"

The experience interpenetrates with that of the poem's droning cavernousness (the air between stanzas has a sound) to induce a mood that, if it isn't spiritual, has no name. The mind of a devout avant-gardist, thus voided of mundane reference, might well fill with avant-garde sentiments. Of course, nothing prevents the respective blossoming of other dispositions—those of trespassers, in Perloff's stoutly parochial view. But if Mohammad doesn't provide a hard answer to the mystery of avant-garde longings, he certainly pries open the question.

As for Mesmer, count on her to pepper the conundrum with miscellaneous meanings. She has long been perhaps history's only mystically inclined Pop poet. (A suite from 1998 includes the lines "Excuse me if I sound like the ancient mariner, I said,/ but I was raised Catholic.") Her researches have included use of hallucinogenic drugs—"to be rational," she said—which coincided with a reduction in her output in 1999. (She recalled a spell of communal living in rural Pennsylvania around that time.)

"I am a popular poet for the daily life," Mesmer remarked, leaving me to envision a notion of daily life that is a good deal more intricate than the bare phrase suggests. Her gaudy lines in Annoying Diabetic Bitch may be a kind of travesty, but their impertinence stirs dormant roots of belief to aggravated consciousness.

Mohammad always determinedly trips up the expectations of our settled tastes in avant-garde poetry; Mesmer continuously embarrasses them. In either case, we are brought to a verge of things that we know we don't know—palpably actual and ineluctably veiled in the steaming light of day.