Photograph by Dustin Lucas
There are still poets who sit at dining-room tables, writing sonnets on yellow legal pads. But the stuff of 21st-century poetry is also spam and search returns. A sample “spoetry” haiku:
Memo: to My Pets
I know what you are doing
No, oh, that’s just wrong
Flarf poetry involves feeding terms like “Rogain bunny” [sic] into search engines and manipulating the results. One of flarf’s detractors, poet Dan Hoy, accused flarfists of being “retro-Futurists.” A stroll through the Kemper Art Museum’s “Chance Aesthetics” exhibit, which opened September 18, supports that theory, but takes the poison out of the barb. Some of the greatest artists and writers of the 20th century used chance operations in their work, including the ones represented here: Jean Arp, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Niki de Saint Phalle.
“There is a resurgence of interest in chance poetry,” says Eileen G’Sell, a poet herself, who also teaches at Wash. U. and serves as publications assistant for the Kemper. “Like in the 1990s, with flarf. At first, people in the poetry world were thinking, ‘This is so weird and stupid,’ and a lot of people still think that—in fact, sometimes I think that—but at the same time, the Whitney just had an event called ‘Flarf vs. Conceptual Writing.’ Once the Whitney’s doing it, you know people are taking it seriously.”
As a supplement to the Kemper exhibit, G’Sell is leading a chance-operations poetry workshop, as well as a separate chance-poetry reading. Both events occur in the Kemper’s galleries this month, though G’Sell says she doesn’t want people riffing off or describing the works themselves—even the poetry-based works, which include a 1916 Dadaist journal edited by Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Marcel Janco, and Fluxus member Alice Knowles’ “House of Dust,” considered to be the first computer-generated poem.
“She was taking this class in 1967 from a computer guy, James Tenney,” explains Meredith Malone, assistant curator and organizer of the exhibit.
“Cage was involved as well. She had four different categories of words describing a house—materials, lighting, location, and its inhabitants. She would make these lists, and made a randomizing system in the computer that just plopped them out. She would print it and rip them off at about 20 pages, slip them in a plastic sleeve, and then that would be a book.”
But just as there will be no odes written to the 40-year-old piece of plastic-encased sausage in Dieter Roth’s “Kleiner Sonnenuntergang (Small Sunset),” there will be no sedentary retro dot-matrixing, no flarfing, no spoetry. “It’s going to be more like games,” G’Sell laughs. “There won’t be any sitting around. I want to do some exquisite corpse; that’s something that’s one of the most famous forms of chance operations in poetry. And it’s still really fun.” Other operations may include variations on games used by French poetry and mathematics collective Oulipo; text cutups like those Tzara described in “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love”; and an adaptation of a technique used by choreographer Merce Cunningham. “I wasn’t successful in writing good poems this way,” G’Sell says, “but it was fun. I’d have a checkerboard that would say, ‘noun beginning with an A,’ or ‘type of insect,’ or ‘verb involving flight.’ Then I would throw a coin, and whatever it landed on, I’d try to incorporate into the next line. I liked it because it involved throwing something.”
One last important thing to mention: This isn’t just for poets. In fact, G’Sell is hoping for a mixy-matchy group. “When people try to think poetically, what ends up coming out sounds like total cliché,” G’Sell says. “It’s a great way to think more inventively and realize you can come up with something really cool…and chance can be a part of that.”
Chance Poetry Workshop, December 2, noon–2 p.m.; Chance Poetry Reading, December 4, 6–8 p.m. Free, but space is limited and registration is required. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Skinker and Forsyth, 314-935-4523. “Chance Aesthetics” runs through January 4, 2010. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
