Essay
Review Title: “Tech
support says ‘Dead Don Walking’: Tradition, the Internet, and the Individual
Talent in the Poetry of Daniel Y. Harris”
Essay
Review Book:
Hyperlinks of Anxiety, Daniel Y. Harris, Cervena Barva Press, 2013
Essay
Review Author: Daniel
Morris is the author of The Poetry of
Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction, Poetry’s
Poet: Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Allen Grossman, Remarkable
Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors Write on Modern Art, and The Writings of William Carlos Williams:
Publicity for the Self. He also is editor of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Jewish Studies.
Essay Review Publication: The Notre
Dame Review, Winter/Spring 2014
Author of Hyperlinks of Anxiety (2013), Daniel Y. Harris is a Paris-born,
California based Jewish poet, artist, and divinity scholar with a special
interest in Jewish mysticism and hermeneutics.
At a lecture called “Post-Digital American Jewish Poetry” at the University
of California, Irvine, Harris describes his task as reassembling Web detritus
into a Golem, “Technology and hyperreality meet Judaic midrash and Biblical
exegesis in stanzas which seek to create a human being from the refuse of
bandwidth” (Schneider, 84). In his new
book of poems, Harris positions himself as an ambivalent ventriloquist of the
human voice. He is an old school page
poet – “an analog/in an age of digits” (32) -- announcing his situation as
author writing on the cusp of the Brave New Web environment. He suggests “an age of digits” simultaneously
amplifies and extinguishes the value of his current practice through the
dissemination powers of an intelligent machine.
In “Emoticon” he writes: “Unhip to need/to be here, but the way back is
splayed:/he can sit and click, exchange/links, but the state of bandwidth/is
skin, the widget in the corner of the screen/exudes the bot of bodies. Digitally,/he clones and is multiple
again.” He continues: “He logs on./The
domain is as big/as a yotta.” (6). Given that a “yotta” is the largest unit prefix in the international
system of units (Wikipedia), we note Harris’s ambivalence towards entering
literary voice on the web as a sublime event. In “Emoticon,” the Brave New Web expands personal visibility on such a
monumental scale that traditional notions of identity and romantic ideas about
creative self-expression are put in question.
In “Confessions of a Blogger,” Harris
addresses with typical ambivalence his
motivations for and concerns about the outcome to achieve the common
philosophical desire to (literally and figuratively) go “in search of
myself” by entering his name and texts
on the web: “digits/for countless others
probing/the Net for my name --/me numbered, me squared/to a thousand and
one/nights of the Boolean me:/tapered/linkrot of vanity/shaping me as
helicoid/in search of myself” (3). His
title winks back to the groundbreaking “confessional” movement of the 1950s
(think Lowell, Plath, Berryman). Fifties
“confessionalism” was self-consciously rejecting Eliotic “impersonalism,” and
returning American lyric to a Wordsworthian self-expressionism with a touch of
Catholicism through reference to the expiation of guilt via confession, as in
St. Augustine. The irony, of course, is
that Harris’s crisis in large part concerns the deconstruction of the
relationship of “voice” to “author” to “authenticity” to “word on page” that
Fifties “confessionalists” such as Lowell privileged in phrases such as “Yet
why not say what happened?” from “Epilogue” (1977). The
idea of “confessing” – in either a religious or a lyric autobiographical –
manner via the digital environment of blogworld seems absurd. And in fact Harris echoes Pound’s Mea culpa
keyword in the Pisan Cantos -- “vanity” -- by associating authorial
presence with a web world animated by Boolean logic -- composed of algebraic combinations of “and,” “or,” and “not” -- in a form Harris
likens to a minimalist term related to the geometry of space. (A Helicoid concerns the minimal surface
having a circular helix as its boundary.
It is the only ruled minimal surface other than the plane.) Harris suggests the paradoxical nature of Web
existence in the passage above. On the
one hand, as in the Arabian Nights folk tales, the dissemination of the poet’s
name and story become a textual form of survival that defers execution.
At the same time, Harris
acknowledges that whatever sense of identity is transmitted via the Web is not
merely publicized through narrative, but rather identity is dispersed into
rhizomatic combinations of storylines, themselves the product of algebraic set
theory logics and spatial designs that take the “confessionalist” far away from,
as in Lowell, a “life study” in which the speaker simply says what
happened. In “Confessions of a
Blogger,” Harris continues, the translation of “self” into the virtual realm
distorts or even destroys authorial intent, but, ever the knotty self-ironist,
Harris also suggests that his “original” voice was nothing to write home about
in the first place because “his” language was always already uncivilized (too
early) and commodified (too late) for significance. The blog realm seems of a malicious intent,
with its own cruel wish to “break/me, pulp my savage accent,/my hack-herd
packing words/in viruses with a thin/mdash” (3).
A page poet, Harris nonetheless
approximates the bewildering explosion of personhood in a web realm by giving voice
to the displaced Other through a virtually untranslatable opaque verse
style: “Diaspora the body in all
places/at once,” he writes in “The Agon Poems” (29). His
book specifically addresses from multiple Jewish perspectives – prophetic, diasporic,
ethical, midrashic, gnostic -- the vexing problems and sublime potential of
disseminating lyrics, the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the
singular, private human voice across time and space to an individual reader, in
an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis
(understood as both opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.
A University of Chicago Divinity
School graduate with a thesis guided by the hermeneutist Paul Ricoeur on the role
of Kabbalah in the works of Moses de Leon, Gershom Scholem, and Harold Bloom,
Harris’s website lists a genealogical ancestry that includes a composer,
members of the French Resistance during World War Two, archeologists, the chief
Ashkenazi Rabbi of Paris, and an 18th Century paternal ancestor who
was a prominent Lithuanian Rabbi, Talmudic scholar, and Kabbalist. Given Harris’s fascination with deep genealogical
personal history and its relationship to Jewish hermeneutics, mysticism, and
political resistance to overwhelming state terror during the Shoah, it is
fitting that although he remains a traditional – if brutally obscure --
page-oriented author with a modernist disposition, his lyrics reflect on how
the mediation of voice in a digital format will impact poetry’s primordial
function of preserving the human image across time and space. Harris regards the realm of hyperlinks as the
ultimate vehicle to conserve and disseminate words and images. At the same time he worries that the new
media environment for poems resembles the Kabbalist’s broken vessel, shattering
text, rather than shards of glass. At
others times, he fears, the hypertextual environment seems like a decidedly
non-kosher Octopus. Its dangerous tentacles
are bent on choking out the personal voice and exhausting the human body with a
vengeance reminiscent of the Shoah that his grandparents actively
resisted. Harris records his sense of
appearing as a trace in the aftermath of a catastrophic alteration to personal
presence in “I”: “I, barcode and libido
of might am here/after rapture, extermination and fetish.”
Designed
for the page, his poetry is by necessity hyperlinked. I say this because one is pretty much forced
to read Harris’s book while remaining online to Google for definitions of unusual
concepts and esoteric terms associated with Greek philosophy and Jewish
hermeneutics, aesthetics, and religion.
Examples include “Theomorph,” “pantomorph,” “Opuscule,” “Khidr,”
“Yotta,” “Methexis,” “Henosis,”
“Shevirah,” “Shekinah,” “helicoid,” “amygadale,” and “Notarikon.” One thus reads Harris in the interstitial
space between page and web, where his esoterica becomes heteroglossed in ways
that take the reader on lines of flight that defy authorial intention. Consider my web-assisted experience of
deciphering the following passage from “The Ballad of Don Notarikon”:
With
spiritus, golemic hurl of speckled air,
my brain
spills into a new nerve. I awake to the
pitiless
gloom of the first person to blankly
gaze at a
spate of pellicles evoking the “I”
to stir the
canon roused by a dare.” (55)
A seriously elliptical mouthful
from an author who states that he “major[s] in opacity”(56)! An online search
for “spiritus” pulls up the Latin terms for spirit or breathing, but also notes
it as a title for a journal of Christian spirituality as well as a high proof
Polish vodka. As a modernist myself, I
can’t help recalling Wallace Stevens’s questioning “Whose spirit is this?” as
he imagines the world-making significance of the female singer on the beach who
has dazzled the speaker after she “sang beyond the genius of the sea” in “The
Idea of Order in Key West” (1934). I
also recall W.B. Yeats’s invocation of the “Spiritus Mundi” (or great
archetypal mind) from which the mystic Irish bard draws out the image of the
“rough” apocalyptic beast as it “Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born” in
“Second Coming” (1919). Might not such a
reference connect us to the “golemic hurl” image? A Golem, after all, is, like the Yeatsian
beast, a monster, albeit from folklore created by Jews as protection from
enemies (Wikipedia). Through the Golem
reference, Harris expresses fear about creating discourse on the web that
defies authorial control. Hence the
reference to “pellicles evoking the ‘I’.” Pellicles? Online research reveals it is, among other
things, a biological term defining the thin layer supporting the cell membrane
in various protozoa, but also a protective cover applied to a photomask used in
semiconductor device fabrication; the pellicle protects the photomask from
damage and dirt (online sources). Offering
an exact paraphrase of the “pellicles” passage may be a fool’s errand, given
its hermeticism, but one can safely say that the “pellicles” reference benefits
from hyperlinked investigation into its connections with the microscopic skin
of the one-celled animal and its function as another kind of protective skin
for a microscopic computer reproduction device. In each case, the “pellicle” skin protects a
fundamental element of biological life and technological reproduction of
images, and thus, for Harris’s poetics, “pellicles” represent the
conservational properties of web-based literary appearance. At the same time, one senses Harris’s disenchantment
with the pellicled Golem. I say this
because such figures for a web-based image of his voice and vision suggest an
unruly monstrous Other, a skin without a body, that seems alienated from selfhood
that, paradoxically, may be regarded as a retrograde act of vanity and
self-commodification: “I awake to the/pitiless gloom of the first person to
blankly/gaze at a spate of pellicles evoking the “I.
Harris’s poetics are steeped in Harold
Bloom’s theory – outlined in his notorious 1973 study The Anxiety of Influence -- of agonic competition among male poets
from different generations engaged in an Oedipal struggle for acknowledgment
and literary power. Harris also
illustrates Bloom’s understanding that contemporary poets are terribly
self-conscious about arriving on the literary scene late in a tradition already
saturated with major accomplishments by prior masters. In an interview with the author, Harris
stated:
My “hermetic
style” and my “stylistic opacity” are saturated with an interpretive
variability richly informed by the limits of the western canon, hermeneutics,
deconstruction, postmodernism and such exemplary print poetry at Stevens,
Ashbery, Celan and Hill. At its core, the strong poem (in Bloom’s sense), is
invention itself, wrestling with agonic tropes that cause the myths of
catastrophe creation to keep breaking forward. Invention is by definition
historiographic. From the amalgam of disparate traditions demanding honor and
bypass, arises the new poem. The demands are great. (Morris)
One feels the “anxiety” referenced in
Harris’s book title is Janus-faced. His
burden as an author is Bloomian because it stems from his desire to distinguish
his elliptical stylings from merely imitating past masters ranging from Rashi
to Celan to Kafka to Stevens to Ashbery. What makes Harris’s anxiety about belatedness
unique, I’d argue, is that he is also concerned with the frightfully sublime
challenge of confronting a virtual format that threatens spatial and temporal
moorings of traditional page poetry.
Let me explain. Harris’s fascination with word play and the
amplification and distortion of meaning, sound, and graphic significance is
indebted to Kabbalistic acrostics, but may also be likened to mid 20th
Century Concrete poetics that materialized language to upset the transparency
of representation and thus challenge the order of things. Although written in a hermetic style that
disrupts a tight fit between sign and signification, and thus defies easy
reading for “meaning” or “content” -- “The Agon Poems” reflect his
self-consciously Bloomian account of belatedness. What makes Harris’s agon peculiar is that his
temporal problem in relation to innovation, contra Bloom, involves arriving to
poetic maturity prior to, rather than in the aftermath of, major developments
in the field. For Harris, I am saying,
belatedness, ironically, means appearing on the scene too early to fully engage
creatively with a new electronic field that has, from his perspective, arrived
too late for him to take full advantage of its resources.
Iconbyte
or
url
hole
in the void
word-machine
as obtuse as incomplete
obscurity
how
the
new language scales the new village
to
look out from a bestiary
of
code
e-signs
eye-level new anti-art chat to carry
on
the phantom sum
of
anonymity
beating
like a pulse (28)
Given
his obsessive concern with literary forebears, Harris is not what Marjorie
Perloff, in Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other
Means in the New Century, would consider as an avant-gardist, or writer interested
in discovery and detachment from past aesthetic models, but rather as
arriere-gardist, one committed to recovery in new formats of disregarded
predecessors (67). Writing that the
arriere-garde “treats the propositions of the early twentieth-century avant
garde with a respect bordering on veneration (56),” Perloff, referring to
Brazilian concrete poets, explains,
The arriere-garde, then, is neither a
throwback to traditional forms – in this case, the first-person lyric or lyric
sequence – nor what we used to call postmodernism. Rather, it is a revival of the avant-garde
model— but with a difference. When, for
example, Oyvind Fahlstrom makes his case for the equivalence of form and
content, his argument amalgamates Khlebnikov’s zaum poetics of the Russian
avant-garde with principles developed by the French lettristes who were his contemporaries. (58)
Arriere-gardist in
Perloff’s sense of the term, Harris’s book bears affinities with the Zohar (Radiance/Splendor), the legendary
Kabbalistic text of esoteric Torah commentary authored by Moses de Leon, the 13th
Century Spanish Jew who claimed his writings were based on Aramaic midrash from
the Second Temple period. The Zohar was later redacted between the 14th
and 18th Centuries in Italy, Germany and Poland by Jewish and
non-Jewish scholars, mystics and theologians.
The key long poem “The Ballad of Don Notarikon”
illustrates Harris’s fascination with word play that bears affinities with how
linguistic creativity occurs through acrostics in the Zohar, but also with modernists such as Wallace Stevens and James
Joyce, and with hyperlink poets such as those associated with the Flarf
movement who turn to the Web itself as a post-modern resource for a peculiar
kind of self-expression that manipulates prior texts:
This
earnest
quip to know thyself is paravisual,
emblem
of italics that hints at bereshit –
the proper
name of Don Notarikon is a
tetragrammaton:
the T-B-D-N syllabary styled on
rabbinic
acronymics. “The,” courtly article, bringer
of names and potency. “Ballad,” its prosodic
reach in twenty stanzas of twelve
line tropes.
“Don,” head dominus, Don Juan, don
a Don
Quixote chivalric self to anoint
your reader
S Panza, or Horatio or a Don
Paterfamilias,
Don Immanuel the courtier of Zeona,
Spain,//
who survives being burnt at the
stake in 1492
to wear the eyes of Don
Notarikon. (50)
In such a passage, one
glimpses how Harris connects a mystical Iberian strain of Jewish hermeneutics
with digital poetics and the realm of hyperlink. In Uncreative
Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age Kenneth Goldsmith argues,
The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges
and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship
to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language,
writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and
manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. (http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14990-7/uncreative-writing)
Goldsmith’s emphasis on
“reconceive[ing] creativity” as a process of appropriation and reconstruction
of prior texts recalls the alchemical method Kabbalists employed to derive
spiritual meanings from Bible text through rearranging words and
sentences. In both computer generated
poetry as described by Goldsmith and the dissemination of text in Harris poems
such as “The Ballad of Don Notarikon” the emphasis is on textuality and
plurivocality.
“The Ballad of Don Notarikon” also reflects on
Harris’s mixed relationship of web era poetics and Jewish hermeneutics through
his invocation of the Greek term for a Kabbalistic method of rearranging words
and sentences in the Bible to derive the esoteric substratus and deeper spiritual
meaning of the words (Wikipedia). In the ballad – a venerable narrative folk
genre that precedes print culture as well as disrupts the association of lyric
subjectivity with a single author--, Harris writes, “The circuitry/for this
hardware is offline. Tech support says
‘Dead Don Walking’ spins codes of hyperlink/as the original alias remains
camouflaged on/the edge of mad stanzas built like Babel to/First crisis.”
The passage quoted above is itself a
coded pastiche. It tropes on a 1995 film
by Tim Robbins starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon about a condemned man befriended
by a nun as he is about to perish on Death Row in Louisiana, and then likens
the unruly dissemination of many languages characteristic of a web environment
to the “Tower of Babel” story from Genesis
11 1-9. The Babel story is an
etiological explanation of the origins of multiple languages as God’s response
to concerns about human freedom and power that, God decided, needed to be
divided to create misunderstandings and miscommunications through the confusion
of tongues (Wikipedia). The Babel story speaks to Harris’s fascination
with roots, origins, and genealogy. In
an essay that appears on his website -- “Strangers and Friends – Cultural
Identity and Community” – Harris urges readers to unearth “the forgotten histories
within ancestral memories and places” so “we might have a starting point for
healing a change.” Interested in the
“fertilizing and benevolent presence of strangers in traditional societies,”
Harris notes that the “Golden Age of Spain” in which Jewish mysticism and
learning thrived for 200 years on the “anxious edges of the Inquisition”
because of “relatively little resistance from clerical and royal powers.”
The Babel story also raises questions
of authorship, as well as the issue of linguistic control of texts one disseminates
via digitalized media in which everyone is potentially an author and
conceptions of audience are bewilderingly estranged from traditional ideas of
intimate union between solitary writer and solitary reader. This is so even as, in the passage quoted
above from the “The Ballad,” Harris, in Derridean fashion, self-consciously
mocks his anxiety about the relationship of author, voice, text, and
originality through description of the source of Don Notarikon’s language and
perspective. “The circuitry…[for the] mad stanzas” -stems
from an “original” source “offline” that is associated with a still living, but
doomed “Dead Don,” but one that is itself fictive – an “alias” that is itself a
subterfuge – “camouflaged.” Don’s
poetry, he comments, is, like the Biblical city and tower, meant to confront
what he calls a “First crisis.” Harris
is a liminal figure situating his poetry at a “crisis” point – an in-between
space or turning point that, while itself a time of uncertainty and confusion,
will pivot the course of future events markedly in one direction or
another. The “online” world is thus not
a comfortable home for the Don – he prefers the “offline” realm of “hardware”
as opposed to “software.”
In a long, tour de force passage from late in “The
Ballad of Don Notarikon,” Harris, recalling the persona (or mask) poems of
Eliot in “Prufrock” (1915) and Pound in “Mauberley” (1920) reflects with his
characteristic deep ambivalence on an alchemical process and diasporic journey
of transfiguration from flesh and blood human existence to avatar in the “wide
empty” of an intelligent machine.
I, lifted alias, potency and low
politique to
mediate between demiurge and
apeiron, my
body chrysolite with mineral
silicates of iron,
part topaz, olive, clay – man of
light – light
man of green – morphed as Notarikon
across
the wide empty filled with
steps. I am born
or pre-born, stillborn not still,
nor implied
coupling as no couple has yet to
rub sweet
swells of comfort on cicatrix or
schism that
I am. I am Don Notarikon. I, in sound mind
and amygdale, am the ars poetica of
a winged
devarim who scaled heights of
darkling tiers
to decrescendo in faults of a man
made out
of words. Here’s one: anthropos, arms curved
to the knuckle of a prehensile hand
marking
basalt with spurs. Here’s one: pantomorphos,
shape-master, “All-Shaped” whose
covering
cherubs and ministering angels bask
in rays
of cabalic privacies. I am now their dread, a
matriculant in the School of
Contraction, with
an emerging student body of
tympanic shapes.
I major in Opacity, minor in
Limited Down.
First things first. I have taken a step. My body
is oblongi….(56)
The speaker is “morphed,”
symbolically devolved, and reinscribed into another, non-human form. I take the image of the anthropos (first man)
and the apelike figure with the prehensile hand to represent the Devo
experience. Devo is then reconceived as
an Odysseus, metamorphic figure -- the pantomorph -- who then is electronically
reborn from the primitive cellular forms of the mind (the computer mind as new biological/evolutional
incubator of creative breath, the Yeatsian “spiritus mundi,” the Kabbalist’s
notion of the Hebrew letters of the Bible as acrostically generative of new
words and new worlds). I say “electronically
reborn” because “amygdale” refers to the almond-shaped structures associated
with groups of nuclei located deep within the medial temporal lobes of the
brain, and linked with memory and emotional reaction. The speaker brags in bravura tones over his appearance
as a Kabbalistic version of a Stevensian “man made out of words” -- “ [I] am the ars poetica of a winged
devarim who scaled heights of darkling tiers” -- devarim is the Hebrew term for
“words,” and also the Torah portion from Deuteronomy in which Moses begins his
repetition of the Torah to the assembled Children of Israel [Chabad.Org]. At the same time, the “demiurge” (or subordinate
deity who fashions the sensible world in the light of eternal ideas; Merriam
Webster Online) who mediates an unlimited, infinite space – the “apeiron” – is
DOA. The Great Don, like the Stevensian
Emperor of Ice Cream who, in a famous poem from 1922, rules with his phallus
(the big cigar) a frothy insubstantial realm of “concupiscent curds,” is merely
a spectral figure. He is
“stillborn.” Further, the poem
references the language of a last will and testament (I, in sound mind…”), and
there is a suggestion that while the image of the Don may be infinitely
reproducible via the web, he is impotent. He exists in an asexual, disembodied environment in which his trace is
likened to a scar:
no couple
has yet to rub sweet
swells of
comfort on cicatrix or schism that
I am
Given that “cicatrix” refers to the scar left
by the formation of new connective tissue over a healing scar or wound (Free
online dictionary), one can infer that Harris regards the Don’s web-based
representational appearance as absence-based (non)existence. (Harris picks up on the theme of electronic
appearance as a smoke-ring like trace, an aftermath of embodied life, in
“Noone”: “without words/soars the severed skull free/of human shape” and “Noone
was here/is/smile the leg/the road//without body” [11]).
For Harris, Jewish poetry in the
digital age is a source of ecstatic hermeneutic practice. It is also a source of anxiety (Bloomian and
garden variety neurosis stemming from future fears) about what Eliot termed the
relation of tradition and the individual talent, as well as the place of
embodied existence altogether. According
to Harris, “People are obsessively concerned with identity. There is an
insufferable desire to be understood but honor what has come before. The danger
is that we could be living in a vacuum of platitudes where everything is cliché”
(Schneider). As DePauw Religion and
Literature Professor Beth Hawkins Benedix notes in a full-length introductory
essay to the volume, lines from Harris’s poetry such as “Does anyone ask about
identity?,” “Do we live here?,” “Too many/writers and not enough readers,” and
the author’s parodistic comment that his task may be to “self-publish the
urbanism of lonely obfuscations” speak to what Benedix calls the “wish for
connection, for a listening Other, [which] sits side by side an equally
compelling need to expose the naiveté of this wish” in the dizzyingly
intangible virtual space of New Media. An
utterly contemporary and postmodern condition for poetry, as witnessed by
recent studies of poetry in the digital age by Adelaide Morris, N. Katherine
Hayles, Marjorie Perloff, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kevin Stein, and C.T. Funkhouser,
Harris suggests current practice is resonant with ancient Jewish mystical
traditions (associated with, for example, Moses de Leon) of esoteric creativity
through the decidedly Jewish and diasporic Derridean processes of
dissemination, textuality, and plurivocality that characterize web-based
communications.
It is important to distinguish Harris’s mixed
response to poetry in a New Media era to that of leading theoretical proponents
of e-poetry such as Goldsmith, Hayles, Perloff, and Funkhouser. Closer in spirit – if not stylistics – to
Kevin Stein, who offers a judicious commentary on e-poetry from the perspective
of a page poet in Poetry’s Afterlife
– Harris is a fascinating cusp figure with a deeply modernist sensibility. His tonal touchstones (Stevens, primarily),
focus on interiority, anxiety, word play, allusiveness, verbal opacity, and an
assemblage/collage aesthetic all put him in modernist camp even as the
modernist is confronting a consuming postmodern realm of electronic
reproduction. Like Eliot, Pound and
Walter Benjamin in the Arcades Project,
for Harris originality and innovation are, paradoxically, contingent upon
extraordinary scholarly efforts to compile and collate esoteric wisdom texts,
political tracts, and sacred and secular literature. For Eliot and Pound the project was to quote
and thus appropriate Confucius, Jefferson, Bhagava Gita, Shakespeare, ragtime
music into graphically and semantically charged compositions that, far from
intended to a dizzying state of bricolage are, in Eliot’s famous phrase from The Waste Land, “These fragments I have
shored against my ruins” (Eliot and Pound were notoriously involved in
reactionary political movements that spoke to their Stevensian “rage for order”
in a period of massive social, political, aesthetic, and economic
upheaval). Flarf writers and e-poets
such as Funkhouser and Jim Andrews and installation artist-poets such as Mary
Flanagan generate decentered texts by, for example, linking URLs, thus creating
hypertexts as “readers” may proceed through webpages by linking on to whichever
webpage the “readers” decide to click upon – thus creating a thematically
dizzying number of possible versions of the “original” version of text the
Flarfist originally “programmed” into being.
Harris, by contrast, publishes page poetry on online ‘zines such as Zeek and via his website, but is at
bottom a 21st Century modernist in that his forums are primarily
obscure print little magazines and small presses – Hyperlinks of Anxiety appears with Cervena Barva Press of
Somerville MA and is distributed via SPD (Small Press Distribution).
Works
Cited
Benedix, Beth Hawkins. “Barely Listening: A Meditation on
Daniel Y.
Harris’s Hyperlinks of Anxiety.” In Daniel
Y. Harris. Hyperlinks
of Anxiety. Somerville, MA: Cervena
Barva Press, 2013.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative
Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Harris, Daniel Y. Hyperlinks
of Anxiety. Somerville, MA: Cervena
Barva Press, 2013.
--. “Strangers and Friends—Cultural
Identity and Community.” Art and Writing of Daniel Y. Harris.
http://www.danielyharris.com/
Lowell, Robert. “Epilogue.” Day by Day. York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, LLC., 1977.
Morris, Daniel. “An Interview with Daniel Y. Harris.” Email interview conducted, March 1, 2013.
Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal
Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 2010.
Schneider, Ilene. “Searching for Self.” Orange Country Jewish Life. March 2013.
Stein, Kevin. Poetry’s
Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
Stevens, Wallace. “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The
Best Poems of the English Language.
Edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.
Yeats, W. B. “The Second Coming.” Poetry:
A Pocket Anthology. Edited by R.S. Gwynn. New York: Longman, 2003
In terms of
literary forebears, Harris is clearly indebted to international modernism. One hears in Harris’s peculiar admixture of
conversational, philosophical, and self-consciously sonic and playful discourse
the poetics of Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West.” His poetry, again like Stevens, is Emersonian,
in its essayistic quality. One has the
sense of a mind working through concepts, ideas, and problems related to
imagining and disseminating the poet’s voice, self, and authorial imagination
not only in and through the artificial form of page poetry, but in a
hypertextual environment where notions of body, community, acknowledgment,
authorship, and visibility, as well as issues of void, chaos, and loss of
control of one’s text, and a radical hermeneutic instability are major
concerns, as is the issue of the transmission of culture and the preservation
of the human image across time. Besides the Stevensian strains, we notice the
punning and love of word play found in James Joyce, the wicked self-criticism
and implication in authorial hypocrisy found in Eliot and Baudelaire. The very concept of “anxiety” – foregrounded
in the book title – is itself a modernist emotion, suggesting an interior
disease that Auden referred to as a modern affliction in “The Age of
Anxiety.” One does not associate the postmodern
condition with anxiety, but rather, as in Deleuze, with the ecstatic
synesthetic rush of schizophrenia. Of
course, “anxiety” is a keyword in Jewish gnostic Harold Bloom’s theory that
“strong” major poets are engaged in a private intergenerational agon, if the
hermeneut is able to read the hidden code. Harris is intensely concerned with
ancestral relationship, as the genealogical section of his website
reveals.
Poetic Form: Ballad (online source) Centuries-old
in practice, the composition of ballads began in the European folk tradition,
in many cases accompanied by musical instruments. Ballads were not originally
transcribed, but rather preserved orally for generations, passed along through
recitation. Their subject matter dealt with religious themes, love, tragedy,
domestic crimes, and sometimes even political propaganda.
A
typical ballad is a plot-driven song, with one or more characters hurriedly
unfurling events leading to a dramatic conclusion. At best, a ballad does not
tell the reader what’s happening, but rather shows the reader what’s happening,
describing each crucial moment in the trail of events. To convey that sense of
emotional urgency, the ballad is often constructed in quatrain stanzas, each
line containing as few as three or four stresses and rhyming either the second
and fourth lines, or all alternating lines.
Ballads
began to make their way into print in fifteenth-century England. During the
Renaissance, making and selling ballad broadsides became a popular practice,
though these songs rarely earned the respect of artists because their authors,
called "pot poets," often dwelled among the lower classes.
