Katie Degentesh. The Anger Scale. Combo Books, 2006.

My Sleep Is Fitful and Disturbed: The Post-Millennial Poetry of Katie Degentesh

Review by Dan Hoy

Not even Time Magazine would dispute the conspiratorial claim that Google’s corporate mission is to position itself as the primary liaison for all virtual data (and spearhead the conversion of every bit of information into virtual bits of information) [1] – so that, in the end, information as a commodity will be inextricable from technology owned or leased by Google. The apocalyptic apotheosis of this kind of Permeate-or-Die capitalist methodology is the Pentagon’s militarization of outer space in an attempt to establish hegemony over all space (e.g. the 2005 launch of the anti-satellite XSS-11 satellite and its burgeoning Global Strike program capable of hitting any target in the world within 45 minutes, with a circular error probability less than three meters) [2], but its bread and butter is the more insidious trickle down doctrines of behavioral standards, such as those asserted by mainstream news outlets and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the psychiatric test frequently used for non-clinical purposes like job screening and custody evaluations.

The poem titles in Katie Degentesh’s The Anger Scale are taken from the MMPI, and the poem content is collaged out of MMPI material fed through the Google [3] grinder. The book title itself is another name for the psychopathic deviate (Pd-4) scale, which, when applied to the MMPI, measures antisocial tendencies, impulsiveness, authority conflicts, and shallow attachments. [4] Unlike most of the other high profile books of Flarf like Kasey Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation and Drew Gardner’s Petroleum Hat, Degentesh’s book includes a brief description of its process at the end of the book, as a kind of epilogue [5]: she became interested in the MMPI after reading online articles about it, then found a pdf of the entire test after some investigative cut and paste with a search engine. The Anger Scale reenacts poetically her practical search for the MMPI by entering in search queries taken from excerpts she found online.

Degentesh’s choice of duotone source material (Google and MMPI) is then both topical and personal, and what’s interesting to me is how these poems act as singular presentations with no direct correlation to their source material (the material being excised and sanitized within the confines of the poem, without any disclaimer [6]) even as the semantic and ideological fragments of these sources assert their representation within our reading of the poems (a reading encouraged by Degentesh’s inclusion of the ‘About This Book’ at the end).

This staggering between presentation and representation, or rather the indeterminate abyss that eclipses both brute and mediated encounters, is what I find most relevant to how we process the contingent and arbitrary datum of our lives. Which is why I also wish Degentesh didn’t deliberately skew the results by tagging a “+ turtleneck” or “+ pussy” to the search query, and that she would trust instead the obscenity of the banal to bleed through to the horror and delight of her audience. But I also suspect that for her (and the rest of the Flarfs) words like ‘pussy’ are as much a generative device as the MMPI and Google, and that her back-end fascination with the intercourse between state-sponsored paradigm and corporate algorithm doesn’t quite click for her poetically unless it intermingles on the front-end with the assvagina lexicon. We all have our obsessions and compulsions, whether imposed or cultivated, so whatever works I guess. And for me these poems, as presentations, work the affect of bourgeois provocation with more precision than her peers [7] and with as much agility as anyone writing poems these days, even as she compromises the poems’ unique opportunity as technocapitalist representations to pull it off.

And pull it off she does, again and again, with enough ruptures of thought to make me forget all about the integrity of technocapitalist representations: “I had no idea you were this religious / I must smash my head into the wall.” The Anger Scale is bristling with the spirit of Christianity, at once ironic and immanent: the word of God in need of resuscitation (“The Bible is as dry as dust / With antiseptic and sterile towels draped around it”); the event or revolution crystallizing into the idolatry of images (“white cows moving towards the retina / which have their origin in Christ himself”); the political cynicism of divine election (“the people at the ballot-box / in the usual way about missionary things / enjoying a cheering sense of God’s love”); the trifecta of patriarchy, technology, and religion (“about Jesus and Satan / and who was better on his computer”); the consumerism of pragmatic spirituality (“to reduce my living out the Gospel of Christ / to drinking loads of prune juice to keep the bowels moving”); the poetic atrophy of prophets and oracles (“We are nearing the time when Christ is come / to make recordings for the blind and dyslexic / in Hawaii, and sees nothing but very plain prose”); the enumeration of banal feats as a catalyst for knowledge that is simultaneously mundane and divine (“I prefer writing about on-base percentages, fielding percentages, / and players’ performance, but sometimes / I just wish God would give me answers on issues of life”); the sacred vulgarity of profane transcendence via the phallic bird piercing the trinity as holiest-of-holes (“Bird came to know the private Madonna: / the woman who would sing snatches / and wetness of the inside of her pussy” – italics DH); the religious evangelists/chefs/butchers with their hands clean and unrolled-up sleeves wandering the edge of the void as undifferentiated mass (“circling a herd along with the Christian pilgrims / with clean white apron and sleeves to match”); the anima/animal of Christ spreading the gossip and gospel of the familial secret (“this lamb is telling me that / me, my wife, son and pet / have never discussed this issue”); the atemporal and irreconcilable sameness of celestial Son and terrestrial Father (“I loved my father and I loved Jesus. / What was I to do? / I felt like a canoe / that was being pulled apart by two strong men”); the bountiful harvest of lies suspending us over the vacuum or void of the subject (“I know God can provide us / with more than one cover story / on the subject of black holes”); the seminal or gnostic spark as a counteractive placebo for phallic and vice-presidential paranoia (“When atrocious examples of evil come to Dick’s attention, / he again speaks of hidden seeds that God placed in each living thing / this widespread dabbling in the world”); the plump comfort of life as an ex nihilo and teleological fiction (“She was a big woman, with lots of hair / She felt that her life was being made up / From a book of love stories told by God”); and the weary, ambivalent reinvention of the Christian world: an old testament fire and brimstone reconstituted as polite and autistically corporate:

You are invited to suffer war, pestilence,

droughts, internal strife, inflation

accompanied by some adjective which explains

things that you would not do in health

If you saw Blade Runner, then you had a glimpse

Of the life of every man of God

The day-to-day variation of teeth

But you still probably wouldn’t get to do all the things you wish you could.

The grown-up children of God are now androidal, blessed, cursed, fleeing and free in their infinite lack of fulfillment. The synthesis of technology and physiology and the itemized, jagged carnivorousness of the everyday has left them like the replicants of Blade Runner, labeled criminals because they believe they are human and know they are not. “Oh, how I want to make someone happy. // I feel sort of mechanical.” The illegality or essential wrongness that defines this human-not-human amalgam of God and bot is specifically a post-millennial condition, not a post-9/11 symptom, and in spite of the Flarf talking points has little to do with Dada, just as 9/11 has only a superficial relation to WWI. [8] This kind of retroactive and projective canon formation (with all its clumsy, phallic implications) tends to obfuscate rather than illuminate, and there’s little difference between calling Flarf the new Dada and the tactical linking of 9/11 with Pearl Harbor by American politicians immediately following 9/11: it’s a way of making any war or movement pre-approved and already extant, in this case disabling Degentesh’s poetry of its capacity for temporal rupture and dislocation, which is precisely what defines it as contemporary, by treating it instead as scripted, authoritative fodder for imaginary art history textbooks, “with antiseptic and sterile towels draped around it”.

Or maybe this is because Degentesh’s brand of tonal dexterity and viciousness has more in common with contemporary poets like Lara Glenum and Ben Lerner than it does with her fellow Flarfs [9], as in her open engagement with the insidiousness of what’s often called neoliberalism and its ability to nullify the opposition without recourse to incendiary cluster munitions (though those work too):

the wind swollen by ill-temper

without a single bomb falling

the rubbish that people put in their bodies

pierced her eyes like shards of glass

Here the poem recognizes how voluntarily internalizing the dominant state paradigm initiates a catalytic effect, jettisoning violence outward with all the precision of a fragmentation grenade. And this violence is a priori, like the air we breathe, already “swollen by ill-temper”, so that anyone with lungs is complicit in it, even those who struggle against it or are already overrun. To be alive is to subsist on this current of violence permeating all things – to seek shelter from the wind is to escape its immediacy only: “The hand over the vagina … / give yourself up to it with a violence / which I confess I am not able to emulate”. It doesn’t matter if the “it” is in reference to the vagina or the hand obscuring it; in either case, the violence is not something we are or that we pretend to be: it’s something that channels through us or wells up inside and overwhelms us like a cresting wave, contorting our faces into the imbecilic stupor of blunt trauma and sexual ecstasy: “Then I feel as if I must void my bladder – but instead, / this great outpouring of juices happens.” The uncanny commonplaceness of it is retained even as it passes through us as something unexpected, and we are as alienated by our familiarity with it as we are familiar with that same alienation, all of which manifests as an indifferent if manic, horrified, deific hilarity: “I had a few experiences of the holy spirit taking over / then again… it could just be cancer hahahahahaha.”

In a world where “even the smart kids / burned the good food in front of us / in favor of the articulation of existing paradigms”, there is no interior solace either: “oh my soul, I have given thee everything, / But I note that my hands do not warm back up inside you.” The heat death of the universe as a metaphor for the acceleration and flattening of time as we grow older has now been literalized by our replication and dispersal across the internet, bits and pieces of various avatars cast off into oblivion or lodged within the false eternity of Google’s cache, like memories we can access but no longer feel:

I remember wondering how I could take care of everyone if I am not physical

Already in mourning for my life and for the life

Of giant smiling rats and 7 ft yellow birds

This elegiac nostalgia for the televisual fictions of childhood is not so much a confessional self-mythologizing as it is a retrospective while the program is still in progress, “an epic which has got nothing heroic about it”; it is the horizon that we also inhabit, and which we experience as both fluttering transcendence and so much clutter: “At the seaside there are not so many birds in your face / as there are when the ocean of human beings gets together”.

Here, at the end of the world, where “the Sun will not always shine just enough and not too much”, “[i]t is extremely difficult to achieve perfect randomness”. This difficulty necessitates a delicate yet rigorous precision, something like Rimbaud’s intimidating, rational derangement of the senses, until what passes between us is nothing but pure communication absent of any meaning, the tender currency of transference and the gracious if questioning acceptance as we flinch from the blinding power too far away to touch, but which burns us anyway. Or as Degentesh/Google/MMPI says in the closing poem of the book, “My Sleep Is Fitful and Disturbed”: “The most common inanities passed between us / mingled with thanks, with inflection like a question / reacting to the powerhouse we call the Sun”.

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[1] See “In Search of the Real Google,” Adi Ignatius, Time Magazine, 02.12.06: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1158961-1,00.html

[2] “The Pentagon’s Bid to Militarize Space”, Giuseppe Anzera, Power and Interest News Report, 08.17.05: http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_report&report_id=347

[3] Since Google is on par with other lexically ubiquitous brands like Xerox and Kleenex, I’m using it here in the generic sense. Degentesh specifies only that she made use of a ‘search engine’, and an email query to the author asking for clarification went unanswered.

[4] At least according to the top Google entry for ‘psychopathic deviate’.

[5] Mike Magee’s Mainstream also includes an afterword that is mostly general comments about Flarf, including a reprint of a piece he originally wrote for the Poetry Project Newsletter (See footnote 7). Mainstream’s stated interest in making use of the Google index to construct poems is “its collaborative texture, its anthropological implications (the sampling of an enormous variety of public speech based on a single word or phrase shared in common), its comic (not to say unserious) frame.” Degentesh’s exploitation of search engines, by contrast, is differentiated by her mashup interrogation of the ideology of technological tools, in addition to the poetic benefits Magee notes.

[6] This is of course assuming you’ve managed to avoid the blurbs on the back of the book, as well as any blogs and listservs and press clippings and readings etc. that make reference to The Anger Scale’s mode of composition.

[7] She is not, for example, championing the use of Google in poetic composition as a “willful democratization” of method while at the same time enacting an elitist critique by appropriating chatroom-speak in order to “interrogate dumbness, ridiculousness, stupidity; to work undercover in the middle of it, to pretend to be it if necessary.” (Quotes attributed to and compiled by Mike Magee – see The Flarf Files: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html) Though in all fairness Magee’s comments were made sometime in or prior to 2003, and I was a bit too exhausted (and am still too exhausted) by the spiraling back and forths on poetry blogs in the summer of 2006 regarding his poem “Their Eyes, Their Asian Glittering Eyes, Are Gay” to attempt a distillation of how his critical position in relation to his own work has since been modified. I’d also like to point out that Magee, who runs Combo Books, is responsible for my favorite cover design this year (Anger Scale’s mock-up of a multiple choice test filled in with a No. 2 pencil).

[8] For elaboration on the Flarf is to 9/11 as Dada is to WWI analogy and the alignment of Flarf with Dada techniques and intentions, see Rick Snyder’s article, “The New Pandemonium: A Brief Overview of Flarf” (http://jacketmagazine.com/31/snyder-flarf.html); for other references to Flarf as neo-Dada, see The Flarflist Collective’s “Actual Interview with a Six-Year-Old on the Topic of Flarf”, (http://jacketmagazine.com/29/flarf-iv.html), Gary Sullivan’s intro to a feature in Jacket Magazine (http://jacketmagazine.com/30/fl-intro.html), and Gary Sullivan’s 2006 Tzara-meets-Flarf poetry reading list (http://www.thirdfactory.net/attentionspan2006p4.html#gs).

[9] Although there’s something similar going on in parts of Mohammad’s tight little book Monsters (Abraham Lincoln, 2006), so this could be indicative of a larger shift.