Life Is a Strain for Me Much of the Time
The Anger Scale
Katie Degentesh
(Combo Arts, 2006)
This planet has--or rather had--a problem
it simply feels that way most of the time
the way a few very rich people do now
they leave off the breathing Americans
in solitary confinement
in the arctic winter, when the sky
has a lot of energy
and the mosquitoes are not in full force
(think pill bugs of the sea
involved in bloody feudal wars)
Some were shoddier than others
Some were taught to play on the violin
Some were nobles who had upset the king
Some were actively connected to the actual events
an old lantern lit in the men's faces
the mud was at least ankle deep
It was the constant darkness more than the cold
the standard average-student mold
Just as your heart goes out to the man
when you learn that he was abusive and miserable,
sometimes it seems odd that topless bathing isn't allowed
when we give away use of roads
we get too much cheese
five of the six dioramas show
you can trust the federal government
to be cheaper than coal
even the smart kids
burned the good food in front of us
in favor of the articulation of existing paradigms
It is cleaner when burned.
The naive reader may believe that you feel uncomfortable
because of the appearance of your eye and eyelid
But the real problem is that
alcohol was the primary agent for the development of Western civilization
around a large quantity of dog poop
To begin with a kind of digression, the note on the text, in the back of the book: "Every poem in this book is titled with a question from the MMPI, or Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a psychological test consisting of 566 true/false questions that has been the benchmark for determining people's mental pathologies as well as their fitness for court trials and military service since the 1930s. Updated in 1989, the MMPI-2 is still relied upon for the same purposes today." I've taken this test--or one very similar to it--in high-school, as part of a routine exam by a therapist. I actually remember noticing the way several of the questions overlapped, and figured that it was to account for lying or other attempts to manipulate the results, and that some of the questions (which you are asked to rank on a scale of "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree") were just freaking creepy. The questions, tho meant to assess current symptoms, actually opened up a whole new range of possibilities for fucked-upness. "I feel uneasy indoors" was followed or preceeded in short space with "I feel uneasy outdoors" and "I feel afraid when I am alone" and "I feel uncomfortable in a crowd" and just about every other possibility. Then there were the more violent ones: "Someone is trying to poison me" or "Sometimes I feel I must injure either myself or someone else."
Anyway, back to the note, which continues to describe Katie's method: [. . .] I began to use [the questions] to write poems [ . . .] by feeding phrases from the statements into internet search engines and piecing the poems together from the results pages. [ . . . ] I might then also replace words or phrases in the results."
So it's tempting to read the poems in
The Anger Scale with the aid of the nearest hotspot, and I'll admit doing that with a few, just like I have with other Flarf creations. But it's much more interesting in this case, to read the poem as if it were constructed in a more usual manner. Because the poem's genius (I said it) is that it makes use of traditional conventions and subverts them at the same time.
It
sounds like a poem. Rhythmically it displays/enacts a pattern of long complex sentences (the first two verse paragraphs, for instance, are one complete sentence each, the second with an appended parenthetical), punctuated by shorter fragments. There's the litany of "Some were shoddier / Some were taught / Some were nobles / Some were actively connected. " And it
looks like a poem: it's arranged in lines, which are in turn arranged in verse paragraphs, irregular in length (so not technically "stanzas") but with some symmetry in the three couplets, and by virtue of the longer paragraphs appearing at the head and tail. And it
works like a poem: it moves by way of familiar rhetorical transitions: "Just as," "when we," "five of six [dioramas] show." It invokes "the reader" in the last paragraph (another preapproved "move"), and even plays an epiphanic trump card: after four relatively elegant lines (in both rhythm and diction) it ends with us looking down at some dog poop. (Which is more like an an anti-epiphany, and traditionally "inappropriate" like so much else re: Flarf.)
On top of all this, and with the book's method in mind, there are then (at least) two tracks on which to the read the poem. The first, being a straight reading, limiting the meaning of the poem (insofar as that's possible) to what's there on the page. I'll attempt a paraphrase:
Abundance makes the world a boring place because there's not as much conflict or struggle for survival. In the past, things were much more exciting/violent/volatile. Civilization is actually a sedative, or a dumbing down. It impairs perception. It amounts to nothing more than crap. Accepting such a paraphrase as the poem's argument makes it difficult to believe in the speaker, however. And that's the next key. The tone of the poem, is that of an opinonated dramatic monologue or discursive essay. But the voice isn't cohesive (subversion of the traditional lyric I); it ranges over various tones and modes and levels of diction. It's polyvocal. It's Culture at Large talking. The internet is talking.
Everybody is talking. And the contradictions and fallacies are all run together.
Which brings me to the second track of the poem, the one where the method is held in mind and the reader allows herself to imagine (or actually look for) the sources of the phrases on the internet. Who said this line, and in what context. Some of the lines are easier to pin down then others, some are constructed (seemingly) of various bits from multiple places. For instance, "involved in bloody feudal wars" and "Some nobles who had upset the king" appear to be from the same source, along with, maybe, "the primary agent for the development of Western Civilization." Any or all of that could have come from an educational site re: World History or specifically the Middle Ages. Some of the other language is similarly academic in tone: "the standard-average student mold," "five of the six dioramas show," "in favor of existing paradigms," amd "the naive reader may believe," could be from a critical essay (though dioramas automatically remind me of Natural History museums, so maybe that belongs in the first list). "Cheaper than coal" and "it is cleaner when burned" obviously go together, and are perhaps from a website discussing energy alternatives, maybe in a political context, which would then link it to the eco-sounding "This planet has--or rather had--a problem" and the stuff about "arctic winter," "breathing Americans," "has a lot of energy," maybe "a few very rich people" and even "the constant darkness more than the cold," which I'm now reading in a kind of ecological doomsday sense, as well as perhaps a historical Big Bang/evolutionary narrative sense, which would also tie it to "the pill bugs of the sea"--whaddaya call those things? Trilobites?
And in accord with the generative process, the title's got it all right there: Life (as in history, civilization, culture), Strain (as in conflict/struggle and also as in a single thread or stream of larger flow, or even a DNA strand?), Me (a polyvocal me, which is again culture, the internet, civilization, the lyric I, a collective ego not to mention unconscious), and Time (again history, civilization, evolution, museums, and even poetic meter/rhythm).
Sorry, no time right now to sum up these tracers--or to proofread. But this poem, and the book it's in, spin me round.
I've been meaning to write about Bruce Covey's 
