Banango Lit

Introduction
The Poetry by Emily Dickinson site has been officially live for over 2 months, so I think it’s high time for a critical evaluation and reflection on how the project has fared. First, some background. PBED was the brainchild of Steve Roggenbuck. The initial stage took place starting in mid-March of this year. Steve posted about his idea for a collaborative poetry project. This post invited people to contribute by: tweeting with the hashtag #poetrybyemilydickinson and/or joining a remix/editing team. The goals of PBED are mentioned at the bottom of that post:
 

please help me do this and show that (1) poetry can be not boring (2) our community is powerful enough to google bomb a phrase like “poetry by emily dickinson” and hijack 50k visitors per month (3) twitter and blogs are not worthless for writers, they are the way of the future and if walt whitman was alive today he would dominate tweetdeck

So these are actually 3 pretty coherent goals that we can use as criteria to assess PBED. At the same time, these are only a few aims that Steve mentioned in his initial post, and I think other goals can be attributed to the project, which can also be used as metrics. Steve, PBED is your baby, but I think you’d agree that as a collaborative poetry project the aims of its participants can be grafted onto it in good faith. I’ll get to this below, but the description of the project on the PBED website is a little different than the one stated in the original post.


The Project Begins
So people started tweeting with the #poetrybyemilydickinson hashtag in March. There were really no parameters on its use. Some people used the hashtag as part of their tweet, like the example by walter davis that Steve gives in his post: “poetry by emily dickinson is really inspiring me to be creative.” Other people just appended the hashtag to funny, poignant, confessional… tweets. Here are just a few of my favorites from the first batch back in the spring. There are tons more that made me smile, or think.
 
tbimusic: Exhausted by cursive handwriting and critical thought, we turned to mixtapes and overturning trash cans.
 
kumquatparadise: love anything that exists

whatisbenseanor: Please read this and understand I own nothing.

I think the viral aspect of the hashtag campaign was pretty successful. Not giving a ton of details about the project was a good move (as we saw, Steve’s first post listed a few aims, but they were brief and located towards the bottom). It piques people’s curiosity and gets them in on the game, even if they’re not exactly sure what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. Bobby, the merch guy for Polar Bear Club, participated and still tweets with the hashtag. He’s not in the (alt) lit world as far as I know, but he’s a friend of Matthew Thompson, who is, and who also participated. I guess it gets some people in, anyway. Some of my friends got annoyed, and I wasn’t even tweeting with the hashtag that much.

In addition to the hashtag campaign, one of the earlier stages was the remix/editing one. Anyone who was interested could participate in this stage. This is how I met my lovely talented friend Justin Carter, and it led to the founding of Banango Lit. Every few days, Steve would email out a batch of recent hashtagged tweets to use as raw material for remixes. People approved tweets as a complete poem, combined various tweets into new poems, or used tweets to make image macros. People had different ways of making remixes: Rod Naquin did acrostics, Veronika Dikoun selected parts of tweets and randomized them in an Excel document, I picked some tweets that I liked and then went through the lists trying to build a poem around them.

We also had some good discussion on the aims of PBED and how best to execute the project. The idea of having the team edit/remix each other’s remixes was tossed around, but ultimately there was only one iteration of editing. I would have felt weird messing with other people’s remixes, even if none of the original material was theirs. That’s a testament to the legitimacy of the remixing of this project: at least for me, it fostered a sense of ownership. My poems might have been compiled from other people’s tweets, but making the poems really felt like creative work. And this is borne out by the fact that different team members’ remixes, and the remixes submitted after the site launched, have distinctive styles. The PBED poems aren’t all just mishmashes of random tweets thrown together. They are poems.

Legitimacy of Twitter
This is a nice place to address one of the stated aims of Poetry by Emily Dickinson: “twitter and blogs are not worthless for writers, they are the way of the future.” So I feel pretty emphatically that what I remixed is poetry, and I regard the submissions to the proper website as the same. I think there’s a tension of sorts between the crowd (of tweeters) and the remixers (as authors). Every remix on the website credits the authors of the original tweets, as well as the remixers. I said in the previous paragraph that I felt ownership over the poems I compiled (what’s the proper verb to even use here? wrote? remixed?). If you know me and you know my writing style, you can definitely tell that the poems are mine (which is perhaps even too bold a statement, considering none of the original tweets I used are mine). At this point, I know Justin’s writing style pretty well, and I can definitely tell that his remixes are his, especially as compared to some of the later poems submitted to the website. But….the tweets all came from other people. I guess this qualifies PBED poems as flarf, though I never really thought of them that way. I think the collaborative angle is a better/more essential one than flarf. Bringing this back to the stated aim though, I think PBED has viably shown that Twitter—specifically, the culled tweets of people around the world—is a productive medium for creating poetry, or at least the building blocks of poems. The collaborative nature of PBED amplified this stated aim, emphasizing it more powerfully than if Steve or Justin or I had just pulled a bunch of random tweets together from anywhere.


Collaboration
Continuing with the development of the PBED project, people continued to tweet sporadically with the hashtag. It quieted down after the initial post-announcement surge, and editors emailed one another their remixes through mid-May, with the pace of our activity also slowing.

The website was finally launched in late August with little buildup. It features a feed of recent #poetrybyemilydickinson tweets, 3 simple directives to get people to participate (tweet and remix), and of course the poems. It also has this explanation of the project:

Poetry by Emily Dickinson is a poetry project promoting active participation in creating literature. It’s an effort to steal Google traffic from a dead writer & redirect it to living writers collaborating online.

That’s some pretty loaded language: “stealing” from a “dead writer” (not even a poet!), with the “living writers collaborating online” implied as superior to the dead one(s). So here’s the thing: I don’t agree with this description of the project. I think it could be described more accurately. I mentioned the tension between tweeters and remixers, which I felt as the latter, but there’s also a distance between those two. The project’s collaborative for sure, but ultimately the poems I compile are distinctively mine because I’m the one with editorial control over which tweets I use and how I choose to organize them. It feels like there’s some kind of a void between people tweeting with the hashtag and people remixing those tweets—which is NOT to say that there’s no overlap between those two groups, but that the two processes, of tweeting and remixing, seem separate from one another. Whereas “living writers collaborating online” implies more of a network type of process. Let me try to illustrate my point:

There’s probably some more overlap between the tweeters and remixers, but the point here is that, as someone who’s predominately on the far end of the remixing side, there’s a whole cohort of tweeters who may even be fellow remixers but who I’m only interacting or collaborating with in a limited sense. They tweet. I take their tweets and do things with them. Those processes are separate. Then you have this:



This drawing above is meant to represent collaboration in a fuller sense, of the sort implied by the PBED description of “living writers collaborating online.” I started this drawing with a simple grid of vertical-horizontal lines, but realized it needed more. Bear with me here: the lines are people, ideally both tweeting and remixing, and the orange spots represent their collaboration with 1, 2, or even more other people. This drawing displays interconnectivity, cross-collaboration…look, my metaphors are kind of hazy, but here’s what it maybe looks like: I tweet, Justin tweets, JDA Winslow and Poncho Peligroso and Stephen Tully Dierks tweet. Justin and I pick our favorite tweets from that pool, and we build a poem up, together. This raises the degree of collaboration. PBED is to be highly commended for the actual process displayed in the first image. That’s already more collaborative than the traditional process of poetry writing. But the collaboration aspect could have been taken further. I liked the first stage in the spring, the feeling of working with other people on the project. Maybe more could have been done to foster microcommunities of project participants. Maybe we could have done some positive social engineering, game-ified the process, provided some sort of incentive for people to work together to create living literature.  Maybe it’s not too late to do that. Justin and I (fake) met because we were both initial editors on PBED. Banango came out of PBED—the first stage of it. That’s awesome, and I want to do more to encourage strangers to collaborate, because great things will come out of it.

Reach
Another aspect of PBED that I want to address is the reach of the project. I don’t have detailed analytics on our audience. But roughly, from what I can tell by who tweeted, submitted remixes, and liked/reblogged the Tumblr posts, we got a lot of people inside the alt lit community to participate. We also brought in some people outside that community (like me, I guess) and got them to participate in various aspects of the project. We probably also annoyed our followers a lot with the constant #poetrybyemilydickinson tweets. One of the things that’d be neat is if we got even more outsiders to participate, or at least piqued their interest in the project—I’m talking the sorts of people who hate poetry. This links up with two goals that Steve stated in his original post: showing people that poetry can be not boring, and Google bombing the phrase “poetry by emily dickinson” (the latter of which is also listed as a step on the website). Kicking that phrase up in the Google search results is a sure way to ensure more visitors to the site and hopefully more participants. This step of the project hasn’t been emphasized much, but it can be done in the future. As for the other goal, of making poetry fun again—I’d say PBED is pretty successful. I enjoyed writing my remixes. One of the challenges PBED poetry (and flarf, and alt lit, and avant-garde, and experimental poetry…)  faces in drawing in outsiders is that they’re turned off by traditional poetry, but don’t consider this sort of material “legitimate” or “literary” or “serious.” That’s beyond the scope of this dissertat post, but one tactic is to expand the explanation of the project on the website. If we explain what we’re doing better, people might be more likely to pay attention. Draw them in with the bold statement about stealing traffic from a dead writer (maybe…), then sit them down and tell them what you mean.

Also, this:



Pacing
Now that I’ve discussed the 3 aims from Steve’s original post and the website description of PBED, there are just a few more things I’d like to mention. Stay with me, readers. One item of concern is the pacing of the whole project. There was a bunch of tweeting when PBED started in the spring. Understandably, the rate of that slowed. Then, when the website launched, there was more tweeting, and a whole slew of submitted remixes. Now, we’re only getting sporadic remixes, and very few tweets (though still some!). It’d be good to keep PBED from petering out entirely and periodically spur interest, getting people to tweet and submit remixes again. Maybe bringing in more outsiders would foster sustained participation. Maybe doing network-style collaboration would also keep the project fresh for participants.   

Original Works
One last issue is original poems. We got some submissions to the website that didn’t seem to be made from any of the #poetrybyemilydickinson tweets. Justin, Steve, and I all had different opinions on whether to publish these original works. On the one hand, it kind of dilutes the mission of PBED and isn’t in the collaborative spirit of the project, especially if submitters had already written the poems and were just looking for a public venue for them. On the other hand, if they were impelled to write original works because of the frenzy of PBED activity, that’s awesome, and we should encourage such writing by publishing their poems. There’s no way for us to really tell for each situation, though, so we ultimately just decided to publish them. It seemed like those poems got less likes and reblogs, but there could be many reasons for that: the poems weren’t as good, nobody knew who the submitters were, or maybe people were just picking up on the fact that the poems weren’t remixes and responding in kind.

So?
Alright, then. We’ve made it this far. Poetry by Emily Dickinson has done a great job of getting people excited about poetry and fostering some creative work. More could be done to encourage collaboration and ensure that the project stays alive, unlike that “dead writer,” Emily Dickinson. But on the balance: well done, guys. Now let’s keep it going.

Shaun Gannon is the founder of LetPeoplePoems, where I need to post more stuff at. The poem I am reviewing, “I AM SHAUN GANNON,” can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWKbro_fzoY.

I am reviewing this in real time so as I write this part, I have not listened to the poem yet.

0:00- I AM EXCITED

0:03- Camera is sideways. This makes me feel odd.

0:21- I like the confidence of Shaun Gannon right now. I like how he is dressed.

0:24- CAMERA JUST TURNED AROUND

0:27- “my heart is a pile of needles left out in the sun”- First “oh shit this is great moment.” Will probably not quote poem anymore because the reader of this review should watch it themselves.

0:33- the repetition of “I am Shaun Gannon” is brave. Good brave. I like this.

1:00- Shaun Gannon’s sense of humor is really strong.

1:10- “Transformers” reference fits so well because Shaun Gannon is Michael Bay. He is blowing shit up and taking no prisoners.

1:26- Starting to wonder how this would translate to the page. Not sure if it would. But I think that’s okay. Shaun Gannon is a poet for the people. For the people to hear.

2:01- Just noticed Shaun Gannon holds the paper he is reading sideways.

2:09- The way he threw that paper down after the guardian angel line! Forceful

2:51- The things that made him cry part was great. There is a sidebar link to Shaun Gannon Celebrity Stylist but I think it is a different Shaun Gannon.

2:57- LOLOL.

3:02- Wait, who are you?

3:24- Shaq reference. Nice.

3:47- I don’t know what you just said, but I liked that.

4:07- “Little black book with my poems in it” again brings to mind my thought re: how Shaun Gannon’s poem would translate to the page.

4:28- Some of this stuff is so “on target” and brilliant and etc

5:18- Unsure if that is part of the poem or just a sidebar from it. Wait, why can’t it be both? Okay it is both.

5:30- This has reached the point where normally I would be like “PLEASE END THIS POEM” but I am not thinking that here.

5:55- Raise hand if you want to be Robert Redford *everyone raises hand*

6:17- Funny, witty, smart, AND irreverent. Shaun Gannon is American Poetry.

6:42- Everyone should call Shaun Gannon baby.

7:30- I can feel this rising to some kind of uber-zenith.

7:46- That should have been the last line. But if it was it would probably not be as “deep” of a poem.

9:33- I like the structure of this last part.

There was something powerful about what I just watched. Something about the swagger of Shaun Gannon and the humor of Shaun Gannon and the everything of Shaun Gannon that melded together to create something great. If there was a DVD called “Best Poems of the Internet Generation” this would be on there and Shaun Gannon would deserve to be on the cover.

A lot of what I think about this poem is summed up already in Beach Sloth’s review of it. So check that out. Beach Sloth is on target when he says that

                By using the repeating phrase “I am Shaun Gannon” he creates a specific flow for the poem. When he wants to build up the tension in the reading, he uses the line several times in quick succession. Or, if he wants to punctuate the absurdity of the exercise, he’ll mention how he is the archbishop of the church of Bowie or how we must be quiet. Shaun Gannon cannot be silenced however.

Shaun Gannon cannot be silenced. Shaun Gannon should not be silenced. Don’t silence him. Don’t even try.

The topic of flarf came up, and Justin and I were talking about how we liked certain types of flarf poems but not others. He mentioned K. Silem Mohammad, who I had never heard of, so I googled him and found this article from Poets & Writers, entitled “Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously?”

The poet Rod Smith is quoted as saying:

Aesthetic judgments about what’s bad in a very hierarchal society are usually serving upper-class people with a certain amount of privilege,” he says. “So for a bunch of poets who are very well schooled in a variety of traditions of American poetry to take what’s considered bad and throw that at people is a very interesting maneuver. It’s not simply bad poetry; it’s quote-unquote bad poetry written by people who know how to write poetry.

A few things:

• What exactly does he mean when he says aesthetic judgments are “serving” a certain class of people? Seems like maybe these privileged upper class people are the ones making the judgments on what is “good” in poetry or otherwise, and therefore what’s deemed good reflects those people’s preferences, standards, moral system, etc.  But if that’s true, what’s really more interesting is not what those judgments mean for the upper class and privileged who make them, but for those who are creating and consuming poetry. As for the former, the creators of poetry: what would it mean for flarf, which according to the article has been marginalized by the Poetry Gods, to be judged as aesthetically sound by those at the top of the hierarchy? Is flarf’s position on the margins of the poetry world an essential part of its character and appeal? Do flarfists even want their work to be more widely accepted, and if so by who? As for the consumers of poetry: how much do aesthetic judgments actually impact upon “common people”? I guess actually a fair amount: thinking back on what I’ve been taught is good poetry, it’s worlds away from flarfy stuff. But then we get back to the appeal of flarf: it’s a breath of fresh air, it’s authentic, it’s human, it’s not stilted. What does it do to flarf to be taken seriously by The Establishment; as writers and readers, what do we want for flarf? Seems like what’s more essential is not that a privileged cohort sees aesthetic value in flarf, which judgment then filters from the top down, but that flarf achieves more widespread acceptance from the bottom up. I want my friends to see that flarf has merit as poetry, especially those—the many—who have been put off by more traditional poetry.

• I winced at Smith’s assertion that flarfists are “well schooled in a variety of traditions of American poetry” and “people who know how to write poetry.” Even though Smith’s a fan of flarf, his own words exemplify some of the problems with the Poetic Establishment that he himself picks out. He disdains those making aesthetic judgments—or rather, a system in which those people serve as aesthetic arbiters—but he lauds the well-educated flarfists who know how to write. I think Smith is missing the mark here. Take Steve Roggenbuck’s Poetry By Emily Dickinson project, for example. What’s so great about it is its democratic aspect. Anyone can be a writer or an editor, regardless of how well-schooled they are in the poetic or any other tradition. It opens up poetry to everyone, kind of analogous to how in both material and subject, flarf itself draws upon spheres of life traditionally untouched by poetry. It’s almost dispiriting when Smith makes it sound like flarf is limited to “people who know how to write poetry,” particularly when he’s just come off scorning the arrangement where a privileged cohort makes aesthetic judgments. Granted, I pulled this quote out of context; Smith seems to be referring specifically to the group of people who established flarf at the very beginning. But the potential of flarf to democratize and spread poetry—in both a creative and consumptive role, as writers and readers—deserves to be looked at too. It’s fantastic that Edge Books, under the auspices of Smith, is publishing an anthology of flarf and presumably, as per the article’s title, helping flarf be taken more seriously. That’s top-down. It’d be even better to get poetry, flarf or otherwise, to the millions of people who, unlike the authors in and likely readers of the anthology, aren’t likely to be literate in “a variety of traditions of American poetry.” That would be a bottom-up effort, and I think a more essential one at that.

• If Smith’s correct that the original flarfists are educated in the art of poetry, maybe he’s helped get at why I favor some flarf poetry and not other. A friend lent me the book “The Anger Scale” by Kate Degentesh. Degentesh googled lines from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (a personality test for mental health) and composed the various results into poems. Even though she flarfed her base of material, I found that the poems were too similar to what I grew up reading and disliking. It was too mechanistic, highfalutin, unnatural. It didn’t go far enough with turning traditional poetry on its head. In contrast, what Steve Roggenbuck and other boykittens are doing with flarf and otherwise is warm, unconstrained, more human, and miles away from what I thought poetry was, in the best way possible. Instead of formulaically googling strings and grabbing what looks interesting, they’re pulling from IM chat logs, making image macro poems, spreading poetry guerrilla-style, and it’s more relevant to me as a person. Sorry, Establishment, poetry that’s obscure or way scholarly in both style and substance isn’t instantly meaningful. That’s certainly not to say that all such traditional poetry is worthless. But take a poem that declares “i dont care about reading a poem/who do you think i am, robert frost?” That’s something I would say. I might even say it lowercase. And it makes more sense to me. I’m not saying that poetry like this is good because it’s “easier” than traditional poetry. It’s good because in the way it’s written, in the mode of delivery, and in the subject matter,  it’s closer to (at least my own) human experience. The flarf and other poetry that speaks to me does so kind of in the way that David Foster Wallace gets at what it is to be human (for me as for countless other twenty-somethings burdened with their own education). It hits me in a way that, all too often, traditional poetry doesn’t.

Also, let’s look at this quote at the end of the article, from the poet Douglas Rothschild, talking about flarf:

It’s all geared toward entertainment and punch lines and maybe a teeny little insight thrown in at the end. Poetry isn’t on my list of entertainment, it’s more important than that.

Some questions:

• Is the goal of poetry to provide insight? Does poetry maybe have various, sometimes-contradictory goals?

• Why isn’t entertainment important?

• Can’t poetry be both entertaining and serve some other, “higher” purpose?

• Why is poetry important to you, Mr. Rothschild? Does it bother you that poetry isn’t important to 99.99% of Americans? Or is part of poetry’s appeal its exclusiveness, as with underground music; do you feel you’re part of a select in-crowd, one of the few literati with the chops to write poetry and make value judgments on it?

• Do you think the flarf movement might be helping to shift poetry in from the margins towards the mainstream? Isn’t this a good thing?*

*For me the answer is yes on both counts. I wouldn’t be writing this essay and thinking about poetry if it weren’t for flarf.


—Rachel

I am holding Steve Roggenbuck’s book downloadhelveticaforfree.com in my hand right now and flipping through it and looking at the poems in it. One poem that I find to be very effective is this one:

I JUST WATCHED
GARDEN STATE
FOR THE
SECOND TIME
LUVIN IN

I think this encapsulates why Steve Roggenbuck is effective at doing what he does.

***

My first encounter with Steve Roggenbuck’s poetry came soon after my first encounter with the literary blog HTMLGiant. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but somehow I ended up on his blog and preordered his book and a few days later got it in the mail and read it all the way through in a few minutes. Then I added Steve Roggenbuck on Facebook. Then I didn’t talk to him because I was afraid of strangers. Then the Bebe Zeva Chat Thread came along and changed the game and etc etc but back to talking about poetry now.

I really enjoyed Roggenbuck’s book, but it took a while for me to figure out the exact reason. At first I just thought it was humorous and sometimes insightful, but then I started thinking about deeper reasons for me enjoying this.

This book is a time capsule. It is a time capsule in the way that all great American poetry is a time capsule. I am not saying that Roggenbuck’s book is as good as Leaves of Grass or anything. But the book does capture a particular time period/ literary movement/ stuff like that in a way that makes it memorable. The choice of Helvetica font for the book captures a movement of people using that font. The use of band references captures the movement of 21st century underground music. The chat lingo captures chat lingo. The private nature of the original words presented in a very public natures captures the idea that that happens all the time in the real world. The combination of all these things are what make the book so effective. Poems like

I AM FOLDING
UNDERWEAR
INBETWEEN
SENDING YOU
MESSAGES

is at once an artifact of modern life (IMing) and Roggenbuck’s personal life (underwear). But it is 2011 and the line between private and public is blurred. This book captures that.

***

Steve Roggenbuck is the ‘face’ of a movement that doesn’t really have a name (maybe ‘boykitten’). This whole movement seems to function in this way with their work, presenting time capsules of contemporary life in a way that they are more than just ‘oh, this is what is happening.’ They are worth opening 125 years from now when the last 12 living people in Montana dig up a box of boykitten poems or something.

I could probably say more about Steve but I will stop.

Buy this book or read it online.

Banango says so.

This review probably doesn’t make sense.

Banango does not believe in proofreading.

-Justin