Technically Soft Targets is a “journal,” but only because it calls itself a journal, though it is as indebted to theoretical concerns as it is to the actual poetry and art between its pages. I went to the official launch at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York – white wine and Bud Light cans, high theory and poetics spoken too fast into a microphone. The room was swampy and loud. I remember at some point thinking that tight jeans may have a future as a theoretical position, and one well represented in the Gallery. The muted, shadowy design of the journal exemplifies the cerebral cool of many of the people I saw that evening – equally well dressed and well versed. I’m led to believe that in fact mismatched socks are not the signs of a genius too “serious” to contemplate clashing patterns and ironed pants – sometimes looking good is vanity, but sometimes it may well be a self-conscious attempt to announce the mutual reflection of the competence of the mind, and that of the body.
Maybe that’s a naïve assumption on my part; perhaps I’m making too big a deal out of it. Either way, fashion is always an appropriation, and in that sense the word and art hotties square nicely with the journal itself. Soft Targets has, for lack of a better term, a military aesthetic. That is, it appropriates the language of military engagement and bureaucracy as a way to hold the journal together, and some of the poetry inside does much the same thing. There are deep nods to Italian Futurism here – editor Daniel Feinberg noted as much in his introductory remarks. Take, for instance, the last lines of Richard Greenfield’s “Tracer”: “In the chair, I sat heavy with it, I went stealth and lifted, black night of / cartography or catastrophe (I don’t know) / and lines of force, lines of strategists, hummed victim names / or AESTHETICS.”
Of course, many of the poems aren’t about war, and many don’t use that language, but taking into account the number that do, and the very meaning of the term “soft target,” it’s impossible to ignore the implications. I wonder how much the appropriation of the military language is a protest against the uses of euphemism to justify or disguise state-sanctioned murder, and how much of it is a desire to simply appropriate the terrible power of those associations to poetic ends. I suppose at a certain point those two concerns become indistinguishable.
However evident the overarching concerns are, it’s on the level of the individual poem that I find myself run aground by my own ignorance. I sometimes feel unqualified to read certain poetry, and whether it’s because of a genuine ignorance of the medium (maybe I’m just dumb?), or a lifetime of cultural whispering concerning poetry’s impenetrability, I’ll never know. Either way, I often find myself consigned to silence in the face of things like Carla Harryman’s “Mere Appearance in Berlin.” In a prefatory note, Harryman says her poem is the middle section of a triptych. This section, “further complicates the notion of ‘appearance’ examined in the … first and third segments.” That we never see the initiation or conclusion of Harryman’s poem may be a bit too complicated for me, or I may just be a philistine. Over the course of several mostly blank pages, Harryman dots phrases and repetitions. Some of them seem to be connected, while others float in the cavernous white of the page, returning again and again like echoes in a vast, walled space. The phrase “Drawing closer” appears and then, a page later, crops up beneath the line “tricks in a seamless fabric tricks in a seamless fabric tricks in a seamless / fabric,” perhaps suggesting the “trick” as a lure, a gravity well that draws in a loose phrase.
Or perhaps I’m making shit up. I smiled a bit, though, after reading Joan Retallack’s essay “The Reinvention of Truth, Part 2: Reinventruth,” in which she stumbles across a mathematical formula that attempts to calculate the amount of material missing from ancient manuscripts. I found myself wishing I could apply it to Harryman’s text – how much necessary material am I missing, and how much is due to my ignorance of the language?
This kind of dumbness, call it curious ignorance, leads to fascination, so at least I have that. I can’t claim to tell you why anyone else might think a piece of poetry is interesting – my knowledge of poetry is too fragmentary and dispersed. All I can do is read and do my best to eke out meaning from a language I don’t really speak – hail a cab in a foreign country and hope that I’m dressed appropriately and headed the right way.
Highlights: poetry by Matthew Rohrer, Dennis Cooper, and Richard Greenfield; book excerpt by Wayne Koestenbaum; essay on Georges Bataille by Jason Smith; art by John Tremblay; funny fake blurbs by Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Engels, Isadore Ducasse, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
I would guess the reason lit mags propagate so is that they have a larger audience than you might think, and one with a vested interest in their continued existence: namely, MFAers. Last I knew there were more than 700 graduate writing programs or fellowships in the country, each flush with writers who want nothing more than publication. And if they can't get in the New Yorker, they'll take some online-only journal nobody's ever heard of (just to be clear, I'm not referring to Soft Targets, for which I have no antipathy other than a knee-jerk dislike for its awfully hip web site). If you don't believe me, start a lit journal and advertise a contest at $15 per submission in the Writer's Chronicle. See if you don't support the journal for a year.
As for comprehending most of the poetry in them, I'm tempted to take the oft-offered position (and forgive the necessary generalizations to come) that it's so hard to comprehend because most of it is not very good. Which is because most of it is, as you mentioned, hopelessly abstract strings of unrelated words thrown willy-nilly into a line or stanza or lit mag. Which in turn is because most of it is derivative pap emulating the poets their authors' professors hold up as the Paragons of Writing. Or because most contemporary poets — grad schoolers, particularly — don't seem to care much at all about writing poetry. It takes up valuable time they could spend drinking, doing coke, fornicating, and combing cigarette ash from the wrists of their sweet mohair sweaters (often simultaneously!). Which is a roundabout way of asking, not how much of Harryman's necessary material are you missing, but how much is she missing?
But that angle of attack discredits the one thing about contemporary poetry that I find sort of honorable: its hermetic quality. Nobody outside that world reads it, and there's really no chance of making a living doing it. Yet thousands of people continue to spend their money and time studying it in graduate school. They are true artists, devoted to their craft despite the almost guaranteed disinterest of the larger world. Or at least, they act the part, and they'll be happy to tell you all about it.
And then they go on to start or work at lit journals. Many of which, unsurprisingly, exhibit such chafing self-importance as the appropriation of military terminology you aptly noted.
Excuse my vitriol, but you could say I'm intimately familiar with a number of grad-school poets and prose writers(who are much the same). It's a sad state of affairs in lit-mag land; discussing it never fails to infuriate me. I suppose I wish there were less emphasis on accumulating and emanating that “cerebral cool” you noticed, and more on studying the art form, refining a craft, and eventually writing something worth reading.
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