November 7, 2019 37
with language and more concerned
with moral content, with morality it-
self, with telling the speaker’s story,
with presentation of the self and/or
the self’s trauma. Use of language in
an attention economy becomes a sec-
ondary concern. These are, of course,
false opposites: there are no absolute
divisions, only tendencies, but it’s hard
to avoid the sense that online there is
much applauding of the sentiment and
less examination of the means. Anyone
can make an agreeable statement, and
the instant feedback loops between the
many and the few that social media af-
fords are inimical to poetry, which is
not primarily a public art but one that
to a large extent consists in private inti-
macies, transmitted one- to- one.
Writing about fiction, though it ap-
plies surely to all literature, Jaron
Lanier expands on this in Ten Argu-
ments for Deleting Your Social Media
Accounts Right Now:
“Oh” we exclaim as readers, “I’ve
always felt that way but never seen
it expressed before.” And then
we hold to this new intimacy, one
shorn of all the contingencies of
sex, race, class and nationality. By
contrast with the anonymous and
tacit intimacy to be found between
hard covers, social media is all
about stridently identified selves—
and not simply to one another but
to all. In the global village of social
media it’s precisely those contin-
gent factors of our identities—our
sex, our race, our class, our nation-
ality—that loom largest; no won-
der it’s been the medium that has
both formed and been formed by
the new politics of identity.Self- curation—the presentation of the
self as a righteous, honorable (happy,
beautiful, generous, etc.) person, often
subject to injustice and aggression—is
the engine of social media. The self is
not a solid object, but as Jia Tolentino,
following the sociologist Erving Goff-
man, writes in her essay “The I in the
Internet” in her new collection Trick
Mirror, “a dramatic effect that emerges
from a performance.” She goes on:
The presentation of self in every-
day internet still corresponds to
Goffman’s playacting metaphor:
there are stages, there is an audi-
ence. But the internet adds a host
of other, nightmarish metaphorical
structures: the mirror, the echo, the
panopticon.... The everyday mad-
ness perpetuated by the internet is
the madness of this architecture,
which positions personal identity
as the center of the universe....
This system persists because it is
profitable.... We have generated
billions of dollars for social media
platforms through our desire—
and then, through a subsequent,
escalating economic and cultural
requirement—to replicate for the
internet who we know, who we
think we are, who we want to be.And one might add: who we want to
be seen to be. One way poetry—as
opposed to social media—assists us is
that it tries to portray an unredacted
version of the human self, replete with,
say, mischief, sadness, guilt, rage, and
also love and wonder. The poem that
admits the speaker is confused or mis-
taken or casually malevolent is one a
reader can identify with, rather than be
seen to agree with and retweet.
Perhaps this is also why the certain-
ties of the prose poem—the more fully
ritualized transmission of a completed
thought—are easier to square with the
new Internet age than the doubts, am-
biguities, and mysteries—the negative
capability—of lyric poetry. This is of
course to generalize, as many of the
best prose poems here disprove that
thesis. However, we see the effects of
the Internet, and particularly social
media, played out in our politics, in our
print media, in our art. Poetry is not ex-
empt. The celebrated poem “Conversa-
tions About Home (at the Deportation
C entre)” by Warsan Sh ire, for example,
is among the “witness poems” included
here:I’ve been carrying the old anthem
in my mouth for so long that there’s
no space for another song, another
tongue or another language. I
know a shame that shrouds, to-
tally engulfs. Allah Ceebta, I tore
up and ate my own passport in an
airport hotel. I’m bloated with lan-
guage I can’t afford to forget.They ask me how did you get here?
Can’t you see it on my body? The
desert red with immigrant bod-
ies shot in the face for trying to
enter, the Gulf of Aden bloated
with immigrant bodies. I wouldn’t
put my children on the boat unless
I thought the sea was safer than
land. I hope the journey meant
more than miles because all of my
children are in the water. I want
to make love but my hair smells
of war and running and running.
Look at all these borders, foaming
at the mouth with brown bodies
broken and desperate.Shire has explained in an interview
that the poem came from her interview-
ing refugees at the abandoned Somali
embassy in Rome, and she adapted—
or, if you prefer, appropriated—the re-
sponses to write first- person poems in
the refugees’ voices. The poem seems
a fairly straightforward transcription,
even including speech’s repetitions and
redundancies (“another tongue or an-
other language,” “I know a shame that
shrouds, totally engulfs”). The poem
recalls in its methods Forché’s “The
Colonel,” gesturing to poetic metaphor
at the end (“now my home is the mouth
of a shark, now my home is the barrel of
a gun. I’ll see you on the other side”),
although the image on which Shire
ends, contra Forché’s peach halves, is
neither visually acute nor circumstan-
tially arresting. It does not deepen or
complicate the domain of the meta-
phor. It has the force of dramatic
speech, and sounds like pop lyrics (and
indeed Shire’s work was featured on
Beyoncé’s album Lemonade). What
power the piece has lies in its direct-
ness and immediacy: it is perhaps less
an event in language than a testimonial
to emotion.
In 1984 Levertov was clear in her
suspicions about the popularity of the
prose poem:Poets who write nonmetrical
poems but treat the line- break as
nonexistent are not even respect-
ing the traditional “slight pause”
of the end- stopped line. The fact
is, they are confused about whatthe line is at all, and consequently
some of our best and most influen-
tial poets have increasingly turned
to the prose paragraph for what I
feel are the wrong reasons—less
from a sense of the peculiar virtues
of the prose poem than from a de-
spair of making sense of the line.In our time, if one attributes, as Noel-
Tod does, the rise in popularity of prose
poetry to the rise of the Internet, and
“the email, the blog, and the tweet,”
it may be useful to try to ask why, and
what this correlation suggests.
In any event, the recent prose poems
here are in the main excellent: notable
among the modern contributions are
Anne Carson’s, who rates two entries
and, as always, seems to do something
both inevitable and surprising with
every piece she writes; Claudia Ran-
kine’s clipped, formal, ambiguous, and
self- scrutinizing prose; Kei Miller’s
vivid and plangent poem “Place Name:
Flog Man”; the breathless, slightly con-
spiratorial tone of Cathy Park Hong
(“Adventures in Shangdu”); that con-
noisseur of ennui, Chelsea Minnis; the
exquisitely dark and funny tonalities
of Luke Kennard in “Blue Dog,” his
disquisition on a plastic pug; Christian
Bök’s virtuosic Oulipo restrictions;
an extract from Keston Sutherland’s
stunning collection Odes to TL6IP;
Matthew Welton’s existential night-
mare of modern nowhereness, “Virtual
Airport”; Anthony Joseph’s mesmer-
izing phantasmagoric “Folkways”; Joe
Wenderoth’s belligerent, comic Letters
to Wendy’s (“Naturally I think about
smashing the skulls and rib- cages of
the other customers”); and PatriciaLockwood’s searing and already well-
known poem “Rape Joke” (“Can any
part of the rape joke be funny. The part
where it ends—haha, just kidding!”).
Reading an anthology like this, how-
ever, one experiences the relentless-
ness of the form. “Without Contraries
is no progression,” as Blake wrote
in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(which might be the first example of
prose poems interspersed with verse),
and, to my mind, prose poems tend to
work best in counterpoint to lineated
work. I know no better argument for
lyric poetry than one made in a prose
poem, Bishop’s marvelous “Strayed
Crab,” included here, who, addressing
a “sulking toad,” says, “You make a
loud and hollow noise. I do not care for
such stupidity. I admire compression,
lightness, and agility, all rare in this
loose world.” Compression, lightness,
and agility, all rare in this loose world:
I’d choose them over “expansiveness”
any day.
Noel- Tod’s methodology as an an-
thologist falls somewhere between,
say, Pound or Vendler, who sought to
impose their own tastes on the canon,
and Francis Turner Palgrave, who tried
to include the greatest hits of his time.
Noel- Tod has much fine discernment,
particularly in the chronologically ear-
lier sections, and he crowd- sources:
“I am indebted to everyone who has
pointed me in the direction of prose
poems over the last three years, includ-
ing the generous suggestions of many
people on Twitter, both known to me
and anonymous.” Whatever the ap-
proach, he’s created a marvelous and
lively compendium of the prose poem,
and a book very much of its time.“It is high time that Lawrence’s non-fiction had
another airing.... For anyone who hasn’t read
any Lawrence, I would readily recommend it as
a good place to start. It presents Lawrence as
diverse, brilliant, and strange. He was all these
things.” —Catherine Brown, Prospect Magazine
You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great
multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of
the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly
controversial novelist who transformed, for better
and for worse, the way we write about sex and
emotions; he was a wonderful poet; he was an
essayist of burning curiosity, expansive lyricism,
odd humor, and radical intelligence, equaled, per-
haps, only by Virginia Woolf.
Here Geoff Dyer, one of the finest essayists of
our day, draws on the whole range of Lawrence’s
published essays to reintroduce him to a new
generation of readers for whom the essay has
become an important genre. We get Lawrence the
book reviewer, writing about Death in Venice and
welcoming Ernest Hemingway; Lawrence the trav-
el writer, in Mexico and New Mexico and Italy;
Lawrence the memoirist, depicting his strange
sometime-friend Maurice Magnus; Lawrence the
restless inquirer into the possibilities of the novel,
writing about the novel and morality and address-
ing the question of why the novel matters; and,
finally, the Lawrence who meditates on birdsong
or the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains.
Dyer’s selection of Lawrence’s essays is a wonder-
ful introduction to a fundamental, dazzling writer.
“[Lawrence’s] writing is often pure pleasure...
A quirky, wide-ranging compendium, revealing
Lawrence’s character and debates over life, art, and
faith between the world wars.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Lawrence is one of our true prophets, not only in
his ‘madness for the unknown’... but in his life-
long development of a technique, a fictional and
poetic way in which the prophetic voice can be
(646) 215-2500, or visit http://www.nyrb.comAvailable in bookstores, call given a formal expression.” —Joyce Carol OatesTHE BAD SIDE
OF BOOKS
D.H. Lawrence
Edited and with an introduction by
Geoff Dyer
Paperback • 512 pages • $19.95
On sale November 12thThe Bad Side of Books is the November
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To join, visit http://www.nyrb.com or
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