K. Silem Mohammad on Rachel Zolf's Human Resources
Rachel Zolf's Human Resources recently received a review / poetic response from poet and professor K. Silem Mohammad on his blog. You can read the response in its entirety at lime-tree.blogspot.com, but we've posted an excerpt below:
The problem of separating a facile from an artful engagement with "a selection of language really used by men," as Wordsworth put it, is that radical historical changes in such language occur at a pace that appears both gradual and dramatic to its reflective users (e.g., poets). The sense of newness is perpetually at war with the sense that this is what we've settled into without even noticing it starting. The poet who treats it as a novelty will write verse that is at best novel, at worst cynically fashionable. The poet who works with an actual feeling for the language in its awkward transitional throes is the rarer case. In the context of language as it has been transformed specifically by recent online communication technology, for example, I think of artists like Alan Sondheim not just as pioneers but as feeling pioneers ....
Can materials that seem degraded not just to a literary establishment, but often to the poet herself, be used "feelingly" in the way I'm trying to get at here?
Answering this question is, as I see it, one of the primary tasks of contemporary poetics. And though I'm not prepared at the moment to offer even a rough prolegomenon to anything like a study of the same, I can at least offer a glance at a new book that impresses me greatly by being consistently sensitive to its unwieldy, unlovely verbal sources. The book is Rachel Zolf's Human Human Resources (Coach House, 2007).
Zolf's work feels "poetic" to me by virtue of never deserting its poetics of negativity, but at the same time never resting on a false conviction that negativity will do all its own work. She does not wallow in cultural bankruptcy for shock value, nor does she attempt to "get past" all the cheapness to a pure poetic space of value. Everything is treated as what it is and put to use in the instance of need described by the verse as it proceeds.
