"Difficult" Poetry: Aggression and Poetry

    I Am An Asshole

I am a never-ending asshole.
A casual outsider lacking strength.
I'm pale, as opposed to bronze;
and I require great amounts of oxygen to survive
though I live in a narrow little room.
I am the asshole in the corner of your eye.
In the market, the woman tearing back
the husks on every ear of corn—
that's not me—but it might as well be,
because I am as much of an asshole as that.
Words escape like steam through the valve of my mouth
and I glide through dreams quite conveniently ignoring
what they could possibly mean
because I am such an immediate creature
and prefer fixed measures to moral fables.
A copper-rust asshole with a fake English accent.
I am propelled by divine assholedom
and hope for world peace
just like any other stupid asshole.
Fricative and plosive I emit
ideas, wishes, and try to snag you
here and in other places, possibly
because I am an asexual feather
falling from a tree, a platonic
cow in a pasture full of rocks and stones.
It's almost time for me to retire to the asshole barn
wherein I chew my cud and type missives
to those who won't ever hear or care to hear
because they're all assholes too.
I love you. I'm an asshole.
I believe you. I'm an asshole.
I want to listen to you and put my head on your chest
and hear you breathe and talk. I
am an asshole. It is frightening just how much
of an asshole I can be.
It frightens me, anyway.
I didn't exactly choose this walk-on
nonspeaking part I mean I didn't vie
for a minor role in a one act off-Broadway
pile of theatrical slop. But here I am.
An asshole offstage and on. A
glass-bead wearing, sometimes confessional
so overly psychological that I might as well
be standing at a chalkboard giving a lecture
through my nose I am such an asshole.
Assholes stub their toes on others.
They get hurt. They tend even to whine.
I am a whiny asshole my mind
is like a hangnail and I never ever shut up.
I yammer and you cringe and I
am like a tongue on a loose tooth when it comes to you
when it comes to thinking about you
I probe and I pry and I go over and over
because that's what tongue-like assholes do.
Stop picking, leave it alone, let it heal, they say.
Assholes have a hard time with that.
They don't listen. They are so so
so much themselves that as assholes
they can't get out of their own assholish way
and I am like that, even the writing, even
this acrid spineless trompe l'oeil
(a word assholes love) terra cotta (ditto)
vat of verbage is shining
with the assholiness of me.
I am such an asshole, that I don't even know
if you deserve to know me, much less
listen to me go on and on like a three-toed
sloth on steroids stuck in a banana tree
without a machete.
When it comes to matters of the heart
I am a bigger asshole than even Kent Johnson
or Bill Knott. Those assholes have nothing on me.
I'm like a giant penis crossing a street
a giant erect penis crossing a busy street
and every door I go in is someone's asshole
whether it's the New York Public Library
or the Metropolitan Museum of Art
I am the asshole giant penis walking through the door
thinking about art, about books
but who am I kidding, assholes
can't have art, not really, can't
get books, not hardly, because
having lived for a year in a cat piss-smelling
trailer in Vermont when I was 18
I know the difference between
having and wanting. Between
an asshole and a wannabe. I
am the real thing. A real asshole.
It's just that I have a fear of sharp objects and
I'm made to wear this gender badge
though I can move like a cat in a dream
the way they disappear into their shimmering
surroundings. In general assholes
don't stand out in a crowd, though
you might think that they would.
At least my brand of asshole doesn't
because I am a white mayonnaise
suburban petrified semi-educated (the
worst kind) cash-poor, overly-giving
you guessed it: asshole.
I am a mixed-up asshole
and I want to put my hands in your pants.
I want to reach in and drag out your dick
and I want to make it hard and then
like the asshole I am for wanting this
and especially for saying it
I want to steer it toward me
and I want you, who run the risk
of becoming an asshole just by association,
I want you to shove your dick in me.
Fuck me. I'm an asshole.
Or have I said that before.
Well, assholes tend to repeat themselves.
I have an obsession with flowers and
luminous things and bees and fossilized skeletons
and you I'm an asshole I
don't believe in anything anymore
don't even know if cannibalism is a bad thing
under the right circumstances
I ascribe human traits to inanimate objects
and I talk to the weather, to the kind of day
it is or isn't because I am an asshole
and am obsessed with the far future
and love and finding limits and breaking them,
it's true, I want to break things
because I am an asshole
I want to break apart the idea you have
of who you could or couldn't love
because I think you could love me
even though I am such an asshole
I think you could I love you
fuck me I love you I'm an asshole
fuck me I love you. Sure, & Aloha: I don't deny
being jingled. I am an asshole after all.
I am a tailless little third-base biscuit
of an asshole, a Byzantine aberrational
overly wrought and unformed
kind of asshole, not a Christian,
though, but I'm as bad as those assholes
because I want to believe, I try to believe,
I wish I could believe, as much as those assholes.
I just can't concede to authority, that's all.
Because I'm an asshole.
I'm an itty bitty epigram
of an asshole, a compressed convalescent
adjunct juxtaposition of an asshole
I'm a suffix, a spit-wad, a military jism schism
of an asshole to the nth degree.
That's what I am. I suppose
I've always had this assholeishness
in me but since I've known you
the assholeity of my being has become
much more pronounced. A perfect
example is how I can't shut up and
how I repeat myself and how I
try, here, even here, to figure things
when anyone who is not an asshole knows
there is no way to really understand anything
and anyone who thinks he or she can unpuzzle
or untangle or even open the window a little
to let some light in is clearly cracked
and obviously a huge and complete asshole.
I hear Sharon Mesmer. I hear Juliana Spahr.
I hear both of those assholes in here and
some others as well because I am an unoriginal
asshole and I freely admit it.
You may think I'm being cheeky
but I really am an asshole. And
I really do think I am. And
I don't know what to do about it
because I'm like a fevered red-faced 3 year old
sometimes when it comes to how I feel
about you and I don't know what
to do about it I don't know what
to do about it I don't
know what to do about it
which makes me an asshole.
Assholes get scared often
and you may think they talk a lot
but words stick to the roofs of their mouths
like peanut butter, to which they are frequently allergic
so swell up with hives and can't breathe
and that's the kind of asshole I am
sometimes when it comes to you
and how I love you. Don't you know
what an asshole it makes me
to say that at all, and then especially
to say it so often? I'm telling you,
it makes me a real asshole. Because
you don't say it back and I
don't even care because
that's how much of an asshole I am.
I can't shut up and I won't
and maybe that makes me
even more of an asshole but
like most assholes I don't care.
I love you fuck me I'm an asshole.
Hail Juliana. Not even a very loud
asshole am I sort of a
petit larceny kind of standing outside
the drugstore asking for change
kind of asshole, though actually
anyone doing that is much much less
of an asshole than I am I
lacerate and regurgitate and attempt to say
things and only an asshole
would do that.
I don't need to hit myself.
I'm not that kind of an asshole.
Do you think I'm hitting myself?
I'm not hitting myself.
I'm talking. I'm a talking asshole
and I won't stop. Maybe you won't
want to listen to me at some point
but I won't ever stop talking, so there,
because that's the kind of asshole I am
and p.s. fuck you I love you I'm an asshole
I love you fuck me I'm an asshole
I love you.


IMPORTANT NOTE: I wrote this post in a state of extreme paranoia and I fear my critical apparatus was completely soaked in the wrong neurochemicals. I leave it here for possible insight into the way the brain works in states of paranoia.

Also, now I notice there is a typo in "verbiage." It's funny I couldn't see that before. Also, I think there might be a word or two missing in one place in the poem or a typo....those lines where she talks about the "lecture." Something seems to have fallen out of the grammar there, unless she wants that grammatical aporia (or whatever it is) to be a grammatical swerve imitating the patterns of speech, which does swerve in ways which most poets and prosateurs decline to reproduce.

The post I made immediately after this one indicates some likely errors I made in my reading of this, missed cues which allowed a paranoid state of mind to embroider the poem and see things (like homophobia) which probably aren't here.

The following reading doesn't even allow the possibility that the poet is truly talking in an honest first person, or that the speaker of the poem is female.

I offer apologies for my chemical imbalance which read the poem this way and disavow the darkest of the thoughts.

I keep the post only because it highlights one aspect of Negative Capability in the poem.

If it shows how a poem takes risks in modeling aggression--which seems to lend itself to misreadings, probably because of the visceral nature of insult--then it might be of interest.

It's funny, because abuse of the first person singular is by implication allowable but the possibility of abuse of the third person is objectionable.

Why should that be?

I just don't like it when I feel people are mocking people because they are poor or gay or emotionally unstable.

And yet if it's first person singular abuse, it's different. Why should this be? Are first person reflexive attacks any less worrisome than third person attacks?

One of the greatest targets in the poem is the idea of "sincerity."

The poem drops a 50 megaton H-bomb on the idea of sincerity.

How does it do this? By telling us how sincere it is every few seconds. This is a large part of the humor.

I don't need to hit myself.
I'm not that kind of an asshole.
Do you think I'm hitting myself?
I'm not hitting myself.
I'm talking. I'm a talking asshole

The poem comes down for me to two words: IMPOSSIBLE AGENDA.

That should be American poetry's other name. It's a superhero who goes to the shrink when (s)he's not leaping tall buildings in a single bound or catching falling babies in space: "Mr. Agenda, the Doctor will see you now...

But the poem is particularly brilliant in just that area, which is why it was able to cause a momentary meltdown for me in a "not good" state....

This part here is perfect John Giorno by the way. John Giorno is so underrated....

I am a whiny asshole my mind
is like a hangnail and I never ever shut up.
I yammer and you cringe and I
am like a tongue on a loose tooth when it comes to you
when it comes to thinking about you
I probe and I pry and I go over and over
because that's what tongue-like assholes do.

I can so hear him reading that as if he wrote that.

Barbara Guest says in one of my favorite lines, "Ellington travels so much in his music, / everyone bumps into him."

That is so true of his stylistic range, and so true of this poem here. It's bumping into so many things in American poetry.

It really should be in the Best American Poetry anthology.

But for reasons like that, not the reasons I listed below when I was clearly at war with this poem (and imagined myself at war with this poet because I thought she was playing the white, rich, Kultur card).

It would be funny if she were, wouldn't it?

The authorial fallacy and essentialism can play havoc with one's mind.

Is there a better example to illustrate the adage that "the poem is smarter than the poet" than these lines...

how I repeat myself and how I
try, here, even here, to figure things
when anyone who is not an asshole knows
there is no way to really understand anything
and anyone who thinks he or she can unpuzzle
or untangle or even open the window a little
to let some light in is clearly cracked
and obviously a huge and complete asshole.

I would like to think the poem is really saying "If you can't see yourself in this poem, THEN YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE."

Enjoy the pathology. Mine and this poem's.

Don't be an asshole about it.








I wanted to look at a poem which positions itself "difficultly" with regard to aggression in poetry.

This is Lynn Behrendt's poem "I Am an Asshole."

I like the poem's rhetorical build, even though I ultimately think its hostility and cruelty leave the poem in the service of the undesirable qualities it is ostensibly indicting.

The thing which drags the poem down for me is that poverty is equated with small-mindedness; there is a snobbishness. And this snobbishness is then enhanced by the literary positioning which is occurring in the poem later, with its affilating itself with other poets who have written cogently on the aggression/attention economy in contemporary poetry; poets like Spahr and Shannon Mesmer are lauded.

This cannot help but be self-serving, and drags the poem down.

And poet/critics like Bill Knott and Kent Johnson have by now become such predictable whipping boys that it is almost embarrassing to see them used thusly again.

This is a part of the branding process for a poet. Whom do you hate?

Is it predictable? Then we might like you.

Is it not? Go away.

I don't really know what their (B.K.'s and K.J.'s) egregious crimes against literature are. I'm not being facetious or disingenuous here. I can't read everything. I've seen some funny satires by Kent. Bill I know more as a poet not as a blogger. It worries me a bit that the ones I always see attacking them are members of recognizable cliques, packs, or poets who are looking to position themselves in cliques in a very obvious way.

I don't buy the mavericks bullshit. I didn't buy it for McCain and I don't buy it for Knott and Johnson.

While I don't know their work well, I think of them simply as individuals who may have some extreme positions and may be be snarky sometimes and rile people by speaking their honest mind. And perhaps they rile people by being too aware of the means of production, and who is controlling that good shit and for whom.

Pack poets hate that shit.

But when we're getting to a point where certain people are going to be called "asshole" by strangers in poems, I worry that we've begun to sound like them.

Hate to use the us-them card, but I hope you know what I mean? Reactionary people like you saw on Crossfire in the old days.

When Juliana Spahr wrote "Spider/Wasp" she didn't sink to the level of the game she was indicting.

That's what I don't like about this poem.

What I do like about this poem is its rhetorical brilliance, when it is being brilliant.

Sometimes it is being very dumb, or contradicting itself.

Would the author of the poem admit she was being an asshole when she wrote this poem?

Because she clearly was.

"If you look long enough into the asshole the asshole begins to look back through you."--Friedrich Nietzsche

She was hating. Hate makes people assholes.

If she can't admit that, I don't like this poem. If she can admit it, I love this poem.

Either way I think it should go into BAP.

She should prefix this poem when she reads it by saying "I personally am an asshole and I wrote this poem from an asshole's point of view. I'm gonna call out some OTHER assholes on their assholeity now."

But I'm afraid she won't do that. I'm afraid she'll read it to people who will snigger like monkeys when they hear Bill Knott and Kent Johnson made fun of for the umpteenth time. And poor people. Because poor people don't fare well in this poem.

I'm sorry that I need to fall into the clutches of the dreaded authorial fallacy, but when you write like this, it suddenly becomes necessary.

We have to check your license. Or income level or something.

Hell, we have to check your rabies shots.

Does the author have a sense of humor about herself?

Because otherwise the poem is just positioning and bile. It's hatred of others who aren't in your camp.

So it's fitting it was published on a site dedicated to hitting below the belt and thinking with your monkey brain.

But the slams against poverty and the fact that many will read this as a homophobic poem (I know I do in places) bothers me.

Here's how an image of a poor person is elaborated, to make it quite clear that the "asshole's" assholiness is intricately connected to his poverty...

"and I require great amounts of oxygen to survive
though I live in a narrow little room."


but who am I kidding, assholes
can't have art, not really, can't
get books, not hardly, because
having lived for a year in a cat piss-smelling
trailer in Vermont when I was 18
I know the difference between
having and wanting.


because I am a white mayonnaise
suburban petrified semi-educated (the
worst kind) cash-poor, overly-giving
you guessed it: asshole.


Lines like this show the poem really is...surprise! an asshole. And so is the poet!

Does she admit she is an asshole?

Does anyone know what "semi-educated" really is?

Who talks like that in America?

Which poet wrote "the gaps in my education needn't be completed?" Or did they say filled? I like that poet. I can't remember. I think filled.

Oh, I think it was Hejinian.

I never saw her hating on poor people or gay people in her poetry. And she's written a lot of poetry.

Am I being an asshole for calling this poem on its hating? Maybe. Nah. Hate sucks.

It's interesting to see the opposite sort of poem to this, where the asshole is actually being spiritually valorized.

Poems like this have been written by Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and many others.

In choosing between "asshole-stigmatizing" and "asshole-embracing" poems I would much prefer the latter.

Who wants to hate such a great part of your body?

Generally, really uptight people hate their assholes. They hate a lot of other things too.

Generally males will hate the asshole more than women, but some women will duh hate the asshole too.

Yeah I know. It hurts if you're a virgin and it's done wrong and all that stuff.

And if you use the male vernacular, you're using the male power.

Call people assholes.

Women poets who expose aggression and make fun of people are good.

Male poets who expose agression and make fun of people are bad.

I think that's how it works.

If they're gay they're a walking, talking asshole. Because they like to get fucked in their ass. Or fuck in the ass. Possibly. We can't be sure but it's a good bet.

You could write a poem about them.

Burroughs already did this anyway but that's no worry.

And if they are emotionally unstable (say bipolar like I am) you can talk about how their emotional lives are wrecks.

That's funny too. And that's in this poem.

And if they care about an art enough to talk about it and have the nerve to like some sentences and not like other sentences, then you can make fun of that trait too.

If they didn't go to Bard and have lots of money and hang out with other poets who teach at Bard like Robert Kelly and Linh Dinh, where a lot of parties put these people in the same room and stuff, you could make fun of them.

Annandale-on-Hudson stuff.

And call them "white petrified and what was it? half-educated? their education wasn't finished. They didn't go to finishing school.

I understand irony. And I understand "not-irony" even better. There's a lot of "not-irony" in this poem.

In fact, this poem is mostly Not-Irony-on-Hudson.

And you could defend a flarf poet to aim for flarf consolidation. Flarf poets are hot right now. In some quarters.

I am cash-poor. I must be an asshole.

Something tells me Lynn Behrendt has a lot of money.

I have a cat. But my house doesn't smell like "cat-piss." Except when my cat is like "pissing."

I won't go on about the homophobia in this poem.

But that's all the more reason this should be in the Best American Poetry 2009.

Because American Poetry should reflect American culture. And hating the poor and the mentally ill are what America's all about baby! Not insular American intellectual culture and its parochial struggles. Although the genius of the poem is it got that in there too. But nobody cares about that but you guys.

What's wrong with being an asshole? Don't you use yours for anything other than shitting? Then your sex life might be a little boring.

Here are things the author wants to attribute as parts of "assholeity" (great word) but are actually just parts of being human...traits everyone has...but that's a good rhetorical move...rhetoric always creates false divides and categorizations...

It's practically what rhetoric is made of!


In the market, the woman tearing back
the husks on every ear of corn—
that's not me—but it might as well be

Duh! you do that for a reason. but if you have servants who do this back home, that lady might be an asshole...


Words escape like steam through the valve of my mouth
and I glide through dreams quite conveniently ignoring
what they could possibly mean
because I am such an immediate creature
and prefer fixed measures to moral fables.

Everybody does this. Life is fast.


I am propelled by divine assholedom
and hope for world peace
just like any other stupid asshole.

I like that she does this. You don't know if she's making fun of people hoping for world peace or having a momentary lapse and falling into empathy with the asshole. I wish she could make a whole poem that subtle and generous. I bet she could if she wrote it with her higher spirit.


Fricative and plosive I emit
ideas, wishes, and try to snag you
here and in other places, possibly
because I am an asexual feather
falling from a tree, a platonic
cow in a pasture full of rocks and stones.

Well we all do the first, and all artists "try to snag (you)"...but there's a problem here with the "asexual feather" since later the asshole is decidedly sexual and in her mind pathologically sexual....

I like the platonic cow. I think of the Mark Tansy painting. You know the one. If you are Annandale on Hudson. Of course you do.

I find this is true of everybody alive...well alive in poetry...this....

I love you. I'm an asshole.
I believe you. I'm an asshole.
I want to listen to you and put my head on your chest
and hear you breathe and talk. I
am an asshole. It is frightening just how much
of an asshole I can be.

I THINK THAT'S THE POEM RIGHT THERE. THE ENTIRE POEM. IF YOU JUST KEPT THAT YOU WOULD ESCAPE WHAT'S MAKING THE SOUL OF THIS POEM SICK!

See, Juliana Spahr (part of your desiderata, your "wish list") would have kept it that spare.

That's why her poems work so well. When they do work, I mean.

She fucks up like everybody else. Like Bill Knott. And Kent what's his name. I have that Aloha book too.

I read everybody. But I don't hate people. I hate bad poems.

I was warned before. This poem is warning me too apparently.

And the following is true of everyone. But (sigh) again it turns ugly and the possible compassion hidden there is wasted. If you can only be witty or humane, be witty. If you're a poet I mean.

Assholes stub their toes on others.
They get hurt. They tend even to whine.

And this is everyone also, but I think she wants it just to be the asshole...

They don't listen. They are so so
so much themselves that as assholes
they can't get out of their own assholish way
and I am like that, even the writing,

At first this poem scared me, because I thought it was transcending something.

Then I realized it was as much a product of its milieu, its desire to be closer to certain powerful artists, and its college affiliations as all the other poems being published.

It is Catullan, though, and women rarely get this Catullan. That's sorta hot.


Okay, I'm tired of talking about this poem now.

I'm tired of being an asshole back at a poem written by an asshole who got upset at some other assholes and hoped this poem would draw her closer to other people she imagines are desirable powerful assholes.

This is the most embarrassing part of the poem for me because it's nothing but a shill:

I hear Sharon Mesmer. I hear Juliana Spahr.
I hear both of those assholes in here and
some others as well because I am an unoriginal
asshole and I freely admit it.

Mesmer critics, bad. Spahr non-worshipers bad. Dumb monkeys.

People in a few years are gonna say "whose dick was getting sucked here?"

I mean when they read this in the Best American Poetry 2009.

But that's how literature works, and I've no doubt she's paid her dues in full.

And I'm sure she doesn't live in a single room and god knows she came far from that trailer trash she was at 18 in Vermont, because now she is calling out the assholes who might still live in a way approximating that dagnabbit.

This needs to go into Best American Poetry 2009.

This is so David Lehman.

The only question I have is whether Lyn B. admits she was an asshole when she wrote this poem?

Can she admit that?

Or is it "first asshole, best asshole" in some weird way?

Is it "Asshole Tag?"

I love everybody.

I love my asshole.

It's not dirty or anything.

I don't want to go to Annandale-on-Hudson someday.

And recite poetry.

I would need to bring my cat.

This poem may be catphobic as well as homophobic.

Please anthologize this.

Fast.

Dead Philip Whalen: Bill, it's all a connect-the-dots universe. I'm an asshole too. Sometimes I would say things to see how dumb American poetry is too. They put me on the Wolverine back up to Annandale but I disembodied quickly.

I know, I know!