SPECIAL FEATURE
Out of Bounds: A Celebration of Genre-Defiant Work
Elizabeth Bradfield, Guest Editor
INTRODUCTION
Out of Bounds: A Celebration of Genre-Defiant Work
This special section features performances, graphic poems, interactive computer programs, and motivational posters by poets and artists working both alone and in collaboration. Behind all of these pieces is the spirit of deep play, of artists questioning the nature and our definitions of poetry and art. Can a piece of code be a poem? A poster with a couplet? Here, we say yes.
The artists gathered in this section are selected for the range of their projects and the quality of their work. The term “genre-defiant” nods to the rebelliousness that thrums behind each piece. It’s work begun, in many cases, with the knowledge that finding a home and an audience for it will be difficult or that it will not live beyond its moment of performance. It’s begun despite.
As humans and artists, we dance between earnestness and foolishness, trying to find some ideal balance between the two. Too much seriousness is ponderous and pedantic. Too much play is only silly. Neither extreme makes for good art. Sometimes, though, by pushing boundaries, we find a new balance. Much like the vital function of the Fool in literature, genre-defiance surprises and delights by providing an alternate view of conventional perspectives.
Work that defies genre and authorship is not, of course, new. Japanese renga of the 8th century were written collaboratively. One might consider Homer a mashup artist, making his poem from the many tellings and retellings of an oral epic. French Surrealists mixed visual art into their experiments. The “happenings” of the 1950s and 1960s were even more multi-disciplinary and worked to break the fourth wall between performer and audience.
Over time, these experiments become folded into the mainstream. Art reinvents itself. Graphic novels, for example, are now a celebrated part of our literary culture. Despite the early examples of William Blake and the tradition of the broadside, poetry has been slow to embrace this new genre. But there is such potential in the form – think of how a cartoon box echoes a stanza, of how image drives lyric expression – and the tide is changing. Poetry magazine now has a special “visual poetry” category for submissions. In this section, Oliver Bendorf’s meditative graphic poem, “Metadata of a Memory” explores the potential of graphic poetry – not illustrated poems or art with text, but a poem in which both image and text are integral.
Art keeps experimenting, dancing with technologies, traditions, and trends. In 2012, the New York Times launched an automatic haiku generator to draw poetry from its articles. Is this art? Is it poetry? Is it news? Who is the author – the programmer of the algorithm? The writer of the article? What does this re-visioning of the news offer readers? The code poems by B.J. Best ask similar questions. Through them, readers/makers use early programming language, which is simple and transparent, to consider their own childhoods and the infancy of the technologies we now live with.
Because the phones in our pockets are at once camera, letter, telegraph, telephone, news channel, theater, casino, and video arcade, the idea of many modes of expression existing together is reinforced every day. There’s a sense that our lives are being stirred from their separations. Not just modes of communication, but separations of time and space, home and work. The work in this section speaks to that, too. The BASK Collective pulls together dance, visual art, music and poetry in its investigations. In combination, each artist’s questions, asked through their medium, come into conversation, expanding and amplifying one another. The self disappears into a whole.
Traditionally, writers don’t get to experience the benefits of group work that movie makers or symphonies do, the sense of being part of a larger project, a team, a synergistic and energetic whole. But so much of contemporary life is about this negotiation between self, groupthink, and solitude. Facebook has taught us to create performative portraits of ourselves with text, pictures, videos, and links to other work. Crowdsourcing instructs us on Wikipedia. Yet studies tell us we are more and more isolated by our participation in those very digital connections. Collaboration with other artists forces us to bridge the isolations we each live in. To communicate with rather than at. To emphasize the object and act of creation rather than its creator.
The Vis-à‑Vis Society is comprised of two poets who, when they come together, use performance to challenge the source of poems and their function in the world. What if the origin of a poem is not only collaborative but beyond the control of the poet? What if poems are not isolated from the moment of creation but inextricable from it? Can a poem answer a direct and practical question? When does pop culture become performance art? The irreverence of both “Burning Questions for Burning Bushes” and “Stretch it Out!” shake up our expectations of poetry and art. Through humor and interactive performance, the Vis-à‑Vis Society investigates the nature of communication and interpretation as well as the divide between high and low art.
Another drive behind collaboration is described in Ravi Shankar’s article for The Writer’s Chronicle in which he praises collaborative writing as a way to “outwit the capricious muse by engaging in a process that by its very nature provides us with the unexpected.”[1] The collaborations between Cheryl Gross and Nicelle Davis speak to this. After meeting each other through Broadsided Press, they have gone on to create illustrated poems, video poems, and entire collections together. They say, “It is my first collaboration where we actually ‘get’ each other. . . . [our collaboration] has brought me to a higher level. Many of my inhibitions have subsided and I’m not afraid to take risks. I was in the past.” Collaboration is a force against our isolation, a spur toward creation, and an exciting challenge.
Why shake things up? The poet Robert Hass writes that our pleasure in predictable poetic forms, like the villanelle, is linked to our early understanding of the world as infants: “The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself . . . . To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served.”[2] As we grow up, we also grow into an awareness that the forms of the world are often broken. We must find a way to celebrate that brokenness, to aestheticize chaos. Our twitchy, ever-leaping online world, which is full of links and bits of information, makes it even more imperative to find modes of art that help us step back and see things from a different, deliberate perspective.
A note by the authors introduces each piece of this section, so you may come into direct conversation with their impulses and ideas. In the end, the pleasure is in the work itself, which I hope catalyzes your own creativity.
[1]. Shankar, Ravi. “Mess and Mayhem: The Plural Histories of Collaborative Writing.” The Writer’s Chronicle. February 2014. pp. 73–74.
[2]. Hass, Robert. “One Body, Some Notes on Form.” Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. Ecco: New York. 1984.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the editor-in‑chief of Broadsided Press and a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review. She is the author of the poetry collections Approaching Ice (Persea Books, 2010) and Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008). Her poetry has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Field, and the anthologies Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, This Assignment is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on Teaching, and New Poets of the American West.