Rob Fitterman - Flarf epic: when in Rome, do as the Ramones do: frenetic and flickering cut-and-paste compositions of metropolitan civilization

Rob Fitterman, Metropolis I-XV, Sun & Moon Press, 1997.

Rob Fitterman, Metropolis I-XV, parts

"Winner of the New American Poetry Series Competition for 1997, chosen by Bruce Andrews, this collection of poetry plays with various notions of city and state, utopia and dystopia, the past and the present.
Andrews writes of this exciting book of poetry: "The city—any city, your city—comes alive in all its maximal, flash-frame, cut 'n' paste glory in Robert Fitterman's Metropolis 1-15. Book 1 launches this open-ended project, resuscitating the Long Poem tradition with a fluxy, ambient splash of border crossings, of social life way beyond the narrowly literary or the possessive lyric's 'merely personal.' Here we're 'coming down from the repro...,' with hairpin turns through a multiplicity of style, into an everyday sensory hologram, a porous yardsale of coming attractions"

"I very rarely re-read books. but recently I've gotten detoured from new stuff, and re-read Robert Fitterman's flarf epic trilogy, Metropolis. Metropolis is absolutely spectacular, and really improved upon re-reading, despite loving it the first time. Flarf poetry is a small contemporary movement where works are created, or composed rather, from found text via internet search engines. Fitterman's trilogy is comprised of three books: Metropolis 1-15, Metropolis 6-29, and Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The first book is a series of free-form poems in fifteen sections, published in 2000, and conceived and written throughout the 90s. The poems are frenetic and flickering cut-and-paste compositions of metropolitan civilization. They spill all over in a million voices of harnessed internet babble, devoid of the lyric pronoun, and intentionally aloof of a contempt for language; in fact embracing, on the verge of celebrating, the internet comodification of language. Inherently there is an anti-voice to the series, but at most one might attribute some voice to the Metropolis itself; his first words as the first line of the book: "As I live and breath." And it does, as it vomits skyscrapers of the useless, usual, useful, and unusual of our collective on-line detritus. Fitterman wades objectively but ominously (if not cynically) through the "EMPIRE: / fire / always on / the mind," where we see human words and ideas spoken through the silent faces of ambivalent monitors; an empire of wasted (or not) thoughts, documented forever in the metropolitan web, as a true democracy of mass information production and consumption.
If the first book is a wading through endlessly produced text (goods), the second is the transition into product, and the transaction to consumer. He opens the second book with five pages of lists of large chain stores (McDonalds, Staples, KFC, KMart, Home Deport, etc.), repeating at different times, conflating each with the other as interchangeable, and once again, ultimately irrelevant to the metropolis whole, which regards all as simply information. The second book moves into themed sections of popular culture consumption, such as food/restaurants/recipes and music/radio/pop songs. There's a clever section called (berries) which relates to the food section, and with the placement of the words, draws a visual comparison to berries, but in the end reveals it to be a Blackberry, "al all t / his stuffs / a princ / e s pocket."
Midway through the book some sort of Metropolis consumer delivers the line: "I close my eyes and I slip away," which is proceeded by a cool sequence of 20 pages of graphically designed patterns and imagery with scattered random words, mimicking advertising imagery. The pieces were done by artist Dirk Rowntree, a frequent collaborator with Fitterman. My only criticism of this sequence is that it should have been in color, but none-the-less is a fantastic use of graphic design aesthetic worked organically into the concept and mythology of the poem. After this sequence, the sections pick up again with a barrage of decontextualized corporate questions pertaining to office efficiency and management, drawing back from the consumer to the corporate producer/vendor.
This section then leads into a series about living a better life, and happiness. This ties into the larger arc of the trilogy, which after wading through this virtual rhetoric, and finding the consumer/producer relationship, begins a descent, leading into the third book, of unfulfilling, unbalanced, unchecked, over-consumption, and moral-less, corporate, capitalist democracy. The books are not inherently condemning of capitalism, but they do call into question, if not re-evaluation the critical mass of meaningless product created by capital, ending ominously with the final line: "His spirit fled into the gloom below."
Despite the fact that they are all really one long poem in thirty sections, book three is my favorite. Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is divided into two sections: Decline and Fall, and each section has fifteen parts. The first section is an aspect of the 'Roman Empire'/America/empire in general/metropolitan civilization, and the second section is the price of that aspect. Unlike the previous books, the third has the most amount of text that seems to have been edited the least. The text ranges from corporate promotional text, to diatribes about what a 'bad kitty goth' is (my favorite part of the whole trilogy), to biblical themed mini golf franchise info, to convention center guides, bubble wrap product info, and forum posts about airbrush tutorial videos.
The concepts of Decline and Fall range from the overt to the nuanced and ambiguous, as various interpretations on the ideas are explored in this very hands-off compositional piece. Fall, as the price of an empire, is presented in a range of repercussions from the list price of goods, to an implied lack of integrity of product-based counter culture, to the comodification and corruption of religion into product, to the ability to avoid parenting and purchase manners and etiquette for children, to a broken litigious overly-bureaucratic justice system, to the complacency and the ostentatious gluttony of excess.
Aesthetically, the work reminds me of my favorite electronic music producer, Susumu Yokota, who has created a series of works composed of found sounds with only very minor (barely noticeable) produced sounds. His found sounds range from classical orchestra music, to opera, to old television clips, to voices, to laughter, to god-knows what. Yokota's end result is more interested in being more emotive than conceptual, as Fitterman is, but both wield collage deftly and to fascinating results.
Metropolis is an impressive accomplishment and a really wonderful, provocative read filled with a vast range of aesthetics under masterfuly composed concepts. I especially like the way Fitterman ends his hip/Objectivist/web-ambient epic with the final line: "This port is bustling with the comings and goings of hundreds of visitors." There's much to be taken from Metropolis. Possibly most of all the fact that despite its past and possible future falls, as with Fritz Lang's classic film by the same name (subtly referenced in book 3), the awe-inspiring Daedalusian glory of the modern Metropolis represents the ideal strive of all civilizations, and all take the chance to achieve it when given one." - Dark Fantom

Gilbert Adair: “Child-Emporererer (vacncy)”: Apprehending U.S. Empire through Robert Fitterman’s Metropolis (pdf)
Rob Fitterman, Metropolis 16-29, Coach House Books, 2002.

"METROPOLIS 16-29 is the second installation in Fitterman's version of the modern project: the Temple built from memory, the city built from words. And since we're cruising here, the language is largely about food and anxiety, desire and escape. "your organization's top priorities. Why is the window of a jail / the toughest challenge you currently face in your job?"

"In this unsentimental good-riddance to the city of Walter Benjamin, Fitterman assumes the role of the new flaneur, virtually ambling through the harrowingly dislocated psychographic landscape of the new metropolis. The once-glorious walls of the arcades have crumbled, leaving us only miles of aisles and infinite portals" - Kenneth Goldsmith
Robert Fitterman, Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Aerial Edge Books, 2004.

"Robert Fitterman's Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire drags Edward Gibbon's historical explorations into a parallel morass of today's mass marketing and consumerism, where Roman Art becomes Airbrush, Roman transportation becomes Bubble Wrap, and etc. This single-section is the third book of Fitterman's long poem Metropolis; the other two volumes are Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon Press) and Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Books)."

"Rob Fitterman apes Edward Gibbon--but instead of restating the fall of the Roman state in words of his own, Fittermsn speaks only in the readymade discourse found by chance, verbatim, amind the ruins of the imperial, American marketplace. Fitterman teaches us that when in Rome, do as the Ramones do. Clamber to the top of the tallest edifice in the city and, like a king, beat your chest, roaring out against circling biplanes. History has becomes the most disquieting infomerical." - Christian Bök

"Metropolis XXX is, any way you slice it, a 3-D (document/drama/dynamite) surround-sound urbanity of now. What does it mean for an outstanding prosodic precisionist of our times to push craft beyond all limits, to this realm of sheer evidence and acoustics? If twentieth-century verse used quanta for measure, today's is a prosody of "shotgun sequencing," (to quote Craig Venter) where characterization means sales. Fitterman's is the first volume I've seen to embody that challenge. An exhibitionary exuberance of stadium seating, priced to move." - Stacy Doris

"Recently, at a graduate student conference on the state of the profession, I heard a doctoral candidate in English Literature discuss why she chose to pursue an academic career instead of continuing her work in politics. It was, she explained, the very act of “close reading” that convinced her of the political potential of literary study. Not only is reading “an ethical practice,” she elaborated, but the kinds of reading made possible for a critic through his or her academic training often lead to conclusions and theories that are politically progressive, not to mention efficacious when shared with an eager group of impressionable students.
Notwithstanding the obviously extemporaneous and cursory formulation of these remarks, this student is recovering a concept that has lost currency in some institutional circles (the Academy, the Associated Writing Programs) during the past decade: the explicit link between reading and a progressive political agenda. Current professional and cultural conventions underscore the relational rather than the constitutive connection between reading and politics, so that in the best case scenario claiming practical political effects for reading seems passé, perhaps quaint; in the worst, specious, perhaps stupid.
When Robert Fitterman gave a lecture at the Poetry Project on 27 February 2006 entitled “Identity Theft: My Subjectivity,” he appeared to his audience to be taking the side of those who would completely uncouple reading and politics, as if any political resonance in the former were mere optical illusion. Through a sophisticated discussion of Alice Cooper (preceded by his playing the 1971 Cooper song, “Is it My Body”), Fitterman argued for an embrace of pop culture, suggesting that even at its worst, stagiest, and most trivial, it could have some interesting potential.
The success of Alice Cooper is the success of a shtick — a recursive theatricality that not long after establishing its own economy of signification dooms its practitioner(s) to a Sisyphean fate of repetition without transformation — which would get coopted by bands like Black Sabbath, and mass-marketed to angst-ridden suburban teenagers, before finally being packaged for prime-time television in the form of Ozzy Osbourne’s reality show, The Osbournes. At this point, then, what could the shtick of Alice Cooper do for a contemporary poet? If the mechanisms of capitalist enterprise (marketing, packaging, advertising, creating demand where there is not yet supply) are easily apprehended in narratives of one pop-cultural phenomenon breeding another, then perhaps a critical engagement with these mechanisms through pop-culture is not far off.
In his lecture, Fitterman made the case that Alice Cooper — once radical, now fully coopted, pop-cultural icon — in his gleeful merger of faux androgyny and hyper-masculine histrionics, actually anticipated some of the most recent and cutting-edge theoretical work on subjectivity: the identity-construtivist view that our subjectivities have always been unitary repositories of an amalgam of subject positions. Thus, a better reading of mass-cultural junk — precisely those phenomena that appear to be coopted, or those “artifacts” that seem to operate unabashedly in service to some marketing scheme — could yield interesting, if not prescient, theoretical claims.
In the best case scenario, this would go a long way toward unpacking heretofore unacknowledged facets of the capitalist power-structure; it would reclaim political efficacy for the humanities by changing the critical focus: “close reading” the junk, not the well-wrought urn or even the budding experimental text. In the worst case, however, this looks like nothing more than subservient willingness to engage the detritus of capitalism simply because of its ubiquity. But these scenarios are not mutually exclusive: by immersing ourselves in the junk of pop-culture (something, it seems, we do without volition anyway) we can have moments of genuine aesthetic bliss while simultaneously critiquing the very objects in our environment and their logic of inception.
This was the theme of Fitterman’s “Identity Theft” lecture, and it extended throughout the most compelling (and, for some audience members, unsettling) portion of his remarks, those dealing with his compositional strategy. The poet’s comments about composition-by-appropriation — using the language of mass-mediated consumer culture without necessarily taking an ironic, critical stance toward such material — were met by a nearly unified response of uneasiness. At the most hostile moment, Fitterman was charged with being lazy, and his poetics was critiqued on account of its supposed easiness and disengagement from political concerns.
The theoretical contextualizations he provided were not enough to assuage a cohort of detractors, whose distinct criticisms shared a kind of thematic rhyme: importing the language of junk, waste, and excess without explicitly offering clues for how its recontextualization in a book like Metropolis XXX operates in service to an agenda of critique is politically irresponsible and, according to one respondent, perhaps even dangerous. For even in what could be considered the most inclusive and progressive poetry institution in the world, there was a certain exclusionary conservatism expressed in response to Fitterman’s remarks, and one needs to ask why.
What it is about Metropolis XXX that makes it susceptible to this type of distinctly political critique? For the sort of audience we could find at the 92nd Street Y, the uptown foil to the Poetry Project, there is something fundamentally unsettling about appropriative compositional strategies, especially in the way they grant purchase to expressive categories that are not necessarily conversational representations of a continuous interior life. But it is curious that an audience well-versed in the traditions of Language writing and post-Language writing, conceptualism and post-conceptualism would find the work of Metropolis XXX potentially dangerous.
Though the particular agonistic tonalities in the reaction to Fitterman’s remarks could be unique and chalked-up to the specifics of the night — the people in attendance, the social context for the lecture, the way the poet presented his material on that given day — they do bespeak a broader pattern in the short reception history of the Metropolis poem, a pattern in which formal observations almost immediately generate seemingly irresolvable political concerns. It seems Fitterman’s compositional approach strikes a chord of anxiety with even the most progressive of readers (or, perhaps, especially with the most progressive of readers), and it is a kind of anxiety that subtends readings of Fitterman as lazy, irresponsible, and dangerous.
The poet suggests that he appropriates the language of excess, junk, waste, and sprawl “not as mockery and not always with the predictable distance that a contemporary poetry reader would bring to the text.” Instead, Fitterman prefers to use this vocabulary in the same way as “pop artists [who] embraced the new vocabulary of TV images.” This, in part, would explain his interest in the sculptor Jason Rhoades, who often creates installations with two types of material: newly purchased items from stores like IKEA and Home Depot and the assorted rejectamenta of heavy industry, popular consumer culture, and Silicon Valley technology. But Rhoades’s installations are not met with the same kind of criticism as Fitterman’s book. Obviously, this could be attributed to the distinctions between their respective media and fields of reception, but I think there is a more complex, if latent, reason.
There is something inherently rebarbative about Fitterman’s compositional approach, particularly owing to the fact that it does not have an associated pedagogical apparatus: Metropolis XXX does not teach its readers how respond. The work of Jason Rhoades, on the other hand, has a series of tonalities that construct a sufficiently ironic context for, say, the unchecked production of massive amounts of donuts, or the artist in a fat suit with a ventilation tube attached to his “anus (ASS HOLE).” Fitterman’s book is more ambiguous about its appropriations of readily available rejectamenta: the stuff of GOOGLE searches is imported but not restrictively contextualized, as it is with Flarf and other kinds of GOOGLE-generated poems. Flarf is deliberately inappropriate or offensive; it is unclear if Metropolis XXX is deliberately anything. The fact that this leaves open the possibility for reading it straightforwardly, without what Fitterman calls a “predictable critical distance,” makes it alarming to some people and, more importantly, situates it on theoretical fault line (or, perhaps, a line of theoretical fault) that requires some attention.
There is no doubt that Metropolis XXX is difficult to appreciate (let alone enjoy), not lastly because the experience of “close reading” it is firstly, if not exclusively, akin to a mind-numbing immersion in the worst kinds of advertising and mass-marketing. Pages one through sixteen are each filled with an advertisement of some variety. In the first moment not explicitly selling something, page seventeen begins, “I’ve got a clearcoating problem that I need some help with.” Sick of Re-Clears-Steve from Sacramento details his dilemma, which is simultaneously quotidian and entirely obscure, explaining that he is “about to lose [his] mind” if he does not figure out why the superficial layer of his clear coat is “peppered with these little dust things.” The respondent, who will ultimately provide an extremely detailed answer, first comforts Steve with a customary version of democratic affirmation: “you’re not alone,” he or she says, “I’ve heard of this problem many times.”
But the democratic subtexts of this response, which initially seem warm and convivial, turn wry and critical. “Let me take a wild guess,” the unnamed respondent offers with an air of snide superiority, “you live in a humid environment,” and “[e]veryone knows that humidity in the line” is responsible for the problem you have encountered. Much could be said about how colloquialisms like “everyone knows” make a semantic shift when placed in this context; everyone knows, for example, that Fitterman’s compositional approach has some political subtexts. The criticisms of his work do not seem to charge him with political muteness (or mootness), but not enough dissent: it is a question of degree. Perhaps Fitterman’s appropriation of language such as this, and his consequent avoidance of a recognizable mode of radical dissent, however, actually gives Metropolis XXX a furtive apparatus for critique, more profitable because of its stealthy nature.
Importing the theoretical terms of Fredric Jameson, Christopher Nealon describes the fiscal circumstances of contemporaneity as “something like really, really late capitalism; capitalism in a fully globalized and triumphal form, the destructive speed and flexibility of whose financial instruments alone make Nixon’s lofting the dollar off the gold standard in 1971 look thoughtful and conservative.” Without making too much of historical contingencies, we can recognize that an entire cultural landscape, the so-called “postmodern condition,” is shaped by these ubiquitous, consumptive, and predatory fiscal circumstances. Perspicaciously contrasting the recent past from our present moment, the visual artist Mike Kelley notes that the so-called postmodern condition is “quite different from postwar existentialism because it lacks any historical sense — there is no notion of a truth that has been lost.” In what he will go on to describe as “a general evenness of meaning,” Kelley aphoristically summarizes the predicament of Metropolis XXX: the social and cultural parataxis that it both represents and seemingly emblematizes.
For some readers, the book articulates helplessness in its resistance to a certain kind of satire, but there is another way to understand its political subtexts. If, as the poet Brian Kim Stefans notes, certain progressive compositional “tactics — beat poetry, punk rock, even radical performance art — have been compromised by contemporary social conditions in which anything, including dissent, can be commodified,” then Fitterman’s book is a kind of dissent that attempts to resist commodification: it stages critique without falling back on recognizable (and thus easily bubble-wrapped and vacuum-sealed) models of intervention.
Organized in thirty numerical sections, and indebted to Enlightenment historiographer Edward Gibbon for its subtitle (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) and epigraph (“little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind”), Metropolis XXX has both an architectonic veneer and a continuous intertext with a foundational moment in Western history. Since these characteristics bespeak the putative order and authority of any great historical treatise, I asked Fitterman about the cover art, half-hoping the number “535947” in the upper border would signify some secrete code for unlocking the best interpretive paradigms for the book. If in fact this is an important work of historiography, I assumed it must have a method, however experimental.
On the contrary, I was surprised to find that “the number is a random one that came back from the photo lab,” not a heretofore undiscovered meta-mathematics or some transcendental signifier for Fitterman’s poesis. The poet would argue that the number is meaningless — “it echoes the excessiveness,” he says, “the junk of the books innards” — but this does not render it semantically vacant. Conspicuous numerals on the cover of a book of Internet-based procedural poetry prime the reader with a series of possible interpretative pathways — the most obvious of which requires a reading of the book as a recent installment in the nascent field of Digital Poetics, literalizing, and consequently theorizing, the algorithm-driven, numerically-coded processes of search engines — without actually providing any: they call attention to themselves only to remain recalcitrant. The cover of Metropolis XXX thus becomes a harbinger for a book chock full of moments that beg to be read in a certain way, yet ultimately resist categorization. The recontextualization as poetry of the banal, and all but ubiquitous, language of contemporary, mass-mediated consumerism engages a tradition of countercultural critique.
But Metropolis XXX persistently rejects familiar models — the camp aesthetic, for example — appealing to (and, in the process, refurbishing) something more akin to mimesis, thereby staging a generative tension between expectations and actualizations. It is this tension that both undergirds “the junk of the books innards,” and enables a certain kind of political auspiciousness, in part for the ways in which it renovates familiar reading practices, and in part for how it argues compellingly for new models of expressivity in a digitized age of post-identity.
It is thus possible to read Metropolis XXX as one might read other books of conceptual poetry, but perhaps not profitable. Even the most experimental works of post-Language writing provide for the opportunity of employing familiar strategies of “close reading” to immerse oneself in their cosmologies. Metropolis XXX, however, firmly resists any attempts toward this end, not because of its ambient though rebarbatively dense language (as is the common charge against other experimental works), but because of its familiarity. The immediate affective experience of reading Fittermnan’s book is almost identical to that of encountering language in our daily lives. Metropolis XXX, therefore, fails to produce a significant estrangement; it does not generate the kind of entfremdungseffekt that would ask us to read it as we would anything else on the continuum from recognisable convention to experimental jargon.
And yet, as Michael Kelleher points out, this is not entirely the case, since “[r]eading this book is sort of like being read to by a thousand voices at once, none of whom [we] recognize, but all of which seem very familiar”. This bespeaks a linguistic dualism, which correlates to an affective syntax of simultaneous intimacy and distantiation. The language of Metropolis XXX is entirely new to us, yet it always has the quality of being a reminder. The poet Tan Lin observes that our language is full of remainders, cognates to the junk Rhoades might use in his installations, and it is these remainders that take on the quality of reminders in Fitterman’s book. Lin writes:
If language is infinite and endlessly self-generating, like some organic cell that spontaneously divides and mutates a structure, it is also a series of dead formulas, stale jokes, archetypes, unmemorable ads, clichés which are rigidly scripted by the rhymes that stick in our heads, by the country and city we live in, the social world we hang out in, the Nissans and Fords we drive, the soap we shower with, the friends and lovers we have, the t.v. shows we half-listen to, the dogs we talk to.
Metropolis XXX draws from an unending — and constantly morphing — supply of material to rearticulate those “dead formulas” and to chart the mutative nature of language, its “infinite and endlessly self-generating” qualities as compounded by the technological, fiscal, and social circumstances of our historical moment. Fitterman’s compositional approach thus resituates the Internet as nothing more than a readily available data set from which to cull idiolects — all kinds of idiolects. Though it may seem retrogressive and ignorant of its own political subtexts, this practice is inherently critical. What if the Internet, Fitterman seems to ask, were to operate in service to poetry? This would not only destabilize certain models of critique, like “close reading,” but it would also interrogate the very idea of critique in contemporaneity.
In forcing us to ponder how we ought to read a book of junk from the Internet, Fitterman is asking, by extension, “How do you read the Internet in the first place?” This fundamental question must be answered before we can develop paradigms for adequately critiquing the culture of triumphant mass-mediation. Elaborated through language that is simultaneously foreign and recognizable, innocent and vexing, Metropolis XXX, therefore, demands a new kind of critical engagement from its readers, an entirely different form of close reading.
The macrocosmic nerves of the project — its organization (which Fitterman has likened to a series of gallery spaces in Chelsea) as thirty discrete sections, each with their own unique visual prosody — direct us firmly away from the particulars of lexicon and syntax, as if to argue against missing the forest for the trees. “Think bigger!” Metropolis seems to say. But while certain macrocosmic features of the project remain fixed — this is a book of conceptual poetry that remains steadfastly true to its concept — there is a constantly shifting terrain page-by-page: merchandise lists, followed by e-mails, followed by tourist brochures, and so on.
The tension between the page and the book thematizes the vertiginous nature of the language Metropolis XXX seeks to represent: miming the affective experience of watching or hearing a series of advertisements, Fitterman subordinates “content” to the rapid-fire of marketing, partly evoking then quickly disbanding thematic nodes. He manages this through the coexistence of collage and sampling, the former at the level of the book (or the concept), the latter at the level of the page. As Kristin Prevallet notes, “collage… decontextualizes and removes the reference from the object by forcing a cohesion with other objects, sampling preserves the reference by presenting it as a chunk of information, rather than a fragmented cutup.” Fitterman, like others before him, experiments with the collision of multiple referents at varying semantic and syntactic levels, but moves beyond the cut-and-paste of Berrigan’s Sonnets or Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath to violently yoke idiolects at a larger scale — the poem for Fitterman is what the line was to Berrigan — so that familiar models of reading and cliché countercultural aesthetic paradigms can be critiqued. Recognizable stimuli set off a series of affective and referential intertexts without sticking around long enough to get comfortably contextualized, and this puts on trial both the way we read and the way we (ought to) feel.
The pseudo-camp tonalities throughout the book, for instance, call to mind a certain kind of aesthetic, but only to undo it. As Nealon argues, “Mass cultural camp invites us all to be clever; post-Language poetic camp … invites us to take a polemical affection for what’s obsolete, misguided, or trivial, and to risk the embarrassment of trying it out.” But Fitterman, inasmuch as he is a post-Language poet, uncouples the “polemical” from the “affection” in Nealon’s logic by asking us to make affiliations with the “junk of the book’s innards” that are not always straightforwardly polemical. Each page of Metropolis XXX makes possible a unique affective response — sometimes we find them humorous; sometimes stupefying; sometimes downright boring — in the end leaving us not with a set of lingering questions (now what did the poet really mean by this?), but a sense of befuddlement about the pay-off (did I really invest time and money in a book of junk from the Internet?).
At the level of the book, therefore, Fitterman argues for a critical (even polemical) affiliation; at the level of the page, however, he troubles the very idea of polemic by providing an array of different cues to generate multiple and often shifting reactions.
The polemical, then, is purchased in Metropolis XXX with neither the familiar avant-garde practice of thematizing the quotidian to subvert the would-be representation of other more appropriate realms of human experience nor a blatant assault on the power-relational features endemic to the language of late (-late) capitalism. Instead, Fitterman argues persistently for an embrace of the miasmic consumerist lingo, without restricting the possible forms that this embrace might take. With its guise of informational egalitarianism and its here comes everybody textuality, the Internet for Fitterman demonstrates finally how “the authentic and the inauthentic can co-exist in interesting ways,” something experimental poets have known for decades.
This version of coexistence, however, has undergone major transformative shifts since the rise of personal computing and mass-mediation: for one thing, it is no longer politically or aesthetically radical to combine the quotidian with the inspired, the “fake” with the “real.” As Fitterman suggests, our culture “IS authentic and its simulacra is part and parcel of its appeal… this is why we don’t speak of ‘irony’ per se anymore.” Thus, in a classically poststructuralist way, Metropolis XXX is polemical in its very avoidance of straightforward polemic, its acknowledgement of the Internet, in the words of media theorist Daniel Downes, as a series of “play spaces for experimental interactions” from which “real” material can be culled. Fitterman is neither interested in the hierarchical categorization protocols of GOOGLE nor in the way GOOGLE-sculpting detournes the proper application of search engines, but genuinely captivated by the “glimmering surface” of the junk that GOOGLE allows him to access.
Metropolis XXX is the product of that captivation, literalizing the act of treating GOOGLE search results as worthwhile materials for poetry, not Flarf, to remind us that since the reality of technologization is not going away, poets ought to claim it. In its seemingly transparent yet carefully managed appropriations (its complex architectonics of collage and sampling), Metropolis XXX argues that the results of genuinely engaging the worst parts of our language — those “unmemorable ads” and “t.v. shows we half-listen to” that Tan Lin eloquently catalogues — are intrinsically complex and interesting. A polemical response to the hypermediation of the zeitgeist, therefore, is not only misguided but also moot. Explicitly railing against the power structure is a familiar practice espoused by some experimentalists, like Edward Sanders or the Language writers, but not by Fitterman: instead, he argues, “the act of plundering is the more political act, claim[ing] consumer language for a world where it does not belong.”
For some readers this is terribly alarming: Metropolis XXX denotes a dire state of affairs, proves the political obsolescence of poetry. Fitterman has responded by arguing extensively for the redemptive nature of his compositional approach, suggesting that the act of “plundering,” as he prefers to call it, is “inherently political.” Etymologically speaking, this is certainly the case, but rather than dispute the semantics of “plunder,” I would prefer to offer that Fitterman’s strategy, politically efficacious or not, makes possible a second-order critique, a metaphysics of dissent.
In his gleefully ambivalent poetics — which, like the numerals of the cover, simultaneously asks to be read as critique, yet refuses to yield a wholly “polemical affectation” — Fitterman makes it known that our so-called “postmodern condition” demands different compositional, receptive, and theoretical paradigms than did even the most recent histories of post-1968 politics, Reganomics, and emergent globalization. In appropriating language, Fitterman suggests the poet can “realize subjectivity in the conceptual strategies or choices of borrowed texts: the endless compositional intersections, interactions, interplays,” and this kind of post-existentialist argument for gaining identity exclusively through action (or, in this case, processes of appropriative articulation) is perhaps the most important contribution of Metropolis XXX: it expands the field of self-expressivity by utilizing “everything,” as Fitterman would say, without subordinating composition to familiar (polemical, ironic) contextualizations.
This may or may not finally be efficacious in the political domain, but it is certainly innovative in a way that denotes the transitionary aspect of our historical moment. If Metropolis XXX is written by a poet who believes subjectivity, as embodied by Alice Cooper, is an amalgam of subjects within a unitary subject position (and it is), and if the book itself reflects a kind of all-over appropriation (and it does), then the argument for cultural and political progress made by Metropolis XXX is one of reflective potential: pause now and immerse oneself in the vertiginous real, even if it is a pack of lies or a procession of simulacra.
The process of interrogating previously fruitful though currently inapt modes of critique, Fitterman seems to suggest, is our best point of departure for beginning to imagine new models of intersection for the political and the aesthetic. Metropolis XXX begins, “You’ve come to this country to relax and enjoy this beauty and cultural diversity,” proposing that tourism in one’s own land has its benefits, its meaningful entfremdungseffekt. So perhaps now, in this time of rapid transition through technologization and mass-mediation, our most politically productive poetics, as Nealon puts it, are “waiting” — that is to say, not exhausting themselves with belated practices, as Fitterman writes, “searching for the best deals and most provocative experiences.” - David J. Alworth
Rob Fitterman, Rob the Plagiarist, Roof Books, 2009.

"Jaques le fataliste. Jack the Modernist. From Denis Diderot to Robert Glück, Fitterman carries on a long tradition of fabricated autobiography, genuinely confessional fiction, and full-out appropriation. But as we know from Jack Torrance, who typed an entire manuscript of the one repeated, plagiarized line: all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. With Fitterman, a plagairist extraordinaire, we have all the play and all the work together in some of the smartest and sharpest textual interventions yet. From a jacquard bathrobe to Jacques Rancière, Jackson Mac Low to a jackhammer, here are the textual hijacks that let you know you've been rob(bed)." - Craig Dworkin

"I had a suspicion about this work. I mistrust all frank and simple poetry. This book makes me feel like my trust was wasted. I finally had somebody verify the story. I thought it was accidental. I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. This book makes me feel like I end up with nothing, but somehow it makes me feel better. I rather liked it. The soft, brushed covering is removable and easy to clean. Adjustable strap holds poems in desired position. New bolder and larger print is easier to see and read. Casing made of 50% post-consumer content. PMA certified nontoxic. Featuring an outstanding one-of-a-kind circle design, this eye-catching creation is certain to become a topic of conversation" - Charles Bernstein

"Conceptual writing seems to thrive on realizing the seemingly impossible, or at the least impossibly unpalatable: write a poem using only one vowel per section; transcribe everything you say or do for a week; write a book in one continuous sentence. So much so that a book like Rob the Plagiarist—a collection of shorter conceptual pieces written by Robert Fitterman between 2000 and 2008—seems almost oxymoronic. How can you write a conceptual poem under ten pages? How hard can that be? Is it even long enough to be unboringly boring?
And yet in many of these pieces Fitterman comes close to achieving something even more oxymoronic-seeming: a conceptualist lyricism. The book is explicitly concerned with subjectivities and the chasms and connections that exist between them, using the “plagiarist” techniques of appropriation and collage to turn the traditional narcissism of the lyric almost literally inside out—to create poems that look in on the subject from without rather than gazing out on the world from within. In “A Hemingway Reader,” Fitterman extracts the “I” statements from The Sun Also Rises in order to create a bleakly phenomenological record of the protagonist’s perceptual wanderings; then he revivifies the resulting text by “translating” it into his own contemporary New York experience, revealing a pattern of likeness and difference that suggests a genuinely touching meditation on the intersubjective value of literature. In “This Window Makes Me Feel,” the conceptual-lyric joining is even more explicit, actually declared in Fitterman’s gloss on the poem, which he explains was “propelled by my interest in subjectivity through appropriation. I.e., what would a text read like if it were entirely subjective, but not my personal subjectivity.” What it reads like, incidentally, is a chorus of lost, lonely, occasionally funny, often insecure voices that, through Fitterman’s linking of the poem to 9/11, becomes a chorus of the dead—anonymous voices and silenced voices being eerily isomorphic.
If Rob the Plagiarist doesn’t achieve the monumentality of Day or the virtuosity of Eunoia, well, it’s clearly not aiming to—it’s really more of a rarities and b-sides collection backing Fitterman’s ongoing epic project Metropolis. And for just that reason it offers a refreshing alternate take on conceptual writing, a break from the technicians, salesmen, and solicitors that can put such a Warhol-cum-carnival-barker face on the movement’s public presentations. There are bold and novel pleasures to be derived from that sort of thing, and no one would champion them more than me. But a book like Rob the Plagiarist offers smaller, quieter pleasures that are no less deserving of appreciation and, in their relative fragility, perhaps even more deserving of attention." - Morgan Myers

"This window makes me feel, looking out of it, like everything I see is just a part of what I read in this book--no more or no less deserving of being included within its pages. ROB THE PLAGIARIST is honestly, without hyperbole, one of the most original books I think I have ever read--and that's even with most of its text being appropriated from other sources.
In ROB THE PLAGIARIST, just as on the evening news, everything is equal--THE SUN ALSO RISES, the credits on a poetry calendar, telemarketing scripts, the Internet's most emotive and fenestrated cullings--it's all reduced and/or magnified here to the stuff of reality, to the stuff of this.
As a work of art, it's completely disorienting--most of the time reading it, I didn't know who had written what I was reading, why it was included, what it meant, or where it was all going--all I knew was that this was something very new to me, something wholly original, a literary version of an Avalanches or an Air France song, but something more as well.
It's also at times very amusing, such as the way the dialog is completely separated in a little play in the middle--one character's first, another's later--or the way something random and silly and specific will sneak out of long blocks of more sentimental thoughtfulness, such as in the long section in which Fitterman Googled the phrase "This window makes me feel" and then put everything he found in a certain order.
More than anything though, it's just so original. I'm not even sure that I love it, I think I like it, but it's really just something so new to me, something completely unlike anything else I've ever read before, and for that I definitely recommend it. Read it, and let your thinking be changed, perhaps forever." - Mike Smith

Rob Fitterman, Rob the Plagiarist 1-880-Flowers (pdf)

Rob Fitterman, Rob the Plagiarist, A Hemingway Reader

Rob Fitterman: Rob the Plagiarist: Tim Davis Catalogue (pdf)

Rob Fitterman, Sprawl, Make Now Press, 2010.

"The customer is always right and let the latest installment of Fitterman's polyphonic, sprawling METROPOLIS be the proof of the pudding. We've come full circle. No longer the passive, voiceless victims of draconian capitalist forces, consumer culture allows us to exercise the subjectivity we've been granted via interpolation (see Barbara Kruger's I shop therefore I am) by talking back to the machine. Disaffected consumers of the world, unite!™ Why vote with our feet when we can churn out chatter in the comfort of our homes? Anybody listening? Fitterman certainly is. Consume this book; satisfaction guaranteed"- Monica de la Torre.

Rob Fitterman, Sprawl (video)

Rob Fitterman, Sprawl Preamble (pdf)

Rob Fitterman, Sprawl Parts (pdf)
Rob Fitterman, This Window Makes Me Feel or at Ubuweb

Louis Bury: Cultural Politics, Postmodernism, and White Guys:
Femininity as Affect and Effect in Robert Fitterman’s This Window Makes Me Feel (pdf)

Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place, Notes on Conceptualisms, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009.

"In NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS, Place and Fitterman erect the first critical framework toward the understanding of conceptual writing, an emergent early twenty-first century literary movement. Elegantly parsed and carefully dissected, this work fleshes out many of the missing details proposed thus far regarding the methodologies and strategies of how to proceed with innovative writing. Both direct and oblique, NOTES is itself a self-reflexive work of conceptual writing in the guise of theory; or is it a work of theory in the guise of conceptual writing? By smartly straddling the creative and the critical, this book does twice the work toward our understanding of what it means to be contemporary" - Kenneth Goldsmith

"Many people seem at a loss for what exactly to “call” the state and various creations within the current of American poetry. Robert Fitterman (along with Vanessa Place) has harvested a project called Notes On Conceptualisms which provides twelve general principles in regards to Conceptual Poetry and what its attempts and executions are. The book is delightfully humorous, perceptively aware and fairly informing. NoC begins at the point of “allegory,” discerning allegorical writing from symbolic writing, testifying that “Conceptual writing is allegorical writing.”

Do you own a “Pavlovian dinner bell?” If so, do you use it?
- No, but I do have a dinner bell—figuratively, metaphorically and allegorically.
Was it a pre-meditated decision to make the book so delightfully funny or did it come out accidentally, arbitrarily?
- Is it funny? Seriously?
I’m glad you find it funny. I think it’s funny. I know a lot of people don’t find it funny. I think Vanessa is funny, but her writing is generally not funny. She probably thinks I’m funny. We thought parts of the book were funny as an afterthought and we made parts of the book funny beforehand.
The book tries to straddle a space where the ideas can be presented artfully and playfully and… like my father says: “between a hard rock and whatever.” It’s not a straight-up scholarly book and it’s not a straight-up institutional critique of a scholarly book. What is pre-mediated, then, is a conceptual gesture towards both.
Recently, Vanessa and I made an impromptu film that pokes fun of Notes on Conceptualisms. It’s titled: “Notes on Conceptualisms: eastcoast/westcoast” and it rips the 1969 Smithson & Holt film titled “East coast West coast.” Below are the links to both of them:
http://www.ubu.com/film/smithson_east.html
http://ubu.com/film/fitterman_conceptualisms.html
What are your top five favorite bands/musicians? (off the top of your head…)
- In the mid-90s, the lovely and brilliant poet Kim Rosenfield interviewed Jackson Mac Low for SHINY magazine, and she asked Jackson what his favorite color was. Jackson’s answer: “I don’t pick favorites.” My taste is broad and indelicate.
What are your top five favorite films? (off the top of your skull…)
- 1. Avatar PG-13
12:45, 4:15, 7:45, 10:50
2. Avatar 3D PG-13 3D
12:00, 3:30, 6:55, 10:25
3. Did You Hear About the Morgans? PG-13
12:20, 2:50, 5:20, 7:50, 10:20
4. Fantastic Mr. Fox PG
12:30, 2:40, 4:55, 7:00, 9:15
5. Ninja Assassin R
12:55, 3:20, 5:45, 8:10, 10:40
Is it “allegory” that is the central/thesis factor regarding Conceptualisms? Or is “allegory” the centrifugal factor?
- Vanessa writes that “allegory is, by nature, centrifugal.” As such, the term does begin and end the Conceptualisms essay. But it isn’t intended to be a central thesis to the essay—there is none. The essay is more exploration than assertion. The nice thing, though, about kicking it off with allegory is that the term is comfortable to writers, especially, as we try to distinguish conceptual writing from conceptual art. To paraphrase Steve Zultanski’s straight-forward definition: in conceptual writing, the most “poetic” or artful element might not be the text itself. That “might not be” extends our traditional thinking about allegory to include a post-Duchampean relationship to allegory.
Do NON-allegorical writers utilize/make use of the “full array of possibilities?” How would that work?
- Firstly, I don’t see “allegory” and “conceptual” as synonymous. There are many poets working with allegory in different ways, and in dialogue with different lineages. Matvei Yankelevich’s new book, Boris By The Sea, is an allegorical fable of sorts, but I don’t think he would consider it a text of conceptual writing. If you mean non-conceptual writers, I would say that leads to an unnecessary bifurcation. The range of conceptual possibilities is very much in flux, and part of our effort with the book is to encourage the strategic “possibilities” of this spectrum. I think there’s a misconception that materiality is on one end and conceptualism is on the other… I think this is a mistake. In Conceptual Art of the 60s, there was a clearly stated objective that ideas should take precedence over materiality. Conceptual writing retains some of that spirit, but without the hierarchal claim. Why? Conceptual writers are not reacting to commodification in the art market, but to the inundation of text that floods our lives. Conceptual writing strategies—especially appropriation, durational texts, archiving, researching, etc.—speak to these concerns. Traditional verse, of course, might address these concerns via content, but without the formal strategy that mimics our rapidly changing relationship to technology and the written word.
What percentage of currently-working poets would you estimate write/operate conceptually?
- I don’t think it matters… but I’ll answer the question anyway. Poets are a tiny piece of the culture-making pie, and progressive/innovative poets make up an even smaller unit, so you can see where I’m going with this. Still, I would say that there are probably 40 or so poets around my age who would consider themselves “conceptual writers”. I’m excited about so many younger poets who would consider themselves to be coming out of this tradition, such as: Lawrence Giffin, Marie Buck, Kareem Estefan, Danny Snelson, Diana Hamilton, Patrick Lovelace, Eddie Hopely, Steve Zultanski, Brad Flis, and many others. Also, I was recently invited to a poetics conference in Norway, and there were several young writers from Scandinavia who consider themselves “conceptual writers”. So I guess it adds up.
But, here’s why I said it doesn’t matter… experimental poetry has a long shelf life. Even if the community is small, the conversation could be vital to the future of the art. In a way, the audience is always the future and the argument about accessibility is a red herring. Beyond the numbers, what’s crucial is to articulate, foster, and engage in a conversation that speaks to the dialogues of the day (and there may be many). The number of soldiers is not the point, as evidenced by The Objectivists or The Situationists.
If “failure” is “the goal” and editing appropriated material is “impure,” where does “success” fit in?
- Failure for the writer means success for the reader. As we say in the essay: “failure in this sense acts as an assassination of mastery.” We have witnessed the “success” of an official verse culture poem, and the qualities that have been heralded by the creative writing workshop. In Notes, we write about failure as a way to violate the text from within with the hope that “this invites the reader to redress failure, hallucinate repair.” This relationship to failure is aligned to a position L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers usefully articulated—they sought to achieve this through broken syntax, while many conceptual writers use normative syntax (albeit often readymade) to the same end.
If poets want to enter the arena of culture-makers, they might want to consider the dialogues that are happening in the culture around them and create works that speak to those conversations. In the other arts, the audience is especially active as part of this dialogue, and that’s where the “success” in failed art works is more inviting that the perfected or packaged art work that is recognizable as such. This “arena” is a place where radical ideas can be exchanged and one either believes there’s good in that or not. As such, the action is on the receiving end, and I say “action” because the more I think about “success” the more nauseous I start to feel. Doesn’t the whole success thang have a distinctively American feel to it? The editing of appropriated materials is not “impure” as I see it, but the term “impure” was what we used to describe a conceptual project that chooses to trip up its own making—more sampling and less readymade. In terms of LeWitt’s idea of conceptual art making—where the artist must not interfere with the preset idea—one might see this sort of editing as a rupture or impurity of that more rigid form of conceptualism. My own work tends to be more on the “impure” side of the equation, so I’m certainly not suggesting a hierarchy here, and I think that might be a problem with the term “impure” for some readers.
Do you, personally, think the Capitalist system will continue, as it has, to swallow “art” with its rhinoceros mouth?
- Yes.
As we claim in the essay, Capitalism has the capability to absorb even its own critique. Think of Citibank ads with line breaks or disjointed phrases. The most challenging conceptual writing, often critiqued as lazy or boring or unreadable, will probably be commodified down the road. But, on some level, this is what appropriation of popular culture in poetry is all about. Here’s a quote we use from Buchloh: “The allegorical mind sides with object and protests against its devaluation to the status of a commodity by devaluating it for the second time…” Doesn’t this predict that very same Capitalist absorption where replication is a form of resistance?
“Hybrid” (in the sense of the newest Norton Anthology and informal discussions) seems kind of bullshit or made-up-out-of-thin-air for something particular yet hard to pin down with one thumb. Your thoughts?
- I agree that the term “hybrid” is too slippery or vague. For our essay, I wanted to borrow Tim Davis’s term “kinda conceptual” or use “muddy conceptual” but those terms didn’t seem quite right either. In other conversations, like the Norton Anthology cited above, doesn’t it refer to hybrid forms and genre-blurring? That’s a very different use of the term. In our essay, we use the term to mean part-appropriated, part-conceptual, part original text, etc. We imagine a spectrum of conceptual writing strategies so that “hybrid” strategies could be seen as falling into that spectrum. In this way, “hybrid” has a fairly narrow or specific definition as it opposes the more “pure” or systematically prescribed pre-text strategies.
In visual art, Post-conceptualism and Appropriation Art are akin to this notion of the “hybrid” as we define it in the Notes essay. The conceptualism is more muddied and the procedures are more sloppy and interrupted (often by a re-emergent subjectivity). I’m interested in the permissiveness of this muddy conceptual model and how it might echo more chaos.
I think the “Institutional Critique”/institutionalism section is quite possibly the most compelling and interesting part of the book. What are your thoughts of the MFA experience? A friend and I, both with MFAs in poetry, joke about it being a fungi on the craft.
- It is not surprising that poetry has not had very much Institutional Critique because we don’t have the same kind of institution that the art world has. Still there are several examples, ranging from Charles Bernstein’s poem Recantorium, to Gary Sullivan’s erasures of literary magazine rejection letters, to Rachel Zolf’s The Tolerance Project (a direct critique of the MFA experience where Zolf uses other poets’ material to compose workshop poems). Additionally, a lot of poets are using the performance space of the poetry reading as an Institutional Critique of the “Poetry Reading.”
I think we’ve driven the “craft of poetry” into the ground. After all, Kraft is just bad cheese. I’m optimistic at my core, and rather than belabor the obvious about the moderate modernism of MFAs, I’m hoping that we’re starting to see a new breed of programs, where poets are treated like artist and culture-makers who are engaged with the most challenging ideas of our day. Otherwise, we’re stuck with our cultural exemption status and delegated to several more decades of greeting card relevance.
I’ve been working on re-crafting old, rather “useless” or “outdated” science books into love poems by a process of erasure, deletion, etc. Constellation-making. Is this an example of conceptual-art-meets-poetry; what I mean is, are there processes that apply conceptually but do not execute conceptually?
- For me, this is an example of conceptual writing, but you’d have to decide how much the erasure and appropriated source material is fore-grounded. In the Introduction to Notes, I begin by talking about erasure techniques because it is such a common practice of late and very much relevant to conceptual writing. The very act of erasure brings meaning to the piece, as well as the act of appropriating source texts. As a writer, one then has a whole range of choices as to how much one wants to point to these strategies. One might hide all of that and create a “successful” poem with no real trace of these strategies. As such, there isn’t much of a conceptual element there because the author is pulling us into the completed text. On the other hand, if the erasure and source texts are fore-grounded, then the reader has that concept or idea to work with as well. In this way the reader is pulled to ideas outside of the text. To repurpose or constellate devalued or “useless” language is a common strategy in conceptual writing, especially as it draws attention to this very process of repurposing.
To repeat myself: ours is an age not of invention but inventory.
This too is allegorical.
In one word, why is a word an object?" - "Ontology." - Interview by Ken L. Walker

Thom Donovan: Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place’s NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS (pdf)
or here

Karla Kelsey: Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman (pdf)

Ron Silliman: Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman (pdf)

Rob Fitterman, Identity Theft (pdf)

Rob Fitterman & Steve Giasson: Directions

Rob Fitterman, Failure: A Postconceptual Poem

Rob Fitterman, Now We Are Friends (excerpt)

Rob Fitterman, Pill Box

Collective Task

"Robert Fitterman: "In early 2006, I invited around 20 poets and artists to participate in a collective project; 12 of those invitees took me up on this offer and saw the project through to completion. In terms of purpose, criticality, and guidelines, I tried to say as little as possible; my hope was that the collective itself would discover a purpose along the way without any initial influence. My only framework was that each participant would offer us a 'task' on the first day of each new month and that the participants would respond to any or all of the tasks." Participants include: Tim Davis, Monica de la Torre, Stacy Doris, Robert Fitterman, Sabine Herrmann, Klaus Killisch, Carol Mirakove, Yedda Morrison, Kim Rosenfield, Lisa Sanditz, Rod Smith, and Juliana Spahr."


Rob's Word Shop

Poet's Sampler: Robert Fitterman

Robert Fitterman: Conceptual writing project: holocaust

Conceptual Writing 101

Rob's webpage