There is no way a poem such as Katie Degentesh’s “I Do Not Tire Quickly” just happened. The poem, part of Degentesh’s forthcoming The Anger Scale, is “constructed” using “the help of Internet search engines,” according to the poet’s bio on The Brooklyn Rail. The title is taken from a question on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It’s flarf, right? Then maybe all flarf isn’t the same. Maybe this flarfist has made some good judgments. Maybe “help” is simply help.
Starting with a declaration that she (the “I” in the poem) will clean up a “messy” heart, she immediately demonstrates how that will not be done, how there are medications to fix everything except the body, how bodily parts turn “a wartime walkie / into the beginning of scientific Islam research”: a game no one can win. Beginning to think in “hours instead of days,” she remind me that “the hours are inner structure for living cautiously and responsively. . . and [that] as this sensitivity deepens, we become more available to the present moment.” (David Steindl-Rast, The Music of Silence: Entering the Sacred Space of Monastic Experience). But that is not what she means. Bertolt Brecht enters, “[keeping] his secrets safe,” alienating himself (as though monks do not) from the universe, hoping to fix things, like “messy hearts,” through detachment. He is “the main reason” for the poet’s critical “watch[ing]” as the “unusual” continues its march toward her. If “tennis” had become something other than a “rarity,” the heart might be “clean,” or the poet might become a communist. What next? The “battles of the mountains” are still to come.
Flarf or no flarf, this poem deals with the classic struggle of the individual against the cruel world. The poet examines the question, is medicine the answer to self-inflicted pain? What about body over thought? She interjects Brecht, but the “sun comes out” (and, to paraphrase Burns, the best laid plans. . . have gone astray.) Degentesh works it, and she works it well. But the jury is still out concerning flarf and, as she leaves us, neither battle has been won. I wonder about the other questions on the MMPI.
More later.
