An Interview with Brian Kim Stefans

The first time I read Brian Kim Stefans’s most recent book of poetry, “Viva Miscegenation”: New Poetry (Make Now Press, 2012), I was sitting in an airport terminal in full view of someone who kept glancing at me with a puzzled look. It only occurred to me much later that seeing “Viva Miscegenation” splashed in large red font across a book cover is probably a disconcerting experience. Situations like that sum up much of Stefans’s work: it causes moments of discomfort, stemming from a difficulty in determining whether the humor is targeted against you or for you, or perhaps both or neither. A common criticism leveled at poets such as Stefans who experiment with electronic and digital technologies is that they emphasize style over substance, employing technology as a gimmick. Stefans’s work clearly pushes beyond that. From his “Open Letter to The New Yorker,” addressing the racism embedded in a profile of Kenneth Goldsmith published by The New Yorker in October 2015, to his web project “Circulars,” which began in 2003 to gather artists’ reactions to the American invasion of Iraq, Stefans is deeply invested in racial politics and in opposing capitalist exploitation. In his academic essays, he expresses a belief in the potential of new media to engage with those issues and disappointment in their failures to do so.

The poem “Love in the Time of Flarf” from “Viva Miscegenation” bears out some of these contradictory concerns. Its title offers a referential joke, bringing to mind Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and therefore equating Flarf with a deadly disease. Flarf is an avant-garde poetry movement in which practitioners mine the results of inputting strange search terms into online search engines and compose the found materials into poems. These poems tend to be shocking, vulgar, and offensive. Critic Brian M. Reed has suggested that in plunging the reader into the depths of popular culture, Flarf does the political work of presenting a “version of the United States . . . so repellent that one feels compelled to reject the portrait and commit to proving its untruth” (Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics). The last stanza of Stefans’s poem registers strong doubt about any recuperative reading of Flarf, or indeed of poetry in general:

Beauty and truth, character and dignityare valuable simulacra nightly,so don’t do it.Waste the afternoon with your flexible guitar,variously Latin, variously punk, for no market.Time is a grey jail, and your lover with the heretical strainyour wisdom.These are more salient than poetryand so, find a place in it, beyond the quietnessof your literary landscapeand the presidential aides who pawn it.

(124)

The usual virtues of poetry—beauty, truth, and their attendant trappings—are mere simulacra that take us away from the real stimuli of the world. Not only that, but the literary landscape is controlled by authorities who sell these simulacra for their own gain. And yet this numb lament for the uselessness of poetry is shot through with paradoxes: it is itself written as the form of a poem intending to impart truth and beauty. For all that it is supposed to be about the highly nontraditional form of Flarf, it uses a standard structure of three stanzas with eleven lines each. Most importantly, it begins with a joke, so as with all of Stefans’s work, we must consider the possibility that the poem may be parodying itself and/or the overly serious reader.

Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, Stefans earned a B.A. from Bard College, attended the CUNY Graduate Center, and earned an M.F.A. in electronic literature from Brown University. In addition to “Viva Miscegenation”, his books of poetry include Kluge: A Meditation and Other Works (Roof Books, 2007), What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), Angry Penguins (Harry Tankoos Books, 2000), Gulf (Object Editions, 1998), and Free Space Comix (Roof, 1998). Other books include Before Starting Over: Selected Interviews and Essays, 1994–2005 (Salt, 2006) and Fashionable Noise: On...