Fiona Banner’s writing is appealing to me because of the visual style that she writes in. There is an aesthetic “cleaness” (for lack of a better word) that I find attractive. I am referring first of all the block style of writing as evident in the piece from her book The Nam. The work seems to be written in a dispassionate tone. The reporter simply reports what she sees. But the work reveals the Banner’s selective creative processes by her focus on certain stimuli as opposed to others. The following passage, for example, generated some insight:

Stuff falls from what’s left of the trees, really slowly, it’s black and just floats down behind the face. The fire has nothing left to burn but it burns on anyway, so orange. He takes another drag. The whole picture fades out, apart from one raging fire in the middle. A helicopter flies in from the left then another from the right, they cross right in the middle.

The writer’s choice of the word “Stuff” is interesting. The writer’s attitude is extremely casual about whatever it is that is falling. The writer might have been more descriptive here, but her  own poetics push through unconsciously perhaps. Likewise, when “A hand appears in front of it,” no description is offered of the hand.  She does use “really slowly” to describe how the stuff falls. Apart from that the piece follows the  this happens and then that happens format.

I took a look at Banner’s website and found the installation artwork “Glass.”  This work, too, reflects what I feel is a “cleaness.” It is obviously transparent, yet it establishes a presence in the installation space. It does nothing to contaminate its environment and is beautiful in an artsy sort of way.

Silem Mohammad’s flarf poetry is a confusing concept to me. I won’t go so far as to say what is expressed in our reading that “… Flarf and Conceptual Poetry are fucking stupid, ”but the idea does give me pause. What I like about it is that it is an ecologically friendly medium. There is something valuable about taking what is already there and creating something new and hopefully interesting. At this point, however, I am not sure that I have a significant appreciation for this technique; unless I’m missing something.

N. Philips writing is extremely interesting to me because of the history she works with. She takes an actual historical event and creates stories or poems of it that have to be reconstructed almost on a spiritual level in order to be understood. Her work, as our reading suggests, creates the sense that we can’t really know what really happened in the situation, but there is enough there to help us understand that something unspeakably horrible has happened.