SMILE, YOU’VE JUST BEEN NICK DEMSKED

(or, my hair is shiny but it doesn’t feel clean)

i.

Nick Demske’s Nick Demske—a kind of potent (and endless) doubling immediately—demands to be spoken through and over and again like the glitchy, media monster that it is. Even titling this post is difficult: which sound bite (doubling as byte) to choose? Joyelle introduces Nick Demske/this contaminate/this contagion to us in her Judge’s Citation. “Language,” she writes, “de-synchs and hooks up in detrimental sequences” (xi). Indeed, Nick Demske has assaulted my brain with Nick Demske force like a Nick Demske (cracked with Nick Demske, spilling Nick Demske)—off my tongue rolls Nick Demske (or maybe in his tongue I—or we—roll/chew, as he commands, “Put Your Face In My Tongue”). I considered, at one point in the reading process, declaring that “I’ve been Nick Demsked” on Facebook. But this just sounded dirty, wrong. Plus, he’s out there somewhere in our virtual reality. Plus—a hole in my logic—, who/what is Nick Demske anyway? A collective? A criminal? A terrorist? A mimic? A strip tease(r)? A jazz musician? A piece of shit? (Joyelle poses the question, “Is it shit or is it speech?”) (xi). In a recent Montevidayo post, Johannes notes, “Transfer is media. Media reproduces. Art is the transfer, the ‘mediumizing.’” In Nick Demske, Nick Demske is as slippery and globby as a media membrane/Art goo, perhaps? “I just want to secrete some hatchling/ So unrepulsive even my grandmother could be// Indifferent,” says the speaker in “View from a Balcony” (57). The “figure of speech,” the loop itself—perpetual syndication: Nick Demske (like): we’ve (always) “never seen him before” (17).

II. Eponymous?

In an interview with Tarpaulin Sky’s Julie Strand earlier this year (available here: http://tskynews.blogspot.com/2010/11/libraries-small-press-and-cross.html), Demske discusses the self-titling of his book as relying on a tradition practiced in music (but less so in literature). Here Demske suggests that, rather than the title being (solely) “eponymous,” he is interested in contributing to an investigation (as launched by poets) into power structures perpetuated by or inherent in the act of naming. He says,

"We assign words--little names--to all these things to separate them from each other, but those distinctions so often--maybe always, I don't know--are artificial and that's a majorly flawed system…Making the book self-titled in an attempt to kind of force collaboration on others is one of my ways of trying to circumvent--or at least bring attention to--one of those power-imbalance flaws of language."

Last week I suggested that we might be able to think about Demske’s text as it relates to Homi Bhabha’s mimicry—as the book often deals in “double articulation” and serves as perhaps “a threat to disciplinary powers” by “cross[ing] the boundaries of the cultural enunciation through a strategic confusion of the metaphoric and metonymic axes of the cultural production of meaning” (122, 130). I think Demske’s stated objective in regard to the self-titling of his book jives with Bhaba’s notion of mimicry’s threat; its partial display is dangerous because there is “no essence, no thing itself” (131). Nick Demske’s Nick Demske is always a dangerous doubling or repetition rather than a representation; in “Rhetorical “Prayer,” he writes, “I ripped out my stuffing./ Removed guts, veins, organs. And then: Nothing” (25). There is “no presence or identity behind its mask” (129) (Lara Glenum describes the work of the Gurlesque poets as operating this way in her introduction to the anthology, and CJ and others have already discussed Chelsey Minnis as “colonized by poetry”; how might Nick Demske’s work compare to the work of some of the Gurlesque poets we’ve read?) In “Put Your Face In My Tongue,” the poem begins with a series of familiar expressions ripped from their context: “Nobody move. Read them and weep. Lifeguard on duty” (17). In these phrases—and Demske’s rickety, swerving, doubled (or frankensteined) clichés (for instance, “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry. I stuck a needle/ In my eye and all I got was this lousy needle/ In my eye”—or the continually thwarted move toward distillation or reduction which instead result in accretion: “I’m not a poet, I/ Just write poetry. I’m not a cop killer , I just/ Kill cops. I’m not a cop killer, I just”)—the text lurches—a kind of paintmixer rattling, without falling or moving away (29, 38, 3). Planes, plates shift across the textual surface; the face contorting in its strict form (Nick Demske: botulism?)—as Joyelle writes, “The sonnet sequence is one brief sequence played backward and forward until its fake, twitchy face says everything” (xi).

C. Criminal? (Crime Scene?)

We’re stuck in the looping, twitching, chewing, media face of/in Nick Demske (the text—and/or we—can’t extricate (ourselves) from the reel, the scene: “The EKG tweets ‘sell’ in Morse code./ Through gold fronts. And it’s going: once. twice. sold” (50)). Is Demske’s text then, like a criminal returning endlessly to the scene of a crime (the “known world” mapped as such—given the “media apriori,” the media shaping/constructing this “true crime” reality as Mark Seltzer suggests) (4)? Nick Demske lurks over (/observes) corporatism, terrorism, atrocity in the book—and he glitches (or is in a glitch in) the system at the level of transmission—or transfer (“My muse gushes deafening orchestra that shreds into fleshy/ Confetti” (36)—“I’m faking it. For real. I actually have/ No idea what the weather will be/ Like” (37)). The language, the rhetoric is unstable (though stable enough to hinge)—dangerous, thieving (a little from this line, a little from previous—speeding things up or drawing things out long enough to make us uncomfortable: “It is raining men. Ha/ Lleujah. A young person is smearing their privates” (an exuberant and unholy observation? (36)). If Demske’s text is offensive (in his TPS interview, Demske considers the word as meaning “not defensive”) in its violence, do we participate in this crime as it is constructed/occurs in the language—the media (we feel these vibrations where, as Seltzer notes, experience is always “referred” because of the “technical combinations of communication and corporeality” (5)? (Nick Demske/Nick Demske: Crime Scene/Scene of the Crime?) Nick Demske sounds his emergencies (“I need an adult,” he writes in “Good Touch”); the emergencies are (sound like) Nick Demske (and the noise of everyday experience).

4. Scat? (“Fuck me, shit me./ Remind me what it’s like to be offended, Nick Demske./ Ah. Already with thee” (7).

Though I know very little about scatting, it occurs to me that scat (in both the scatological and musical senses of the word) might serve as an interesting lens through which to consider the text. In terms of singing, scat (according to Wikipedia) involves a vocal improvisation in which the singing attempts to turn the voice into a kind of instrument (creating “the equivalent of an instrumental solo”). Just as scat involves improvisation and the use of specific musical structures (“stock patterns, riffs,” etc.), the magic of Demske’s text seems to occur in the activation of strange correspondences—opening up strange lines of flight (though sound in music—in scat— would be a reterritorialization, according to D&G) along the sequence(s)—which we might read as hosting Demske. In “Sonnet,” the speaker disappears from the scene: “Because I am the substitute teacher, better than any/ [insert six lines here]” (31).

…
(Some more questions/closing/opening remarks)

How is the book form figured here—especially as Demske’s obsessions register across/throughout the text? How does this text compare to others we’ve read this semester or last? (For instance, Demske’s text seems to exhaust itself less than The Cow, I think, while remaining nervous/nervy. Do Demske and Reines (register) shock(s) (to) the system in similar or different ways?)

Does curation seem like an apt way to describe Demske’s text? If so, how does this curation compare to Hawkey’s Ventrakl or Aaron Kunin’s The Sore Throat?

Who/what is Nick Demske, anyway? Is he endlessly aborted in this text? Scooped?

Other thoughts?

***

“There is no I in team” (27).