Peasants
Brad Flis
Patrick Lovelace Editions, 2009
Review by Eddie Hopely

With the outline of a severed head coated with removable censorship material as cover image, Brad Flis’ Peasants quickly addresses its reader as the spectator of a general horror, and its consumer as the producer of the human (face) within. The glare required to produce the image of Peasants’ cover title text, studded within a metallic gray rectangle of lotto-scratch latex ink, seems to pierce the material and reappear in flight and gloss, an arc around pages turned, and captured in a double-photographed saucer shape. To look at Peasants, and write with a coin, triangulates unidentifiable masses famously subject to a secondary mysteriousness by federally mandated non-specificity — casualties of war or violence, economically disadvantaged classes, and anonymous airships.

This book approaches its own specificity within the more abstracted narratives offered by socio-political information authorities, moving against the delimiting character of a generality which can overcode visuals with a kind of determining knowledge. Although initially shifting the choice to see death from news source, or government PR machine, to reader, a treated, tampered-with quality inherent to multiple mediating severances remains an informant of Flis’ text. Our murky economic relationship to the appearance of distant subjects speaks to the final censorship of the deceased face as thoroughly as a respect for the dead. The uneasy considerations of future readings which interactive or modifiable art objects inaugurate (will its meaning-making be “used up”?) plug into local action as a concrete archive of desire: where the immediacy of the images afforded by this reader-erased cover can be reified by metonymic cultural matrices that turn seeing into thinking-the-already-known.

Later interactions are consistently framed by an index of localized human activity, embodied in the scratched material, referencing previous drives towards a more complex knowing, or at least a wanting to. It is a motif capable of juxtaposing the disparate moments of our own interactions with the book, and it emphasizes the text’s interest in how we decide to figure historical instance, and its cause, into their contemporary counterparts: in Peasants, the symbols or narratives of sovereignty, and the politicized event.

There is a sense of travel through the languages employed to construct human situation, always-already in progress towards the technical goals, and violences, of an indefinite politico-managerial vocation. “Anti-conquest” starts the book with the cold questions (“What are the ‘generic’ terms?”) of a strategist, interlocking with playful references and challenges, and proceeds with creation myths, underlying an interlocutor’s understanding of occupations, systems of classification, and selves:

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The titles and texts of section I most literalize travel, with the longer “thinking” pieces kneading ostensibly separate events and objects into one another (“Nuptials,” “A Demon I Tie On”), inter-cut by interpolative border or boundary encounters (“Speak and be awesome nationalist”). Brad’s texts take place over three sections, each projecting the whole distinctly, a factor that contributes greatly to the inter-textual minutia that instills a bureaucratic eeriness, already eminent to more overt subjects (such as the WTC attacks).  When “American Idol,” the poem of section II, unexpectedly underscores an awareness of our “understanding of the links between impact and impartation” tied to the “working language,” it glances askew at subjects produced by section I, recasting the “Modern English farmers” of “Anti-conquest” as farmers of the Modern English Language. The mix of long and short poems in each section enhances a realization of one’s attention span — themes appear and reappear, manipulating a cognitive reading map to include densities beyond the weight differential between pages in the left or right hand. When section II ends in one page, for example, it suggests both an immediate rereading and a share of meaning-function equal to its surrounding sections.

Innovative forms also send forward these backwards-facing reverberations. Two pages into “Anti-conquest,” Flis’ brief introduction of lines (“ | ”) first restructures the relationship between the appearance of words and their sensible position within the text, then subtly shifts our knowledge of the pages’ motions (up to that point) towards a unified vertical alignment — instead of the left to right of pages passing before us — by breaking and reinstating a length of “ | ” between two pages. This sudden unification of disparate parts (“Have you ever thought about killing yourself?”) emphasizes a theme of misinterpreting the original stakes and ramifications of communication and its mediums.

At “checkpoint @ first ingress”, the interrogative dialogue of “Anti-conquest” gives way to a repetition of the authoritative giving-it-to-you-straightness of “What I’m saying to you is”, slipping manically between defining ground conditions and hinting at accusations, inviting the fear of misunderstanding, the confusion when being stopped or arrested:

The terms of passage seem as if they can be even more terrifying:

These concerns over mi(ss/x)ed signals or effects, detached from their causes, reach the foundations of our current political climate most clearly in how section III deals with the WTC attacks: “Time to go up there, and tell them what you are / doing” (“Time to Bomb Saddam”).  The events taking place in each portion of “Flight Simulator” call to mind the terrible portent said in hindsight, of the suicidal attackers in training: they wanted only to fly, not land. The poems move from, to our eyes, excessive arcane spellings, through “pared down” contemporary language and its fragments, ending finally at letter groups from which looping lines indicate the flight of associated words: the last four letters of “h s a e h a p e s e b a a d o l n t o h t,” for instance, producing “[tonight].” Here, the challenges of working out potential significations (word, material, and arrangement) are refracted through the dangers of letting things settle too thoroughly:

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“Legends of the Fall,” a centered list or index of webpage topics concerning the material collapse of the Twin Towers, asserts the mundanely technical complexity of any event — again, unnerving and pausing the credibility of what we imagine to have gathered from the text thus far, a condition borne into theatricality when we realize that numbering only the book’s odd pages has allowed section I’s first numerated sheets to be 9 and 11. These “inside job” moments, in which conspiracy passes over the book’s earlier gestures, appropriate the gradual semblance of irresolvable data proper to fringe web journalism. Computers and the internet appear silently in Peasants as both mass reference sources for the eclectic knowledge-modes in use, and as a technological interface providing the initial structuring of these elements.

Although some lines and sections may contain appropriated language, and although a poem such as “A Demon I Tie On” could reference Brian Kim Stefans’ term for the program or codes used to produce computer poems, Peasants possesses a consistency of voice bound to an excellence of word choice and tonal development. There is an enormous variety of work present, including a kind of tele-drama featuring sniper Lee Boyd Malvo (really the United States’ 43rd President disguised as Malvo), and Ground-Zero (“Are you some sort of jerk-off?  Some sorta dummy? / Nominees, / Open your mouths and I will fill them / With song ideas for you.”). Peasants is an extremely engaging book, frequently rewriting its own terms and examining individualistic methodologies of embedding temporal markers into what we mean when we speak of an event or object occurring over a period or series.

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