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A review by nick_jenkins
My Baby First Birthday by Jenny Zhang
4.0
The line “not everyone can be sloppy and get away with it” from Zhang’s poem “communication ≠ connection” states plainly this book’s challenge to itself and to the reader. Is Zhang one of those people who can be sloppy and get away with it, and will the reader try to stop her?
The challenge of sloppiness as an aesthetic is that trying to achieve it can be self-defeating: the more one strives to produce an effect of disorganization, the more a latent structure of organized thoughts and motifs begins to coagulate and obtrude through the mess. Aiming at spontaneity will not work: sloppiness is not the same thing as spontaneity, first of all, and spontaneity is meant to feel fresh and emergent, while sloppiness is all residue and rot.
In other words, it is genuinely an aesthetic challenge to write sloppy poetry, and perhaps (another paradox) the only way to evaluate an author’s success at achieving this effect is to monitor the reader for signs of disgruntlement and disengagement. Such a response can be seen in one Goodreads reviewer’s complaint that Zhang confuses vulgarity for sophistication. I don’t think she actually does, but I do think she wants to tempt the reader into precisely that judgment. “This is just crude” would be the most desirable reaction possible—crude does, after all, mean “raw” and has a connotation of rankness or viscosity. Crudity is sloppiness.
But Zhang says that not everyone can get away with being sloppy. Does that suggest that some people’s efforts at sloppiness fall short of the mark, or that they succeed too well, that their sloppiness was so energetic that it engaged the reader almost against their will? I think of the dark allure of Frederick Seidel’s poetry like that—he can’t get away with sloppiness because his readers know they are being toyed with, that Seidel at his most repellent is also Seidel at his most aggressively domineering. Sloppiness is far more passive in its repugnance: it is not trying very hard to disgust you—it just does.
Zhang achieves this passivity by returning again and again to both infantile fixations (anal and oral) and pubescent self-obsession (genital). This very loose borrowing of Freudian stage theory is not ironized but it also does not ask for the reader’s commitment: we aren’t required to play along. Zhang exposes these fixations as kinks—they are not meant to be mimetic (to represent something in the world or in the mind) but purely performative, something close to a gloopy, chaotic ritual. (There is a recurrent theme of semen replacing both communion wafers and the waters of baptism as sacramental substances.)
All in all, I found this collection of poems to be deeply intellectually rewarding and pleasurably intense aesthetically. I would not recommend it, though. You will have to decide whether or not you want to accept it on its own terms.
The challenge of sloppiness as an aesthetic is that trying to achieve it can be self-defeating: the more one strives to produce an effect of disorganization, the more a latent structure of organized thoughts and motifs begins to coagulate and obtrude through the mess. Aiming at spontaneity will not work: sloppiness is not the same thing as spontaneity, first of all, and spontaneity is meant to feel fresh and emergent, while sloppiness is all residue and rot.
In other words, it is genuinely an aesthetic challenge to write sloppy poetry, and perhaps (another paradox) the only way to evaluate an author’s success at achieving this effect is to monitor the reader for signs of disgruntlement and disengagement. Such a response can be seen in one Goodreads reviewer’s complaint that Zhang confuses vulgarity for sophistication. I don’t think she actually does, but I do think she wants to tempt the reader into precisely that judgment. “This is just crude” would be the most desirable reaction possible—crude does, after all, mean “raw” and has a connotation of rankness or viscosity. Crudity is sloppiness.
But Zhang says that not everyone can get away with being sloppy. Does that suggest that some people’s efforts at sloppiness fall short of the mark, or that they succeed too well, that their sloppiness was so energetic that it engaged the reader almost against their will? I think of the dark allure of Frederick Seidel’s poetry like that—he can’t get away with sloppiness because his readers know they are being toyed with, that Seidel at his most repellent is also Seidel at his most aggressively domineering. Sloppiness is far more passive in its repugnance: it is not trying very hard to disgust you—it just does.
Zhang achieves this passivity by returning again and again to both infantile fixations (anal and oral) and pubescent self-obsession (genital). This very loose borrowing of Freudian stage theory is not ironized but it also does not ask for the reader’s commitment: we aren’t required to play along. Zhang exposes these fixations as kinks—they are not meant to be mimetic (to represent something in the world or in the mind) but purely performative, something close to a gloopy, chaotic ritual. (There is a recurrent theme of semen replacing both communion wafers and the waters of baptism as sacramental substances.)
All in all, I found this collection of poems to be deeply intellectually rewarding and pleasurably intense aesthetically. I would not recommend it, though. You will have to decide whether or not you want to accept it on its own terms.