Brian Kim Stefans

WHAT IS SAID TO THE POET CONCERNING FLOWERS by Brian Kim Stefans Factory School, 2006 Poetry, 148 pages, paperback $14 Reviewed by C St Perez

In What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers, Brian Kim Stefans quotes musician Brian Eno: “With punk, a brand-new axis opened up: professionally cut [/] hacked about by a brainless cretin. As often happens, this appeared (and was intended) to be an anti-style style […] The effect was not to overthrow and eliminate the idea of style but to give it new places in which to extend itself” (89). Stefans’s poetry, extended through the axis of punk, offers new possibilities for a “punk-avant” rebellion.  Throughout What is Said, Stefans incorporates themes that we wouldn’t normally associate with “flowers” or other romanticized poetic themes. At different moments, we read: “Calibanic fortune-cookies at Studio 54” (61); “Visitors: a talcum blind, Jihad vs. / McWorld” (53); “a dark humor obtained, a cyber-sexual, / middle-aged vaudeville of what was relentless” (65); and (my personal favorite) “Philip K. Dick channeling Spicerian Lenny Bruce through old coffee radio / of insomniac Chomskyite nites” (84). Stefans describes his praxis in the poem “This Method is Poetry”: This method is poetry                              pulling in “outside” feelings, habits, that wouldn’t be acceptable                              otherwise but now like a toehold on to humanity’s cliffs it                                                           persists […] (19) His “anti-style style” places us on the stage of poetic rebellion, where the poet’s desire “to create a situation becomes [his] only cause” (31). Stefans mentions International Situationist member Guy Debord in this collection, perhaps to point us to the situationist idea of “derive,” a spontaneous drifting through varied ambiances. The poem “Midas Ears” is exemplary of Stefans’s ability to create a situation: “We” have found roses cheaper than cigarettes. (Putting a square patch on your shoulder to kill an instinct.) Perhaps I will stay here, away from your writing divided between the rout of Pollocks and What’s Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers. * I stop  and wave. Then punk happened. (45) His poetic inclinations fluidly shift tones and textures, reveling in his instincts to let anything enter. Formally, What is Said presents so many different techniques that the book reads like a volume of “selected poems.” Perhaps this is not so far from the truth: on the acknowledgements page, we learn that What is Saidcomprises 6 previously published chapbooks, along with other poems, a play, and a short comic (a collaboration with poet and artist Gary Sullivan). This impressive range promises aesthetic revolution:  Promises: quasi-elitist self-training as a poet —setting the parameters since it is then, so much more revealing in my writing, syntax even— talker— that a particular aspect of poetry that begin with this sentence that is lacking in the creation of a “schedule” not to mention my own social distractions of cultural capital will be my expression of revolutionary will, writer, yes. (40)