Third

and all that

Shaking your money maker
In the land of why not:
Natural male enhancement,
And getting rich quick
is
Breaking free from the pack.

And all that, “Drill baby, drill!”
drill baby drill baby drill baby ß (a mantra few wanted to chant)

burrowing infant

hole making newborn

holy failed abortion

Permit me: in these phony reports--
And increase your PayPal!

Click here; is an opportunity--
All here!

Friends: Licensed love pills--
I gave them.


























Although I thought this poem would be the easiest to write, I found it very hard to give the up the effort to create representational meaning and let the text work on its own level. I tried a few poems with some of the pattern generators but was unhappy with the completely nonsensical result. I thought about editing them into slightly more cohesive units of meaning but gave up that project in an effort to find text that I was exposed to in my surroundings.
The first half of the poem is all TV commercial advertising which I somehow sit through apparently on a daily basis, hearing but not listening. This text must work its way into the subconscious by lulling the audience into a stupor. By taking these quotes out of context and placing them within the context of the poem the inane claims made by corporations to improve your lifestyle become silly and trite. The heavy rhetoric behind these words is evacuated and mocked by cutting and pasting them together to show how outlandish such claims really are. These are advertisements, not for things themselves, but for lifestyles and ideas which really have nothing to do with the product. Just as language is frustrated in expressing meaning, these products claim to deliver something that they never can.
Language is also explored as a kind of meme or a sound bite that can be used to influence the public. The cry of “Drill Baby, Drill,” uttered by Giuliani at the Republican National Convention, attempted to influence Americans by giving them an easily chantable phrase meant to take over the mind on the level of language. It is noted parenthetically that this manta failed to gain public acceptance in an effort to step outside the text and cause the reader to question her/his relationship to the piece in the same way that Hejinian asks the reader, “are your fingers in the margin.”
I also experimented with Homolinguistic translation by playing with the words drill baby. Drill baby becomes hole making newborn becomes holy failed abortion, and of course the idea of a drill baby is itself a play on the original utterance. The silliness, absurdity and offensiveness of this move is a definite nod to the Flarf movement in which intentionally bad poetry is produced.
The last few lines are all found text from a spam generator which again demonstrate the lengths advertisers will go in asserting that their products are a panacea for the ills of everyday life. The irony is that these claims to fulfill all desire, delivered through the medium of language, cause more suffering by fostering the idea that an end to suffering can be had at a price. Such desire feeding only goes to create more desire, and by recontextualizing the language of advertising this poem seeks to undermine the foundation upon which the rhetoric of advertising is founded.