Before getting into heady discussions and theorizing, I want to acknowledge that reading Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle (Northwestern University Press, 2023) is undeniably fun. As a graduate student in literature, I often reach for an analytical approach to cultural production (ugh, enough already!), which in turn often limits my engagement with a text on a personal level. I inevitably find myself so used to over-explaining what a text is doing that I forget what the text does to me.
In some respects, overexplaining Chang’s work takes away from its effect. As they note in “RASPUTIN,” “i just want to be slightly beautiful & lightly educated.” The poet composes texts predominantly by combining individual (at times quite long) lines that draw from various speech-genres, such as texts to your last hookup (“like jesus said, i am thirsty . . . ur place, or another trip to dean & deluca (???) hmu”), ideas for tweets (“Fiction writers love to look “furtively””), and general absurdity (“read rilke while lukas gage was rimmed on ep4 of white lotus”), all the while straddling the binaries of high and low, sincere and irreverent. Their previous poetry collection, Almanac of Useless Talents, my introduction to their work, expresses in its title a profound resistance to a reading of their work that puts it to use, tries to take it for more than the deep anarchic fun that it is. But since overexplaining is the useless talent I bring to the table, let’s reject this warning and have at it.
The irreverent pleasure of Michael Chang’s poems stems from their shocking juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated chains of associations, each line meant to be more provocative and absurd than the last. The list of visually and at times semantically isolated long lines that comprise the most frequent shape of their texts recalls the famous notecard poems of the late Moscow Conceptualist Lev Rubinstein. Indeed, placing Chang’s work alongside Conceptualist practices reveals the radical critique of poetic subjectivity hidden beneath its turbulent surface. Rubinstein’s texts are composed on individual library catalogue cards that the poet read from in his famous performances. Each utterance is thus isolated, the poem’s progression consisting of a series of discrete statements combined through their enunciation. This form reinforces the “content” of his texts: Rubinstein’s poems are collections of overheard phrases from late Soviet life, instructions, aphorisms, and directions, all of which do not cohere into a singular poetic voice but rather remain meditations on language and its illusory referents.
One of the Conceptualist poet’s most famous texts is the seemingly personal “This is me” (1995; all translations are by Philip Metres), which begins as a flipping through of a family photo album before spiraling off in a variety of different media tangents, the sum total of which is, as the title suggest, is meant to point to the unrepresentable lyric subject “me.” The text concludes with an impossible composite self-portrait of sorts:
113
And this is me.114
And this is me in underwear.115
And this is me in underwear.
I hid my head under the blanket116
And this is me in underwear.
I hid my head under the blanket
running across a sunny meadow.117
And this is me in underwear.
I hid my head under the blanket
running across a sunny lawn,
my marmot safely in my hands.118
My marmot safely in my hands.119
Exit.
Returning to the initial “photo album” conceit in card 114, the text complicates the image in card 115 by adjoining an additional line that breaks the same conceit: where is the camera that can take a photo of the speaker both in his underwear and under a blanket? Card 117 only makes the image even more impossible with the added detail of “running across a sunny lawn”—the “photo album” is left behind, and the reader is forced to confront the lack of exact reference in language. Before the speaker/subject exits at the end of the poem as a stage direction (another acknowledgment of language’s illusory nature), the text repeats its interpolation of a line from Beethoven’s “La Marmotte”: rather than being unique and discrete, the self, the “me” is an assemblage of quotations at the end of the day.
Like Conceptualist poets, Chang challenges traditional notions of reference in poetry: in contrast to the late Soviet networks that Rubinstein’s poetry is plugged into, their linguistic world is that of the late 2010s-early 2020s internet, replete with memes and shitposting. Their works self-consciously draw from a wide variety of linguistic strata that historically have been seen as beyond the scope of poetry:
The notion of “poetic language” is bogus & elitist—everything is poetry
It looks like one of those creatures that’s cute but could kill u
It’s a golf pencil
It’s a pair of cowboy boots
Look away!
Watch the gap!
Run for office?
Can I even run my own life?
The associative daisy chain begins with a theoretical claim, albeit presented appropriately colloquially, before running away on the internal logic of its own flow. After listing everyday items as sites for poetry, the text transitions into the language of everyday instructions, before taking “Run for office?” seriously and doubting even the ability to continue producing itself.
Chang is not concerned with their poetry being “personal” within the dominant paradigm of what Donald Hall calls the “McPoem”: usually a snapshot of an intense individual experience drawn from the poet’s life, defined by attention to sensory detail where emotions are shown and not told, in part as a testament to the inciting moment’s intensity. Furthermore, the expectations for a McPoem from writers of color and queer writers are even more narrow and confining, as Chang self-reflexively notes in Almanac of Useless Talents:
i put these secrets into skin fry them till they are golden brown
drizzle plum sauce on them sweet & savory
this is how they want me to write
instead i write about timothée chalamet
Here, failure to be “personal” reveals the unconscious biases that structures readers’ expectations of what counts as “personal.” The McPoem, as the term suggests, is just another product. While critics have argued that the genre of poem Chang satirizes is egalitarian in increasing accessibility to the genre as a whole, their approach manages to be even more egalitarian by directly referencing everyday speech and confronting the elitism of “poetic language” within the text itself while providing the reader even more shocking pleasures of unexpected and unusual combinations. Their montage of linguistic spheres, parallel to that of the Conceptualists, also challenges the very notion of a stable and emotionally honest lyric speaker:
you said this is one of your more vulnerable poems
i said yea, cuz of you, you made me this way
burned all my yearbooks cuz boring is worse than fake
why’d you say that i’m not responsible for how you feel—&
you’re not responsible for how i feel
where does that leave us
parking lot at little caesars
deep love, bargain prices
Vulnerability or “sincerity” is revealed to be another mask, another brand, brought into dialogue with the language of commerce in Chang’s unending linguistic merry-go-round.
In contrast to Conceptualist practices and related movements that thematize language as such and emphasize its disconnection from reality, however, Chang’s poetry has an undeniable viscerality where it cannot merely be reduced to “marks on a page” even if its relationship to the real world is fraught. As they proclaim in “THE OVERLY AGGRESSIVE FORTUNE COOKIE SPEAKS,” “only white ppl can afford language poetry.” The collection’s title aptly names this contradiction at the heart of their creative process: artificial detachment on the one hand, deeply involved and wild on the other. This anarchic spirit is not the kind of personality that stems from confessional poetry—Chang’s texts are far too “insincerely sincere” and chaotic to cohere into a unified and comfortable notion of a personal monologue.
As such, I propose to view Chang’s aesthetic sensibility through the music genre of hyperpop. While the term is highly debated in the music community (and this review is yet another in a series of the genre’s death knells), transposing it into the field of literary analysis and widening its applicability is nonetheless useful to understanding Chang’s Internet-inspired dance around sincerity. Broadly understood, hyperpop describes, according to the Independent (clearly the most reliable source for this information) “a self-referential, humorous and excessive brand of pop music,” “a sound enthralled with taut, squealy synth melodies and Auto-Tuned earworm hooks, but also surrealism, nostalgia for the apparently bygone internet age of the Noughties, and distortion, lots of it.” Artists such as 100 gecs, Dorian Electra, and Rina Sawayama do not wrestle against the “falsity” of pop music but embrace and lean into it, writing catchy and absurd songs on topics ranging from losing all your money on a stupid horse to telling people online to “touch grass.” Hyperpop performs a highly queer-coded variety of intentional camp that in its chaotic energy achieves glints of sincerity amid multiple layers of irony and subversion.
I do not mean to “classify” Chang’s work as the poetry of hyperpop: such a claim would dilute an already diluted term. The term does, however, provide an optics for understanding the rapid shifts and the insincere sincerity that animates their work, the unruly spirit that follows their process of association. The aesthetics of hyperpop sit as a counterweight to Conceptualist remove and coldness. As Chang proclaims at the start of “白球鞋 WHITE TENNIS SHOES”: ““poetry of the everyday” means boring poetry,” and their texts, varied as they are in their “subject matter” (if that term is even appropriate), are never boring, infused with the frenetic zaniness of terminally online hyperpop. This zaniness, of course, is highly self-reflective: Chang does not have poems that are entirely metapoetic, but their paratactic combinations of lines frequently dip into statements about poetry itself. Thus, “BEST BUDDIES, 1990” ends with a send-up of traditional sensory-oriented poetry with pure affect:
A critic said that Nabokov’s feelings were like no one else’s . . . really? No one else’s?
Let’s strive for fewer words & more feeling . . .
The feeling vs the image: “face down ass up”
In a classic sprint from high to low, Chang moves from the ineffable Nabokov to the direct 2 Live Crew, the juxtaposition forcing the reader to reckon with their own views of “literariness” and privileging flow above all else.
In contemporary discussions about creative production under capitalism, be it the threats of AI, accusations of plagiarism, or the steady slippage of art into content, we frequently and often uncritically fall back into Romantic notions of genius that emphasize the role of the artist as a divinely inspired creator. To be fair, the landscape for creativity created by late capitalism is hostile, to say the least, and collective, systemic solutions that go beyond the realm of art are necessary for true flourishing. I do not mean to dismiss these threats as insignificant. What I do suggest is that returning to an idea of an exceptional individual whose naturally gifted brilliance is what makes them deserving of the title “artist” is propped up by many elitist assumptions that obscure the true anarchic and rhizomatic nature of creativity. Furthermore, it does not present a viable alternative to art under capitalism: in the twenty-first century, “visionary poet” is just as much a brand as anything else. Michael Chang’s poetry offers a fascinating alternative: dive head first into the “artifice” of poetry. These are not the words of a whispered confession, nor the booming bass of a prophet: the fragments that comprise their texts are meant to read as fragments, the transition and flow between each line more significant than the line itself. More than anything, once again, Chang’s poetry is fun and liberatory, confronting expectations of what the genre “should be” head-on.
