Michael Scharf introduction, Bowery Poetry Club, 11/15

Michael Scharf is a contributing editor at Publishers Weekly and Poets & Writers magazines, and the editor and publisher of Harry Tankoos Books. He is the author of Telemachiad, a Harry Tankoos chapbook. His most recent book, Verite, is available online at Ubu editions.

If Michael Scharf were a kind of tea he would be …CONSTANT CRITIQUE.

If he were an animal he would be a pushmepullyou, one head political, the other personal, creating tension as they pull in opposite directions. His poetic essays and expository poetry constantly illustrate the tensions between human beings as social beings. He writes in his brilliant, uncategorizable thinkpiece, “I Love Systems,” which Drew Gardner has called “perhaps the most original _day my father died_ confessional poem ever written”: “in most climates one cannot live without working or paying or forcing someone else to work, so that capital, an image or expression carried and directed by people, makes use of psychological prejudice as part of its hidden mechanisms for exploiting labor.”

If Michael Scharf were from another planet, he would surely be here as an anthropologist. Perhaps because he loves systems, he has an extraordinary ability to get aesthetic distance between himself and his species, and therefore to describe it (us) systemically as something altogether strange and more than a little problematic.

If he were a mythological figure he might be Atlas. Or a reincarnation of Celan — to whom he pays homage with portmanteauish, not unGermanic neologisms such as carapacesararay and postrestantaurant.

Constant critique. His poems are the keenest coruscations of conscience criticizing cankerous capitalist corruption.

At the same time they are musical entities. They hum with the music of analysis — cantatas of concept, thought sonatas, fugues against the state.

There is a great range in them of stylistic approach, from a straightforward literary/historical/sociological/theoretical statement like this one:

After the nihilism of modernism

that either crashed and burned in

theological or fascist fervor, or into un-

healthy obsessions with the body’s many

manifestations, and after the frustrate ironies,

pop inoculations, bad faith appropriations and scare

quotes that followed in the poetry of Michael Palmer and others,

we are entering a period similar to the Age of Reason, but bereft…

to the odd and whimsical

Bee haven, paeanuts,

excreting hornden,

grand gallumpf.

Let us borrow that grand gallumpf, and welcome….