Sam Riviere, _Kim Kardashian's Marriage_

 THIS IS RIVIERE'S second book of poems, from 2015. It follows a very regular organizational plan.

 Suppose we have a "List A" with the following nine words or phrases: american, beautiful, girlfriend, grave, ice cream, infinity, spooky, the new, and thirty-three. Now suppose we have a "List B" with the following eight words: berries, dust, heaven, pool, sincerity, sunglasses, sunsets, and weather. Now take a word from List A and pair it with a word from List B: "girlfriend berries," or "spooky sunglasses," or "the new heaven." Make each possible pairing the title of the poem, and you will have 9 x 8 or 72 titles--the 72 titles of the 72 poems contained in Kim Kardashian's Marriage, a number arrived at because her marriage to Kris Humphries lasted 72 days. 

The 72 poems are arranged in eight sections of nine poems apiece, the sections bearing titles--"Primer," "Contour," "Highlight"--taken from the stages of Kim Kardashian's makeup routine.

In other words, we have a mathematically-generated structure as rigorous as that of Dante in the Divine Comedy, with all its threes and sevens and nines, but instead of being based on the harmony of the cosmos it is based on numbers arbitrarily chosen from aspects of the career of a celebrity who is a byword for superficiality. 

The poems themselves are composed with techniques that in the USA are called "flarf." In the words of the jacket copy, the poems "have been produced by harvesting and manipulating the results of search engines to create a poetry of part-collage, part improvisation." For instance, the poem titled "the new hardcore" begins with this couplet:

This is an all-out onslaught
that very much lives up to the  tech spec.

The poems are not exactly expressive, then--they do not proceed from  the observations, ideas, and emotions of the poet--but they can be read as though they are, I'd say, and are even very effective read that way, funny, surprising, even fresh, despite none of the language having actually popped up spontaneously in Riviere's imagination.

These are poems that don't want to be Poems--that want to leave far behind everything that Heidegger waxed lyrical about in "The Origin of the Work Art." And maybe that's healthy, given how things unspooled with Heidegger. Or is it an abdication? Or a renunciation? I'm not sure I like it, but it may be important, I have to admit, a poetry for after the demise of Poetry, a poetry that is important for its renunciation of Importance.