MLA Chernoff, Estro Flunky

Estro Flunky is a whiplash blur of self-yes-and-ing, a chapbook that, for all intents and purposes, could never be talked about enough. But, I must admit I am biased, because I am thriving off the parasocial relationship living rent-free in my headcanon since reading it. I kid, but in all seriousness, it has led to some incredibly creative moments for myself in my own writing.

MLA Chernoff is, as far as I can tell, living the dream. If you’re familiar with bill bissett, Adeena Karasick, or Vanessa Place’s work, then you will feel right at home with MLA. A self-described “recovering academic” (likely synonym of “postmodern Neo-Marxist”), there is nothing flunky about the inner intertextuality of this too brief work. It’s more like they were writing dril tweets as tumblr posts. Living the dream for real.

I feel as though it could not be more relevant, nor satirical, though not only MLA’s but the title it riffs off of, Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, too. Like Shrek, there are layers at play here.

Just last month, Daniel Kolitz published a long-form piece on gooning in Harper’s. Hot on its heels, though seemingly unrelated, 20,000 Epstein emails got published revealing that, among many other less explicit implications, Donald Trump allegedly performed oral sex on former president Bill Clinton, something that the “biopolitical fictions” of the GOP’s constituents may not, unlike every other accusation, finally, be able to stomach.

What Estro Flunky accomplishes, even within its first staccato accompaniment of lines and line breaks, is this punk-like defiance of polite society, the wrath of liberal sexuality, and a nuance to Freudian slip that only someone with an inner Oscar Wilde could smirk in the face of while improvising verse. It’s sonorant, evocative, unrecalcitrant, and pulls no punches with readers familiar with the joys of punctuation, formatting, and the eschewance of orthographic convention.

There are places I wanted to delve into allusions and for the chronically online, you likely won’t miss a beat—but I misgendered the Pokémon Geodude in the process of writing this and decided it’s not an angle I’m brave enough to take—rather leave it to more talented writers, such as the author of A Giant List Explaining Why All 151 Pokemon Are Queer.

If you’re desensitized to all the internet has to offer and doomscrolling through the existential pain, MLA Chernoff’s Estro Flunky chapbook is like seeing one of those old endless screaming bot’s tweets that really resonates with you and drags you up clinging to the door frame out of the void as you recite the Bane monologue word-for-word making direct eye contact with yourself in the mirror, weeping.

Soyjacking

In-other-words,
this pome is basically
an estrogen-based, involuntary
detoxification protocol, which
concerns the bawdy affects of
MLA. A bawdy pome,
citationally countersexed
through name-spite, trudged new.

Lusting prosaic,
actually: if anything.
If things must be hushed
to the extreme, this is a tomato timer,
a political fiction, a fear of the self,
keying futurity, slashing its tires.

In-other-words,
I am feeling.
Feeling, finally, to feel—finally.
Ribcage pitted, enclosed hands
strongarmed by sweat
in holdhope,
shivering deregulation
in bad faith readings
of Celan.

    In-other-words
    can the Munster speak?

Unexpected expectations
of of of nightfall droughts,
half-seated in shade. Doubtslain by
fullness, mouth caned by the
end at the very end of the end.

A fence reckons a light
snow up the sleeve, begins the show,
purrs at a poet’s ugly moon.
Depressive, they invert desire
into verse, named from without:
untitled, like pomes of yore,
your yore, a yak of longing
going, going, gone: yippee.

    In-other-words
    can the Munster speak?

I give you you—blanket-slapped
encroaching loveless raptures
of serious seriousness, valued
over the counter, uncounted,
filed single, like the ease of a 600%
price increase. Stepping off and
counting down the days until
theory practices the law of the lump,
some tenderness, and other
brainy risks.

    In-other-words
    can the Munster speak?

I give you you—guilt-flacked
wishes, a flock of egrets acknowledging
infinite regret, regressing into memory,
a stye drained of grainpang,
verboten kernels melting into melting pots,
thin with watersalt,
thick with untranslatable
Nachträglichkeit that
cannot be unwilled, lest the dose
lowers you into me, into age, and later,
out, off-page, into unscripted wilderness
with choreographies
of the will:
compulsive, repetitive,
impulsive, competitive.

Awkward re-pubescence
signalling de-pimpling and
bioluminescence,
red pills sulking sublingually;
the hope for the hope of a hope
end of the line, the chain, this chain:
the soft landing
of being skinned alive
by sophistries of
a softer whim.

    In-other-words,
    can the Munster speak?
    Would they want to,
    anyway?

I would be remiss not to conclude when I first read this chapbook, I was exuberant, writing in my notes how inspiring this work felt, how much it made me want to write, quote:

Reading this makes me want to submit 5 fucking chapbook [sic] to rob mclennan to publish thru above/ground, goddamn. I loved it.

And it did. I did, I mean, write. I started a very important project thanks to MLA Chernoff and I had a very important conversation about said very important project with another writer because of it. Thank you, MLA. But since then, I have been lost to the colourless fury of a wordless existence, like opening my eyes every day to a blank page and letting it suffocate me.

I should have written this review far earlier. Maybe it would have helped me maintain the momentum that it gave me. My only hope in writing it now is that it brings back the initial feeling that led me to doing something very serious, several months ago, and then wandering along the allegorical coast of writer’s block aimlessly, knowing I should probably turn back at some point and head home, without ever once turning around.

Rereading this book all this time later makes me ask myself: what the hell is wrong with me? But this isn’t about me, I am writing about MLA Chernoff’s work. Underrated sleeper poetry of the decade.

There are assonances here (pardon my French) to bill bissett (that damn smile, @54:55), undeniably, as their CV will confirm:

There are only a handful of Canadian writers I have seen perform at public readings since 2018 that commit to the sound poetics (Lautgedichte) of traditional Dadaists: bill, Stuart, Gary (Gregory Betts and Lillian Allen were there during Gary Barwin’s reading in Toronto, too, but, at least in the moment, it seemed he was the maestro of all the sound choices that night), and MLA. They’ve really tapped into something I don’t think many others in our generation(ish? peace and love) could, for lack of wits or lack of guts, really commit their whole emcee-ussy to.

bpNichol and Paul B. Preciado seem to be just as present as one another in this work, a nod to each of them (did I hallucinate the Martyrologist reference?) serving as a testament (pun intended) that non-cis/genderqueer poetics has a historical stake in experimentalism, both literal and, in the case of Preciado, biochemical, especially in the final poem of the chap, “DOMESTIC BIOTERRORISM; or, THAT SUMMER FEELING”, which opens with two bombastic stanzas, “Better be fuckan healing. // If your friends and their friends aren’t / on a watchlist, you’re doing it wrong” which brings to mind the femboy-to-Nazi pipeline discourse that was briefly relevant in the mainstream at some point over this year’s 24-hour news cycle.

The constant appearance in print of equals signs between words throughout, too, of course give visual lip service to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets of yore, although my familiarity with Black Mountain school of poetry begins and ends with George Bowering’s work, really. But in all the orthographic and grammatical and even prosodic conventions broken in this short text, these pockets of intellectual influence reveal their abyss-like depths, with every unconventional turn of keyboard demonstrating their reconstituted lore, stewed together into something more.

Lastly, and perhaps most challenging to connect with or express, is MLA Chernoff’s influence of Celan. Tied up in expert knowledge with the collected works of Freud, the German-language authors’ combined show not only in the insistence of certain psychological literary tropes (Preciado’s coinage of pharmacopornographic capitalism evermore salient in hindsight) as is common with any acknowledgement of Freud, but a subdued commitment to Celanisms, not only those special kinds of German neologisms usually combining two nouns or a noun and an adjective into metaphors of their own that he’s known for, apparent in such turns of Chernoff’s phrase as “pertwet waterbone” or “eternity of fleeting / sad lamps”, but more appreciatively than the North American 20th century poets who found it trendy to namedrop him, translate him, or borrow a word or two before moving on, speaking from experience of having read Celan in German myself. I wonder what he would make of our modern coinings such as “nihilistic violent extremism,” when, no doubt, all violence is extreme and nihilistic, by definition.

If Chernoff seems hesitant or all-too brief, I ask myself, why shouldn’t they be? They are working off a blueprint that is continually in the process of being drawn up and their body of extant work to date is already vertigo-inducing. This imaginary house already has such good bones to build off of and I sincerely hope they keep writing (“Jordan Peterson is just Heidegger for incels” gives top-tier rage bait for the alt-right). Keep writing more about the things you know and love.

I can’t wait to read their latest through rob’s above/ground press SLOPTIMISM of the WILL💔😭 out now!