THE FLOW OF THE POEM’S
DISPLAY OF ITSELF

by CARRIE HUNTER

Carrie Hunter’s The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself began as a formal experiment with a canonical text of the avant-garde, John Ashbery’s legendary long poem Flow Chart. It grew into an extended reflection on influence, community, and what it means to spend one’s life reading and writing poetry.

Hunter's experiment with Flow Chart continually returns to Ashbery as a portal to the particulars of Hunter’s own writing life. But the work expands to include ecological connections and collapse, her friend and publisher Marthe Reed, and Bay Area writing communities.

It would be easy to read this work as either an homage to or takedown of Ashbery, but Hunter’s experiment yields something ultimately more interesting, a

poem that happens in the context of the community in which it was written and read. This was surely the case for Ashbery and the New York School as it is for The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself, a tribute to the work of her friends. 

Praise for The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself

Carrie Hunterʼs writing takes the most exciting innovations of Language Poetry and cleverly folds them into a voice that is playful, anxious, wise, and funny. In The Flow of the Poemʼs Display of Itself, she uses the unexpected collision of Marthe Reed and John Ashbery to produce a well of language from which she draws ingeniously to illustrate how hilariously inadequate poetry is as a politi-cal tool in our fraught and failing moment at the same time that it may be the only way to speak truthfully to this era. As Hunter puts it: “Songs never end, they just vibrate off each other, / resounding back and forth forever. / Half full/half empty, but about the shore.”    
– Misha Crafts

In The Flow of the Poemʼs Display of Itself, Carrie Hunter drops us into a deep, associative state where thought and its output, language (her own and others), become animate, sentient, brilliant under her gaze. Get your necessary neuro-plasticity here! Pathways burn bright as Hunter runs new routes via filmic cuts and splices. Hunter’s poetics also clearly act out an ethics and a politics around collectively-generated, collectively-augmented reality. There’s so much joy in watching her work.                

– Lindsey Boldt 

About the Author

Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, was in the Black Radish Books publishing collective, and edited the chap-book press, ypolita press. She is the author of three prior full-length collections of poems: Vibratory Milieu, Or-phan Machines, and The Incompossible. She lives in San Francisco and teaches ESL.