Melville House, 2008
Read by Aaron Giovannone
Over the last few years, Tao Lin’s blog (readerofdepressingbooks.blogspot.com) has cultivated a large following of fans, or as he has called them in one of his self-promotional web stunts, “Tao Lin Interns”. Lin’s transparent, funny, confessional style is well-suited to the online environment’s demand for immediate gratification, and judging by the blog postings of some of his avid ‘Interns’, this style is highly contagious.
One of the most appealing things about Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Lin’s second book of poetry, is how it skillfully navigates the poles between irony and earnestness. We can see this in Lin’s use of what we might consider staples of poetic writing: metaphor and prosody. There is, in fact, barely a metaphor in the book, besides the extended anthropomorphisms where Lin becomes a hamster:
In florida a giant hamster lays in bed worrying about its future
The hamster has bad eyesight
And many other problems
Later that night the hamster drives its car around
Listening to sad music; the hamster lightly drums its paws on the steering wheel
The hamster is alone
But not for long: at home three waffle friends wait
Cooling inside a countertop oven in the kitchen
While the hamster metaphor is obviously ironic, a purposefully transparent veil for Lin’s confessionalism, it’s also serious because the figure adds something at face value: the writer really does feel trapped and powerless like a hamster. Lin’s best prosody works in a similar way, both earnestly and ironically:
‘in the distance a sarcastic man walks around
I don’t know if he’s sarcastic or not
I don’t know anything about him
I don’t know anything’ is an irrational
and melodramatic pattern of thought.
Through repetition and self-quotation, Lin crafts a solipsistic music that undercuts the pretension of rhythmic or rhyming poetry while simultaneously providing the pleasures of such writing.
While Lin’s self-examinations often cross the line into self-indulgence, the overall impression made by Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is of a young man trying to find a morally responsible position in the world. In one poem Lin describes straight-forwardly and persuasively why independent businesses are more ethical than publicly-traded ones. This is not inconsistent with the funny poems in the book; after all, isn’t making people laugh – making them happy – an ethical thing to do? Tao Lin is very good at it, which is perhaps why so many bloggers like him (and want to write like him).
