FAQ:

Ben Doller

An author's statement

Thank you for your question. FAQ: springs from several fascinations: for one, the form and language of advice, especially the sort of advice frozen in online portals, usually tapped from the fingers of nameless or aliased non-credentialed purveyors of wisdom. I am happy to report that this fascination has now officially been exorcised. The other long-standing fascinations continue to linger and trouble: the (im)possibilities of the poetic line, the distinctness of aural and visual elements in writing, the obsessive accretion of sentences in prose, and the non-narrative potential of texts as energy.

“Frequently Asked Questions” (or “FAQ” in the acronym) are masses of questions listed alongside corresponding answers, intended to streamline any website’s communicative features. If you want to know something within a certain context—any context—simply trace yourself into that context on the web, and you will most likely always find that you aren’t the first to have such a quandary (a disturbing existential problem in itself).

I don’t know what I was looking for like five years ago, but there was something I wanted to fix, make, or understand. It might have even been a kind of poem or animal I wanted to know more about, and instead I found this strange “FAQ” breed of meta-communication—a communication at once collective and clubby and oddly impersonal. (I often find myself a little too entranced reading similar such forms of formally directive public speech––recipes, instruction manuals, bus schedules, advertisements, and so on.)

So I began Googling “FAQ”—repeatedly—and got lost in the omnipresence of this form. Then I began to construct my own.

The distinctly FAQ brew of laziness ISO couch-potato practicality, along with the complex dramatic situation inherent in this ghostly interface between people (or typings that are remnants of creatures that were at some point real people) still strikes me as funny, sad, and staggering. The necropolis of the interwebs is almost too nauseating to bear, the detritus fetid with abandoned possibilities and existences. The voices behind the “Frequently Asked Questions” blend together and boil. The voices behind the “Frequently Offered Answers” are conspicuous in their pretense of mastery and wisdom, while inhabiting merely partial identities, someones somewheres purely textual.

Most poetry lies on the page in this same way: strings of decisions made we know not why, other potentials discarded and disappeared. A poem can be as remarkable for the things it omits––the zones it suggests but does not hazard––as the things it contains.

No one even knows how to pronounce FAQ: “fak,” “faks,” “facts,” “fock,” or “ef-ay-cue.” We live in an era so textual that the names we use are often only seen, never uttered. I want a poetry that does the exact opposite: combinations of words/sounds that make new meanings beyond their textual placeholders, new potentials, which liberate rather than confine a reader.

FAQ: the book is, in some ways, a total resistance to FAQ the mentality.

I was also thinking of the portability of conceptual art while writing this book, a suitcase full of concepts, jokes that can be retold in form only. Then there’s the South American experimental narrative tradition, which I love and towards which I can only hope to tip a hat. (Hello, Madam Lispector; Good evening, Señor Cortazar.) There’s “Fizzles.” There’s Cela’s Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son. There’s the piling up of language in sentences, in vignettes seemingly unconnected but by voice. Speaking of sentences piling, here’s where I should stop now.

But there’s the line. As to the poetic line, it is the reason I am drawn to poetry. The line and its breaking is, to me, the fundamental quality of poetry, the thing about which I think the most, and of which I think the most highly. In this book, I wanted to see if there were ways that prose could hold the same potential for energy and transformation as I see built into the end of a broken line (the “gulp”). I hope the twin phantoms of poetic music and logic rattle their chains between these margin walls.

Any questions?