Ugly Duckling Presse | No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself.

No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself.

Robert Fitterman

illustrated by Natalya Lobanova

Poetry | $16 $14

"A consistent protest against suffering." — David Kaufmann

Robert Fitterman's new book-length poem borrows its poetic form, loosely, from James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem, to orchestrate hundreds of found articulations of sadness and loneliness from blogs and online posts. A collective subjectivity composed through the avatar of a singular speaker emerges. But the real protagonist of No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself. is subjectivity as a mediated construct—the steady steam of personal articulations that we have access to are personal articulations themselves already mediated via song lyrics, advertising, or even broadcasters. No, Wait... blurs the boundary between collective articulation and personal speech, while underscoring the ways in which poetic form participates in the mediation of intimate expression.

Excerpt ˇ

Excerpt

I’ll just start: no matter what I do I never

seem to be satisfied,

The world spins around me and I feel like

I’m looking in from outside.

I go get a donut, I sit in my favorite part

of the park, but that’s not

The point: the point is that I feel socially

awkward and seem to have

Trouble making friends, which makes me very

sad and lonely indeed.

I am way too sensitive and always feel like

no one likes me.

I don't know what to do—I’m just super tired

of feeling this way.

Close ˆ

About the Author

Robert Fitterman is the author of 14 books of poetry including Nevermind (Wonder Books, 2016), and Rob’s Word Shop (Ugly Duckling Press, forthcoming, 2017), No Wait, Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (Ugly Duckling Press, 2014), Holocaust Museum (Counterpath, 2013, and Veer [London] 2012), now we are friends (Truck Books, 2010), Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books, 2009), war, the musical (Subpress, 2006), and Metropolis—a long poem in 4 separate volumes. He has collaborated with several visual artists, including: Serkan Ozkaya, Nayland Blake, Fia Backström, Tim Davis and Klaus Killisch. He is the founding member of the international artists and writers collective, Collective Task. He teaches writing and poetry at New York University and at the Bard College, Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies.

Other Contributors

Natalya Lobanova has been publishing her artwork online since 2010. This has led to solo exhibitions in Knoxville, Tennessee and Tampico, Mexico, as well as participation in numerous group exhibitions in London and Copenhagen. She has also provided illustrations for numerous online and print publications. She is currently a student of Philosophy and Politics at the University of Edinburgh.

Links

Author's Website

Notes on Conceptualisms (with Vanessa Place)

Cover Illustrator's Website

Book Details

Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 88 pp, 5.75 x 7.25 in.
ISBN 9-781-937027-32-2
Publication Date: March 1, 2014
Funding: the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and New York University

News and Reviews

Advance Praise

The better part of Rob Fitterman’s more recent work—and here I am particularly thinking of SPRAWL, PILLBOX and NOW WE ARE FRIENDS—concentrates on public performances of privacy. Fitterman has always mistrusted the ideology of lyric sincerity and he has a healthy disdain for all forms of prefabricated affect. But his well-earned cynicism is tempered by a countervailing sense that unoriginal language can indeed express heartfelt, if barely articulate and articulated experience. So underneath his source texts’ self-dramatizations and clichéd self-pity you can hear echoes, however faint, of real pain. While it is, therefore, hard not to read his work as an attack on commodified subjectivity as well as on a debased poetry of emotional authenticity, it is also hard not to detect in his poetry a consistent protest against suffering.—David Kaufmann

Fitterman’s works constitute an anti-nostalgic and timely re-iteration of appropriation strategies and engagement in modes of radical mimesis that critically examine capitalism under digital culture, mounting an agenda of changing the distribution of the sensible not by making the invisible visible but by proposing counter-reading to ambient distraction and ever-more insidious textual instrumentalities in a culture saturated with marketing and deluged by information…—Judith Goldman, Postmodern Culture