Zachary Thompson Reviews MLA Chernoff’s [Squelch Procedures]

[Squelch Procedures]. MLA Chernoff. Gordon Hill Press. $20.00 CDN, 120 pp., ISBN 9781774220320

In [Squelch Procedures], poet MLA Chernoff explores consciousness and identity like a programmer hacking through cyberspace. From its table of contents all the way to its final acknowledgements, the language and layout of [Squelch Procedures] work in tandem to present, through words and design, a traumatized psyche which is as hopelessly dependent on the internet as a coping mechanism as it is empowered by the web’s ability to enrich and contextualize our own experiences. These ‘pomes,’ as Chernoff dubs them —existing in some shared ground between poems and memes — embrace all the joys and terrors of internet culture, from playful [square brackets] and ALL CAPS exclamations to toxic MRA dating profiles. What the reader is to take away from the work will be as personal and varied as subjective experience itself; indeed, even the titular word ‘squelch,’ which appears throughout the pomes some 50 plus times, is always employed in a way which refuses concrete definition.

Despite the book’s conceptual trappings, [Squelch Procedures] never feels impenetrable. As with the best ‘difficult’ poetry, reading [Squelch Procedures] is an exercise in gaining familiarity with the book’s idiosyncrasies; the more of the pomes one reads, the warmer and more engaging Chernoff’s protean narrative voice becomes. One recurring device is the repeated imagery of bodily functions throughout the book, reminding the reader that these AI aesthetics are commanded by human hands. “Snugging the snot out of some piss-and-shit lover,” remarks one pome, “into the gardener’s garden, where we were where we were.” The line conjures Adam and Eve, hopelessly corporeal within the metaphysical garden, bearing a similar relationship to the Biblical Eden as a modern-day web enthusiast might bear to the endless engagement of YouTube or Wikipedia. The internet can seem like an idealized space, offering respite from the realities of the individual’s plight, but ultimately we remain on the other side of the screen, “where we were”.

A discomfort with the body’s processes makes itself known elsewhere: in “[Digression II…]” Chernoff draws attention to “my sour skin,” poking and picking at it “pore by Ginko’d pore”. The body’s limitations serve to disrupt not just the simulated fantasies of the internet, but the stability of one’s self-perception as well. In one pome, Chernoff muses on “the contours of our plumped and pompous faces” while asking the question “when did you become so various?”. These lines are followed shortly by “U and I:/the difference between silly and sully/You and I:/jesting gestation, arms engulfing legs — a oneness so frilly”. The “arms engulfing legs” is one of several allusions to self-consumption: in “[No, New York (Squelching for the Red of a Hook)],” Chernoff compares NYC gentrifiers to ouroboros, the snake which swallows its own tail; in “[Squelch iii (Lyric for Lyrica)],” the pome itself “make aliyah” (Hebrew for ‘ascent,’ though commonly used today to refer to the return to Israel from the diaspora) “with its own ass and /smooches everything it sees”. The ‘frilly oneness’ which ends the line describes the instability of identity as presented throughout [Squelch Procedures], a scenario where the self’s wholeness is never conceivable without some ‘frills’. Chernoff jumps from one meditation to the next, voice perpetually in flux, like someone flipping through a hard drive’s worth of selfies, looking for some shared value intrinsic to each.

English poetry is strewn with dense tomes serving as indexes of vast obscure references, and [Squelch Procedures] operates in this tradition, though it takes its cues from search engines instead of encyclopedias. Look to any page and you are likely to find a proper noun or turn of phrase which rings familiar. “[Digression II: Three Steps on the Ladder to Radicalizing Your Depression]” cites lyrics from Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream”, then several lines down references animated sitcom King of the Hill. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas makes his way into “[Sharp Squelching Sound; Jokerification Intensifies]”, soon to be joined by millennial rock icons Mitski and Waxahatchee. “[[Squelching] a Coke with Y;ou]” may be the most dynamic example of all, interspersing a parade of banal capitalist iconography (Pepsi, Arby’s, Nike Air Force Ones, Doug Ford) with body-horror auteurs J.G. Ballard and David Cronenberg.

Yet even when critiquing the same internet culture which rendered the term ‘random’ such a hollow signifier, these pop- and sub-culture references never feel like cheap non-sequiturs. Each appearance of a cultural figure or a mass-marketed product feels pointed and deliberate. When Chernoff writes, in “[Digression II…]”, that they are “in lust for you and/together we qualify for this Groupon”, the sentiment feels as much a goof on the trendiness of Groupons as it is a commentary on feigned performances of intimacy — how lust, as opposed to love, may dissipate as readily as the bond shared between two people meeting up in order to reap savings. And if Chernoff, at times, risks a pandering tone when lampooning easy targets (as they do when going after Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk and the aforementioned Premier Ford), the criticism is usually either valid (“Jordan Peterson is just Heidegger for ‘incels’”) or so self-awarely ‘cringe’ as to be forgivable as camp (“they’ve hacked your bank account./Neigh, they’ve elongated your musk”).

MLA Chernoff has made no secret about the importance of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy to the nature of their poetry; this is their second book since the debut volume Delet This to feature Derrida’s name on the cover artwork. The tribute is ambitious but hard-won; few poets make as wide-usage of the Derridean play of language as Chernoff does, and one would be hard-pressed to find a book of poetry (pome-etry?) which explores language’s ability to shape reality as thoroughly as [Squelch Procedures] does. The key to this particular linguistic game is Chernoff’s employment of the word ‘squelch.’ Featured throughout the pomes dozens of times, as a noun, verb, adjective, and with myriad spellings and suffixes, trying to find the commonality in all these uses of ‘squelch’ at times feels as overwhelming as the speaker’s own quest for a coherent sense of self. Chernoff even seems to use the word ‘squelch’ to call attention to its own unstable signification, as evinced in this opening line from “[Guided by [Squelch]es” (a pome which serves, among other purposes, as a love letter to indie rock heroes Guided By Voices): “If I needed squelch to signify the moves that I should make I’d go back to the lake and find another lad to eat my matter”. Chernoff, evidently, doesn’t “need” ‘squelch' to signify their moves; but through repetition of the word, ‘squelch’ gains more and more signification with each usage (an extremely useful device, whether Chernoff actually “needs” it or not to make their point). By the end of the volume, one suspects readers will have, however tentatively, settled on their own definition of ‘squelch’ — the objective of the book, though, may be to forever disrupt any definition from bearing scrutiny.

It is comforting to take so much enjoyment in reading [Squelch Procedures]. At times the play of the book’s language, while exhilarating for the reader, feels as though it may be torturous for the poet. By exhausting so many different linguistic approaches to self-determination, Chernoff’s narrator runs the risk of exhausting their own internal archive, not just of words, but of emotional resilience. The final pome explicitly leaves us with an admission, simple and stark, of uncertainty: “‘I’m—Who?’”. An earlier pome, however, suggests a note of resigned consolation amidst all this confusion, perhaps even anticipation of what is to come next: “The announcement announces nothing if not itself”. As Chernoff no doubt still has much more to say to their readers, it may be that [Squelch Procedures] announces nothing if not Chernoff[’s self].

Zachary Thompson (he/him) is a writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from York University, as well as a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. He has read from his fiction at the Lit Live Reading Series in Hamilton, and recently participated in a presentation at the 2021 Conference of the Comics Studies Society.