Download Helvetica for Free by Steve Roggenbuck, a review by Perrin Carrell

Steve Roggenbuck is part of a relatively new movement of “internet” poets writing loosely in the tradition of Tao Lin. He published a book of 100 poems, Downloadhelveticaforfree.com, which is also available for free on the book’s website of the same name.

So far, this is how I read the reception of the book. While some people like it, others react strongly against it; the strongest criticism I’ve heard was made by Kat Dixon of Divine Dirt Quarterly, who labels Roggenbuck and similar poets neo-Dadaists. She said of their writing, “[it’s] cliquey, crappy work.” Others, like Noah Cicero of wewhoareabouttodie.com are openly confused by the book, falling back on the standby politically correct response to the avant garde: “I don’t totally get it, but it’s interesting and it got people talking, I’ll give you that” (please forgive me for oversimplifying). With respect, I think it is important to disagree—first because Roggenbuck’s book is not avant garde, and second because I think some of my colleagues have sold this book short.

I think part of the problem is people approaching poetry with a kind of funeral seriousness. In fact, I can’t see how the following is not immediately clear upon reading the book: it does not take itself too seriously. It is open and lighthearted and fun. It winks at itself. More importantly, it winks at the digital culture in which it is produced. More importantly still, it winks at how people operate there.

But a lot of the time it’s not making a commentary on anything, and I wish more people could set aside their literary training and see what I think is the book’s rather obvious idea: people say and do funny things on the internet.

The charm is in the book’s self-voyeurism. The content is “found” in logs of old instant message conversations from Roggenbuck’s high school years; many of these conversations are between himself and his girlfriend.  The tone of the book—nostalgia and amusement—depends on this dynamic. It may even be what saves it from the estrangement that plagues a lot of flarf poetry. In other words, instead of lifting words from just any internet source, Roggenbuck takes phrases he wrote in the ironically intimate setting of an instant message many years ago to someone he loves, words that have since been forgotten. What we get is Steve—the private life of Steve that even Steve forgot—and that’s what makes the book so fun.

It does other important things, too. It illuminates the ways in which people view writing. It shows how a phrase in a private chat box becomes something distinctly different when it is copied, pasted into a word document, called a poem by a poet, sent off to a printer, bound, and distributed to you fine people in book form.

“I SHOULD / REALLY EMAIL / THAT PROF / AND ASK / WHAT EXACTLY / HE MEANS BY / POSTERBOARD”

Language transforms from personormal (copyright: me) into something some reviewers are sweating over, comparing to unrelated poetic movements, labeling and dissecting—and inside, Roggenbuck is giggling.

It also pulls back the skin on the human-internet relationship. Take the title. If you type “download Helvetica for free” into a Google search bar, a review of Roggenbuck’s book is the third result. The title is designed to manipulate the internet itself via search engine optimization and present internet poetry to internet users who are not looking for it. Roggenbuck is making a lighthearted spectacle of irony here by simultaneously (1) using the internet to spread poetry and (2) making fun of the internet.

Other reviewers have been more generous, but even the favorable reviews have been one-dimensional. Most have been along the lines of (forgive me for over-simplifying) “These are simple, short, refreshing, and funny flarf poems that make a commentary about the nature of poetry.” Well duh, but not enough.

So here’s something no one seems to be saying.

This book is Americana. Beyond depicting cultural artifacts in the poems, each poem is itself a cultural artifact. The book does not, as some reviewers suggest, simply use internet language as a poetic device; instead, it situates the internet itself in American history by snapshotting the stark, funny, mundane, unadorned lives it contains. It presents the internet as a time capsule. This is especially true in Roggenbuck’s internet-dependent process: the conspicuous, self-conscious ability to retrieve records of private conversations from the past. It is a book sculpted from text written when both Roggenbuck and the internet were coming of age, and it may be one of the most American books of poems to arrive in recent years. This is the book’s highest achievement. It is Americana in its truest form, and it feels that way when you read it.



Perrin Carrell is an MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago. His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Exquisite Corpse Annual, Ophelia Street, The Coachella Review, and GC Advocate, among others. He is also the founder and director of the community-published poetry magazine, allwritethen (www.allwritethen.org).