Finished Sex Hat & Kasey essay this weekend.
Conclusion on Flarf:
The rearrangement of the poem-poet-reader dynamic by Flarf offers new strategies for both poet and reader. By imagining the actual worlds where both the poetic statements of “Does Your Poetry Hold Up?” make a kind of sense, and also (perhaps most importantly) by imagining worlds or selves where one would be subject to such statements, assertions and appraisals, a reader experiences a kind of negative capability that is usually regarded as the province of poets. In creating this new approach to reading, Flarf enacts a re-imagining not just of techniques of poetic composition but also a reconsideration of the contexts – social, political and physical– that can be given to poetry. The majority of statements of writings about Flarf, by both its practitioners and readers, have focused mainly on its impact on poets (by providing Google as an alternative means to composition and/or by offering a messier aesthetic). Flarf’s potential and importance has been underestimated by limiting the discussion to just the poet’s point of view. Flarf makes new demands on both the poet and the reader who chooses to engage with it by radically equalizing the relationship between the role of poet and the role of reader: the Flarf poet is first a reader of the results of his or her Google search, both passive recipient of the original sources language and active composer of the findings. The Flarf reader’s role, by being less fixed than the poet’s, is considerably more complex.
Monday, November 29, 2004
Sunday, November 28, 2004
"My Mother Would Be Abandoned at the Altar"
My mother would be abandoned at the altar,
and I her son, though summer-born and summer-loving,
would fly to and land on a threatening asteroid
from the Blue Ribbon Panel on Aerial Wildland Firefighting,
where I dream about being able to push off one end of the Space Station
jangling when I go over bumps at low speed.
My mother would be on a feeding tube and trache,
and she sends me an email that simply says hi.
She lets me ride for free if you know what I mean
where I fall over the railing and I am hanging there for a while.
I dread that they will look in the cabinet for some extra tissue,
for I fall thereby into the error.
She would bring a handsome patrimony.
And I would bring back great portions of the firstborn of the flocks.
When will she become aware of the trials of OJ, the severed Bobbits,
pierced from their anus to their mouth,
their heads like dogs looking at a ceiling fan?
I tread my woman whit respect and want to be equal.
Behind the little girl, trying to grab hold of her nightdress.
I have gone to great lengths to expand my threshold of pain,
talking to myself and like staring at stuff for an hour.
For she has included a fascinating snapshot of Rudolf,
sewn round with a zig-zag machine.
She rides with her kids, four-up on a scooter.
She uses a hands-on constructivist approach.
She sends me strange messages by other means
and I come with the wicked style. I would bring my wife from Pakistan,
the Little Ice Age.
I may not have a faerie doll, but this yarn ball sure is fun.
I tear at the ivory teeth of an insatiable piano,
and her eye ranges from crisp, structured abstraction to romantic collage.
She draws a house with a little boy at the window.
Never beyond the verges of sartorial excess, she says.
She trains me a lot on this because I love treats.
She rewards me after the kids fall asleep.
But I must never, never go into anyone else's yard and take their beauty away.
Yet it would have been too cruel to do anything but chew your lower lip,
always, in a horizontal position
at her wrist, in a hallucinogenic reverie catalyzed by boredom
to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
flying up to a basic level of competence
to bring down Berlusconi,
straining and then moaning as the jet began to loop.
My mother would be the final arbiter of the suitability of my purchases,
and I her one bedroom apartment,
from her home sent to Catholic school, and expected to learn English
as if her little brain pan were a volume of choice,
as if her purposeful inattention
sought in me some sign of an adequate heir.
Ah, but high in nitrogen, potassium, and higher fatty acids.
And far, far beyond the limits of good taste
to let my almost 5 year old go trick or treating as a dismembered head.
And then I saw a dad playfully burying his two small daughters—
it seemed my uterus measured 29cm, which he said was fine.
I tore at my thick mane of wet hair with a comb
until the blood mother turned her spells on them,
far, far beyond the doses I recommend •
to horizons of the last dream I had, the one that you laid before me in blue crystal
I saw, and I couldn't believe how bad the deus ex machina was.
I flew, as a medic on those planes,
sent from my server (and more disturbingly) from my personal e-mail address,
striking out from a wilderness of dew-wet blossoms.
My mother would be cured and my father saved from an early grave
and even now, a year later, the mice are still alive,
when the wounds of the world walk out from the tomb,
and the woman with the eels collided,
her fierce eyes grown tired beneath the hood of her soggy cloak, and if her heart
were broken, it could signal a bearish tone toward the sector.
I would be the ghost of the future.
I tread water for three days in a row
talking to myself, and vice versa.
My mother would be abandoned at the altar,
and I her son, though summer-born and summer-loving,
would fly to and land on a threatening asteroid
from the Blue Ribbon Panel on Aerial Wildland Firefighting,
where I dream about being able to push off one end of the Space Station
jangling when I go over bumps at low speed.
My mother would be on a feeding tube and trache,
and she sends me an email that simply says hi.
She lets me ride for free if you know what I mean
where I fall over the railing and I am hanging there for a while.
I dread that they will look in the cabinet for some extra tissue,
for I fall thereby into the error.
She would bring a handsome patrimony.
And I would bring back great portions of the firstborn of the flocks.
When will she become aware of the trials of OJ, the severed Bobbits,
pierced from their anus to their mouth,
their heads like dogs looking at a ceiling fan?
I tread my woman whit respect and want to be equal.
Behind the little girl, trying to grab hold of her nightdress.
I have gone to great lengths to expand my threshold of pain,
talking to myself and like staring at stuff for an hour.
For she has included a fascinating snapshot of Rudolf,
sewn round with a zig-zag machine.
She rides with her kids, four-up on a scooter.
She uses a hands-on constructivist approach.
She sends me strange messages by other means
and I come with the wicked style. I would bring my wife from Pakistan,
the Little Ice Age.
I may not have a faerie doll, but this yarn ball sure is fun.
I tear at the ivory teeth of an insatiable piano,
and her eye ranges from crisp, structured abstraction to romantic collage.
She draws a house with a little boy at the window.
Never beyond the verges of sartorial excess, she says.
She trains me a lot on this because I love treats.
She rewards me after the kids fall asleep.
But I must never, never go into anyone else's yard and take their beauty away.
Yet it would have been too cruel to do anything but chew your lower lip,
always, in a horizontal position
at her wrist, in a hallucinogenic reverie catalyzed by boredom
to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
flying up to a basic level of competence
to bring down Berlusconi,
straining and then moaning as the jet began to loop.
My mother would be the final arbiter of the suitability of my purchases,
and I her one bedroom apartment,
from her home sent to Catholic school, and expected to learn English
as if her little brain pan were a volume of choice,
as if her purposeful inattention
sought in me some sign of an adequate heir.
Ah, but high in nitrogen, potassium, and higher fatty acids.
And far, far beyond the limits of good taste
to let my almost 5 year old go trick or treating as a dismembered head.
And then I saw a dad playfully burying his two small daughters—
it seemed my uterus measured 29cm, which he said was fine.
I tore at my thick mane of wet hair with a comb
until the blood mother turned her spells on them,
far, far beyond the doses I recommend •
to horizons of the last dream I had, the one that you laid before me in blue crystal
I saw, and I couldn't believe how bad the deus ex machina was.
I flew, as a medic on those planes,
sent from my server (and more disturbingly) from my personal e-mail address,
striking out from a wilderness of dew-wet blossoms.
My mother would be cured and my father saved from an early grave
and even now, a year later, the mice are still alive,
when the wounds of the world walk out from the tomb,
and the woman with the eels collided,
her fierce eyes grown tired beneath the hood of her soggy cloak, and if her heart
were broken, it could signal a bearish tone toward the sector.
I would be the ghost of the future.
I tread water for three days in a row
talking to myself, and vice versa.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
If you're terribly bored and want to waste two minutes of your life, you can take this quiz. It's about me. Get to know more than you want!Take my Quiz! and then Check out the Scoreboard!
Friday, November 26, 2004
Great day so far, nothing but lit work. First day I've been able to do this since. . .
Almost all finished with the Kasey essay, though I feel retarted that I was spelling his last name wrong earlier. I get so annoyed when I see Ashberry, etc., so I can just imagine seeing your own name mangled. Also read Matt Henriksen's ms, Alien Bug Prints Its Way to Freedom, which is f'ing amazing and needs to be published this moment. Also got a chance to spend some time with some Jon Thompson poems that are in ms. Also, catching up on my Gertrude, reading "Poetry and Grammar," "Stanzas in Meditation," "Picasso." Working on the last Complex Sleep for Sex Hat as well. For some reason was also drawn into reading Bob Perelman's "Speech Effects" essay in the Close Listening anthology edited by Charles Bernstein. Fairly interesting essay, but what struck me was Perelman's description of a David Antin speech-performance in CA in the early 70s with some Language folks in attendance. Surprisingly it seems they took audience-friendly cues from Antin as an opportunity to respond at length in the midst of his talk to the point that Eleanor Antin says that she feels trapped by these five guys who won't stop talking or interrupting and that she came to hear art and they were disrupting this.
My interest really isn't the possible rudeness of the audience members, or even of establishing a boundary between "art" and "not-art" at an Antin-like speech-performance (though I was amazed at some MFA graduate readings where the introduction/explication of the poem and the poem itself were nearly interchangeable; poet introducing "so I was driving down the road and saw a pickup with two calves in the back and as the truck turned into the parking lot the calves slid to one side of the truck and I thought 'life is like that"; poet's poem: "driving down the interstate/a pickup with two trembling calves in the bed/turns into the Walgreen's parking lot/causing the young cows to slide against their will/to the other side of the bed/the way life causes us to slide/towards the darkness we all are headed for") (something like that).
Anyway, two sentences are picking at my brain:
"Near the end of the piece, Antin and Silliman had a long dialog about the form of the talk, with Silliman, in a comment that in hindsight anticipated the clash to come, suggested that Antin was not interested in innovation and was perhaps courting catastrophe to move forward. Antin replied that the formal catastrophe in the arts of discourse had occurred near the end of the eighteenth century when a fixed sense of the group being addressed disappeared."
First of all, let's all be thankful that it's a coincidence that it's RS in this passage that I'm interested in & that he's not the object of interest; what I'm interested in is Antin's observation & needed the previous sentence to give context. Anyway, the fixed sense of group thing: is this a common observation (about discourse in general)? It seems intuitive, & I remember writing a paper for the one Marxist guy at Arkansas about the rise of modern & post-modern innovations and difficulties arising from literature giving voice to previous un-voiced populations (it wasn't as poorly put as that) and that previous models worked for achieving and maintaining power (the drop in didacticism being maybe the result of less writers try to teach & maintain current standards & models).
But I never thought about the disappearance of a fixed group to be addressed. I immediately think of blogging, for whatever reason, and not poetry--just the idea that certain bloggers seem to be writing to a fixed group & aim to instruct & persuade them. I am thinking of RS here, and also Mayhew in his own little way; Mike Snider too. Working on the Kasey essay I read through all of his Lime Tree archives and found it extremely instructive without being as grating as the other blogs that seem to aim at instruction & I wonder how much of this is Kasey's personality, how much is the fact that he's younger and seems more 'in touch', & how much is just me. But also I wonder to what degree it is because his blog doesn't seem to assume a 'fixedness' to his audience. [insert examples that prove these wild assertions here] Blogging continues to be this incredible sociological experiment, trying to imagine the hidden motivations & assumptions behind the postings, from Henry's assumption of isolation & marginality to Jordan's notes-to-self approach, both approaches do fix maybe a stand-in audience (no one & Jordan himself, respectively) for rhetorical purposes but still with the knowledge that people are reading. Skimming through the blog roll I wonder who's assuming an audience of peers, who's trying to prove her or himself to an assumed audience of elders, who's instructing the assumed audience of neophytes, who's trying to get laid, etc.
Almost all finished with the Kasey essay, though I feel retarted that I was spelling his last name wrong earlier. I get so annoyed when I see Ashberry, etc., so I can just imagine seeing your own name mangled. Also read Matt Henriksen's ms, Alien Bug Prints Its Way to Freedom, which is f'ing amazing and needs to be published this moment. Also got a chance to spend some time with some Jon Thompson poems that are in ms. Also, catching up on my Gertrude, reading "Poetry and Grammar," "Stanzas in Meditation," "Picasso." Working on the last Complex Sleep for Sex Hat as well. For some reason was also drawn into reading Bob Perelman's "Speech Effects" essay in the Close Listening anthology edited by Charles Bernstein. Fairly interesting essay, but what struck me was Perelman's description of a David Antin speech-performance in CA in the early 70s with some Language folks in attendance. Surprisingly it seems they took audience-friendly cues from Antin as an opportunity to respond at length in the midst of his talk to the point that Eleanor Antin says that she feels trapped by these five guys who won't stop talking or interrupting and that she came to hear art and they were disrupting this.
My interest really isn't the possible rudeness of the audience members, or even of establishing a boundary between "art" and "not-art" at an Antin-like speech-performance (though I was amazed at some MFA graduate readings where the introduction/explication of the poem and the poem itself were nearly interchangeable; poet introducing "so I was driving down the road and saw a pickup with two calves in the back and as the truck turned into the parking lot the calves slid to one side of the truck and I thought 'life is like that"; poet's poem: "driving down the interstate/a pickup with two trembling calves in the bed/turns into the Walgreen's parking lot/causing the young cows to slide against their will/to the other side of the bed/the way life causes us to slide/towards the darkness we all are headed for") (something like that).
Anyway, two sentences are picking at my brain:
"Near the end of the piece, Antin and Silliman had a long dialog about the form of the talk, with Silliman, in a comment that in hindsight anticipated the clash to come, suggested that Antin was not interested in innovation and was perhaps courting catastrophe to move forward. Antin replied that the formal catastrophe in the arts of discourse had occurred near the end of the eighteenth century when a fixed sense of the group being addressed disappeared."
First of all, let's all be thankful that it's a coincidence that it's RS in this passage that I'm interested in & that he's not the object of interest; what I'm interested in is Antin's observation & needed the previous sentence to give context. Anyway, the fixed sense of group thing: is this a common observation (about discourse in general)? It seems intuitive, & I remember writing a paper for the one Marxist guy at Arkansas about the rise of modern & post-modern innovations and difficulties arising from literature giving voice to previous un-voiced populations (it wasn't as poorly put as that) and that previous models worked for achieving and maintaining power (the drop in didacticism being maybe the result of less writers try to teach & maintain current standards & models).
But I never thought about the disappearance of a fixed group to be addressed. I immediately think of blogging, for whatever reason, and not poetry--just the idea that certain bloggers seem to be writing to a fixed group & aim to instruct & persuade them. I am thinking of RS here, and also Mayhew in his own little way; Mike Snider too. Working on the Kasey essay I read through all of his Lime Tree archives and found it extremely instructive without being as grating as the other blogs that seem to aim at instruction & I wonder how much of this is Kasey's personality, how much is the fact that he's younger and seems more 'in touch', & how much is just me. But also I wonder to what degree it is because his blog doesn't seem to assume a 'fixedness' to his audience. [insert examples that prove these wild assertions here] Blogging continues to be this incredible sociological experiment, trying to imagine the hidden motivations & assumptions behind the postings, from Henry's assumption of isolation & marginality to Jordan's notes-to-self approach, both approaches do fix maybe a stand-in audience (no one & Jordan himself, respectively) for rhetorical purposes but still with the knowledge that people are reading. Skimming through the blog roll I wonder who's assuming an audience of peers, who's trying to prove her or himself to an assumed audience of elders, who's instructing the assumed audience of neophytes, who's trying to get laid, etc.
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
A newer blog that bears your consideration: Arkansas alum (class of 95) Dan Tessitore's A Hole in the Head.
Both Tony Robinson and Zach have posted pictures and inventories of their "top shelves". My literal top shelf isn't my most used shelf, it's just for stacks of poetry periodicals and borrowed books. I suppose my equivalent of a top shelf is the stacks of books that surround me on my big wooden desk that I do everything (yes, everything) on.
To my right: Simulcast, Benjamin Friedlander; Atmospheric Conditions, Ed Roberson; Close Listening, ed. Charles Bernstein; Fear and Trembling/Repetition, Kierkegaard; Eroding Witness, Nathaniel Mackey; Complete Short Poetry, Zukofsky; Boundary 2 (Spicer Issue); printout of "Hanging Out With Pablo and Jennifer," K. Silem Mohammad; Collected Prose, Olson; Deer Head Nation, Mohammad; Spicer's lectures; The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner; Paradise & Method, Bruce Andrews; Dreamweaver 2004 for Dummies; Maximus Poems; Butterick's A Guide to the Maximus Poems; "1990-2001," Lorraine Graham & Mark Wallace; "Against Metaphor," Chris Vitiello.
To my left: Oulipo Compendium; Book of Haikus, Jack Kerouac; printout of Chris Vitiello's Irresponsibility ms; Why/Why Not, Martha Ronk; Muthologos v.2, Charles Olson; No: a journal of the Arts, issue 3; A Thousand Devils, K. Silem Mohammad; Voices Cast Out to Talk to Us, Ed Roberson; The Alchemist to Mercury, Robert Kelly (ed. Rasula); Helen in Egypt, HD; three textbooks for my text editing job; Bottom: on Shakespeare, Zukofsky; Tjanting, Ron Silliman; By the Waters of Manhattan, Charles Reznikoff; Giscome Road, CS Giscombe; The American Godwar Complex, Patrick Herron.
The other top shelf is in the bathroom, where I keep Duncan's Selected, Devin Johnston's Aversions, and a recent issue of Skanky Possum.
To my right: Simulcast, Benjamin Friedlander; Atmospheric Conditions, Ed Roberson; Close Listening, ed. Charles Bernstein; Fear and Trembling/Repetition, Kierkegaard; Eroding Witness, Nathaniel Mackey; Complete Short Poetry, Zukofsky; Boundary 2 (Spicer Issue); printout of "Hanging Out With Pablo and Jennifer," K. Silem Mohammad; Collected Prose, Olson; Deer Head Nation, Mohammad; Spicer's lectures; The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner; Paradise & Method, Bruce Andrews; Dreamweaver 2004 for Dummies; Maximus Poems; Butterick's A Guide to the Maximus Poems; "1990-2001," Lorraine Graham & Mark Wallace; "Against Metaphor," Chris Vitiello.
To my left: Oulipo Compendium; Book of Haikus, Jack Kerouac; printout of Chris Vitiello's Irresponsibility ms; Why/Why Not, Martha Ronk; Muthologos v.2, Charles Olson; No: a journal of the Arts, issue 3; A Thousand Devils, K. Silem Mohammad; Voices Cast Out to Talk to Us, Ed Roberson; The Alchemist to Mercury, Robert Kelly (ed. Rasula); Helen in Egypt, HD; three textbooks for my text editing job; Bottom: on Shakespeare, Zukofsky; Tjanting, Ron Silliman; By the Waters of Manhattan, Charles Reznikoff; Giscome Road, CS Giscombe; The American Godwar Complex, Patrick Herron.
The other top shelf is in the bathroom, where I keep Duncan's Selected, Devin Johnston's Aversions, and a recent issue of Skanky Possum.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Back home in NC now. Pooped. We hopped off the plane and I took Leigh directly to a calculus test -- she's in a three hour class right now on the Supreme Court. I'm barely able to string together sentences. She's the brains, I'm the looks. Had a wonderful time in NYC. The reading with Joyelle went better than I could have hoped -- Leigh and I put our brains together for constructing a good set list. Readings, especially in front of people who are likely unfamiliar with you, are just a thrilling opportunity to redefine yourself to yourself as a poet -- I wanted to present some sort of framework for what I've been doing so I started off with a prose piece that I hadn't read before. It seemed to work pretty well as the ground for the sprouts that I read afterwards. Tried to un-accentuate the humor as much as possible; like Jordan, I was thinking of Silliman's and Friedlander's remarks over at Silliman's blog on knowing laughter, etc. at readings. Anyway, tried to read out loud humorous bits as I generally think of them: more bridges than destinations. I read a lot of things for the first time & it was really a receptive audience. Everyone seemed so smart, it got the Tostian juices percolating. My description sounds a bit infantile, which is okay; it was just a sort of giddy experience.
One thing I need to work on is just talking to people; reading sober (always the right move) meant socializing sober, which doesn't come naturally, though I had great little chats the whole time, especially good to have really nice talks with Sarah Manguso, Jim Behrle, Timothy Liu and Joyelle at St. Mark's; best of all was sharing beers afterwards with loved ones Leigh, Matt & Katie, Will, and Sergio & Amanda.
If you saw the thing about U2 riding down Times Square on a flatbed truck doing their new song over and over . . . we were there. Really just a stupidly happy thing. We come out of a shop hearing adolescent screaming, Leigh looks up and goes "Is that Bono?" We'd been talking about U2 quite a bit lately, so it was appropriate to us anyway that they'd be right in front of us, rocking into midlife.
Random note: a new blog that might be, even in its infancy, my favorite in terms of thinking about things I'm thinking about right now. I would love to see Thomas talk about Flarf, a barely tapped oil well for poetry, at greater length.
Tried to limit myself on bookbuying. Got Silliman's N/O, which is astounding, as well as some Tom Raworth and Graham Foust. I just put one of my weekly needling entries to Silliman's comment box; I don't read the blog intending to do so, but I can't help it. I should probably just be thankful that Allen Grossman, Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, David Rosenberg & others don't have blogs so I don't have to do the same strange internal juggling. I mean, it's tough enough balancing my affection for Aaron's poems and my repulsion at his current face.
A Beard of Defiance I understand & endorse but is a Lobotomy of Defiance going to do anything but empower the current regime?
One thing I need to work on is just talking to people; reading sober (always the right move) meant socializing sober, which doesn't come naturally, though I had great little chats the whole time, especially good to have really nice talks with Sarah Manguso, Jim Behrle, Timothy Liu and Joyelle at St. Mark's; best of all was sharing beers afterwards with loved ones Leigh, Matt & Katie, Will, and Sergio & Amanda.
If you saw the thing about U2 riding down Times Square on a flatbed truck doing their new song over and over . . . we were there. Really just a stupidly happy thing. We come out of a shop hearing adolescent screaming, Leigh looks up and goes "Is that Bono?" We'd been talking about U2 quite a bit lately, so it was appropriate to us anyway that they'd be right in front of us, rocking into midlife.
Random note: a new blog that might be, even in its infancy, my favorite in terms of thinking about things I'm thinking about right now. I would love to see Thomas talk about Flarf, a barely tapped oil well for poetry, at greater length.
Tried to limit myself on bookbuying. Got Silliman's N/O, which is astounding, as well as some Tom Raworth and Graham Foust. I just put one of my weekly needling entries to Silliman's comment box; I don't read the blog intending to do so, but I can't help it. I should probably just be thankful that Allen Grossman, Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, David Rosenberg & others don't have blogs so I don't have to do the same strange internal juggling. I mean, it's tough enough balancing my affection for Aaron's poems and my repulsion at his current face.
A Beard of Defiance I understand & endorse but is a Lobotomy of Defiance going to do anything but empower the current regime?
Monday, November 22, 2004
Balls to the wall here in the big city. Not sure what that means, but it sounds good. Ain't no trip to Cleveland. I am reading my poetry at St. Mark's tonight at 8 pm. Joyelle McSweeney will also be reading her poetry. Got the set list down. Enjoying the city. Celebrity spotting: Minnie Driver, Jordan Davis. PS: Congrats to Zach on his Fence-dom.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
We're heading to NYC tomorrow. Hard to express how excited this hick is. Chapel Hill's the biggest town I've ever lived in. I've been to Chicago and London, but that's about it on big cities, unless you count Seattle. I feel like Bob Pollard rolling out of Dayton to prove himself to the sophisticated.Speaking of proving one's self to the sophisticated, I've been working on this essay and Kasey and Flarf for the last week or so. It's going to be my critical writing sample in my applications to various Ph.D. programs. I'm close to being finished with my rough draft, then I need to tighten the thinking and organizations, flesh out some vague ideas and assertions. It may or may not be a good idea, but I'm going to post what I've got so far. Please do feel free to correct egregious errors and assumptions I make, counter my assertions, point me to good sources. I'm basically trying to prop up Flarf inside a tree that includes Personism, Projective Verse and Language. My grasp and familiarity with Language is certainly less than my knowledge of the other two, and the essay reflects this. Anyway, I think Kasey up to something really important and revelatory, and I'm trying to present this critically.Okay, so:
(paragraphs towards an essay that will likely be called):
Blowing Up Just to Say Something to Us : K. Silem Mohammad and the Sub-Poetics of Flarf
Flarf has arrived on the experimental poetry scene as a fully developed community and aesthetic; it has even introduced a new technique, Google-sculpting[1], as a poetic tool. In light of this, it’s something of a surprise that Flarf also appears to be a nearly accidental, or at least unanticipated, occurrence arising from a unique intersection of technology and community. The tongue-in-cheek quality of the poems themselves and the poets’ bemused, hyper-self-aware pronouncements seem natural, even necessary, considering the un-anticipated emergence of a poetics which has been featured on BBC radio, Village Voice, and other venues. These pronouncements and descriptions of Flarf by the poets associated with it (K. Silem Mohammad, Nada Gordon, Gary Sullivan, Michael Magee, Kate Degentesh, Mitch Highfill, Rodney Koeneke, others) resemble each other fairly uniformly in their less-than-serious stances, all of which helps Flarf anticipate and defuse potential criticisms of it. In their half-mocking manner the poets seem to have taken their cues from Frank O’Hara’s half-mock manifesto “Personism” which, perhaps partly because of its self-knowing presentation, has remained a relevant and revelatory poetics forty-five years after its composition.[2]
Gary Sullivan’s submission of a deliberately awful and offensive poem to http://www.poetry.com/ to see if such a poem would still be accepted for the site’s anthology—it was—is usually referred to as the first Flarfist act. He locates the origins of Flarf in the subpoetics listserv, an invitation-only offshoot of the public Listserv set up by Charles Bernstein at SUNY Buffalo. According to Sullivan, “somehow, ‘flarf’ began to take on a meaning: ‘having the quality of flarfiness.’ We now began to look at other things and to see them as ‘flarfy.’ I was never 100% sure what it meant—something akin to ‘campy,’ but with somewhat different resonances. More awkward, stumbling, ‘wrong’ than camp. The flarf ‘voice’ in my head was that of my father, a transplanted southerner, who likes to pontificate, and who has a lot of opinions that kind of horrify me.”[3] A social and aesthetic pressure to express acceptable sentiments seems to be an underlying impulse to Flarf; “I liked being on the subpoetics list,” Sullivan writes, “but at times it felt a bit stifling—very P.C. So I began using ‘flarf’ on the list as a way of keeping my own tendencies toward repression—which the list seemed to help foster—at bay.”[4]
The best introduction to Flarf as a whole is probably the twelfth issue of Michael Magee’s journal Combo, published in spring 2003. “A Note from the Editor” introducing the issue demonstrates Flarf’s Googling technique, the social aspect of Flarf, and its emphasis on irreverent humor. The contributors of this issue are referred to in this introduction, but apparently through the means of Googling their names and collaging together the results:
You’re so smart, eh! So Kasey , know what you want for Christmas? K: Yep! …
Well duh! These people need ideas! . . . A critical drubbing. Too synthy, too
disco, too teenybopper. My mom is a pervert comic book that Kasey likes.
It’s sexy, they young adults doing what they love to do and doing it well!!
To be general, the issue strikes me as an extended in-joke that quickly grows wearisome; the original delight in reading poems that venture outside the usual poetic lexicon lessens as it seems clear that Flarf’s appeal in most of the poems is mostly that of a knowing novelty act. I should also note that I was originally turned off by Flarf simply because it appeared to be so neatly packaged as a movement; a creation narrative was quickly set in place that included a group of East and West coast poets, all of whom seemed to be relative poetic insiders. What about poets with lesser connections performing their own Google experiments? What about Linh Dinh’s poems culled from similar sources?
It is more or less exclusively the work of one of the poets associated with Flarf, K. Silem Mohammad, which has motivated my interest in this new genre. In reviewing Mohammed’s Deer Head Nation, Aaron Kunin locates the book’s appeal in a social context: “a poem establishes an artificial community among its readers. Everyone who reads a poem is connected to it and to its other readers--an occult fact that Mohammad cheerfully exploits . . .”[5] I would like to extend Kunin’s insight; Mohammad’s Flarf poems, more readily than any other poet’s Flarf poems that I’ve read, establish a community not just among the readers of his poems, but also among the readers and the speakers/sources of his poems. Even as Mohammad’s Googling approach seems to mirror the approaches of others, his poems enunciate a wider range of emotions, shifting from anger to loneliness in a startling fashion while still reveling in the humor of the improper, unacceptable statements that his searches discover. The juxtaposition of raw, aggressive emotion and linguistic naiveté is often illuminating. One of the most appealing poems in the Combo issue is Mohammad’s “The Led Zeppelin Experience,” which cultivates a dreadful, violent authority that is only accentuated by its often child-like use of language and comical/frightful misspellings, most notably of the word “retarded.” Here is the poem in its entirety:
The Led Zeppelin Experience
what are you retarted making fun of dead people?
if your popin shit like that i don’t even know you
man I swear I would kick you’re a$$ if I ever saw you
you or knew who the f*ck you are cuz no play?
you can’t even make sense when I’m REALLY drunk
are you retarted serious question
not doing homework, thats for sure
go to a library! just look up Henry James duh
re: Dumb & Dumber: are you retarted, that movie was great
you sound excited about it. . . .
do you wanna see me puke? What are you retarted?
no (than whats your fucking problem)
well unless you are retarted like this dumb ho
then you know what napster is
so here is a list of some hot songs:
fuck i don’t know any songs. . . .
you are an anus mouth , are you retarted
this has damage bonus fruitcake
fuck up u are obviously have some kind of obsesion wit me
it’s a wonder why your husband left you and you’re all alone
you venture into my valley and you then ask for your life??
you will not leave this valley alive little dwarf
I would like to argue that part of the poem’s appeal is its juxtaposition of phrases that illustrate a general state of some type of obliviousness (cultural, emotional, political) with phrases like “it’s a wonder why your husband left you and you’re all alone” that reveal a full and sinister awareness. While many other Flarf poems revel in ‘outsider’ language that is apparently mostly of interest because it is not usually allowed in poems, Mohammea’s Flarf poems use the outsider language as an entry point to not just language outside the poetic mainstream but emotions, social situations and value systems that are usually not present in contemporary poetry.
The poem “Peek-a-Boo” from Deer Head Nation also utilizes Google techniques to sinister effect. It begins “September 9, 2001.” With Mohammad’s Googling process known beforehand, this is an ominous note with which to begin a poem, highlighting a kind of innocence or human obliviousness to events which we, in the future, are now aware of (contrast this with the burgeoning genre of “Post 9/11” poems, many of which view the day’s events in the safety of hindsight with the muted language of hindsight, incorporating the events into pre-existing elegiac stances[6]). The rest of the opening stanza consists of rapid cuts between fairly infantile utterances (“peek-a-boo” “smile”) and phrases that offer no continuity of thought:
bluselpilka. bloody cisma smilesjgrins
facial expression [also. shriek
this would be the shaft and
seventeenth-order non-stiff bloody
threatening rows of perfect teeth
Mohammad’s presentation of these lines seems to be strategic; the rest of the poem, in comparison to these lines, is lucid. The above lines present an apparently un-filtered presentation of the Google-sculpting technique; odd word combinations and punctuations are included, causing a reader to confront Mohammad’s language as material to be sculpted and collaged. The lack of complete thoughts or emotions in these lines also hint at a difficulty of utterance and address: it is not clear who is speaking or who is being spoken to. Only in the last line (“threatening rows of perfect teeth”) do we get a complete utterance or observation. Overall, the stanza emphasizes both Mohammad’s technique and an awareness of the difficulties for many speaker to master the language at hand.
The opening of the second stanza mirrors the first, beginning “Tuesday, September 11.” One can argue that Flarf, or at least Google-sculpting, is uniquely equipped to deal with traumatic periods: the language presented is a language of immediacy, as opposed to the language of careful introspection or correct impression. A direct treatment of the event is possible for the Google-minded poet; this is true even years down the line as long as the original material is still available. It’s unlikely, though, that the language from this stanza[7] (or poem) is from September 11th , though an argument can be made that 9/11 helped solidify the necessity for a Flarf aesthetic. According to Gary Sullivan, “Not too long after 9/11, people began posting again, though now all of the flarfs—many of which were parodies of AP News items—in some way shape or form addressed the aftermath of 9/11, including media portrayal of same. [. . .] I started a ‘sadness’ series-doing searches on ‘The horrible sadness,’ ‘the awful sadness,’ ‘the unending sadness,’ etc., in response to what was becoming a kind of stifling national(ist) mourning.”[8]
The visceral death-and-carnage reality of September 11th is embedded in “Peek-a-Boo” much more directly than in many of the ‘mainstream’ post-9/11 poems that airbrush out the gore of the day and focus more on the political, social and psychic impact of the events on the nation of survivors. Mohammad’s poem obsesses over a handful of words; one can venture that teeth, animal and bloody are among the search terms used for “Peek-a-Boo.” The word teeth is used eleven times in the poem, animal is used fourteen times, bloody occurs seven times. The rest of “Peek-a-Boo” circulates around these three words & appears to be constructed from phrases that attach themselves (collateral phrases?) to these key terms when Googled. Flarf in this way can be presented as almost a parody of Pound’s great Modernist innovation where, in Hugh Kenner’s words, his vortex is “not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water.”[9] Mohammad’s poems & lines aren’t the search words but are patterns made visible by the search words. Again in Kenner’s words: “[a] patterned integrity accessible to the mind; topologically stable; subject to variations of intensity; brought into the domain of the senses by a particular interaction of words.”[10] A contrast can be made between Pound’s method, which attempts to frame history and culture within a single totalizing aesthetic (some have argued that this correlates with Pound’s fascist leanings) and Mohammad’s method, which surveys and presents recent culture and history as it is (or as it is created and altered on the Internet) through the lens of a search engine, several words & Mohammad’s edits.
Mohammad’s process & editorial eye collaborate to create absolutely unexpected images and phrase clusters; as an objective instrument, Google is unafraid of any image or register of language and Mohammad applies its discoveries to great effect. “Peek-a-Boo’s” language is relatively tame compared to perhaps more “hardcore” Flarf poems (to be discussed later). From “Peek-a-Boo”:
what it’s like to be an animal
transform the gunman into a bloody
truck, tractor or farm animal
eye swollen shut and
lips pulled away from his teeth
in flashback to his ancestor
“a mountain with a smile”
bloody, scary silence
The transformations that occur between lines are striking; language that intends (or was intended) to go in one direction is re-routed into unanticipated territory. The line “transform the gunman into a bloody” comes from a hyper-violent short story called “Aaron Kaiser versus Raven Whitehorse.”[11] The scene in the story describes a gunman clenched and squished by huge mechanical jaws. Mohammed’s poem re-locates the language away from its video game-ish origins to a more pastoral setting, joining it with a line that arises from an apparently popular “You Might Be a High-Tech Redneck” bit circulating the Internet that reads: “You might be a high-tech redneck if . . . your screen saver is a bitmap image of your favorite truck, tractor, or farm animal.”
In discussing Mohammad’s achievement , Marcel Duchamp’s description of “R.Mutt’s” submission of an urinal to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists is applicable: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”[12] Similarly, freed of the burden of generating new language—the burden of Romantic originality—Mohammed is free to view pre-existing language from a new point of view, to create new thoughts for the language at hand (as well as new rhythms & images for this language). All of this would still be possible for a reader to appreciate even if Mohammed and other Flarf-ists kept their processes private; lines such as “he never brushes his teeth/his bloody techniques” and “he now has a very diabolical smile/for his little plan to get the dog/bloody hand prints emblazoned” have an immediacy that is not at all dependent upon a knowledge of the processes involved. In fact, some readers may be disappointed to discover that lines like those quoted above didn’t spring from the poet’s imagination but were found by him. Some may even argue that the lines are plagiarized. But I’d argue that the re-imagining of source, & the reader’s knowledge of the source of Mohammad’s language, is the great realization of these poems.
Jack Spicer is perhaps the 20th century’s most insistent proponent of the essential Outside as a source of poetry, though the idea of a source outside the poet as being generative is an ancient one, from classical invocations to the muses to Milton entering William Blake’s foot as a comet to dictate poetry to him. In Spicer’s first Vancouver lecture, in June of 1965, Spicer articulates his theories:
. . . essentially that there is an Outside to the poet. Now what the Outside is like is described differently by different poets. And some of them believe that there’s a welling up of the subconscious or of the racial memory or the this or the that, and they try to put it inside the poet. Others take it from the Outside. Olson’s idea of energy and projective verse is something that comes from the Outside.
I think the source is unimportant. But I think that for a poet writing poetry, the idea of just exactly what the poet is in relationship to this Outside, whether it’s an id down in the cortex which you can’t reach anyway, which is just as far outside as Mars, or whether it is as far away as those galaxies which seem to be sending radio messages to us with the whole of the galaxy blowing up just to say something to us[13]
According to Spicer, an essential element of the outside source is its remoteness; the distance a poet (or the source) must travel is a sign of the message’s claim to urgency. To illustrate this ideal, Spicer famously referred to the poet as a kind of radio: “essentially you are something which is being transmitted into.”[14] I would like to briefly point to the importance of technology here, whether it is the invention of the radio which allows Spicer’s Martians to dictate messages to the poet or whether it is the evolution and popularization of the Internet to such a degree that the Google search engine allows Mohammad to access social climates and circles that – whether because of geography, race, class or inclination – he would otherwise not be able to access. For the contemporary poet’s imagination, technology is a democratizing force; the poet is pushed to acknowledge the divide between his or her poetic presentation of everyday speech and the actuality of everyday ‘speech’ as it occurs in chat-rooms, personal web sites and the like. A poet can offer her or his poems as a respite from the everyday ‘abuses’ of the language, or work to more accurately reflect ‘non-poetic’ registers of language, but it’s becoming more difficult for poets to ignore what ‘everyday speech’ actually looks like in the hands and mouths of everyday people.
The other Outside source that Spicer refers to in the above passage – the id – can also serve as a metaphor for Mohammad’s Googled sources, the language of individuals whose values are normally nowhere reflected in the well-considered, carefully chosen lines of (in Mohammad’s words) “the effete peripatetic poet safely above a scenic view of the countryside and its filthy horizon.”[15] In one formulation that can be derived from Mohammad’s view, the Googled sources create the bubbling subconscious of the language, a subconscious that more directly expresses the fears, desires and prejudices that often are excluded from acceptable and publishable poetries. But in fact Mohammad takes a more radical stance and offers these voices not as marginal or subliminal pools but as the actual main current/currency of the language: “A mainstream is a forceful, central current that carries in its path all the debris and livestock and entire vacationing families that get vortexed into it. It is not a carefully constructed iron walkway [. . .] In the mainstream, you have to shout to be heard above the roar [. . .] The mainstream is the scary global video game we live in, everyday, and it has nothing to do with some absurd publishing scam . . .”[16] In Mohammad’s formulation, the Robert Pinskys and Mary Olivers of the poetry world, poets who often are referred to as mainstream poets, are actually the (self-) marginalized voices. A truly mainstream poetics would more closely reflect the tensions and excitements of the present as the present is experienced by those outside a poet’s (often privileged) peer group.
Benjamin Friedlander describes the generally hostile reaction of the Buffalo Poetics Listserv when he began posting his “Anti-Hegemony Project,” contributions to the Listserv that discussed the vaunted Language poet Ron Silliman. Friedlander’s posts contrasted with the usual Listserv traffic not in subject matter or critical appraisal of Silliman (the posts express a wide range of reactions to Silliman the poet and personality)—the primary uniqueness of Friedlander’s posts is their style: the syntax and language of the Silliman posts are lifted directly from chat rooms devoted to fans of the pop singer Madonna (“I am normally a Silliman fan to the max, but I think I am slipping. What is the story on him and Lyn Hejinian being terrorists?”[17]). Friedlander, in his introduction to “Anti-Hegemony Project,” posits this question: “Could it be that the [Silliman] postings [. . .] wounded the vanity of the List as a whole, and not merely the figures named directly?”[18] Friedlander proposes that because his posts appeared to treat an intellectually prized poet and poetic movement as, in his words, “adolescent twaddle,” the posts were seen as a threat. Viewed in the context of this essay, this negative reaction can also be seen as a symptom of even the experimental poetics community’s insularity and loftiness. “We have in the [Anti-Hegemony Project] the bold, vigorous, and semi-lucid prose, the biting sarcasm, the pungent opinionation, and the unscrupulous directness of the world beyond poetry.”[19] Implied in both Friedlander and Mohammad’s projects is the necessity to bridge the distance between the world of poetry and the world beyond poetry as both are currently conceived. In Mohammad’s view, “[Mainstream poetry] would have to be aggressively public, perhaps--distributed via mass mailing or spam messages, say. It would have to be as shameless as television . . .”[20]
In this formulation, the epiphanies, values and insights presented in this new mainstream poetry would figure to be radically different than the world presented by the discourse on the Buffalo Listserv and/or the world presented in a poem like Mary Oliver’s “The Dipper,” which ends:
And still I hear him—
and whenever I open the ponderous book of riddle
she sits with his black feet hooked to the page,
his eyes cheerful, still burning with water-love—
and thus the world is full of leaves and feathers,
and comfort, and instruction. I do not even remember
your name, great river,
but since that hour I have lived
simply,
in the joy of the body as full and clear
as falling water; the pleasures of the mind
like a dark bird dipping in and out, tasting and singing.
The simple world as presented here is perhaps enticing, a pastoral world “full of leaves and feathers,/and comfort, and instruction.” But it would indeed seem odd to argue for this as language or a world that can be labeled mainstream—there’s not only an assumption of an unusual degree safety and comfort in these lines, but also an assumption of ample time for both leisurely experiencing nature and contemplating its importance[21]. There’s lyricism and emotion here but it is the lyricism and emotion of a relatively rare level of comfort, of an arguably irresponsible purity.
Is Mohammad post-lyrical then? The promise of lyricism offered by a solitary figure in repose uttering his or her thoughts and emotions is not offered in Mohammad’s poems. This is not to say, however, that lyricism (or, in Mohammad’s words, “its related effects, such as antilyricism, metalyricism, paralyricism . . .[22]”) is absent in his poetry. In 2002 Mohammad notes a change in his process: “from a period of intuitive, transrational lyricism [. . .] to a period of heavily rule-based assemblage, using principles of collage to work backward from the earlier method, attempting to simulate lyricism . . . ”[23] Poetic lyricism as it is generally considered (language that is appropriate for singing) arises from what a lay man would consider natural speech, language that coexists easily with one’s daily life of work, entertainment and shopping. Ron Silliman, when contemplating the subject behind the phrase “thank you” on a trash receptacle, writes “[m]uch (although not all) of the anonymous commercial language of daily life is constructed around [. . .] the normative or plain style of grammar. This discourse of the social contract is writing in the purest Derridean sense—even in its most truncated forms, as on this wall, it insinuates a universe of order, a hierarchy made to appear natural.”[24] A poetry that reflects the language of ‘normal’ social orders and hierarchies reinforcing the naturalness and rightness of those orders and the absent but implied authorities of those orders. The disconnect between the impulse of Language-associated writers and lyricism as it is generally known is pronounced; one of the more remarked upon tendencies of contemporary younger poets, the melding of an evasive poetic surface and old-fashioned “I”-centered poetic lyricism, does seem untenable, or at least partially unaware of the inherent contradictions of this melding. This is not to suggest that such contradictions cannot or are not mined for effect, but that such contradictions should perhaps be an impetus not to simply return to lyricism as it was known pre-Language but re-imagine lyricism.
[insert here a paragraph combining Silliman’s “the space between period and next sentence” statement and Kasey's comments on
Barrett Watten’s poem “Mode Z”
at Lime Tree:
“"Mode Z" requires imaginative participation from the reader [. . .]: we must constantly invent and revise contexts in which the "voice" of the poem makes sense, or in which its failure to make sense makes sense. [. . .] The orders and advice and observations offered by this speaker are offered, in front of a constantly changing geopolitical backdrop, to a likewise shifting audience. That blank irony I mentioned colors everything, including the pauses between sentences.”
Mohammad’s poem “Mars Needs Terrorists” from Deer Head Nation was also chosen by Language poet Lyn Hejinian for inclusion in 2004’s Best American Poetry anthology. Even surrounded by some of the most accomplished experimental-minded poets—such as Bob Perelman, Nathaniel Mackey and Alice Notley—Mohammad’s “Mars Needs Terrorists” stands out as a distinct re-imagining of what poetry can be. A quick glance at the opening section (there are ten sections) will demonstrate its unique appearance and approach:
1.
:.:.:.:.: alien parasites
:.:.:.:.: alien slave ship survivors,
:.:.:.:.: alien teenagers in 1950s Florida, sex
:.:.:.:.: terror and destruction, terror
:.:.:.:.: terror designed to part dumbass teenagers
:.:.:.:.: some now very wet
:.:.:.:.: romantic, the republican
:.:.:.:.: told me of their terror
:.:.:.:.: outfit for ?I?ma slave
:.:.:.:.: a fundraiser for republican
:.:.:.:.: and wet buns contest
:.:.:.:.: parents talking about sex
:.:.:.:.: of here 7.battle him republican 8
:.:.:.:.: 8.we are 138.9 teenagers
Visually, the presence of the series of colons and periods sets this poem apart from most other poems, whether mainstream or experimental. While I’m unsure of Mohammad’s intentions in starting each line with this punctuation, the effect only reinforces the poem’s reliance on the Google-sculpting process. The series of colons suggests that each line is the result of a previous—though to the reader unknown—equation or statement; one can imagine the Google search words being the unstated left-hand half of the equation. The series of periods implies a kind of ellipsis, suggesting that each line in and of itself is only a selected portion of a previous whole. Apart from the appropriateness of Mohammad’s use of preliminary punctuation in terms of its relation to his process, it also causes the reader to re-imagine her or his approach to reading the poem. By highlighting the process (and the seams involved) in this manner, Mohammad forces the reader to make active decisions. Is one to read the poem as an unedited product of a chance operation? Is one to read the lines as individual riffs on a set theme (with the theme being whatever search terms Mohammad chooses)? Or is one to read the poem as an unsuccessful or at the very least unusual attempt at creating a single private consciousness from public discourse? (A high ratio of the lines in fact do connect syntactically; one can read the statement “romantic, the republican told me of their terror outfit for ?I?ma slave” as a single utterance.)
Mohammad’s reading of Watten’s poem has been a useful guide to my own reading of “Mars Needs Terrorists.” While readings and the pleasures derived from them often extend beyond one’s conscious intentions and reactions, I do consciously read Mohammad’s poem at (at the least) two levels. The first level follows his reading of Watten very closely: “we must constantly invent and revise contexts in which the ‘voice’ of the poem makes sense, or in which its failure to make sense makes sense.”[25] This is where the fore-grounding of the Google-sculpting process comes into play. Instead of the revision and invention of possible contexts that is required by Watten’s poem, the reader of “Mars Needs Terrorists” is afforded the knowledge that these lines do exist somewhere on the Internet: in actuality, in their original contexts. Coming across a line like “of here 7.battle him republican 8” one tries to imagine a possible world for it. The line could have originated from a track list of liberal protest songs using the contrast between “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Battle Him Republican” for ironic purposes. Less likely but still possible is that it is a result of a person’s mishearing or misremembering the title “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Likewise, the line “some now very wet” in the context of the Google process could have originated from innumerable contexts, ranging from the sexually explicit to the innocently descriptive. The montage effect of much modernist and post-modernist poetry is in play here but with an added level: a montage not just of the images or lines themselves but also a montage of their sources.
The second level of my reading, also derived from the fore-grounding of Mohammad’s process, is of watching Mohammad himself and his relation to his sources (as I have imagined them). Steve Evans assesses Deer Head Nation as being “smarter and more critical than the procedure alone could have predicted for – which I take to mean that we have cause to be grateful to K. Silem Mohammad for some modicum of old-fashioned authorial decision making and information-shaping.”[26] Evans’ assessment points to the privileged nature of reading Mohammad’s poems; by fixing his general processes and sources, Mohammad presents as variables not his own emotions, thoughts and imaginings but (as noted above) those of his sources. But Mohammad does allow himself to also be a present variable in these poems, but solely at a linguistic and conceptual level. To frame things perhaps more precisely, let me present Michael Magee’s[27] statement comparing Flarf and Personism:
This will sound needlessly hyperbolic but it seems to me that there's an analogy to be made between flarf and O'Hara's Personism -- which itself was a technology-based/generated poetry: to borrow a formula, the web is to flarf what the telephone was to O'Hara: 1) a way to gather and exchange information very very quickly AS A FORM OF POETRY; 2) a way to undercut and/or render flexible the idea of authorship; 3) a way to, as Duncan said of O'Hara, "restore to poetry its trivial uses."
One might say that Flarf is a radical elevation of the tendencies already there in Personism.[28]
Flarf viewed as such is in the tradition of other modernist movements made possible by technology, with Google playing a role somewhere between Personism’s telephone and Projective Verse’s typewriter: a new instrument for both gathering information and for re-imagining the construction of a poem. Flarf is also in the tradition of the Language poets’ movement away from a speech-based poetics; instead of a single static speaker, Flarf presents language from persons in various spectrums of development and flux.
The Flarf-Personism comparison extends also to a reader’s approach to a poem. In “Personism” O’Hara famously stated that the poem was now “at last between two people instead of two pages,” re-framing the poem as an address between individuals. Such an approach allows the reader a frame for enjoying the daily minutiae of many of O’Hara’s poems; in this rearrangement of the poem, “one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.” A part of Flarf’s appeal is its re-arrangement of the poet-poem-reader dynamic. O’Hara’s Personism “puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person.” In this formulation I take “the person” as being the person a poem originally addresses; in O’Hara’s take Personism was born when he decided to write a poem to someone he was in love with and then realized he could just use the phone instead. If the idealized audience of a bard is a large group of listeners the solitary reader has the option of picturing her or himself as one among a crowd. If the idealized audience of a Romantic poem is the poet himself the reader has the option of picturing her or himself as the self-same poet or perhaps an omniscient presence. Personism presents a single, individual, actual person as the idealized reader of a poem therefore re-imagining not just the poet’s stance to a poem but a reader’s self-conception: the reader can imagine her or himself as the actual original person addressed or as one who overhears the conversation between two people that Personism describes. In either instance Personism presents a potentially more casual, active and intimate level of address and listening.
With full awareness of the poet’s Google-sculpting processes, a reader of a Flarf poem is free to re-imagine her or his relation to the text. Instead of being situated between the poet and the person addressed, a Flarf poem is situated between the poet and the original sources of the language, with the reader posited somewhere outside this conversation (therefore freeing the reader to decide for one’s self where to be situated). In this way Flarf resembles the procedural works of Jackson Mac Low or John Cage, or various OuLiPo projects, or Ronald Johnson’s erasing of Milton’s Paradise Lost to create RADI OS. But while many of these works use single source texts that were consciously created as literature, Flarf incorporates texts created from a variety of sources, most of which occur outside of the world most would consider literary. In Mohammad’s “Does Your Poetry Hold Up?” from his online chapbook Hanging Out with Pablo and Jennifer, tracking down his sources reveals a wide range of documents that demonstrate a rather astonishing range of emotions, assumptions and values. The sources include: a self-interview on a personal web page (Q: “Are you really a depressed individual, are these heartbreaks you write about true?” A: “I’m far from depressed!”); a poetry assignment from a high school English class; an interview with the poet Walt McDonald (“I don't think poetry will stop wars, I don't think poetry will warn the world. I think that's what the Lord came for, and look what they did to Him.”); self-publishing advice from a personal web site; directions for posting to a poetry discussion forum at http://www.dreamersreality.com/; interviews with poets Nick Piombino, Diane Wakoski (interviewer: “I'm interested in depth, so I think you certainly have depth”), Quan Berry and David Lehman; Honore de Balzac’s The Exiles (“Go, never reveal your ideas to the vulgar! Be at once the altar, the priest, and the victim!”); a post to “The Blender Board” from November 1998 (“I, too, am only 14 and i have been submitting here since i was 12. I haven't gotten feedback on some of my works”); an interview with John Whitworth (“Oh I do hope I have a magic path, I do hope so”); a poem from a personal web page (“I explore my coffee-flavored existence,/searching decades of clouded translucence/for some proof of life”); the guest book of a personal poetry web page (“Poetheart, I love your latest poems.”); a book review at Amazon.com; a web published short story titled “Will You Remember Me?” (“In her semi-reclined position she reached out, touching the thigh of the other woman in order to bring her attention back from tormenting the seagulls”); the love books of Ovid (“With all that remains of so great a poet, you scarce could fill a tiny urn”); a story titled “Verse & Vignette” from http://www.xenafan.com/ (“’Humphf.’ Gabrielle humphfs as she begins slipping”); a personal web page warning readers about poetry.com that includes a poem written against poetry.com that was nevertheless accepted for poetry.com’s anthology (“Poetry.com is a giant scam./It is run by the same people who run/the International Library of Poetry,/which is also a scam.”); a “How to Write Poetry” website (“Although some would argue that the Golden Age of Poetry passed away with Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, people everywhere are still writing volumes and volumes of the stuff”).
“Does Your Poetry Hold Up?” is for me the pinnacle of Flarf thus far. A reader equipped with the knowledge of Mohammad’s technique and the proliferation of on-line poetry sites of every conceivable stripe will read this piece with a mix of bemusement, repulsion and empathy. In “Projective Verse,” Charles Olson writes, “The objects which occur at every given moment of composition (of recognition, we can call it) are, can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem.”[29] One implication of Olson’s assertion is that to respect an accident is to respect the actual; to use what actually occurs as opposed to one’s wishes about occurrence. Reading Mohammad’s piece one is faced the actuality of how poetry is discussed, considered and sold.
[complete this paragraph; paragraph on Does Your Poetry?'s move towards an 'over-voice'; conclude]
Notes:
[1] “[Y]ou search Google for 2 disparate terms, like "anarchy + tuna melt" – using only the quotes captured by Google (never the actual websites themselves) you stitch words, phrases, clauses, sentences together to create poems.” Michael Magee. “The Flarf Files” on Charles Bernstein’s syllabus page (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html),
[2] Michael Magee makes this Flarf-Personism comparison explicit:
"One might say that Flarf is a radical elevation of the tendencies already there in Personism.
If the occassion called for it I could make this claim in very very very intimidating THEORYSPPCCHHHChhgggccchh ARF ARF ARF.
But anyway it's true.
To steal another formulation from O'Hara, flarf being surer and quicker than poetry, it is only just that flarf finish poetry off."
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Rain Taxi. Online edition. Winter 03/04.
[6] The website of the Academy of American Poets (http://www.poets.org/) has a “Post 9/11 Poetry Resources Page” that maintains links to poems and collections of poems pertaining to 9/11 and/or written in its wake. Stephen Dunn strikes a representative chord in his poem “To a Terrorist”: “I'm just speaking out loud/to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,/doomed to become mere words.”
[7] The complete line from Rogers’ poem, dated 1999, reads “and judaspriests who yield to animal need.”
[8] “The Flarf Files.” http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html
[9] The Pound Era. 146
[10] Ibid.
[11] This story can be found on-line at http://www.hlrpg.com/Battle-Archives/2000/October2000-Archives/akai-vs-rwhi-17oct2000.html.
[12] “The Richard Mutt Case” Art in Theory. ed. Harrison & Wood. 252
[13] The House that Jack Built: the Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. ed. Peter Gizzi. 5
[14] Ibid. 7
[15] http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html
[16] Ibid.
[17] Benjamin Friedlander. Simulcast. 105
[18] Ibid. 43-44
[19] Ibid. 44
[20] “Towards a Mainstream Poetics.” http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html
[21] This observation about Oliver’s poem is stated with a knowledge that it takes a certain degree of leisure and privilege to have the time to run Google searches and create poems in this manner.
[22] Post to the Buffalo Poetics Listserv. Tue, 3 Sep 2002. http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0209&L=poetics&P=R4813&D=1&H=0&I=-3&O=T&T=1
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ron Silliman. “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. ed Charles Bernstein.
[25] Lime Tree. http://ksilem.com/?. April 28, 2004.
[26] “Field Notes.” The Poker 4 (summer 2004)
[27] Flarf poet who maintains the Mainstream Poetry blog and edits Combo, an experimental poetry magazine which produced an “all-Flarf” issue in the spring of 2003.
[28] “The Flarf Files” http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html
[29] Collected Prose. 243
(paragraphs towards an essay that will likely be called):
Blowing Up Just to Say Something to Us : K. Silem Mohammad and the Sub-Poetics of Flarf
Flarf has arrived on the experimental poetry scene as a fully developed community and aesthetic; it has even introduced a new technique, Google-sculpting[1], as a poetic tool. In light of this, it’s something of a surprise that Flarf also appears to be a nearly accidental, or at least unanticipated, occurrence arising from a unique intersection of technology and community. The tongue-in-cheek quality of the poems themselves and the poets’ bemused, hyper-self-aware pronouncements seem natural, even necessary, considering the un-anticipated emergence of a poetics which has been featured on BBC radio, Village Voice, and other venues. These pronouncements and descriptions of Flarf by the poets associated with it (K. Silem Mohammad, Nada Gordon, Gary Sullivan, Michael Magee, Kate Degentesh, Mitch Highfill, Rodney Koeneke, others) resemble each other fairly uniformly in their less-than-serious stances, all of which helps Flarf anticipate and defuse potential criticisms of it. In their half-mocking manner the poets seem to have taken their cues from Frank O’Hara’s half-mock manifesto “Personism” which, perhaps partly because of its self-knowing presentation, has remained a relevant and revelatory poetics forty-five years after its composition.[2]
Gary Sullivan’s submission of a deliberately awful and offensive poem to http://www.poetry.com/ to see if such a poem would still be accepted for the site’s anthology—it was—is usually referred to as the first Flarfist act. He locates the origins of Flarf in the subpoetics listserv, an invitation-only offshoot of the public Listserv set up by Charles Bernstein at SUNY Buffalo. According to Sullivan, “somehow, ‘flarf’ began to take on a meaning: ‘having the quality of flarfiness.’ We now began to look at other things and to see them as ‘flarfy.’ I was never 100% sure what it meant—something akin to ‘campy,’ but with somewhat different resonances. More awkward, stumbling, ‘wrong’ than camp. The flarf ‘voice’ in my head was that of my father, a transplanted southerner, who likes to pontificate, and who has a lot of opinions that kind of horrify me.”[3] A social and aesthetic pressure to express acceptable sentiments seems to be an underlying impulse to Flarf; “I liked being on the subpoetics list,” Sullivan writes, “but at times it felt a bit stifling—very P.C. So I began using ‘flarf’ on the list as a way of keeping my own tendencies toward repression—which the list seemed to help foster—at bay.”[4]
The best introduction to Flarf as a whole is probably the twelfth issue of Michael Magee’s journal Combo, published in spring 2003. “A Note from the Editor” introducing the issue demonstrates Flarf’s Googling technique, the social aspect of Flarf, and its emphasis on irreverent humor. The contributors of this issue are referred to in this introduction, but apparently through the means of Googling their names and collaging together the results:
You’re so smart, eh! So Kasey , know what you want for Christmas? K: Yep! …
Well duh! These people need ideas! . . . A critical drubbing. Too synthy, too
disco, too teenybopper. My mom is a pervert comic book that Kasey likes.
It’s sexy, they young adults doing what they love to do and doing it well!!
To be general, the issue strikes me as an extended in-joke that quickly grows wearisome; the original delight in reading poems that venture outside the usual poetic lexicon lessens as it seems clear that Flarf’s appeal in most of the poems is mostly that of a knowing novelty act. I should also note that I was originally turned off by Flarf simply because it appeared to be so neatly packaged as a movement; a creation narrative was quickly set in place that included a group of East and West coast poets, all of whom seemed to be relative poetic insiders. What about poets with lesser connections performing their own Google experiments? What about Linh Dinh’s poems culled from similar sources?
It is more or less exclusively the work of one of the poets associated with Flarf, K. Silem Mohammad, which has motivated my interest in this new genre. In reviewing Mohammed’s Deer Head Nation, Aaron Kunin locates the book’s appeal in a social context: “a poem establishes an artificial community among its readers. Everyone who reads a poem is connected to it and to its other readers--an occult fact that Mohammad cheerfully exploits . . .”[5] I would like to extend Kunin’s insight; Mohammad’s Flarf poems, more readily than any other poet’s Flarf poems that I’ve read, establish a community not just among the readers of his poems, but also among the readers and the speakers/sources of his poems. Even as Mohammad’s Googling approach seems to mirror the approaches of others, his poems enunciate a wider range of emotions, shifting from anger to loneliness in a startling fashion while still reveling in the humor of the improper, unacceptable statements that his searches discover. The juxtaposition of raw, aggressive emotion and linguistic naiveté is often illuminating. One of the most appealing poems in the Combo issue is Mohammad’s “The Led Zeppelin Experience,” which cultivates a dreadful, violent authority that is only accentuated by its often child-like use of language and comical/frightful misspellings, most notably of the word “retarded.” Here is the poem in its entirety:
The Led Zeppelin Experience
what are you retarted making fun of dead people?
if your popin shit like that i don’t even know you
man I swear I would kick you’re a$$ if I ever saw you
you or knew who the f*ck you are cuz no play?
you can’t even make sense when I’m REALLY drunk
are you retarted serious question
not doing homework, thats for sure
go to a library! just look up Henry James duh
re: Dumb & Dumber: are you retarted, that movie was great
you sound excited about it. . . .
do you wanna see me puke? What are you retarted?
no (than whats your fucking problem)
well unless you are retarted like this dumb ho
then you know what napster is
so here is a list of some hot songs:
fuck i don’t know any songs. . . .
you are an anus mouth , are you retarted
this has damage bonus fruitcake
fuck up u are obviously have some kind of obsesion wit me
it’s a wonder why your husband left you and you’re all alone
you venture into my valley and you then ask for your life??
you will not leave this valley alive little dwarf
I would like to argue that part of the poem’s appeal is its juxtaposition of phrases that illustrate a general state of some type of obliviousness (cultural, emotional, political) with phrases like “it’s a wonder why your husband left you and you’re all alone” that reveal a full and sinister awareness. While many other Flarf poems revel in ‘outsider’ language that is apparently mostly of interest because it is not usually allowed in poems, Mohammea’s Flarf poems use the outsider language as an entry point to not just language outside the poetic mainstream but emotions, social situations and value systems that are usually not present in contemporary poetry.
The poem “Peek-a-Boo” from Deer Head Nation also utilizes Google techniques to sinister effect. It begins “September 9, 2001.” With Mohammad’s Googling process known beforehand, this is an ominous note with which to begin a poem, highlighting a kind of innocence or human obliviousness to events which we, in the future, are now aware of (contrast this with the burgeoning genre of “Post 9/11” poems, many of which view the day’s events in the safety of hindsight with the muted language of hindsight, incorporating the events into pre-existing elegiac stances[6]). The rest of the opening stanza consists of rapid cuts between fairly infantile utterances (“peek-a-boo” “smile”) and phrases that offer no continuity of thought:
bluselpilka. bloody cisma smilesjgrins
facial expression [also. shriek
this would be the shaft and
seventeenth-order non-stiff bloody
threatening rows of perfect teeth
Mohammad’s presentation of these lines seems to be strategic; the rest of the poem, in comparison to these lines, is lucid. The above lines present an apparently un-filtered presentation of the Google-sculpting technique; odd word combinations and punctuations are included, causing a reader to confront Mohammad’s language as material to be sculpted and collaged. The lack of complete thoughts or emotions in these lines also hint at a difficulty of utterance and address: it is not clear who is speaking or who is being spoken to. Only in the last line (“threatening rows of perfect teeth”) do we get a complete utterance or observation. Overall, the stanza emphasizes both Mohammad’s technique and an awareness of the difficulties for many speaker to master the language at hand.
The opening of the second stanza mirrors the first, beginning “Tuesday, September 11.” One can argue that Flarf, or at least Google-sculpting, is uniquely equipped to deal with traumatic periods: the language presented is a language of immediacy, as opposed to the language of careful introspection or correct impression. A direct treatment of the event is possible for the Google-minded poet; this is true even years down the line as long as the original material is still available. It’s unlikely, though, that the language from this stanza[7] (or poem) is from September 11th , though an argument can be made that 9/11 helped solidify the necessity for a Flarf aesthetic. According to Gary Sullivan, “Not too long after 9/11, people began posting again, though now all of the flarfs—many of which were parodies of AP News items—in some way shape or form addressed the aftermath of 9/11, including media portrayal of same. [. . .] I started a ‘sadness’ series-doing searches on ‘The horrible sadness,’ ‘the awful sadness,’ ‘the unending sadness,’ etc., in response to what was becoming a kind of stifling national(ist) mourning.”[8]
The visceral death-and-carnage reality of September 11th is embedded in “Peek-a-Boo” much more directly than in many of the ‘mainstream’ post-9/11 poems that airbrush out the gore of the day and focus more on the political, social and psychic impact of the events on the nation of survivors. Mohammad’s poem obsesses over a handful of words; one can venture that teeth, animal and bloody are among the search terms used for “Peek-a-Boo.” The word teeth is used eleven times in the poem, animal is used fourteen times, bloody occurs seven times. The rest of “Peek-a-Boo” circulates around these three words & appears to be constructed from phrases that attach themselves (collateral phrases?) to these key terms when Googled. Flarf in this way can be presented as almost a parody of Pound’s great Modernist innovation where, in Hugh Kenner’s words, his vortex is “not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water.”[9] Mohammad’s poems & lines aren’t the search words but are patterns made visible by the search words. Again in Kenner’s words: “[a] patterned integrity accessible to the mind; topologically stable; subject to variations of intensity; brought into the domain of the senses by a particular interaction of words.”[10] A contrast can be made between Pound’s method, which attempts to frame history and culture within a single totalizing aesthetic (some have argued that this correlates with Pound’s fascist leanings) and Mohammad’s method, which surveys and presents recent culture and history as it is (or as it is created and altered on the Internet) through the lens of a search engine, several words & Mohammad’s edits.
Mohammad’s process & editorial eye collaborate to create absolutely unexpected images and phrase clusters; as an objective instrument, Google is unafraid of any image or register of language and Mohammad applies its discoveries to great effect. “Peek-a-Boo’s” language is relatively tame compared to perhaps more “hardcore” Flarf poems (to be discussed later). From “Peek-a-Boo”:
what it’s like to be an animal
transform the gunman into a bloody
truck, tractor or farm animal
eye swollen shut and
lips pulled away from his teeth
in flashback to his ancestor
“a mountain with a smile”
bloody, scary silence
The transformations that occur between lines are striking; language that intends (or was intended) to go in one direction is re-routed into unanticipated territory. The line “transform the gunman into a bloody” comes from a hyper-violent short story called “Aaron Kaiser versus Raven Whitehorse.”[11] The scene in the story describes a gunman clenched and squished by huge mechanical jaws. Mohammed’s poem re-locates the language away from its video game-ish origins to a more pastoral setting, joining it with a line that arises from an apparently popular “You Might Be a High-Tech Redneck” bit circulating the Internet that reads: “You might be a high-tech redneck if . . . your screen saver is a bitmap image of your favorite truck, tractor, or farm animal.”
In discussing Mohammad’s achievement , Marcel Duchamp’s description of “R.Mutt’s” submission of an urinal to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists is applicable: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”[12] Similarly, freed of the burden of generating new language—the burden of Romantic originality—Mohammed is free to view pre-existing language from a new point of view, to create new thoughts for the language at hand (as well as new rhythms & images for this language). All of this would still be possible for a reader to appreciate even if Mohammed and other Flarf-ists kept their processes private; lines such as “he never brushes his teeth/his bloody techniques” and “he now has a very diabolical smile/for his little plan to get the dog/bloody hand prints emblazoned” have an immediacy that is not at all dependent upon a knowledge of the processes involved. In fact, some readers may be disappointed to discover that lines like those quoted above didn’t spring from the poet’s imagination but were found by him. Some may even argue that the lines are plagiarized. But I’d argue that the re-imagining of source, & the reader’s knowledge of the source of Mohammad’s language, is the great realization of these poems.
Jack Spicer is perhaps the 20th century’s most insistent proponent of the essential Outside as a source of poetry, though the idea of a source outside the poet as being generative is an ancient one, from classical invocations to the muses to Milton entering William Blake’s foot as a comet to dictate poetry to him. In Spicer’s first Vancouver lecture, in June of 1965, Spicer articulates his theories:
. . . essentially that there is an Outside to the poet. Now what the Outside is like is described differently by different poets. And some of them believe that there’s a welling up of the subconscious or of the racial memory or the this or the that, and they try to put it inside the poet. Others take it from the Outside. Olson’s idea of energy and projective verse is something that comes from the Outside.
I think the source is unimportant. But I think that for a poet writing poetry, the idea of just exactly what the poet is in relationship to this Outside, whether it’s an id down in the cortex which you can’t reach anyway, which is just as far outside as Mars, or whether it is as far away as those galaxies which seem to be sending radio messages to us with the whole of the galaxy blowing up just to say something to us[13]
According to Spicer, an essential element of the outside source is its remoteness; the distance a poet (or the source) must travel is a sign of the message’s claim to urgency. To illustrate this ideal, Spicer famously referred to the poet as a kind of radio: “essentially you are something which is being transmitted into.”[14] I would like to briefly point to the importance of technology here, whether it is the invention of the radio which allows Spicer’s Martians to dictate messages to the poet or whether it is the evolution and popularization of the Internet to such a degree that the Google search engine allows Mohammad to access social climates and circles that – whether because of geography, race, class or inclination – he would otherwise not be able to access. For the contemporary poet’s imagination, technology is a democratizing force; the poet is pushed to acknowledge the divide between his or her poetic presentation of everyday speech and the actuality of everyday ‘speech’ as it occurs in chat-rooms, personal web sites and the like. A poet can offer her or his poems as a respite from the everyday ‘abuses’ of the language, or work to more accurately reflect ‘non-poetic’ registers of language, but it’s becoming more difficult for poets to ignore what ‘everyday speech’ actually looks like in the hands and mouths of everyday people.
The other Outside source that Spicer refers to in the above passage – the id – can also serve as a metaphor for Mohammad’s Googled sources, the language of individuals whose values are normally nowhere reflected in the well-considered, carefully chosen lines of (in Mohammad’s words) “the effete peripatetic poet safely above a scenic view of the countryside and its filthy horizon.”[15] In one formulation that can be derived from Mohammad’s view, the Googled sources create the bubbling subconscious of the language, a subconscious that more directly expresses the fears, desires and prejudices that often are excluded from acceptable and publishable poetries. But in fact Mohammad takes a more radical stance and offers these voices not as marginal or subliminal pools but as the actual main current/currency of the language: “A mainstream is a forceful, central current that carries in its path all the debris and livestock and entire vacationing families that get vortexed into it. It is not a carefully constructed iron walkway [. . .] In the mainstream, you have to shout to be heard above the roar [. . .] The mainstream is the scary global video game we live in, everyday, and it has nothing to do with some absurd publishing scam . . .”[16] In Mohammad’s formulation, the Robert Pinskys and Mary Olivers of the poetry world, poets who often are referred to as mainstream poets, are actually the (self-) marginalized voices. A truly mainstream poetics would more closely reflect the tensions and excitements of the present as the present is experienced by those outside a poet’s (often privileged) peer group.
Benjamin Friedlander describes the generally hostile reaction of the Buffalo Poetics Listserv when he began posting his “Anti-Hegemony Project,” contributions to the Listserv that discussed the vaunted Language poet Ron Silliman. Friedlander’s posts contrasted with the usual Listserv traffic not in subject matter or critical appraisal of Silliman (the posts express a wide range of reactions to Silliman the poet and personality)—the primary uniqueness of Friedlander’s posts is their style: the syntax and language of the Silliman posts are lifted directly from chat rooms devoted to fans of the pop singer Madonna (“I am normally a Silliman fan to the max, but I think I am slipping. What is the story on him and Lyn Hejinian being terrorists?”[17]). Friedlander, in his introduction to “Anti-Hegemony Project,” posits this question: “Could it be that the [Silliman] postings [. . .] wounded the vanity of the List as a whole, and not merely the figures named directly?”[18] Friedlander proposes that because his posts appeared to treat an intellectually prized poet and poetic movement as, in his words, “adolescent twaddle,” the posts were seen as a threat. Viewed in the context of this essay, this negative reaction can also be seen as a symptom of even the experimental poetics community’s insularity and loftiness. “We have in the [Anti-Hegemony Project] the bold, vigorous, and semi-lucid prose, the biting sarcasm, the pungent opinionation, and the unscrupulous directness of the world beyond poetry.”[19] Implied in both Friedlander and Mohammad’s projects is the necessity to bridge the distance between the world of poetry and the world beyond poetry as both are currently conceived. In Mohammad’s view, “[Mainstream poetry] would have to be aggressively public, perhaps--distributed via mass mailing or spam messages, say. It would have to be as shameless as television . . .”[20]
In this formulation, the epiphanies, values and insights presented in this new mainstream poetry would figure to be radically different than the world presented by the discourse on the Buffalo Listserv and/or the world presented in a poem like Mary Oliver’s “The Dipper,” which ends:
And still I hear him—
and whenever I open the ponderous book of riddle
she sits with his black feet hooked to the page,
his eyes cheerful, still burning with water-love—
and thus the world is full of leaves and feathers,
and comfort, and instruction. I do not even remember
your name, great river,
but since that hour I have lived
simply,
in the joy of the body as full and clear
as falling water; the pleasures of the mind
like a dark bird dipping in and out, tasting and singing.
The simple world as presented here is perhaps enticing, a pastoral world “full of leaves and feathers,/and comfort, and instruction.” But it would indeed seem odd to argue for this as language or a world that can be labeled mainstream—there’s not only an assumption of an unusual degree safety and comfort in these lines, but also an assumption of ample time for both leisurely experiencing nature and contemplating its importance[21]. There’s lyricism and emotion here but it is the lyricism and emotion of a relatively rare level of comfort, of an arguably irresponsible purity.
Is Mohammad post-lyrical then? The promise of lyricism offered by a solitary figure in repose uttering his or her thoughts and emotions is not offered in Mohammad’s poems. This is not to say, however, that lyricism (or, in Mohammad’s words, “its related effects, such as antilyricism, metalyricism, paralyricism . . .[22]”) is absent in his poetry. In 2002 Mohammad notes a change in his process: “from a period of intuitive, transrational lyricism [. . .] to a period of heavily rule-based assemblage, using principles of collage to work backward from the earlier method, attempting to simulate lyricism . . . ”[23] Poetic lyricism as it is generally considered (language that is appropriate for singing) arises from what a lay man would consider natural speech, language that coexists easily with one’s daily life of work, entertainment and shopping. Ron Silliman, when contemplating the subject behind the phrase “thank you” on a trash receptacle, writes “[m]uch (although not all) of the anonymous commercial language of daily life is constructed around [. . .] the normative or plain style of grammar. This discourse of the social contract is writing in the purest Derridean sense—even in its most truncated forms, as on this wall, it insinuates a universe of order, a hierarchy made to appear natural.”[24] A poetry that reflects the language of ‘normal’ social orders and hierarchies reinforcing the naturalness and rightness of those orders and the absent but implied authorities of those orders. The disconnect between the impulse of Language-associated writers and lyricism as it is generally known is pronounced; one of the more remarked upon tendencies of contemporary younger poets, the melding of an evasive poetic surface and old-fashioned “I”-centered poetic lyricism, does seem untenable, or at least partially unaware of the inherent contradictions of this melding. This is not to suggest that such contradictions cannot or are not mined for effect, but that such contradictions should perhaps be an impetus not to simply return to lyricism as it was known pre-Language but re-imagine lyricism.
[insert here a paragraph combining Silliman’s “the space between period and next sentence” statement and Kasey's comments on
Barrett Watten’s poem “Mode Z”
at Lime Tree:
“"Mode Z" requires imaginative participation from the reader [. . .]: we must constantly invent and revise contexts in which the "voice" of the poem makes sense, or in which its failure to make sense makes sense. [. . .] The orders and advice and observations offered by this speaker are offered, in front of a constantly changing geopolitical backdrop, to a likewise shifting audience. That blank irony I mentioned colors everything, including the pauses between sentences.”
Mohammad’s poem “Mars Needs Terrorists” from Deer Head Nation was also chosen by Language poet Lyn Hejinian for inclusion in 2004’s Best American Poetry anthology. Even surrounded by some of the most accomplished experimental-minded poets—such as Bob Perelman, Nathaniel Mackey and Alice Notley—Mohammad’s “Mars Needs Terrorists” stands out as a distinct re-imagining of what poetry can be. A quick glance at the opening section (there are ten sections) will demonstrate its unique appearance and approach:
1.
:.:.:.:.: alien parasites
:.:.:.:.: alien slave ship survivors,
:.:.:.:.: alien teenagers in 1950s Florida, sex
:.:.:.:.: terror and destruction, terror
:.:.:.:.: terror designed to part dumbass teenagers
:.:.:.:.: some now very wet
:.:.:.:.: romantic, the republican
:.:.:.:.: told me of their terror
:.:.:.:.: outfit for ?I?ma slave
:.:.:.:.: a fundraiser for republican
:.:.:.:.: and wet buns contest
:.:.:.:.: parents talking about sex
:.:.:.:.: of here 7.battle him republican 8
:.:.:.:.: 8.we are 138.9 teenagers
Visually, the presence of the series of colons and periods sets this poem apart from most other poems, whether mainstream or experimental. While I’m unsure of Mohammad’s intentions in starting each line with this punctuation, the effect only reinforces the poem’s reliance on the Google-sculpting process. The series of colons suggests that each line is the result of a previous—though to the reader unknown—equation or statement; one can imagine the Google search words being the unstated left-hand half of the equation. The series of periods implies a kind of ellipsis, suggesting that each line in and of itself is only a selected portion of a previous whole. Apart from the appropriateness of Mohammad’s use of preliminary punctuation in terms of its relation to his process, it also causes the reader to re-imagine her or his approach to reading the poem. By highlighting the process (and the seams involved) in this manner, Mohammad forces the reader to make active decisions. Is one to read the poem as an unedited product of a chance operation? Is one to read the lines as individual riffs on a set theme (with the theme being whatever search terms Mohammad chooses)? Or is one to read the poem as an unsuccessful or at the very least unusual attempt at creating a single private consciousness from public discourse? (A high ratio of the lines in fact do connect syntactically; one can read the statement “romantic, the republican told me of their terror outfit for ?I?ma slave” as a single utterance.)
Mohammad’s reading of Watten’s poem has been a useful guide to my own reading of “Mars Needs Terrorists.” While readings and the pleasures derived from them often extend beyond one’s conscious intentions and reactions, I do consciously read Mohammad’s poem at (at the least) two levels. The first level follows his reading of Watten very closely: “we must constantly invent and revise contexts in which the ‘voice’ of the poem makes sense, or in which its failure to make sense makes sense.”[25] This is where the fore-grounding of the Google-sculpting process comes into play. Instead of the revision and invention of possible contexts that is required by Watten’s poem, the reader of “Mars Needs Terrorists” is afforded the knowledge that these lines do exist somewhere on the Internet: in actuality, in their original contexts. Coming across a line like “of here 7.battle him republican 8” one tries to imagine a possible world for it. The line could have originated from a track list of liberal protest songs using the contrast between “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Battle Him Republican” for ironic purposes. Less likely but still possible is that it is a result of a person’s mishearing or misremembering the title “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Likewise, the line “some now very wet” in the context of the Google process could have originated from innumerable contexts, ranging from the sexually explicit to the innocently descriptive. The montage effect of much modernist and post-modernist poetry is in play here but with an added level: a montage not just of the images or lines themselves but also a montage of their sources.
The second level of my reading, also derived from the fore-grounding of Mohammad’s process, is of watching Mohammad himself and his relation to his sources (as I have imagined them). Steve Evans assesses Deer Head Nation as being “smarter and more critical than the procedure alone could have predicted for – which I take to mean that we have cause to be grateful to K. Silem Mohammad for some modicum of old-fashioned authorial decision making and information-shaping.”[26] Evans’ assessment points to the privileged nature of reading Mohammad’s poems; by fixing his general processes and sources, Mohammad presents as variables not his own emotions, thoughts and imaginings but (as noted above) those of his sources. But Mohammad does allow himself to also be a present variable in these poems, but solely at a linguistic and conceptual level. To frame things perhaps more precisely, let me present Michael Magee’s[27] statement comparing Flarf and Personism:
This will sound needlessly hyperbolic but it seems to me that there's an analogy to be made between flarf and O'Hara's Personism -- which itself was a technology-based/generated poetry: to borrow a formula, the web is to flarf what the telephone was to O'Hara: 1) a way to gather and exchange information very very quickly AS A FORM OF POETRY; 2) a way to undercut and/or render flexible the idea of authorship; 3) a way to, as Duncan said of O'Hara, "restore to poetry its trivial uses."
One might say that Flarf is a radical elevation of the tendencies already there in Personism.[28]
Flarf viewed as such is in the tradition of other modernist movements made possible by technology, with Google playing a role somewhere between Personism’s telephone and Projective Verse’s typewriter: a new instrument for both gathering information and for re-imagining the construction of a poem. Flarf is also in the tradition of the Language poets’ movement away from a speech-based poetics; instead of a single static speaker, Flarf presents language from persons in various spectrums of development and flux.
The Flarf-Personism comparison extends also to a reader’s approach to a poem. In “Personism” O’Hara famously stated that the poem was now “at last between two people instead of two pages,” re-framing the poem as an address between individuals. Such an approach allows the reader a frame for enjoying the daily minutiae of many of O’Hara’s poems; in this rearrangement of the poem, “one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.” A part of Flarf’s appeal is its re-arrangement of the poet-poem-reader dynamic. O’Hara’s Personism “puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person.” In this formulation I take “the person” as being the person a poem originally addresses; in O’Hara’s take Personism was born when he decided to write a poem to someone he was in love with and then realized he could just use the phone instead. If the idealized audience of a bard is a large group of listeners the solitary reader has the option of picturing her or himself as one among a crowd. If the idealized audience of a Romantic poem is the poet himself the reader has the option of picturing her or himself as the self-same poet or perhaps an omniscient presence. Personism presents a single, individual, actual person as the idealized reader of a poem therefore re-imagining not just the poet’s stance to a poem but a reader’s self-conception: the reader can imagine her or himself as the actual original person addressed or as one who overhears the conversation between two people that Personism describes. In either instance Personism presents a potentially more casual, active and intimate level of address and listening.
With full awareness of the poet’s Google-sculpting processes, a reader of a Flarf poem is free to re-imagine her or his relation to the text. Instead of being situated between the poet and the person addressed, a Flarf poem is situated between the poet and the original sources of the language, with the reader posited somewhere outside this conversation (therefore freeing the reader to decide for one’s self where to be situated). In this way Flarf resembles the procedural works of Jackson Mac Low or John Cage, or various OuLiPo projects, or Ronald Johnson’s erasing of Milton’s Paradise Lost to create RADI OS. But while many of these works use single source texts that were consciously created as literature, Flarf incorporates texts created from a variety of sources, most of which occur outside of the world most would consider literary. In Mohammad’s “Does Your Poetry Hold Up?” from his online chapbook Hanging Out with Pablo and Jennifer, tracking down his sources reveals a wide range of documents that demonstrate a rather astonishing range of emotions, assumptions and values. The sources include: a self-interview on a personal web page (Q: “Are you really a depressed individual, are these heartbreaks you write about true?” A: “I’m far from depressed!”); a poetry assignment from a high school English class; an interview with the poet Walt McDonald (“I don't think poetry will stop wars, I don't think poetry will warn the world. I think that's what the Lord came for, and look what they did to Him.”); self-publishing advice from a personal web site; directions for posting to a poetry discussion forum at http://www.dreamersreality.com/; interviews with poets Nick Piombino, Diane Wakoski (interviewer: “I'm interested in depth, so I think you certainly have depth”), Quan Berry and David Lehman; Honore de Balzac’s The Exiles (“Go, never reveal your ideas to the vulgar! Be at once the altar, the priest, and the victim!”); a post to “The Blender Board” from November 1998 (“I, too, am only 14 and i have been submitting here since i was 12. I haven't gotten feedback on some of my works”); an interview with John Whitworth (“Oh I do hope I have a magic path, I do hope so”); a poem from a personal web page (“I explore my coffee-flavored existence,/searching decades of clouded translucence/for some proof of life”); the guest book of a personal poetry web page (“Poetheart, I love your latest poems.”); a book review at Amazon.com; a web published short story titled “Will You Remember Me?” (“In her semi-reclined position she reached out, touching the thigh of the other woman in order to bring her attention back from tormenting the seagulls”); the love books of Ovid (“With all that remains of so great a poet, you scarce could fill a tiny urn”); a story titled “Verse & Vignette” from http://www.xenafan.com/ (“’Humphf.’ Gabrielle humphfs as she begins slipping”); a personal web page warning readers about poetry.com that includes a poem written against poetry.com that was nevertheless accepted for poetry.com’s anthology (“Poetry.com is a giant scam./It is run by the same people who run/the International Library of Poetry,/which is also a scam.”); a “How to Write Poetry” website (“Although some would argue that the Golden Age of Poetry passed away with Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, people everywhere are still writing volumes and volumes of the stuff”).
“Does Your Poetry Hold Up?” is for me the pinnacle of Flarf thus far. A reader equipped with the knowledge of Mohammad’s technique and the proliferation of on-line poetry sites of every conceivable stripe will read this piece with a mix of bemusement, repulsion and empathy. In “Projective Verse,” Charles Olson writes, “The objects which occur at every given moment of composition (of recognition, we can call it) are, can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem.”[29] One implication of Olson’s assertion is that to respect an accident is to respect the actual; to use what actually occurs as opposed to one’s wishes about occurrence. Reading Mohammad’s piece one is faced the actuality of how poetry is discussed, considered and sold.
[complete this paragraph; paragraph on Does Your Poetry?'s move towards an 'over-voice'; conclude]
Notes:
[1] “[Y]ou search Google for 2 disparate terms, like "anarchy + tuna melt" – using only the quotes captured by Google (never the actual websites themselves) you stitch words, phrases, clauses, sentences together to create poems.” Michael Magee. “The Flarf Files” on Charles Bernstein’s syllabus page (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html),
[2] Michael Magee makes this Flarf-Personism comparison explicit:
"One might say that Flarf is a radical elevation of the tendencies already there in Personism.
If the occassion called for it I could make this claim in very very very intimidating THEORYSPPCCHHHChhgggccchh ARF ARF ARF.
But anyway it's true.
To steal another formulation from O'Hara, flarf being surer and quicker than poetry, it is only just that flarf finish poetry off."
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Rain Taxi. Online edition. Winter 03/04.
[6] The website of the Academy of American Poets (http://www.poets.org/) has a “Post 9/11 Poetry Resources Page” that maintains links to poems and collections of poems pertaining to 9/11 and/or written in its wake. Stephen Dunn strikes a representative chord in his poem “To a Terrorist”: “I'm just speaking out loud/to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,/doomed to become mere words.”
[7] The complete line from Rogers’ poem, dated 1999, reads “and judaspriests who yield to animal need.”
[8] “The Flarf Files.” http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html
[9] The Pound Era. 146
[10] Ibid.
[11] This story can be found on-line at http://www.hlrpg.com/Battle-Archives/2000/October2000-Archives/akai-vs-rwhi-17oct2000.html.
[12] “The Richard Mutt Case” Art in Theory. ed. Harrison & Wood. 252
[13] The House that Jack Built: the Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. ed. Peter Gizzi. 5
[14] Ibid. 7
[15] http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html
[16] Ibid.
[17] Benjamin Friedlander. Simulcast. 105
[18] Ibid. 43-44
[19] Ibid. 44
[20] “Towards a Mainstream Poetics.” http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html
[21] This observation about Oliver’s poem is stated with a knowledge that it takes a certain degree of leisure and privilege to have the time to run Google searches and create poems in this manner.
[22] Post to the Buffalo Poetics Listserv. Tue, 3 Sep 2002. http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0209&L=poetics&P=R4813&D=1&H=0&I=-3&O=T&T=1
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ron Silliman. “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. ed Charles Bernstein.
[25] Lime Tree. http://ksilem.com/?. April 28, 2004.
[26] “Field Notes.” The Poker 4 (summer 2004)
[27] Flarf poet who maintains the Mainstream Poetry blog and edits Combo, an experimental poetry magazine which produced an “all-Flarf” issue in the spring of 2003.
[28] “The Flarf Files” http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html
[29] Collected Prose. 243
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
I'm fairly certain that the more I become obsessed with reading and writing, the worse I get at being friendly. Or at least at staying in touch. It's something I still have to figure out because to really do anything that turns out well writing or reading wise I have to become completely absorbed & if they choice is doing that for an hour or calling an old friend, I always choose the first choice, especially as of late where grabbing that spare hour even to sit and really read a book becomes the goal of the day (beyond doing all the stuff for grad school/job applications and actually doing my text-editing job). My Monday:
1) Get up & take Leigh to campus. Organize forms, addresses, cv & etc for recommenders. Mail forms, etc. Do some housework.
2) Pick up Leigh.
3) Work on my essay on Flarf & Kasey. The Band & Linda/Richard Thompson on headphones. Take a walk in the woods before sunset.
4) Much needed quality time w/ Leigh. Watch sunset.
5) More work on essay. Check emails. Dinner. Talk to Paul about our manuscript ideas.
6) Text-editing job while Bugs Bunny plays.
7) Check on news, etc. Bonds is MVP! Writing this.
8) Bedtime! Read some of Tjanting before dozing off.
A pretty good day. Hour and a half spent driving, though. I'm coming up with a plan to use that driving time for poetical ends.
Playing off of Michael Magee's Personism-Flarf comparison. Bringing Projective Verse into the mix. Flarf's Google somewhere between Personism telephone and Projective Verse's typewriter. All three present alternatives to both reading and writing poems, though the writing bit is what gets emphasized the most.
Flarf as modernist montage not just of images but of sources.
We're going to NYC on Thursday. Will be my first time to spend time there. I'm reading w/ Joyelle McSweeney at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's on Monday night.
I'm asking you New Yorkers just two things: the names of good used bookstores & good art galleries. All I ask. & come to the reading if you can.
I've got to do about 20 hours of text-editing, plus finish the Kasey essay (halfway) and send off job applications between now and Thursday morning. Wish me luck.
1) Get up & take Leigh to campus. Organize forms, addresses, cv & etc for recommenders. Mail forms, etc. Do some housework.
2) Pick up Leigh.
3) Work on my essay on Flarf & Kasey. The Band & Linda/Richard Thompson on headphones. Take a walk in the woods before sunset.
4) Much needed quality time w/ Leigh. Watch sunset.
5) More work on essay. Check emails. Dinner. Talk to Paul about our manuscript ideas.
6) Text-editing job while Bugs Bunny plays.
7) Check on news, etc. Bonds is MVP! Writing this.
8) Bedtime! Read some of Tjanting before dozing off.
A pretty good day. Hour and a half spent driving, though. I'm coming up with a plan to use that driving time for poetical ends.
Playing off of Michael Magee's Personism-Flarf comparison. Bringing Projective Verse into the mix. Flarf's Google somewhere between Personism telephone and Projective Verse's typewriter. All three present alternatives to both reading and writing poems, though the writing bit is what gets emphasized the most.
Flarf as modernist montage not just of images but of sources.
We're going to NYC on Thursday. Will be my first time to spend time there. I'm reading w/ Joyelle McSweeney at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's on Monday night.
I'm asking you New Yorkers just two things: the names of good used bookstores & good art galleries. All I ask. & come to the reading if you can.
I've got to do about 20 hours of text-editing, plus finish the Kasey essay (halfway) and send off job applications between now and Thursday morning. Wish me luck.
Saturday, November 13, 2004
Friday, November 12, 2004
I'm feeling spastic tonight. Here's a happy photograph, Chris Vitiello's & me's birthday bash this July w/ fellow Lucifer Poetic Folks.
Chris ate that whole bowl of guacamole!
GS Giscombe & Jon Thompson will be reading Saturday night at Ken Rumble's Desert City Reading Series; Brian Howe will be reading at the Blue Door afterwards, where Rafael Aviles' paintings will be on display. Please come check it out, Tar Heels.
Gonna try to take the literature GRE test tomorrow morn. Then party with my Lucipo family.
Chris ate that whole bowl of guacamole!
GS Giscombe & Jon Thompson will be reading Saturday night at Ken Rumble's Desert City Reading Series; Brian Howe will be reading at the Blue Door afterwards, where Rafael Aviles' paintings will be on display. Please come check it out, Tar Heels.
Gonna try to take the literature GRE test tomorrow morn. Then party with my Lucipo family.
In my Octopus review of Noah Eli Gordon's excellent The Frequencies I trotted out what I'd hope would be my catchphrase:
Google is the new typewriter.
Then Noah emails me to let me know he doesn't actually Google-sculpt his poems. It's still a catchy catchphrase though. Wish I would've saved it for the Kasey essay. But I've recycled it for all you Unquiet Gravers.
I'm full of catchphrases, by the way:
The short live short lives.
Keep reading, I'm reloading.
Stay away from Little Rock girls.
And so on.
Google is the new typewriter.
Then Noah emails me to let me know he doesn't actually Google-sculpt his poems. It's still a catchy catchphrase though. Wish I would've saved it for the Kasey essay. But I've recycled it for all you Unquiet Gravers.
I'm full of catchphrases, by the way:
The short live short lives.
Keep reading, I'm reloading.
Stay away from Little Rock girls.
And so on.
In happier news I'm really enjoying writing a longish piece on Kasey's Deer Head Nation, Hanging Out with Pablo & Jennifer, and the potential uses of Flarf in general. I'm thinking of calling the piece "The Flarfing Man's Tennyson."
Sample:
The visceral death-and-carnage reality of September 11th seems embedded in “Peek-a-Boo”, much more so than in other post-9/11 poems that airbrush out the gore of the day and focus more on the political, social and psychic impact of the events on the nation of survivors. Mohammed’s poem obsesses over a handful of words; one can venture that teeth, animal and bloody are among the search terms used for “Peek-a-Boo.” The word teeth is used eleven times in the poem, animal is used fourteen times, bloody occurs seven times. The rest of “Peek-a-Boo” circulates around these three words & appears to be constructed from phrases that attach themselves (collateral phrases?) to these key terms when Googled. Flarf in this way can be presented as almost a parody of Pound’s great Modernist innovation where, in Hugh Kenner’s words, his vortex is “not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water.” Mohammed’s poems & lines aren’t the search words but are patterns made visible by the search words. Again in Kenner’s words: “[a] patterned integrity accessible to the mind; topologically stable; subject to variations of intensity; brought into the domain of the senses by a particular interaction of words.” A contrast can be made between Pound’s method, which attempts to frame all of history and culture within a single totalizing aesthetic (some have argued that this correlates with Pound’s fascist leanings) and Mohammed’s method, which surveys and presents recent culture and history as it is (or as it appears on the Internet) through the lens of a search engine, several words & Mohammed’s edits.
Mohammed’s process & editorial eye collaborate to create striking, immediate imagery and phrase clusters; Flarf is seemingly unafraid of any image or register of language. “Peek-a-Boo’s” language is relatively tame compared to perhaps more “hardcore” Flarf poems (to be discussed later). From “Peek-a-Boo”:
what it’s like to be an animal
transform the gunman into a bloody
truck, tractor or farm animal
eye swollen shut and
lips pulled away from his teeth
in flashback to his ancestor
“a mountain with a smile”
bloody, scary silence
The transformations that occur between lines are striking; language that intends (or was intended) to go in one direction is re-routed into unanticipated territory. The line “transform the gunman into a bloody” comes from a hyper-violent short story called “Aaron Kaiser versus Raven Whitehorse.” The scene in the story describes a gunman clenched and squished by huge mechanical jaws. Mohammed’s poem re-locates the language away from its video game-ish origins to a more pastoral setting, joining it with a line that arises from an apparently popular “You Might Be a High-Tech Redneck” bit circulating the Internet that reads: “You might be a high-tech redneck if . . . your screen saver is a bitmap image of your favorite truck, tractor, or farm animal.”
Marcel Duchamp’s description of “R.Mutt’s” submission of an urinal to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists is applicable here when discussing Mohammed’s achievement: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”[1] Freed of the burden of generating new language (the burden of Romantic originality), Mohammed is free to view pre-existing language from a new point of view, to create new thoughts for the language at hand (as well as new rhythms & images for this language). All of this would still be possible for a reader to appreciate even if Mohammed and other Flarf-ists kept their processes private; lines such as “he never brushes his teeth/his bloody techniques” and “he now has a very diabolical smile/for his little plan to get the dog/bloody hand prints emblazoned” have an immediacy that is not at all dependent upon a knowledge of the processes involved. In fact, some readers may be disappointed to discover that lines like those quoted above didn’t spring from the poet’s imagination but were found by him (some might even say they are plagiarized). But I’d argue that the re-imagining of source, & the reader’s knowledge of the source of Mohammed’s language, is the great realization of these poems. The idea of a source outside the poet as being generative is an ancient one, from classical invocations to the muses to Milton entering William Blake’s foot as a comet to dictate poetry to him.
[insert paragraph on Spicer’s Martians here, presenting comparison between ‘actual’ and cultural aliens as poetic sources]
The promise of lyricism offered by a solitary figure uttering his or her thoughts and emotions is not offered in Mohammed’s poems. This is not to say, however, that lyricism (or, in Mohammed’s words, “its related effects, such as antilyricism, metalyricism, paralyricism . . .[2]”) is absent in his poetry. In 2002 Mohammed notes a change in his process: “my own work seems to be in the throes of a transition: from a period of intuitive, transrational lyricism with a (typically postmodern) tendency to interpolate bits and pieces of found discourse [. . .] to a period of heavily rule-based assemblage, using principles of collage to work backward from the earlier method, attempting to simulate lyricism [. . .] via the manipulation of found materials. ”[3] Poetic lyricism as it is generally considered (language that is appropriate for singing) arises from what one would consider natural speech, language that coexists easily with one’s daily life of work, entertainment and shopping. Ron Silliman, when contemplating the subject behind the phrase “thank you” on a trash receptacle, writes “[m]uch (although not all) of the anonymous commercial language of daily life is constructed around [. . .] the normative or plain style of grammar. This discourse of the social contract is writing in the purest Derridean sense—even in its most truncated forms, as on this wall, it insinuates a universe of order, a hierarchy made to appear natural.”[4]
[1] “The Richard Mutt Case,” Art in Theory, ed. Harrison & Wood, p. 252
[2] Post to the Buffalo Poetics Listserv. Tue, 3 Sep 2002. http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0209&L=poetics&P=R4813&D=1&H=0&I=-3&O=T&T=1
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ron Silliman. “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed Charles Bernstein.
Sample:
The visceral death-and-carnage reality of September 11th seems embedded in “Peek-a-Boo”, much more so than in other post-9/11 poems that airbrush out the gore of the day and focus more on the political, social and psychic impact of the events on the nation of survivors. Mohammed’s poem obsesses over a handful of words; one can venture that teeth, animal and bloody are among the search terms used for “Peek-a-Boo.” The word teeth is used eleven times in the poem, animal is used fourteen times, bloody occurs seven times. The rest of “Peek-a-Boo” circulates around these three words & appears to be constructed from phrases that attach themselves (collateral phrases?) to these key terms when Googled. Flarf in this way can be presented as almost a parody of Pound’s great Modernist innovation where, in Hugh Kenner’s words, his vortex is “not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water.” Mohammed’s poems & lines aren’t the search words but are patterns made visible by the search words. Again in Kenner’s words: “[a] patterned integrity accessible to the mind; topologically stable; subject to variations of intensity; brought into the domain of the senses by a particular interaction of words.” A contrast can be made between Pound’s method, which attempts to frame all of history and culture within a single totalizing aesthetic (some have argued that this correlates with Pound’s fascist leanings) and Mohammed’s method, which surveys and presents recent culture and history as it is (or as it appears on the Internet) through the lens of a search engine, several words & Mohammed’s edits.
Mohammed’s process & editorial eye collaborate to create striking, immediate imagery and phrase clusters; Flarf is seemingly unafraid of any image or register of language. “Peek-a-Boo’s” language is relatively tame compared to perhaps more “hardcore” Flarf poems (to be discussed later). From “Peek-a-Boo”:
what it’s like to be an animal
transform the gunman into a bloody
truck, tractor or farm animal
eye swollen shut and
lips pulled away from his teeth
in flashback to his ancestor
“a mountain with a smile”
bloody, scary silence
The transformations that occur between lines are striking; language that intends (or was intended) to go in one direction is re-routed into unanticipated territory. The line “transform the gunman into a bloody” comes from a hyper-violent short story called “Aaron Kaiser versus Raven Whitehorse.” The scene in the story describes a gunman clenched and squished by huge mechanical jaws. Mohammed’s poem re-locates the language away from its video game-ish origins to a more pastoral setting, joining it with a line that arises from an apparently popular “You Might Be a High-Tech Redneck” bit circulating the Internet that reads: “You might be a high-tech redneck if . . . your screen saver is a bitmap image of your favorite truck, tractor, or farm animal.”
Marcel Duchamp’s description of “R.Mutt’s” submission of an urinal to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists is applicable here when discussing Mohammed’s achievement: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”[1] Freed of the burden of generating new language (the burden of Romantic originality), Mohammed is free to view pre-existing language from a new point of view, to create new thoughts for the language at hand (as well as new rhythms & images for this language). All of this would still be possible for a reader to appreciate even if Mohammed and other Flarf-ists kept their processes private; lines such as “he never brushes his teeth/his bloody techniques” and “he now has a very diabolical smile/for his little plan to get the dog/bloody hand prints emblazoned” have an immediacy that is not at all dependent upon a knowledge of the processes involved. In fact, some readers may be disappointed to discover that lines like those quoted above didn’t spring from the poet’s imagination but were found by him (some might even say they are plagiarized). But I’d argue that the re-imagining of source, & the reader’s knowledge of the source of Mohammed’s language, is the great realization of these poems. The idea of a source outside the poet as being generative is an ancient one, from classical invocations to the muses to Milton entering William Blake’s foot as a comet to dictate poetry to him.
[insert paragraph on Spicer’s Martians here, presenting comparison between ‘actual’ and cultural aliens as poetic sources]
The promise of lyricism offered by a solitary figure uttering his or her thoughts and emotions is not offered in Mohammed’s poems. This is not to say, however, that lyricism (or, in Mohammed’s words, “its related effects, such as antilyricism, metalyricism, paralyricism . . .[2]”) is absent in his poetry. In 2002 Mohammed notes a change in his process: “my own work seems to be in the throes of a transition: from a period of intuitive, transrational lyricism with a (typically postmodern) tendency to interpolate bits and pieces of found discourse [. . .] to a period of heavily rule-based assemblage, using principles of collage to work backward from the earlier method, attempting to simulate lyricism [. . .] via the manipulation of found materials. ”[3] Poetic lyricism as it is generally considered (language that is appropriate for singing) arises from what one would consider natural speech, language that coexists easily with one’s daily life of work, entertainment and shopping. Ron Silliman, when contemplating the subject behind the phrase “thank you” on a trash receptacle, writes “[m]uch (although not all) of the anonymous commercial language of daily life is constructed around [. . .] the normative or plain style of grammar. This discourse of the social contract is writing in the purest Derridean sense—even in its most truncated forms, as on this wall, it insinuates a universe of order, a hierarchy made to appear natural.”[4]
[1] “The Richard Mutt Case,” Art in Theory, ed. Harrison & Wood, p. 252
[2] Post to the Buffalo Poetics Listserv. Tue, 3 Sep 2002. http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0209&L=poetics&P=R4813&D=1&H=0&I=-3&O=T&T=1
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ron Silliman. “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed Charles Bernstein.
According to my GRE study guides for Literature, the only notable poets of the last 100 years are Plath, Yeats, Eliot & Brooks, and maybe Pound (up to say 1925 maybe). DH Lawrence? All you need to know is "the mysticism of the human body". Geez.
How this test is a gauge of who will be a good critic of literature I have no idea.
How this test is a gauge of who will be a good critic of literature I have no idea.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
My life was important and worth living.
My work is severe even under the garment of love.
My work among the insects.
So be silent, my child, in time you will see that my greatest
gift is to get to know me. But my daughter (19)
has been my biggest burden.
We are hoping that you will someday
be able to meet your real family.
(You can find out how to import pictures of your real family
into the game for the electronic families
to decorate their walls with.)
My best friend is myself I don't need nobody else
to be there for me care for me.
My biggest fear is to be afraid of fear itself.
My work is severe even under the garment of love.
My work among the insects.
So be silent, my child, in time you will see that my greatest
gift is to get to know me. But my daughter (19)
has been my biggest burden.
We are hoping that you will someday
be able to meet your real family.
(You can find out how to import pictures of your real family
into the game for the electronic families
to decorate their walls with.)
My best friend is myself I don't need nobody else
to be there for me care for me.
My biggest fear is to be afraid of fear itself.
Saturday, November 06, 2004
Nothing usually makes blog readers' eyes glaze over like poems, probably. Especially 'blasts from the past', assorted juvenilia. So without any further ado, here's some pre-grad school poems I just stumbled across. I worked as a night auditor at a hotel in Branson during my year off between undergrad and MFA-land; the job afforded plenty of time to do some writing. One month I decided to write a poem a night, taking titles and language from old issues of Horizon magazine from the 50s that I had found. Productive month in terms of shedding old tendencies. Some of the poems:
WHEN FORGERY BECOMES A FINE ART
Robert Browning would not touch
Elizabeth's sonnets. Instead, he asked
an alchemist to examine the papers.
Then, two detectives investigated the type
with which the sonnets were printed.
"A sonnet is an exact science," R remarked
to E. over tea and walnut bread.
"And should be treated in the same
cold and unemotional manner."
"What a hot day it is!" she responded.
THE TWO WORLDS OF ALEXANDER
As he was going to supper, Alexander found time
to think about Buddha, and sweated profusely.
He immediately retraced his steps and coiled himself
about the garlands of the women, thus terrifying his men.
It was long guerilla warfare, with utterly strange tactics.
Alexander founded cities and bathed,
Buddha added the Oriental feature of a third eye.
In desperation, Alexander feigned sickness.
Buddha, attempting to entice Alexander eastward,
had his own horse led, riderless, across Asia Minor.
Asleep in his sick bed, Alexander dreamt of the landscape
as the horse passed through the capitals of the ancient East.
His men built another city as he bathed and watched
a bird pick up and drop a lovely piece of string.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, M.D.
He has a river's memory of cities--
accepting all the dirt, the baskets;
weaving his way into feminie caves
and, delighted, departing with new debris.
But now he wants to live in the past,
closer to the injured men he (drifting)
passed on the stone streets--
he can read his poems out loud
and enjoy their broken lines;
he can mourn little houses from a passing train.
He is like a man crossing a river.
To keep the memory of the river
he keeps moving from house to house.
A man of habit, he lays his hands
on his own house. He reaches
into his bag of tricks and drives
a nail between two windows.
MISUSES OF THE PAST
The Mexican muralist Diego Rivera
painted like his heroes: Lenin, Trotsky,
Eugene V. Debs -- but how differently!
He was bound to engulf the world.
There is nothing new in this notion;
the idea is obvious and had occurred
to many before Rivera. Likewise
we need not know the details
of history to recognize its children:
Sputniks, economic freedom, "the times."
For the same reasons history cannot
tell us how to live with Rivera,
we cannot contemplate it without irony.
We hear so much about the failures of science,
similar worries over the common man.
Marx saw color as the key to history:
through isolation and examination
one masters its hue. Rivera himself
confessed that in his youth he was
forever dreaming aesthetic revolutions.
"Castles in Spain" as he called them.
"THE GREATEST WIT IN ENGLAND"
His chief vexation was the reoccurence
of heartfelt fucking in the summer months.
Warm weather never agreed with him.
Mr. Smith boasted that he lived with doors
and windows wide open, that anyone
could learn whatever they wanted about war
by spending the summer with his family.
He was not in favor of healthy pregnancies.
He spoke disrespectfully of the equator.
He lived on the beach. In the midst of a storm
he was seen at the door of his cottage with mop
in hand and bucket nearby. Trundling
his mop, squeezing out the sea-water, he pushed
away the sea. The contest was unequal; Smith's
cottage was lost. He pissed on the waves.
He hailed the coming of the railway with similar wit.
"Every fresh accident on the railroad signals
an improvement," he wrote. "What we want
is an overturn which would kill a bishop." Years later
his wife perished in such a wreck. "Bring me all
the blotting paper in the house," he replied.
TEN AUTHORS IN PURSUIT OF ONE SUBJECT
The inability to say anything deeply
is only part of the problem. The choice
of subject matter also seems to indicate
some sort of change in social customs.
In one novel, a Greek shipowner
drives a pickup over his baby's milk,
watching her cry with admiring wonder.
And the ending's funnier than the author
intends it to be: after the gang leaves,
the shipowner helps his daughter
into her clothes and puts her on a train
for New York. There's at least
a hint of the same attitude in all these novels,
most of which involve some variation
of the love triangle. In one triangle,
we find sex and shapeless confusion
courting a young artist. Tennessee Williams
and the city of Paris compose the base
of yet another one, with "The Lost Generation"
perched at the apex. I gather French cities
have been neglected in sexual fiction.
WHEN FORGERY BECOMES A FINE ART
Robert Browning would not touch
Elizabeth's sonnets. Instead, he asked
an alchemist to examine the papers.
Then, two detectives investigated the type
with which the sonnets were printed.
"A sonnet is an exact science," R remarked
to E. over tea and walnut bread.
"And should be treated in the same
cold and unemotional manner."
"What a hot day it is!" she responded.
THE TWO WORLDS OF ALEXANDER
As he was going to supper, Alexander found time
to think about Buddha, and sweated profusely.
He immediately retraced his steps and coiled himself
about the garlands of the women, thus terrifying his men.
It was long guerilla warfare, with utterly strange tactics.
Alexander founded cities and bathed,
Buddha added the Oriental feature of a third eye.
In desperation, Alexander feigned sickness.
Buddha, attempting to entice Alexander eastward,
had his own horse led, riderless, across Asia Minor.
Asleep in his sick bed, Alexander dreamt of the landscape
as the horse passed through the capitals of the ancient East.
His men built another city as he bathed and watched
a bird pick up and drop a lovely piece of string.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, M.D.
He has a river's memory of cities--
accepting all the dirt, the baskets;
weaving his way into feminie caves
and, delighted, departing with new debris.
But now he wants to live in the past,
closer to the injured men he (drifting)
passed on the stone streets--
he can read his poems out loud
and enjoy their broken lines;
he can mourn little houses from a passing train.
He is like a man crossing a river.
To keep the memory of the river
he keeps moving from house to house.
A man of habit, he lays his hands
on his own house. He reaches
into his bag of tricks and drives
a nail between two windows.
MISUSES OF THE PAST
The Mexican muralist Diego Rivera
painted like his heroes: Lenin, Trotsky,
Eugene V. Debs -- but how differently!
He was bound to engulf the world.
There is nothing new in this notion;
the idea is obvious and had occurred
to many before Rivera. Likewise
we need not know the details
of history to recognize its children:
Sputniks, economic freedom, "the times."
For the same reasons history cannot
tell us how to live with Rivera,
we cannot contemplate it without irony.
We hear so much about the failures of science,
similar worries over the common man.
Marx saw color as the key to history:
through isolation and examination
one masters its hue. Rivera himself
confessed that in his youth he was
forever dreaming aesthetic revolutions.
"Castles in Spain" as he called them.
"THE GREATEST WIT IN ENGLAND"
His chief vexation was the reoccurence
of heartfelt fucking in the summer months.
Warm weather never agreed with him.
Mr. Smith boasted that he lived with doors
and windows wide open, that anyone
could learn whatever they wanted about war
by spending the summer with his family.
He was not in favor of healthy pregnancies.
He spoke disrespectfully of the equator.
He lived on the beach. In the midst of a storm
he was seen at the door of his cottage with mop
in hand and bucket nearby. Trundling
his mop, squeezing out the sea-water, he pushed
away the sea. The contest was unequal; Smith's
cottage was lost. He pissed on the waves.
He hailed the coming of the railway with similar wit.
"Every fresh accident on the railroad signals
an improvement," he wrote. "What we want
is an overturn which would kill a bishop." Years later
his wife perished in such a wreck. "Bring me all
the blotting paper in the house," he replied.
TEN AUTHORS IN PURSUIT OF ONE SUBJECT
The inability to say anything deeply
is only part of the problem. The choice
of subject matter also seems to indicate
some sort of change in social customs.
In one novel, a Greek shipowner
drives a pickup over his baby's milk,
watching her cry with admiring wonder.
And the ending's funnier than the author
intends it to be: after the gang leaves,
the shipowner helps his daughter
into her clothes and puts her on a train
for New York. There's at least
a hint of the same attitude in all these novels,
most of which involve some variation
of the love triangle. In one triangle,
we find sex and shapeless confusion
courting a young artist. Tennessee Williams
and the city of Paris compose the base
of yet another one, with "The Lost Generation"
perched at the apex. I gather French cities
have been neglected in sexual fiction.
Friday, November 05, 2004
Interesting conversations going on w/ the Lucipo listserv re: the Bush gloom.
Good to talk to Adam Clay on the horn. Looks like we may be applying to a few of the same Ph.D. towns.
A good library trip today. It'd been awhile. The haul:
Ron Silliman, Bart
Jack Kerouac, Book of Haikus
Nathaniel Mackey, Eroding WitnessGertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation
Robert Duncan, Writing Writing
Susan Howe, The Europe of Trusts,
Ed Roberson, Atmospheric Conditions
Robert Duncan, Caesar's Gate
Ed Roberson, Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In
HD, Helen in Egypt
Still looking for: Robert Kelly's The Loom; In the American Tree.
Good to talk to Adam Clay on the horn. Looks like we may be applying to a few of the same Ph.D. towns.
A good library trip today. It'd been awhile. The haul:
Ron Silliman, Bart
Jack Kerouac, Book of Haikus
Nathaniel Mackey, Eroding WitnessGertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation
Robert Duncan, Writing Writing
Susan Howe, The Europe of Trusts,
Ed Roberson, Atmospheric Conditions
Robert Duncan, Caesar's Gate
Ed Roberson, Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In
HD, Helen in Egypt
Still looking for: Robert Kelly's The Loom; In the American Tree.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Well it feels like a wake up call for me to be a more politically active Democrat & not settle for just feeling informed.
I'm left wondering to what degree does a person (myself include) end up voting for a candidate who seems to embody traits that match one's self-conception. Bush is perceived to embody fortitude, Christian values, etc. I don't know. There really is a sense of Democratic "you should vote for Kerry because me & Kerry think he's best for you" that I'm certain is alienating. My thinking is that Clinton's appeal is more "I'm similar to you" than "I know what's good for you." But of course Kerry got more votes than Clinton did.
Here's me & Leigh at Linda's before the gloom descended:
Just got back in from a great road trip to Athens to read at UGA with Joe Donahue. Many thanks to Brian Henry for inviting us & keep us distracted from the gloom. We basically pulled into the parking lot, walked up the stairs and started reading. I was going pretty well, I think, 'til I looked up and saw Jed Rasula. My bowels shuddered in nervousness. Joe, as always, was pitch perfect, both in his reading and in our I-85 singalongs to Exile on Main Street & Alien Lanes. Poetry felt vitally necessary these last two days. Ron Silliman, Jonathan Mayhew, Billy Collins, Jim Behrle, Dean Young, Arkansas mafia, old friends who design web sites for free: I love you all. Please forgive my trespasses.
I'm left wondering to what degree does a person (myself include) end up voting for a candidate who seems to embody traits that match one's self-conception. Bush is perceived to embody fortitude, Christian values, etc. I don't know. There really is a sense of Democratic "you should vote for Kerry because me & Kerry think he's best for you" that I'm certain is alienating. My thinking is that Clinton's appeal is more "I'm similar to you" than "I know what's good for you." But of course Kerry got more votes than Clinton did.
Here's me & Leigh at Linda's before the gloom descended:
Just got back in from a great road trip to Athens to read at UGA with Joe Donahue. Many thanks to Brian Henry for inviting us & keep us distracted from the gloom. We basically pulled into the parking lot, walked up the stairs and started reading. I was going pretty well, I think, 'til I looked up and saw Jed Rasula. My bowels shuddered in nervousness. Joe, as always, was pitch perfect, both in his reading and in our I-85 singalongs to Exile on Main Street & Alien Lanes. Poetry felt vitally necessary these last two days. Ron Silliman, Jonathan Mayhew, Billy Collins, Jim Behrle, Dean Young, Arkansas mafia, old friends who design web sites for free: I love you all. Please forgive my trespasses.
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
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