Poetry might be the only art whose leaders are regularly criticized for trying to stay relevant.

... well, what's the line today? What's the cowardly opinion? What's the position people are afraid not to take?

Night owls in daylight.

Take your best swing!

Risa Puno - The Course of Emotions.

I'll be performing at the Bowery Poetry Club this Sat at 4:00:

Drew Gardner -- poetry and guitar
James Ilgenfritz -- bass

with

Ted Pearson

308 BOWERY, just north of Houston

Has someone thought to create a PDF chapbook of all the comment field and blog reaction to Issue 1?. Clearly that's where the poetry is in all this.

Perhaps I have a perverse sense of humor, but the spectacle of poets angrily claiming and defending the value of their intellectual property and brand name in a context where it has no value to the culture at large is funny to me. What does it mean that this concise, wrong-headed group writing might have more energy charge to it than much of the poetry of the comment writers?

The poems in the Issue 1 all do sound like they're from the same poem generating software. So it's really the work of a single author. I see some people are calling this Flarf. The event of Issue 1 is Flarfy in that it's provocative and identity-blurring. Identity-blurring always enrages poets for some reason.

The poetry itself isn't Flarfy, because Flarf poetry is very much a product of the individual poets who write it. You can tell which Flarf poet is the author within a few lines. Flarf poetry is expressive, or more precisely, it is a hybridization of expressiveness and procedure. The work coming out of the Flarf collective is poetry by any means necessary.