Flarf Orchestra CD release party at Le Poisson Rouge, Fri 1/13, 7:00

Me reading "On Fire" at DC Arts Center, Washington DC, 10/16/2011

Buck Downs: guitar
Mel Nichols: ukulele
Maureen Thorson: ukulele

Video: Katie Degentesh

Nada Gordon, Scented Rushes, Roof Books, 2010

Scented Rushes is a series of highly artificed poems of seduction and frustration. It moves from the excited frustration of approach to the bitter frustration of rejection. The book is loosely epistolary, addressed to a distant love object, one who is truly objectified, having little or no presence beyond the engine he creates for the poems. He is a governor in the engine of the book. The poet's obsession is presented as a given, the reader is given no information about what makes this person appealing to the poet. In some respects the book fits the troubadour model of seduction poetry, though gender-inverted. This structure, and the general aura, which feels like Cindy Sherman crossed with Spongebob Squarepants, creates the feeling of a strangely ambiguous musical theatre project.

These are love poems, but they are not erotic in any direct sense. There is very little in the book addressing questions of pleasure or gratification. The dirtiest thing that is said is "I want to see the front matter." These are aggressive romantic provocations launched into deep space. Their drama comes from the poet wrestling against herself.

The undercurrent of playfulness and semi-epistolary orientation call to mind some obvious parallels, Bernadette Mayer for instance. The drama and conviction that fantasies count calls to mind Lady Gaga, and the love of absurdity and considerable energy and liveliness to a perhaps more unlikely parallel, Benjamin Péret.

The style is violently florid, entailing thickets of verbal laciness brought to an aggressive, renaissance festival extreme. The tone sometimes veers into prime mid-70s British prog-rock.

"Just where the snail falls from the eye of the sun"

Gordon's extravagantly flowery style and seemingly intentional abuse of adjectives is counterbalanced by an unwavering, expert feel for the arrangement of language.

The combination of forces that come into play as the poems progress from an agitated kind of hope to disappointment and anger produce some startling moments:

"So the rhapsodies now turn inward, like condoms on ghosts."

or this, from a poem set on a subway:

"Everyone has earbuds -- and was once a tiny zygote with DARK IRISES alone in a liquid place."

There are poems that use flarf methods to engage with vocabularies and subject matter that depart considerably from what one might normally expect in dramatic love poetry. These are some of the strongest moments in the book, where the traditional sealed cosmos of the obsessing poet/lover allows for uncanny intersections with the vastness of social quantity.

Rod Smith’s new poem “What’s The Deal” illustrates how Flarf and conceptual poetry might be the perfect complements of each other, in the sense of complementary colors. They are 180 degrees apart. Where Conceptual poetry is intentionally boring (“If there were an Olympic sport for extreme boredom, I would get a gold medal." --Kenny Goldsmith) and the reader’s engagement is meant to be minimal or impossible, Flarf is highly engaging. Where Conceptual poetry is made to be as self-referential as possible, Flarf uses a world of complex reference that threatens to veer out of control. In Conceptual poetry, the author is meant to be as distanced as possible from the material. With Flarf poetry it’s the opposite: Smith’s neural net is jacked directly into the spiraling prism-like streaks of digital social information the poem uses as it’s Googled raw material.

Conceptual poetry is rule-bound. Smith’s poem is based not on a rule but a single starting point: repeat a question and see what happens. The two approaches have the repurposing of digital text in common, but their effects are so different that when you put them side by side they cover an amazing amount of artistic territory with very little repetition.

The iterative rhythm of Smith’s “What’s the Deal” moves like a flip book, quickly going from questions about the nature of Madonna to the nature of hydrogen to Grape Nuts and then to "the bright light you see before dying." There are few answers, though one of the most striking is: “The menace of wind turbines,” evoking the feeling of some frightening but sustainable zero-carbon future.

The poem has an inexorable forward momentum. Once you start reading you don’t want to put it down. The feel of it goes from delightful to unnerving and back again.

What's the deal with Sanka?

(this is a cute way
of telling your Barista 'thank you')

I saw some graphic of a black hole
and Sanka

The affect of the questions ranges from imploring to incredulous to frustrated, a distorted reflective surface of multiple selves in which the shifting image of the author is always present. The answer that often seems most likely is “I don’t know exactly.”

“What’s the Deal” is packed with details, details not from the poet’s life, but from other people’s lives. These are built into a whirring kinetic swirl -- interlocking lines harmonized (and de-harmonized) with multiple voices that Smith will then bring to a dead halt by dropping a perfect Steven Wright-like Zen stone into the whole thing:

The socks / appear never / to have / been worn / so the condition is / immaculate"

After a few pages “What’s the Deal” begins to glow with the extrapolated resonance of millions of individual human plots. How do things turn out? Do we find out where the hundreds of rubber duckies came from that inexplicably showed up across the Sunnyvale campus? Who is packing the truck and moving to LA? What's buried behind all these diners?

for the BP oil spill anniversary, #181 from Michael McClure's proto-Flarf book 15 Fleas

THE MURRES AND THE PUFFINS BLEW MY MIND
I ALWAYS DREAMED THAT I WOULD FIND
one covered with oil
and save his life
and toil to resurrect his beauty
and he'd love me
and be my pet murre
or auk or puffin
I loved the feathered crests
asweeping from their eyes
and their sturdiness
and clowny painted beaks
in midst of dignity
OH MY GOD!
I read a book about a boy who made friends
with an ornithologist and went with him to a bird
rookery and they found all the birds some of them
still alive and faintly staggering and lying
dead and dying with their wings chopped off. The
island had been attacked by feather pirates. And
another story about a native taking people on raft
from isle to isle and they hated him but he had
a secret stash of water that he drank through
a tube while the loathsome white people slept…
I like Egyptian frescoes too…

And to study all the alphabets.

Good article by Adam Roberts in The Atlantic: "Flarf: poetry meme-surfs with Kanye West and LOLcats."

I should add that the poem Pizza Kitty referenced in the article is by the inimitable Rodney Koeneke.

Eddie Vega writes in Comedy Beat on Flarf, comedy and poetry, and the We-Are-Familia performance.

Why Flarf is Better Than Conceptualism.

Turns out that Flarf makes you smarter.

A Flarf primer, courtesy of Franklin Bruno, is now on Bookforum.

Adeena Karasick, Bowery Poetry Club, 3.14.09

Adeena Karasick provided sustained tonal variation and a broad sense of overall contour with more fun, funny, exuberant, "performatively-oriented" giving-a-shit about the audience than I was prepared for. It was the best reading I've seen her give. This is not a situation where you show up to listen and prove you care about poetry despite the lack of aptitude or interest the poet shows in getting the material over to you. Karasick cares enough to put on a good show and she wants to be loved and is going to damn well prove to you that you should love her, at least for as long as she's on the stage.

Clearly she gives slam poets a run for their money, and I don't consider slam performance anything to sneeze at. She's a sometimes compelling and explosive ham on the same level of talent as say, Edwin Torres, and she has the dangers and challenges that come along with this fact. I could feel her fighting to not fall into a formula, which I've seen her do, and the energy this fight released infused the room with a kind of humming expectant warmth that destroyed any trace of the lingering dread which sometimes creeps upon me at a poetry reading that I might be facing new variations on the old tune of fatigue-inducement as indicator of poetic seriousness and value. Not a bit of it, folks.

There were two highlights. One a flarfy search and replaced dating advice poetics repurposing of The Rules. So much of Flarfiness is sustainability, cultural repurposing, recycling, and finding alternate poetic energy sources. A kind of eco-poetry. (cue John Latta tantrum!) The prose rhythm of this new piece shows that Karasick can deploy tonal effects keyed directly to placement and shifts in content, even though much of her work is pitched from a place where the performance insists on it's modulations despite or against variations in material the way someone might insist you join them for a drink after work tomorrow and you know they might or might not show up, leaving you with plenty to think about either way. Mixing these approaches broadened the performance horizon considerably. The other high point, and the outro, was also a detournment, this time of the Dance Pop Obama Girl, pulled from the landfill and remade into a hilarious love song "I've got a crush on Osama," as good as anything on John Stewart or the Kootenay channel. It's amazing what one word change can lead to.

Studio 360 on Flarf

my comments for Joe Safdie over at Limetree:

What I'm jonesing for is more critical engagement from people challenging Flarf but who don't actually read the books. What I see here is you asking loaded questions about "Flarf" based on your reading of this review. Your questions read more as opinions than questions. Without having read the books, or at least the book under discussion, there's no way you can critically engage beyond a very superficial level about Flarf in general. It's unsatisfying to constantly read smart people doing weak critical thinking because they can't be bothered to confront the primary sources and make up their own minds -- and there is a lot of this! I'm challenging you to be a worthy opponent, which is a valuable thing.

Surely different writers have different processes when writing about poetry. But would it be outrageous of me to suggest that actually reading the work that you're expressing opinions about might in fact be an essential element of critical thought?

Sometimes you have to pour the coffee through the chicken to feed the one trapped in the cogs of economy.

Jordan Davis writes about my poem "Fixing a Real Phantom Limb" over at Lemon Hound.

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.