Flarf, Bleh

June 29, 2009

I clearly live in a different world than the flarfists and their new admirers. My reaction to the Poetry magazine feature on flarf was a long, sighing, bleeeeeeeehhhhhhh. With a few exceptions—Jordan Davis’s second poem and Sharon Mesmer’s entry—the poems just bored me. Or were, in the case of Christian Bok’s (sorry, I don’t know how to quickly make an umlaut) poem, just another in a long string of totally incomprehensible work from a celebrated author, not a single word of which I’ve ever understood. I’m way too dumb for Bok’s poetry! But the Lego drawings were fun…

I assume the flarf poems were worked and shaped and basically in some way crafted by the authors, but I see little evidence in the result, which is generally about as (un)interesting to read as it is to randomly Google (which was fun for the first few days of Google’s existence; the novelty quickly wore off), or flip through a book reading random sentences. Which is to say: not very.

I had pretty much the exact opposite reaction to the entire issue of Poetry than Stan Apps, who shares in excruciating detail how horrible he found the “Poems” and how fantastically interesting the “Flarf and Conceptual Writing.” For all the vitriol Stan directs at Tony Hoagland’s poem, at least that poem conveys something from the author, where stanzas such as:

RadioShack
GNC
Sears
Crabree & Evelyn

or

Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57 H98 06], used as a plasticizer: 52%.

are essentially only poetry if I use them to create a poem in my head with or between the assemblage I’ve been given. And that assemblage is pretty thin. Sandra Beasley’s “Unit of Measure” it seems to me, has much the same intent as a flarf list, but also tells a story (of a kind), crafting the search-engine like facts into a sequence that is thoughtful and amusing.

Some flarf is funny. Nada Gordon’s poem made me smile when I wasn’t wincing, both of which may well be part of the flarfist intent. The 22-panel Emo cartoon was funny, and reminiscent of a number of web cartoons I read regularly, though it was 14 panels too long. But John Hodgen’s poem “For the man with the erection lasting more than four hours” was funnier than both, as was Beasley’s “Let Me Count the Waves.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t some bad entries on the “Poems” side of the ledger: Philip Levine and Charles Simic, for example, have pieces in the issue I can’t believe would make it out of the slush pile if they’d been submitted by anyone else. But overall, I think Poetry has—in the past few years—become a much more interesting publication publishing more variety than ever, as both the flarf and recent vizpo features demonstrate, not to mention poems like those by Ange Mlinko and Amy Beeder in this double issue. And it’s been my reading experience that the flarfists and post-avants are in no way immune to the same kind of name- and relationship-based favoritism they despise in the world of the mainstream.

But I do appreciate that some of those commenting on the flarf issue have pointed to poems and lines they like rather than attempting to elevate their preferred pieces by denigrating others, which is useless to me approximately 99.341% of the time. There’s a fine line between productive contrast (such as Stan Apps’ comparison of Hoagland’s “At the Galleria Shopping Mall” with Fitterman’s “Directory,” which I don’t buy at all and, in fact, illustrates precisely the problem I have with a lot of flarf, which is that Stan Apps’ reading—his creation using Fitterman’s words—is interesting; Fitterman’s poem is not) and the dubious taste of adrenalinized attack that emotions can propel us past rather quickly)

As I’ve noted here many times, including at length recently, I continue to look for my way into some of these different poetries, so I truly appreciate the blog entries and willing commenters that follow them. And whether I find much “there” there or not, I applaud Poetry’s effort to present a more diverse range of voices and approaches to poetry. In some ways the editors put themselves in a no-win position doing so, alienating some of the mainstream readers while inviting mockery from the rest, but it doesn’t appear to deter them from doing their best to revitalize the magazine.

Tags: aesthetics, flarf, poetics