Apr
13
Flarf = Dionysus?
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Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo.
An introduction to the 21st Century’s most controversial poetry movements.
BY KENNETH GOLDSMITH
Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry. Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard? And what fun to wreck it: knock it down, hit delete, and start all over again. There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty. With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?
Jun
3
Curiosities
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Google sets plans to sell E-books
Critics: Google book deal a privacy, monopoly disaster
Google Wave combines hybrid of instant messaging, e-mail, blogging and wiki technology all in one
Is ‘slam’ in danger of going soft?
Forbes Magazine on making a living as a poet
May
30
A poegle like no other
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A Moment Like No Other
Sitting at ringside for the next big boxing event just won’t be the same.
This is truly our lucky day for we are here to live it. This is a moment that is like no other. We traveled by bus from Brooklyn, New York; “in terms of its historic magnitude,” we waited a lifetime for a moment like this.
This was very obviously no Colgate moment. More a Kodak moment for their would be no repeat, in other words. We owe all of them for this moment. … that are part of their lives and no big deal, For young blacks and other, to those rare politicians like Lyndon B, you could hear, where these and others were going
His diploma in one hand, his classmates embedded in his heart, the beauty and inspiration of a reunion like no other: It was a moment in time … As the hour drew near for Barack Obama to be sworn in as this nation’s 44th president, it’s impossible not to suffer from a bit of whiplash trying to capture the meaning of this moment that would be like no other.
Donna in Napoleon, Ohio (search phrase: “A Moment Like No Other”)
May
30
Poegling in Virginia
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Ramblings of a Geek Hacking for Christ
Condomania lives.
Couples pack their separate cars.
Mobile Manor is the next trailer park casualty.
Sonny James, I wish it hadn’t happened.
Remember the man caught in a vacuum
sex act that got him 90 days in prison?
Maybe he came back under a different name.
Blessed are those who go in circles.
I’m tired of my room smelling like Bengay.
I’m tired of watching nipples that aren’t mine.
I am the great broken pecker.
I used to believe
in an omnipresent Trotsky force,
and laugh at internet dating, flyfishing,
Woody Allen’s failed romantic comedies.
I used to hum along to
Sinatra covers in our elevators,
and watch sportspub brawls.
Last week the Knicks proved
there is no such thing as a rebuilding year.
Maybe I’ll turn Bedouin,
travel to the outskirts of the Haraldskær marsh,
watch the sky for comet Lulin,
and the mystery of a shrinking violet zodiac.
-Chad in Virginia Beach (search phrase “i wish i hadn’t”)
