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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?

More at Poetry Foundation

Gary Sullivan performs.

This is the poem that Gary Sullivan, the inventor of Flarf poetry, first submitted to Poetry.com’s contest.  We’ll be updating our History of Poegles to include this image and further information about Sullivan and his compatriots.

 

Gary Sullivan, inventor of Flarf, has a great history of Flarf in Brooklyn Rail. We commend it to you.

“Time will tell if the end of the Bush Era will render irony and cynicism obsolete. Rod Smith, who sprinkled a few Flarfs into his latest collection, Deed (Iowa, 2008), will publish a Flarf anthology in late 2009 through his own Edge Books. Meanwhile, the popular Flarf list search combo this week is ‘Obama’ + ‘unicorns.’”

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