Gary Sullivan gets a pointillist portrait in the Wall Street Journal, which featured last week an article on Flarf vs Conceptual poetry.  Quoth the Journal:

Flarf is a creature of the electronic age. The flarf method typically involves using word combinations turned up in Google searches, and poems are often shared via email. When one poet penned a piece after Googling “peace” + “kitty,” another responded with a poem after searching “pizza” + “kitty.” A 2006 reading of it has been viewed more than 6,700 times on YouTube. It starts like this: “Kitty goes Postal/Wants Pizza…”

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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

WNYC recording of the recent Whitney event.  Listen here.  For the show the Whitney “staged a faux battle between the two movements, featuring poets Christian Bök, Nada Gordon, Kenneth Goldsmith, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, Kim Rosenfield, Gary Sullivan and Darren Wershler.”

“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.’”