Flarf Attack

So much Flarfy stuff on the net since the publication of That Poetry Magazine.

It starts with Kenny Goldsmith stirring the waters, stuff about disjunction and monkeys, typewriters:

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?

Ron Silliman likey the idea of but something is nagging at him. Dale Smith don't like it not one bit.

Kenny even makes it into Wired. Then he responds.

Comments

[EGNEP]

addendum to http://openned.com/2009/04/19/online-publishing/" rel="nofollow">April comment thread concerning absence of tagged poetry at myEbook recently reversed by http://www.myebook.com/index.php?option=tag&tag_id=16766&status=ns" rel="nofollow">Fo-ConPo-like invasion.