Flarf & Tag Clouds

Dale Smith:

And also, and this is the part some won’t like, I’d like to know if flarf is not engaged in the production of tag clouds? Is not the stated purpose of flarf just this, to create tag clouds through “combination and remixing” outside of the contexts of discourse that provided meaningful space for the words in the first place? Flarf poems resist criticism because they resist meaning by voiding words of the contexts of their origin. If Google is the archive through which Flarfists meet with their own good minds to create a poetic vocabulary of “intensity” perhaps in order to “incite a feeling or a response” we need, certainly, “to invite the interrogation of that response or what induced it” to the table. As far as I can tell, it’s not that critics are just mean ole nasty cusses who want to dismiss flarf outright, but flarf builds into its practice resistance to the kind of argumentation necessary to produce meaningful commentary.

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Link List

Links recently added to the Openned sidebar: neon highway abandon yr timid notion fait accompli

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1000 Novels Everyone Must Read

If The Guardian was in charge of the world, we would all have to read 1000 novels. This raises a number of interesting computations. Reading one novel per day (a feat within itself) it would take you 2.73 years to complete the list, or  2 years, 8 months, roughly. If we were to assume you had a life outside of the list (which is not implied in the Guardian's fascistic instructions) and say that you could complete a novel every week, then you are looking at close to 19.2 years of reading. Assuming that you fit these novels in amongst your normal reading habits, perhaps to the extent of one a month, you have an unenviable 83.3 years of perilous scanning ahead of you. I'm not sure what this list is meant to achieve. The Top 100 Novels of All-Time is bad enough - at least that seems to be trying to rank the buggers. This is less a list and more a collection of books staggered amongst some wide-ranging and wholly inaccurate classifications (the 'State of the Nation' genre being my favourite). Perhaps I'll compile a list of 1000 Poems Everyone Must Read. I think I'll start with 'If'.

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10 Banned Albums Burned Then Played

Brian Joseph Davis, just like it sounds. Featuring:

1. Stravinsky 
2. Mahler 
3. First Family/ Louie Louie 
4. The Beatles 
5. Sex Pistols 
6. Prince 
7. Dead Kennedys 
8. 2 Live Crew

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X-Fartor

A new X Factor style television talent show will attempt to discover the next British art sensation.

The BBC Two show, presented by advertising boss and art collector Charles Saatchi, is open to all aspiring artists. Artists aged 18 and over can apply to www.submityourart.com.

My ability to express my opinion in words fails me. But I am simultaneously not surprised.

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Sound Poetry: 2009 x 12

Matt Dalby:

I realise it's late in the month and all, I also realise there's not a huge market for this stuff, and I do have other stuff to do with mutapoem. But I have decided that I am going to attempt to release a CD of new sound poetry every month for the whole of 2009.

Tare is the first, paypal button should be available soon or might be available already depending on when you're reading this.

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The Pun

Geof Huth:

The pun is the highest form of literature, being completely entangled in language, inextricable from it. Puns appear in my head unbidden, as if gifts of heaven, and I lay them down into the masonry of whatever building of words I’m constructing. It is a rare poem of mine that exists without a pun, but many of the puns are oblique, hidden, disguised, probably only visible to me. I see them and say to myself, No-one will ever see that.

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The Inauguration Speech

In-depth analysis from Jonathan Raban, the only article about the speech that has kept my attention until the end:

Under the guise of noble platitude Obama was able to get away with murder, cloaking in familiar and emollient language an address that otherwise defied convention. There was a hint of this in his ritual bow to the outgoing president, in which he spent five words acknowledging Bush's service to his country and 10 in thanking him for his departure from office. In no inaugural has a president so completely repudiated the policies of his predecessor as Obama did on Tuesday. Look back at the "forbearers" sentence, and see the sting in its tail: "true to our founding documents". Most of the crowd of more than a million who packed the Mall, a few of whom loudly booed Dick Cheney when he was wheeled on to the stage, believed that the Bush administration had done its best to shred the constitution. The distinction between "we the people" (who are loyal to the founding documents) and "those in high office" (who stand accused of abusing them) hung ambiguously in the air. If you wanted to hear it, it was there; if you didn't, it wasn't.

Read the rest here.

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More from Marcus Slease

This man has the soft fleshy part of my ear:

so much writing out there. In the good book they say to sort the wheat from the not-wheat. texts are multiplying at increasing rates. I have heard the distinction between innovative and mainstream no longer holds sway. At least in America with so many soft surrealists and mags and blogmags popping up everyday. The Fence revolution etc. There is good poetry in all "camps" of course. Not population control but some good strong critics and more selective publications? perhaps more vision? or perhaps poetry communities swapping their writing? cell to cell...

And:

A very interesting interview with Anne Waldman and Stacy Szymaszek about the Poetry Project at St. Marks church in the Bowery. The history. The community building. The future. One of my favourite places in the universe. The Openned reading series in London has the potential to build along these lines. 

And his blog continues onwards with writings of Abraham Smith and Sean Bonney.

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DBC on Mr. G

David-Baptiste Chirot lays the smackdown on Kenny Goldsmith:

The underlying theme of Mr. G’s “avantism” then is not to do with ideas, with actual works, or with any kind of confrontation with emptiness’s of many kinds al around one. On the contrary, what Mr. G stands for is a well fed and tenured elite of “avantists” who need to do nothing more than announce that they’re “avantists” and manifest this in the differences between their books sales and lecture fees and those of the Mainstream Poets, themselves many of them also funded by the same sources as the “avantists.”

More smackdown here.

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