When words are all we have
And here’s another guy who’s brave. Braver than us? He does this every night.
But wait. I will also give you, below, the opening paragraph of an article in the new issue of Poetry (Chicago). Flarf. I think that technically my poem Richard Price is flarf. I’m trying to get to grips with the definition of this thing the Americans seem to taken by, and whether I think it sounds like it has any meaning. I realise that meaning is supposed to be a bit recherché nowadays, in its primary mode at any rate, but here is the paragraph:
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?
Fun; cute; funny; engaging; it makes poetry sound fun! And the author is kind of cute! And it’s even sort of true, when you think about it, applying it to some kinds of experience. Or is it ways of experiencing? Isn’t this kind of talk sort of… once-removed? Doesn’t it rely almost totally on bathos for its effects? Rendering it the same, in terms of how its parts move, as the early Woody Allen?
But what if something were really – you know – important? What if you wanted depth? What if it were urgent? What if the whole point of your linguistic endeavour was to immerse yourself and your readers in the primary meaning of its subject? What if you wanted to shout from the rooftops?
I ask all this only because there seem to be camps, and they seem split, and people are talking about this as a definition of what it is to be contemporary in one’s poetic practice. Now, I love kitsch. I find the above really engaging and fun. And, as I said, I think I have unwittingly written flarf. But within that, there is a time for the velvet Elvis painting, and there is a time for direct observation.
Don’t you think this line of nothing’s-that-vital reasoning, feel-good as it is, if you applied it as a tenet would ultimately cheapen – well – life? and our miraculous ability to write about it?
The thing about flarf is that it isn’t the whole of poetry; if it were you might well be right about it cheapening life. I’ve written poems based on walking around shopping malls picking up phrases from the shop windows; but it’s not the whole of my work. Others take themselves much more seriously.
Sometimes, when poets take themselves too seriously, I start groaning, running for the proverbial door. Sometimes when poets are too frivolous, you wonder if there’s any real depth.
I like some of the flarf poems in that issue of Poetry; and I like the “conceptual” poems too (especially Bergvall, and Bok); but I wouldn’t want to read that kind of poetry all the time. Anymore than I like to eat icecream all the time; but I like icecream.
Hi Steven, yeah, you’re right – it’s that über-seriousness that gets to me, all the claims made which always seem to carry a veiled implication that anything else is somehow passé… I enjoyed the article I quoted, as it happens, which is why I quoted it. Thanks for commenting, I was hoping you might!
It sounds to me like the poetic equivalent of, “Oh, I wasn’t really trying,” the built-in excuse kids use to cushion themselves against an expected failure. Perhaps it’s a response to the feeling that it just isn’t possible to compete with Frost and Yeats and Auden and Eliot, let alone Chaucer and Wordsworth and Keats (and we won’t mention the dark plains, where the shadows cast by the Really Grand Ancestors stunt all growth). “If really trying is doomed, I’ll go for ‘How can you tell the difference between trying and not?’ ” is what one feels here.
Or perhaps that’s way too glib. Maybe this is a whole new territory, plows breaking virgin ground. But it sure doesn’t feel that way.
RHE
Richard, thanks for that too. No response on the Allah O Akbars? I thought they were simply amazing.
If that’s the case, then does writing poems from all the words in a scrabble game count? And you have to work just as hard at that kind of poem, as the other sort… so it is trying, I guess.
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