Flarf: A Review of Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf

 This has been one of the most unhinged years I've lived through.

Hi.

I have some reading to share and some thoughts.

Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf

I picked up K. Silem Mohammad's Breathalyzer at a pretty dramatic turning point in my life and I read and re-read it too many times. Then everything else by Kasey except his first book. Finally, following some serendipitous encounters with this interview on youtube years later, I scoured the net and saw that Deer Head Nation was on sale and I read it cover to cover on Thanksgiving around 11 pm to 1 am. It's a beautiful, beautiful book (I've never read something so laugh-out-loud disturbing that doubles as a horror book) that led me to think about Flarf again and to break out Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf from Edge.

What the hell is Flarf?

I know an answer of course— just my answer, but it will have to do. I took a class called Very Contemporary Poetry in 2008 that led me to all these poets. I was talking with a friend the other day who said that people recognize a shared value system by way of sense of humor very quickly. For better or worse, I think that I understand Flarf well, especially poems by K. Silem Mohammad, Sharon Mesmer, and Drew Gardner. And Flarf poetry works in pretty similar registers and modalities to other writers I found after Breathalyzer: 

Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets for instance which, according to Lyn Hejinian on the back cover, encompass plenitude (I agree), and which work through inclusion of a strange and resonating repetition (isn't resonance always about repetition?), find as a mode their finest development in the poems and methods of the collected Flarf anthology. Both The Sonnets and Flarf find something new in the poetic form by using the trope of a repeated phrase over the course of a book, or, in Flarf's case, an entire body of work, that points backwards to old references from earlier poems' readings, as well as generally "outward" to the lives and exploits of the phrases outside the limits of the book. This is a form of allusion that needs a more descriptive name for its ability to warp time and give a few syllables their own lives. Eat your heart out, Notes On The Waste Land.

It's possible I've read so much Flarf poetry over so many years now that I get a great, outsized kick out of a poem like "I Am So Stupid" (whose title alone makes me cackle). Perhaps you will too. Observe.

These poems, alongside the appeal of their charms, might serve one day as a snapshot of the early and mid aughts whenever we understand what the hell that time was and why it was so flarfy. Or perhaps there might be a new wave of the movement on the way as new readers find what was wonderful about Flarf and live in similarly ununderstandable times. Come what may, I'll be porting Deer Head Nation around whenever I need that particular, authentic melange of unspeakable horror to lighten my spirit (it's the authenticity that does it) and the Flarf Anthology as a way to discover.

Enjoying The Kooky Languages with You,

Lee