I have been following & mixing it up a little with some of the blog-discussions about FLARF (Ron Silliman has linked to most of it). I have to admit, I like the word "flarf" - sort of a synthesis of fluff, laugh, and a dog barking...

My Theory on Flarf is that it is essentially a kind of Clowning - a primitive form of Comedy... its "serious" critical apologia are just another shtick in the program - Allamistakeo, as EA Poe put it... & those who take them seriously fall into a "serious" trap...

They are the Fellinis of contemporary American poetry (without Fellini's wistful sweet big-hearted so-Italian nostalgia - essence of Clown, purified to Super-Clown-Saint)...

So let's take this thought-experiment a little further : Flarf has become the dominant-hegemonic-canonical form of Contemporary Poetry! Whole Collegiate programs are devoted to studying & celebrating its Heros & Heroines... deeply-considered doctoral theses are defended & even written...

Paradoxically, Gabriel Gudding emerges as the Flarfiste's Flarfiste, since his critical pronunciamentos are both more deadpan-serious & funny than the flarfistas themselves...

Kent Johnson is celebrated as one of the Original Sad Clowns... his plangent personae & rumbustious challenges to the Establishment are recognized at last as nonpareil "bigfoot shuffles"...

Even minor poet Henry Gould gets his due in Flarf Kingdom! As the air-filled Shelley-balloon of Lilliputia - he of the enormous endless epic HENRIAD - there in his own private tiny Rhode Island...

Grad students excavate & debate fine points of the Flarf Renaissance of Dramatic Poetry, rooted as it is in a fundamentally Dionysian attitude - play, play play! -'s the thing...

They will deliberate over the Flarferrians Oedipal relationship with their Father, John Ashbery - since his status as "original Flarfist" is a contradiction in terms (Official or "Tectonic" Flarfism categorically denies the existence of "originality")... this crux or dilemma hits hard, especially on the NY-School-derived Flarffers, such as Jordan Davis, Drew Gardner, Gov. John Connolly, JFK, "Toenails" Lantucci, Nada Gordon, Gordon Nado - who love-hate Ashbery, since their own literary identity derives from a non-identity with Ashbery, who's own non-identity generated the non-identical techniques of Flarf, so that an escape from suffocating identity leads to an identity which circles back to a suffocating non-identity which sounds very familiar... - so where's Berrigan when we need him? Back in Rhode Island, no doubt.