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.

Enjoying Kasey's (& Nada's) reflections on "what it means to me".

Poetry was not a big part of my childhood. Music, reading & public recitation were, however. There were a lot of school & church plays, speeches from American history to be memorized & recited, hymns & campfire songs & so on. I remember singing hymns & songs all through the long bus rides to summer Y camp. That's how they used to keep us occupied.

"Fair are the meadows,
fairer still the woodlands,
clothed in the beauteous[?] garb of Spring..."

I do remember having to memorize & recite "The Charge of the Light Brigade" for my 5th-grade English class.

Most of the pleasure of poetry in those days came from the silliness involved in class recitals - the many ways kids would find to obliterate the poems.

The NY School can be understood as an outgrowth of this phenomenon.

I think I learned to enjoy reading poetry later, by way of reading fiction. Fiction lights up the imaginative faculties - you learn to "see" the world in the book. & poems are little fictions.

Enjoying the delights of Hat 6. I should read more poetry.
Like Kim Lyons' poems especially.

More evidence that the younger generation is just plain smarter than we are. (smart, ie. intelligent & stylish). Though occasionally the multiple layers of self-parody & self-consciousness are... a bit jejune (to this stuffy 52-yr-old senior citizen).

Happy to appear alphabetically between Nada Gordon & Mark Halliday. (Both of whose poems seem, in places anyway, to be riffing in jokey ways on mine. Widderruf. But I'm just being self-conscious.)

Mark Halliday was at Brown, in the grad program I think, a couple of years ahead of me. He published my first poems outside of high school, in a little spiral-bound anthology of "new poetry". I wonder what ever happened to that. Mark & David Cashman were publishing The Providence Review then (with the epigraph from the Bonanza Bus driver on the frontispiece - "This is Providence. Everyone changes here.") David is still writing poetry - had a book published recently (This Much : selected poems, 1970-2000. Catskill Press, 2003).

Emerged from my musty cave last night to attend reading downtown (at new spare restaurant-bar, Tazza) by visiting Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan. Funny, exuberant, bawdy, silly. Politics, art, sex, religion - all the serious stuff - are fodder for satire. Enjoy life, be free. Great singing (a complex aria set to some industrial engineering magazine?) by the startlingly pale Nada. Poe would have approved. High points for me were their version of the Book of Revelation (set to an antique novelty-items catalog), Gordon's take-off on Whitman (Song of My OwnSelf), Sullivan's long Kerouacky epistolary piece. Their performance style reminded me, oddly, of the atmosphere at the coffeehouse sketched in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red.

The evening was hosted by two Mikes w/microphone (Gizzi & Magee). Mairead Byrne was there too. This is Providence, reporting.

Nada on subjective formalism vs. mathematical. She's right to counterbalance the model-making head trips with a more centered "mimesis" (the "canons" of Leonardo & predecessors - squaring the circle on the human microcosm - were centered on genitals or navel). But math is everywhere. Nada herself did some division (Nada divided by Ron = Ada with remain d'Or). Gaze into your navel you'll see a very physical umbilical cord back to nautilus spiral seashell.

Nada asks why she wrote "hummingbird fever".

My guess is she was thinking of the book Nightingale Fever, a study of Mandelstam (who originated the phrase), Akhmatova & Pasternak (? or Tsvetaeva), by British poet & translator D.M. Thomas.

Or it could be coincidence.

funny Nada for 4/29.