Objectify This

According to Micheal Magee, “Poems are, like, total bullshit unless they are/squid or popsicles or
deer piled/on elk in the trunk of David Hasselhoff’s/cutlass Sierra.”

That’s pretty much the spirit of the first poetry movement of the 21st century: semi-dadist riffing with Googleian specifics.

It’s an interesting metaphor for modern consciousness– globalization has brought the information age, and with it zillions of esoteric facts and tabloid-worthy memes of celebrity gossip and pornographic images and pure bullshit. It’s all designed to compete for our attention– so why not poetry?

Poetry has so long been about “mak[ing] it new”, at least according to Ezra Pound. If this is true, the flarf movement is a logical consequence of the reaction between the aftereffects of modernism and the short attention span of the information age.

This is poetry that does not just talk about stalking Walt Whitman’s ghost through a supermarket in California or lusting after the compact and delicious body of an unavailable woman across a restaurant but actually dares to use the raunchy, politically incorrect lingo of the mind at work.

I’m intrigued by the offbeat associations of the flarf movement, which arise from internet searches but often create the feel of the harrassed metropolitan consciousness. Is this postpost-modernism? The rise of a new avant-apathy? A Baudelaire-worthy reinvention of the art form? Or is this just a bunch of people who like to get together and say ‘kike’ and have discovered that people will publish them?

However you classify it, it’s surprisingly formal. Flarf originated on a listserv and initially required an ethnic slur in each poem.  Of course, on first glance, using slurs is objectification — but any complete condemnation of ethnic slurs is as complex and repressive as their reclamation. But Flarf did not necessarily attempt to reclaim slurs (which is fortunate, since identity politics, and especially reclamation, can be so fraught) so much as to dare to pull them out of our cultural closet.

This contemporary excavation of our cultural flotsam and jetsam does not necessarily make Flarf more accessible than traditional modernist poetry– in fact, ethnic slurs are so taboo that even employing them in a lighthearted way in public alienates many audiences as much as any other in-joke.

Yet such offense arises because these words have a special magnitude; they threaten the humanity of groups of people en masse, and thus groups of people censure them. But which is more harmful— the power that we assume they possess, or the imposition of censorious restrictions on linguistic agency?  What could be more apt celebration of slurs’ rebirth as tools of agency than the reincarnation of lingusitic arts in a freer form?

Perhaps poetry, which for so long attempted to bring us images (which video technology now does better) and sounds (which audio technology now does better) in pleasing patterns (which are now trite) or realistic representations of the mind at work (which too often require too much of the modern attention span) has finally found its hook: the magic words that will make people stand up and shout, “What!?”

Flarf is nonsensical, at times, but also funny, poignant, and surprisingly affective, as if a pastiche of random, specific cultural icons and slurs were the only way to truly personalize communication all along. Go try it, cracker. You might like it.

For more about Flarf, wiki Flarf, read about Flarf in The Brooklyn Rail or listen to the Poetry Foundation’s “Excuse Me While I Offend You” podcast from their Poetry Off the Shelf series.