Posts tagged ‘flarf’

July 19, 2010

this is what I am thinking as I am picking the sleep from my eyes.

by jhon baker

Had a nap yesterday that didn’t feel like a nap and last night didn’t feel like sleep until about seven am which lasted until roughly nine. I’d call it sleeping in if the night was full of sleep. Most nights since I stopped taking the anti-psychotic have been fine but the main reason to stop taking the meds has not reversed itself as of yet. My mind is still clouded and the creative drought still exists. There is the other thought that I am splitting my mind between too many things right now to be able to concentrate on new poetry or prose.
I decided this weekend that I ought to have been applying labels or tags to each of my posts for easier reference. As I had not been doing this I am now going back and having to skim each one to apply the labels or tags and avoid the temptation to revise and rewrite passages that are not on the level of quality that the others are. Last night I did over a hundred thus completing the bulk of them and tonight I may finish the project but now I am thinking that I would be better off thinking of about 15 tags and only utilizing those which would mean that I would have to start over. I am not being kind to myself.
This morning is a Tom Waits morning and currently the song “Kentucky Avenue” is playing – brings me to tears every time.
My coffee is good and thanks to Kara for making it this morning when I was refusing to rouse myself. There is nothing better than walking into a kitchen where there is fresh, hot coffee and clean mugs – I drink it black and burn your fingertips hot.

I wonder what is done with medical waste and what will alien anthropologists think when it is found?

I’m almost sure there is a simple explanation but I am too nervous to use Google thinking that flarf may lead me into a new direction where there exists the pornographic denizens of the internet.



Words are dry, meaningless

words are dry,
expression faceless.
the ladybugs came here to die
on my window;
baking in the sun.

a hundred portraits
unhung,
composing city life.

walks along South Michigan
in Chicago;
children think I am homeless
and dirty.

find Buddha in the patrons .
find Buddha in the hall.
find Buddha on the front steps
of MOMA.
je suis beau!
find Buddha in me!

on these steps I ask for a light;
and I am
not thinking that I’m going to write this
a year later, or more, sitting at
my desk. where
ladybugs come to die
on my window.

– Hoc Scripsi

July 17, 2010

Mostly wondering what comes next

by jhon baker

Listening to Rachmaninov (there are too many fucking variations on how his name is spelled for spell check to keep up thought it offers nightwatchman as an alternative) and thinking about this kind of poetry I’ve just read about called flarf. The example I saw was from a Google’s search prediction – someone put in half a phrase and then took what was there and called it a poem. Here is the Wikipedia definition of this avant garde nonsense. And it is nonsense in my not so humble opinion. In the article it compares it to so called “cut up” – which really is the Tristan Tzara method where you cut the words out of something else and rearrange them like either a ransom note or magnetic poetry. The Tzara method takes authorship as where flarf takes an audience to simply recognize it to be something and react to it. I don’t call it poetry but accidental art and it would more belong in a museum then in a serious journal. As accidental art I think it’s interesting and engaging. Like typing in an innocuous phrase and searching images until you manage to find porn – normally about ten pages for any keywords.
another way to look at flarf would be closer to photography – taking what is already there and manipulating it or pulling it into focus. Forcing a viewer to read beyond the goal.
So, I am not saying it’s bad art – just incorrectly categorized.

edit: I use the word authorship – I think it is the wrong word – what I mean is that to come up with this flarf a writer is unnecessary – a poet would only get in the way, I mean that there is no single creator but an audience to recognize it for it’s writerly quality but without the writer it is avant garde art, that should be on the walls, not on broadsides.

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