tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8861197.post113269659284037193..comments2023-06-27T16:51:05.805+02:00Comments on The Pangrammaticon: The Poetics of InaccrochabilityThomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8861197.post-1132817832067167822005-11-24T08:37:00.000+01:002005-11-24T08:37:00.000+01:00This just maybe late night gibberish (and a bit of...This just maybe late night gibberish (and a bit of devil’s advocacy), but what if the point of flarf (and maybe all poetry) is that it is simply fun, “a superior amusement.” Are we taking flarf too seriously? Is the joke on us? Flarf reminds me of Dada and Duchamp humorously thumbing their noses at formal art and society, and they seem to be comfortable with that aspect of it. Maybe that’s what Gary and others were driving at. Yet, I also wonder is everyone a bit uncomfortable admitting that flarf can be funny, that poetry is aesthetically enjoyable. Is all this post-poetic act theorizing exposing a pragmatic, puritanical streak that is uncomfortable with the sheer joy of art? We can’t admit that at some level it is fun and unproductive, so we construct elaborate theories to justify spending hours reading or writing poetry? I admit I don’t think I agree with this. I think that poetry does have cultural significance. Doesn’t it? That critical theory has a role. Doesn’t it? <BR/><BR/>What sparked this line of thought was an essay by Barbara Guest, titled “Wounded Joy”, in which she writes:<BR/><BR/>“In the youth of my poetry I was fortunate to be surrounded by painters in the Art movement of Abstract Expressionism and I learned from them. <BR/>First I noticed these painters appeared to have a lot more joy than did the poets. They were more playful! Their ideas were exploding on the canvas and they had a sense of freedom the poets were only beginning to learn from them.”<BR/>Are we strapping our selves to a gurney of serious theory and forgetting the joy and playful side of art? Just some late night food for thought…I may wake up with a throbbing blog-over, and regret this whole incident as I toss my smoke-filled jacket in the washer and fumble with the child-proof aspirin bottle.David Leftwichhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03674591142500915199noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8861197.post-1132796414360292902005-11-24T02:40:00.000+01:002005-11-24T02:40:00.000+01:00Thomas, thanks for the reply -- I'm glad we can st...Thomas, thanks for the reply -- I'm glad we can still have a reasoned back-and-forth about this stuff. It may be that the blogs are not fit for a fully developed conversation along these lines but my increasing suspicion is that the question of Eliot is not incidental to the question of Flarf. It may be true that "most of Eliots contemporaries had emotional lives that would seem silly to us" but among his contemporaries were, I'd say, a few people wearing their big boy pants while Eliot wore his GoodNite rubber undies -- they would include John Dewey and Kenneth Burke. Works like Dewey's ART AS EXPERIENCE and Burke's PHILOSOPHY OF LITERARY FORM make Eliot, in my opinion, seem young and amateurish. Forget for a minute that Eliot's politics such compared with theirs, he's also simply not in the same leaugue with them as a thinker. (There's a reason that Adorno praises Dewey in AESTHETIC THEORY. Does he even know Eliot exists?) And the poets who come out of this Dewey/Burke nexus (WC Williams, Zukofsky, Stein, Langston Hughes to name a few of their contemporaries) construe the world in a way that contrasts directly with Eliot. My book EMANCIPATING PRAGMATISM maps out the poethics (to use Joan Retalak's term) of this contra-Eliot tradition -- and I see that poethics as simpatico with Flarf, albeit in a very complex "uncomfortable" way.Montanahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13799996487649262045noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8861197.post-1132786979070411312005-11-24T00:02:00.000+01:002005-11-24T00:02:00.000+01:00Dear Mike (Magee?)The short answer is, yes, my att...Dear Mike (Magee?)<BR/><BR/>The short answer is, yes, my attitude to the popsicles indicates my critical stance. Popsicles are not what they seem: they are forms.<BR/><BR/>My interest in the sources of flarf is peculiar because, once one understands what they are, they undermine themselves as "content". So my interest here is one that can't survive the scrutiny it proposes.<BR/><BR/>Tony has been trying to salvage the sources as such, i.e., he has been suggesting that reading a flarf poem involves (re)imagining the contexts that produced their content. In my opinion, flarf is interesting in its use of sources that are obviously of no interest whatsoever--precisely because, I might add, it is often easily situated in "the emotional range of a lovesick teenager".<BR/><BR/>I hope I didn't say that the poem would have been better off without the popsicles. I did say that the popsicles do not bring me discomfort (or get me thinking that it must have been uncomfortable to write it). In fact, I think this poem gets us feeling more precise, more intense, more useful things about feminism (often despite that movement's programmes).<BR/><BR/>Obviously I think you're being too hard on Eliot, but we can always take that issue up. Most of Eliot's contemporaries had emotional lives that would seem silly to us, and found themselves (meaningfully) in social situations that we'd find absurd. I think this is just a question of Eliot being the past that we know more than because Eliot is what we know. (That could have been said better.)<BR/><BR/>I think part of my proposal here, and I want to say this seriously, that is, as something that might be contested and shown to be wrong (because it is my concern to be right about this), is that there is something "wrong and silly" about thinking that putting a few words together on a page could ever constitute "headlong cultural engagement".<BR/><BR/>This what Eliot nailed better than anyone: criticism must be about poetry as poetry, not as culture, or politics, or philosophy, or history. And once we see this we see also that poetry (as poetry not as a conversation piece in some other pursuit) is mainly "a superior amusement".<BR/><BR/>Good poems always recognize this limitation. Flarf, I think, forces humility willy-nilly upon itself by making its procedure so obvious and its depth so easy to fathom. What we're talking about, it seems to me, is whether flarf can accomplish "its" goals in direct opposition to the goals of its authors. I think it can, and Gary's position is an indication that it does.<BR/><BR/>I hope I'm not straining your sympathies. I still see myself as very much a minority, outside voice in this discussion and am really just appreciative of the interest in my views and trying to acknowledge it as best as I can. For me, the question of what flarf is keeps feeding back into the question of what poetry is. So I don't think it's an empty exercise to wonder what criticism in Eliot's key would make of it.<BR/><BR/>I do know we're so beyond that now.<BR/><BR/>Thanks again,<BR/>ThomasThomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8861197.post-1132772370696252722005-11-23T19:59:00.000+01:002005-11-23T19:59:00.000+01:00Thomas,I've been pretty sympathetic towards your a...Thomas,<BR/><BR/>I've been pretty sympathetic towards your arguments in this thread, but I wonder if the seeming dismissiveness of popsicles (yes I'm being serious) isn't symptomatic of a basic critical stance in your writing (again, I'm just wondering, I don't know your criticism well enough to say): that is, a dismissiveness of *content* as a category relevant to your concerns. I have no doubt that you know a few things people do with popsicles but are you honestly that bored with what popsicles do in this poem? (apologies for the screwed up linebreaks):<BR/><BR/>************<BR/>THE NEW POPSICLE PUSSY FEMINISM <BR/>IN THE WORK OF FLARFETTE JONES<BR/><BR/>At the same time, it has to be distinguished, I think, from feminine hysteria, which is covert and isolated; it is much more difficult for a woman to perform hysteria and/or silliness in public, the social opprobrium far more severe.<BR/>––Maria Damon<BR/><BR/>Pussy ... anti-woman conspiracy theory involving a popsicle <BR/><BR/>Across the street in front of the Pussy Cat Theatre <BR/>I watched two women on the next blanket pass a popsicle <BR/><BR/>The pussy willow branch gracefully swaying in the <BR/>pure enjoyment of a cold popsicle <BR/>The headline says 'Feminism Breeds Violence' <BR/><BR/>To be the primary band associated with riot girl feminism <BR/>come into a bar or complain loudly about dykes who put energy<BR/>into feminism. <BR/>I like to go out with guys and talk about pussy. ... Holy Christ on a<BR/>popsicle stick! <BR/>She made me tea and gave me a popsicle, showed me <BR/>I'm a pussy... since, y'know... Feminism is the advocacy of political <BR/>Dwarves - Let's Fuck - Blood Guts & Pussy <BR/>Pursue her, she might fall into the clutches of feminism <BR/>I asked Dan if he could sign Popsicle Toes <BR/>would probably sell her machine and continue marketing pussy ... <BR/>Pierce Brosnan is a pussy prettyboy. ... Maybe a housewife <BR/>don't take away her feminism mind poison <BR/>the thing is THERE––like a popsicle or something <BR/>something *fun*. Go sit in the sun with a popsicle. <BR/>***********<BR/><BR/>Or, more importantly, to popsicles in the poem that inspired the above, Katie Degentesh's astounding "The Popsicle: An Essay"?<BR/><BR/>It doesn't seem to me that form and content are so easily separated -- your interest in source material should tell you that.<BR/><BR/>I wonder too, just as an example, whether it matters to you that TS Eliot's poetic *content* suggests the emotional range of a lovesick teenager -- it certainly does to me: e.g. it makes whatever formal inventiveness there is to find in his work seem rather grudgingly executed and it makes his FH Bradley-ish philosophy and criticism seem that much more sophmoric and exclusionary.<BR/><BR/>If nothing else, flarf is about headlong cultural engagement -- this seems to be what Stan Apps is trying to say, and to hazard a guess as to what this quality of this engagement might be. In contrast, Eliot (and I supose this is why I think of him here) gives one the impression that a single popsicle does tragic violence to his tongue.<BR/><BR/>Beware the popsicles, they are not what they seem!Montanahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13799996487649262045noreply@blogger.com