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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Excuse Me While I Offend You

Curtis Fox: We’re not making a habit of this, but for this week’s program, we have another advisory: there’s language coming up that some people might find offensive. This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, November 27th, 2007. I’m Curtis Fox. This week, “Flarf.” Part of the fun of this new movement in poetry is just saying its name, Flarf. It’s up there with Dada in the catchy name department. But what is Flarf? You ask. Well, Flarf is kind of hard to define. It’s a lot of things.

Mitch Highfill: First and foremost, Flarf is funny.

Sharon Mesmer: I have never seen someone so loud and moronic and annoying and diabetic.

Gary Sullivan: It’s satire.

Michael Magee: But it doesn’t read as straight satire because what it’s satirizing is unclear.

Gary Sullivan: I like to liken it to camp calloused, knobby, aching. This is my grandmother’s anus.

Flarf Poet 1: An embarrassment factor.

Flarf Poet 2: I’m overworked...

Flarf Poet 3: Startled that they’re wasting their time.

Flarf Poet 4: It’s not really poetry at all.

Flarf Poet 5: But really, why waste my time.

Speaker Flarf is inappropriate.

Gary Sullivan:No. Come on, white people.

Speaker: It’s inappropriate.

Gary Sullivan: Roll up your hamburger pants and let’s talk about poetry.

Curtis Fox: Flarf is intentionally inappropriate. Which begs the question, why would anybody wanna write intentionally inappropriate anything? Well, Sean Cole’s a poet and a radio producer, and he knows some of the Flarfists, so we asked him to explain it for us.

Sean Cole: I first heard about Flarf four years ago at a poetry marathon at MIT. It was the kind of event where the readers and the audience actually talked to each other, and right away I could tell that Flarf was pretty controversial.

Mitch Highfill: Douglas, put your fingers in your ears. This is a Flarf poem. Thank you.

Audience member: Oh my God.

Mitch Highfill: Jellyfish dreams.

Douglas: I can’t hear you.

Mitch Highfill: That’s the idea, Doug. [LAUGHTER] Pop, rev, jellyfish label number lucky, 00031958, the teardrops. Two. Jellyfish thing...

Sean Cole: The reader in this case was my friend Mitch Highfill. What I didn’t know at the time was that he didn’t exactly write this poem. He collaged it together using phrases he liked from Google searches—Google sculpting, it’s called; all the Flarfists do it. And when I say all “the Flarfists”—there are about twenty of them now, constantly posting poems to the Flarflist, which is a private email listserv that’s been running for more than six years. Mitch was involved right from the beginning

Mitch Highfill: When we started, there were rules. There had to be some sort of ethnic slur in every Flarf poem. Typically, it was anti-Irish, just because Gary Sullivan, who invented Flarf, is of Irish extraction.

Gary Sullivan: I don’t know that it was really invented.

Sean Cole: This is Gary Sullivan.

Gary Sullivan: But what happened, I guess—I mean, there’s a myth origin.

Sean Cole: Basically, back in 2000, Gary caught wind of one of those scam poetry contests. They say they’ll publish your poem if you win, and then everybody wins, and it turns out you have to pay them 60 bucks or whatever.

Gary Sullivan: Anyway, I was so angry and livid about this that I went online right away, found them—

Sean Cole: And submitted the most offensive poem he could think up. He called it...

Gary Sullivan: “Mm-hmm.”

Sean Cole: Here it is.

Gary Sullivan: Yeah, mm-hmm, it's true big birds make big doo! I got fire inside my "huppa"-chimp(TM) gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god wanna DOOT! DOOT!

Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! Hey! oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake…

Sean Cole: It gets worse. Nonetheless, about a month later, Gary got an envelope in the mail with his poem showing through a little cutout window and a letter telling him how important it was. So, he did it again. Got Mitch and a bunch of other friends involved.

Gary Sullivan: And I’m basically telling my friends, “You know what? You’re gonna get this cool envelope, you know, like a window envelope with your poem in it. So, if you have this super offensive poem or whatever, it’s gonna be right there in the window, and then like the postman’s gonna see it. That’s gonna be great.”

Sean Cole: Soon the contest received a flurry of intentionally bad poems—a lot of them Google sculpted, though Gary says the process is actually closer to painting.

Gary Sullivan: It’s like deciding, I need this sort of tone, I need this sort of tone. And you choose these tones based on knowing, or having some sense of what you’re gonna get based on certain kinds of searches.

Sean Cole: In fact, the very name “Flarf” came from a Google search. Gary stumbled across the phrase...

Gary Sullivan: “Flarfy mean purple.” And it was in reference to marijuana, but we started using it as a verb. “Let’s Flarf this text.” “Let’s Flarf this up.” So, it stuck.

Sean Cole: And for a few months, Flarf was just a distraction. But the thing is, Gary and Mitch and the others are serious poets. They publish a lot, get invited to do readings all the time, mostly in New York where a lot of them live. And soon they began to see things in the Flarf poems that they liked. And this silly side started to merge with their main project. Gary even read one of the poems to an audience just to shake things up, but a lot of them liked it. And then Gary realized these poems aren’t bad. They’re awful.

Gary Sullivan: I mean, which I think is a very different idea than bad. “Bad” is just like bad writing. Awful is something else. I mean, awful is, oh, I can’t believe that. There’s something that really should not be going on there.

Sharon Mesmer: Best large labia free, best big tits and best big butt women with outrageous huge boobies and living large, 100% sapphic fingering.

Gary Sullivan: Basically, we’re talking about what are people ignoring, really? And I think that this comes up in poetry all the time. Over certain periods of time, someone will come along and say, what have we been ignoring?

Mitch Highfill: We are saying, why can’t you be ludicrously obscene in a poem? Why not?

Sean Cole: This is Mitch Highfill again, the poet who was reading at MIT.

Mitch Highfill: Why does a poem have to be, you know, nice? It doesn’t have to be nice. Poetry is supposed to change you. It’s supposed to... Any art’s supposed to change your life. You don’t read a poem to have something nice happen. Or if you do, I don’t think you’re really anywhere. That’s nowhere. You read a poem to be affected, to be shook.

Sean Cole: And to Mitch and Gary and the other Flarfists, a lot of the poetry flowing from academia into mainstream literary journals isn’t gonna shake up anyone.

Michael Magee: There’s a genuine sense from people on the Flarflist—I don’t know if everyone would agree with this.

Sean Cole: Mike Magee has been on the Flarflist since 2002.

Michael Magee: That the language of chatrooms is in fact more interesting and more poetic than 90% of the poetry out there.

Mitch Highfill: What we do on the Flarflist often is we get hold of a trope of some kind.

Michael Magee: The sort of memes that are in those poems get used and reused by other poets. Squid.

Mitch Highfill: The squid is inspirational.

Michael Magee: Dear Assclown...

Sharon Mesmer: “Squid versus Assclown.” [AUDIENCE APPLAUDS] Arthur Treacher grabs my assclown. Assclown grabs my squid. Squid signs me u[ for the NOW Action Alert…

Sean Cole: This is Sharon Mesmer reading at the 2006 Flarf Festival. Yes, Flarf Festival. If it isn’t a movement at this point, it’s got all the hallmarks of one. Sharon’s coming out with a whole book of Flarf poems called Annoying Diabetic Bitch. And there are at least seven other Flarf books on the market now.

Mitch Highfill: Nada Gordon’s Folly.

Nada Gordon: I like to have a little loot to tickle while the world’s ending.

Mitch Highfill: Katie Degentesh’s book is stunning, in my opinion.

Speaker: What’s that called?

Mitch Highfill: The Anger Scale.

Katie Degentesh: I loved my father and I loved Jesus. What was I to do? I felt like a canoe. [LAUGHTER]

Mitch Highfill: These are really good books and really good work. So, in a way, Flarf failed. Because what’s happened, what the Flarf movement is producing, is actually good work. And that wasn’t the idea. The idea was intentionally bad poetry. [LAUGHS]

Sean Cole: Of course, some people still think it’s bad.

Interviewer: Do you hate all Flarf poems categorically?

Douglas Rothschild: Well, that’s what’s interesting about Flarf. It’s terrible!

Sean Cole: This is Douglas Rothschild, the guy in the audience at MIT. You remember.

Mitch Highfill: Douglas, put your fingers in your ears. This is a Flarf poem. Thank you.

Douglas Rothschild: Oh my God.

Sean Cole: And Douglas is a poet too. He’s known and argued with the Flarfists for years. To him, Flarf is the poetry version of the Emperor’s New Clothes. And the whole Google sculpting thing is nothing new, he says.

Douglas Rothschild: It’s a nice idea. But the whole book, mountains of poets doing it. I don’t need to go to a poetry reading to have it explained to me what it is that the internet is doing. I want to have an insight from a poet. Something, something, give me something.

Marjorie Perloff: I mean, what makes it poetry?

Sean Cole: This is Marjorie Perloff, a well-known critic and professor, generally a champion of the avant-garde. She first heard about Flarf when one of her grad students wrote a term paper about it.

Marjorie Perloff: Nothing is done with rhythm. Nothing is done with syntax. Nothing is done with sound, like repetition. It’s not exactly Whitmanian free verse, and it is just divided into lines arbitrarily.

Michael Magee: I mean, that sounds to me, you know, like the words of someone who hasn’t read a lot of the work.

Sean Cole: This is Mike McGee again. To be fair, Marjorie Perloff told me she hadn’t read a lot of the work.

Michael Magee: But I do think that the work is new in some important sense. It doesn’t pay off all of the kind of traditional ways of reading avant-garde American poetry.

Marjorie Perloff: They’re not that different from everything else that’s out there. And by “that different,” I mean this: they still have white space around the margins. They’re still written in block paragraphs, in a sense. In other words, you get a block of black prints surrounded by white space. There’s nothing very revolutionary here at all. But that’s my—perhaps that’s my own view of poetry. I don’t only feel that way about Flarf. I feel that way about two-thirds of what’s written these days.

Sean Cole: Still, Perloff says she’s glad that Flarf exists, that they want a new kind of poetry. And she certainly doesn’t object to the outrageousness of it, she says. But many people have, especially in the contentious, divisive world of the poetry blogosphere. One Flarf poem was pretty much compared to an act of rape. One of Mike’s poems sparked a summer-long online controversy in which he was accused of being sexist and racist. The title is a pun on a line from “Lapis Lazuli” by Yeats.

Michael Magee: The line, “Their eyes, their ancient glittering eyes are gay.” So, it’s “Their guys, their Asian glittering guys are gay.”

Sean Cole: Mike says he got defensive at first, trotted out all of his credentials, including his scholarship in African American literature and race relations, but then it hit him: If you write intentionally offensive poetry, some people might find it offensive.

Michael Magee: I think before that point, I had wanted them to find it offensive and inappropriate in the best way, you know. [CHUCKLES]

Interviewer: So you didn’t expect them to be offended. You just expected them to find it offensive.

Michael Magee: That’s exactly right. And so, the fine line between those two things was something that I had to recognize.

Sean Cole: Still, even in all the fighting, Flarf is doing something that poetry in general hasn’t done in a long time. It is shaking people up and making them talk and think. It’s engaging its audience in a way that’s kind of unheard of for poetry these days. Mitch Highfill even went as far as to say he thought the arguments about Flarf were almost better than…

Sean Cole and Mitch Highfill: Flarf itself.

Mitch Highfill: The fact that people are arguing about what is and isn’t appropriate is a good thing. We need more arguments like that.

Flarf Poet 1: You fucked Jimmy.

Flarf Poet 2: Chicks dig war.

Flarf Poet 3: Ready for spanking.

Flarf Poet 4: Your vagina scares me.

Flarf Poet 5: Ew, ew, ew.

Flarf Poet 6: This is a serious poem, everybody.

Curtis Fox: That piece was produced by Sean Cole, who is a poet by night and a radio producer by day. Normally, this is the point in the program where I tell you about the thousands of poems and the dozens of related essays and reading guides we have on our website, but the truth is we don’t yet have any Flarf poems in the vast archives of poetryfoundation.org. But we do have one audio Flarf poem by Drew Gardner, who you just heard in Sean Cole’s piece. It’s called “I Am So Stupid.” Look for it under featured audio at poetryfoundation.org. And do let us know what you think of this program, where our motto is…

Douglas Rothschild: Something, something. Give me something.

Curtis Fox: Email us at podcast at poetryfoundation.org. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I’m Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.

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