Postcards from the Imagination

Hi Ginger - I'm intrigued by your comparison of flarf to the work of William Carlos Williams. Could you point me toward the poems of Williams' you were thinking of? I detect a little flarf avant la lettre in La Primavera Trasportata al Morale, but as for the rest of his work, I'm not seeing the resemblance.

Jordan, off the top of my head I think "Kora in Hell" and "Paterson" might serve as examples. Both appropriate at least some of their material, and both challenge traditional ideas about narrative--traditional ideas generally. That's not to say there's a 1-to-1 correspondence. Of course not! But I do think flarf is a kind of extension of the poetic project initiated by Williams in the first half of the 20th century. Williams extrapolated out the nth degree, you might say.

Ginger - I'd forgotten Kora in Hell; that's an apt point of comparison. Tell me, though, doesn't Robert Frost strike you sometimes as Robert Browning or Thomas Hardy extrapolated to the nth? I happen to like Hardy, Browning, Frost, and Williams, and sometimes I even enjoy finding echoes and unexpected developments of their styles and strategies in the work of my contemporaries.

I take it from your tone that Williams is someone you feel is perhaps overexposed, as far as his cultural legacy goes. It's a real problem, the paradox you mention of the avant-garde tradition, and if I were in the literary theory business I'd stake a lot more on my wager that the flarfists are conscious of this as the *main* problem for any writer who wants to try something different.

Where I disagree with you is on the point of distraction from what we need or want to say: I think the flarfists get to the point much faster than everybody else writing today.

Robert Frost strikes me as one of those poets whose reputation far exceeds his talent. Personally, his work's never done much for me. And clinging as he did to meter in an age of free verse, I don't see how anyone could mistake him for working outside the tradition. If I do feel a bit overfed on both Williams and Frost—and I do--that's not exactly what I was getting at in my post.

Extrapolation in itself isn’t necessarily bad, and I agree there’s probably some interesting work left to be done that will come out of both traditions. What bothers me is all the noise about who’s really *making it new*, and who’s not, and how one’s aesthetic choices are supposed to line up neatly with one’s political views. For instance, we recently took some flak for putting an image of two men kissing on the cover of The New Hampshire Review. Some people were upset, not by the image itself, but by what they perceived as the dissonance between the journal’s poetics and its progressive-leaning cover art. There we were trying to do our itty-bitty little bit to say those kinds of images belong in the mainstream, and we were getting shit from the left about how insincere we must have been if we paired *that* image with *those* poems.

Frankly, I’d love to see more innovative and more ambitious work in the virtual pages of our magazine, but attracting that kind of work is going to be a real uphill battle. As I said elsewhere, there’s this cultish sort of “you’re either in or you’re out” mentality in both camps that makes straddling the line incredibly unpleasant. I’d wager there are a lot of poets who give up trying fairly early in their careers in order to avoid taking so much shit from both sides.

I have no doubt that flarf is a direct response to the anxiety of trying to be creative in an extremely uncreative historical moment. If flarfists enjoy what they’re doing, and readers like you find it meaningful, great! All I’m after is the room to articulate whatever doubts I may have about it without being pigeonholed. I have a fairly large doubt, for instance, about the heavy doses of irony on which flarf depends. And to my mind that’s a vastly more interesting conversation than whether or not my earnestness makes me the biggest tool on the block.

I imagined that you all might enjoy Frost's book New Hampshire, actually -- that it might be a point of overlap in our tastes. I can't imagine being overfed Williams, but I was lucky to be taught his work by a teacher who gravitated toward what he did that still comes off as radical, everything from Sour Grapes on through Spring and All and a while after.

As for the uphill battle of attracting more ambitious work, isn't that as easy as identifying the ambitious poets and soliciting work from them? I find that most people in poetryland like to be asked. The asking changes the perceptions. Ignoring the dividing lines goes a ways toward changing the reality.

If only it were as easy as asking! Plenty of poets have declined the invitation, and some don't even bother to respond. But I'm going to keep trying.