harrow mid suicide attempt discovering her popsicle of a girlfriend

an unfunny joke about antis

the funny thing about bullies - especially self-righteous bullies that travel in packs, such as antis - is that 99.8% of the time they come out on top of any conflict they get into. 

and holy hell, it’s fucking infuriating when it’s not completely exhausting. we all like to see clapback at people who don’t play fair and treat others like shit. when someone is really nasty and abusive - when they’re chronically mean and dangerous and seemingly untouchable - it’s easy to yearn for their comeuppance and want to see them know they’re beat. we want the fear and shame and guilt bullies and abusers spread around revisited on their own head so they understand how awful a person they’ve been.

but realistically: you’ll never see a bully/abuser/anti doubt or question themselves. you’ll never see them backtrack with sincerity. you’ll never successfully shame them out of their behavior or devastate their confidence with your logic and consistency, because successful bullies - by definition - will always be less empathetic, more shameless, and more self-serving than anyone they have the power to abuse.

you will never beat a bully at the shame game. bullies live that game. shaming others is the source of their social power; they know (at least subconsciously) that flinching is game over. when someone points out their behavior is something shameful, they have to excuse or deflect or dismiss it: else, they lose. They deserved it. they hurt me first. who cares what you have to say? 

and if you don’t have the direct authority to punish a bully, why should they care? abusers thrive in this world because they’ve decided the ethics and empathy that guide social rules don’t apply to them. Ethical people have lines they cannot cross without violating their sense of what’s right: abusers trample those lines, doing whatever serves them best, because they’re not obligated to care.

maybe it seems unthinkable they’d get away with it … but in general, our social networks have an inbuilt ‘get out of jail free’ card for abusers. we have to trust others are following the same social rules we are. when we don’t trust that, it’s actually worse. (we get … well, present-day tumblr, probably.) but that very trust makes society blind to behavior that crosses lines - it’s too unthinkable that anyone would do that. innocent until proven guilty. and that doubt protects abusers who are willing to pretend they too are trusting, caring people who follow the rules.

in fact, bullies care more about setting down social rules than anyone because they limit the behavior of everyone other than themselves. Rules set boundaries for ethical people. trust that those rules will be followed blinds people to all but the most blatant rule-breaking behavior. and when bullies lay down the rules, the rules themselves are often designed to encourage and shelter abusers.

I believe this is why the worst abusers so often turn out to be the most vocal activist, the most upright churchgoer, the politician with the anti-abuse platform. Such bullies do, in fact, truly advocate for everyone following the standards of behavior they support … except themselves.* These abusers are free to jump in and out of bounds whenever it suits their needs, making them all but impossible to call out. They harass and threaten and torment their targets, exploiting the victims’ trust and sense of obligation to protect the bully from exposure. but the moment a target retaliates, abusers are the first to call them out for bad behavior, damaging the victim’s reputation and improving their own without compunction, sympathy, or remorse.**

Perhaps the most ironic part is that the higher the standard of behavior the bully advocates for, gatekeeps, and regularly violates, the more powerful and invulnerable they become and the more blatant and open their two-faced behavior can be.  Their hypocrisy is only remarkable to people who know what standards they supposedly uphold and demand of others. To everyone else the standards themselves are absurd. so what if a person falls short sometimes? why do you care? why are you surprised?

This is the social loophole that bullies and abusers in the anti-shipping movement exploit - and there are a lot of abusive anti-shippers. As the self-declared fandom/shipping police, tasking themselves with creating rules of conduct and aiming to enforce them by shaming, guilting, and threatening dissenters, anti culture by nature attracts the best shame game players - bullies and abusers - and draws them into its ranks. 

unhampered by social obligation or a need to play fair, abusers rapidly rise to the top of policing communities like anti-shipping. already governed only by their own convenience, an abuser will never suffer from concerns of going ‘too far’; therefore, the loyalty of an abuser to a cause that gives them licence to abuse will never come into question. their gleeful eagerness to punish, lack of sympathy for their targets, and their willingness to come down hard even on other antis is both admired and feared. everyone wants to be their friend to insure their inevitable slip-ups due to self-conflicting rules are forgiven, unwittingly putting themselves in debt to a person who will never let them forget it.

so who’s left to call a hypocrite out, even when their hypocrisy is open and blatant? at least subconsciously aware that the the only real tethers on behavior in spaces where authority is nonexistent - tumblr, twitter, etc - are empathy and shame, abusers do their level best to evoke those feelings in everyone around them while being completely free of those feelings themselves. they cannot be shamed by anyone; they don’t play fair and they don’t show sympathy if it doesn’t serve their needs.

In short: as long as a bully’s opponent gives even the slightest fuck about playing fair, being kind, and giving the benefit of the doubt, they will never out-bully a bully.

the point of this long-winded post is this: 

if you’re hoping for some creator to smack antis down; if you’re sitting in front of your computer, jaw dropped, as antis flock to the dmcb fandom and set up their absurd rules despite the source material being in conflict with everything antis supposedly stand for; if you see anti-shipper victims sharing how they were driven to suicide attempts and think ‘surely this time antis will be conscience-striken’: the reality is that anti-shippers will never apologize, will never admit to hypocrisy, and will never take ownership of the consequences of their actions. 

bullies always come up smelling like roses because they know social rules are actually nigh-unenforceable. They only apply to the abuser if the abuser chooses to abide by the rules, and why would they limit themselves like that?

and if you don’t like it, there’s nothing you can do about it. 

that’s the joke. (i’m not laughing either.)

*and the louder bullies support the cause of vulnerable people, the more unthinkable it is that they would ever exploit vulnerability themselves. 

**this is a wildly successful technique abusers use for self-protection. it accomplishes many things at once:

it feeds the abuser’s deluded worldview wherein their target is the badguy and the abuser is their hapless victim. (this is how abusers justify abuse most of the time: they have to act outside the rules to protect themselves!)

puts the spotlight on the victim, magnifying their errors and minimizing/erasing the effect of the abuser’s provocation

the victim feels ashamed for their behavior; even if they realize they wer provoked, they are ethically bound to acknowledge what they did was wrong (and the abuser will hold it against them for eternity)

the victim may be successfully gaslighted into doubting that their actions were provoked or warranted

if the victim attempts to act against their abuser’s interest in the future, their credibility is now damaged/doubtful

if the abuser can’t pull off looking squeaky-clean to others, tarnishing their target’s reputation makes outsiders less likely to come to their aid, excusing the abusive dynamic as ‘mutual.’

“A PROTEST POETRY intended to induce funks of ambivalence.” That phrase appears in Stan Apps’s “Free Dolphin Radio,” the opening poem of Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf. While its placement may have been fortuitous (given the book’s alphabetical arrangement by author), it seems a fitting motto for the entire collection, as well as for the movement the book presents as a whole. “Flarf” refers to a self-styled avant-garde collective that sprung up around 2000 and was devoted to exploring the web, then in its “wild west” phase, as a resource for making poetry. On a private email list, its members developed a technique they refer to as “Google sculpting,” which calls for the poet to trawl the internet for preexisting language, usually by putting combinations of intentionally silly or offensive keywords into a search engine (“pizza” and “kitty,” “Rogaine” and “bunny,” “pussy” and “turtleneck”) and then creatively arranging the results into strange, funny, and unsettling collages. Voilà: “Arthur Treacher grabs my assclown / Assclown grabs my squid / Squid signs me up for the NOW Action Alert list.” (This is from Sharon Mesmer’s “Squid Versus Assclown.”)

The name “Flarf” is a neologism, which one of its founders, Gary Sullivan, defines as describing “a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. ‘Not okay.’” It is also, he explains, a verb, meaning “to bring out the inherent awfulness, etc., of some pre-existing text” (thus, one can “Flarf” any unsuspecting piece of writing). Flarf, you might say, is what poetry would sound like “if pirates pumped the stuffed-up airwaves full of dolphin hymns and rat speak,” to quote another line from that same opening poem.

In the early 2000s, Flarf was a big cartoon thumb stuck in the eye of the poetry establishment. Pumped full of “rat speak” by pirate poets sailing the high seas of the internet, Flarf poems were disjunctive works made from the ugly feelings, vulgarity, and raucous surreality that colors our everyday experience in the digital age. With language extracted from chat rooms, message boards, and the underbelly of our online lives, the poems were deliberately messy, abrasive, and distasteful. But Flarf was also ostensibly “a protest poetry”: from the start, the Flarfists explained that they were supplying a subversive response to the nightmarish absurdity and deceit of contemporary culture in the post-9/11 era. Mostly, though, it seemed custom-designed to provoke misgivings from arbiters of taste and to induce “funks of ambivalence” about its aesthetics, its politics, and its worldview from both staid cultural gatekeepers and other avant-garde poets.

The funk continues to linger over Flarf, now more a period style than a going concern. While it has been claimed as a powerful and enduring intervention in the development of American poetry, some see it as little more than an extended prank; others insist it was only a tired retread of Dada and other earlier avant-garde experiments. Some claim its practice of borrowing language from “ordinary” people on the internet (often riddled with misspellings, stupidity, racism, and xenophobia) is ultimately patronizing, elitist, a form of punching down. Flarf has been dogged, too, by ethical questions about whether the reproduction of hateful, offensive language perpetuates rather than critiques harmful stereotypes and prejudices.

This anthology will probably not put such questions to rest. For one thing, it’s not clear why the Flarfists decided to publish this collection of their work (co-edited by five of its members) now, at a time when many of the poets themselves have moved on, and the more heated debates about the movement have subsided. Is the anthology meant to provide a snapshot of a vital and ongoing phenomenon, like Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry? Is the timing of its appearance intended to suggest that Bush-era Flarf is now newly relevant in the dark age of Trump? Or is it more a bid for canonization, an enshrinement of a now-defunct avant-garde in poetic history?

It’s even harder to answer these questions because, unlike many such collections, Flarf is completely devoid of scholarly apparatus and critical framework: it has no preface or introduction, no manifestos or statements of poetics. There’s no effort to define Flarf or trace its origins or goals, no attempt to explain its methods or sketch out its intellectual or poetic investments. It is nearly impossible to tell when the poems were written, or whether any of the material in the book is new or recent, or if it all dates from Flarf’s heyday, over a decade ago. Of course the editors’ decision to remove all context and helpful framing is probably deliberate, in keeping with the anarchic spirit of the movement, which is as allergic as Dada was to high seriousness, “official” institutions, the canon, and so on. But if that’s the case, then why produce an anthology at all? At the very least, a few signposts would have helped orient a younger generation of readers who missed the Flarf moment the first time around.

What we are left with, of course, are the poems themselves, giving us the opportunity to take stock of Flarf’s achievement, as it gathers in one place many of its best-known, and best, works, including Drew Gardner’s “Chicks Dig War,” Jordan Davis’s “Pablo Escobar Shopping T-Shirt,” Michael Magee’s “Mainstream Poetry,” Sharon Mesmer’s “Annoying Diabetic Bitch,” K. Silem Mohammad’s “Mars Needs Terrorists,” and selections from Katie Degentesh’s The Anger Scale. Left to fend for themselves, these poems do make a sort of argument for Flarf’s value, and relevance. From the vantage point of 2018, Flarf can be seen as a compelling extension of the long, vital tradition of avant-garde collage, appropriation, and remix, updated for the internet age in intriguing ways. The best Flarf poems use the resources of search-engine technology to capture the exuberance, the strangeness, and the cracked beauty of what Anne Boyer calls our “electronic vernacular.” Jordan Davis suggests as much in one poem when he writes, “‘What I love about the chat rooms / Is that they’re already halfway to poetry, / What’s poetry but lines, what’s a chatroom,’ / He started rubbing the squid.” Where else can one find a poem titled “Humanism Is Cheese” or another with lines like these: “Phoenix is the land of milk dowsers, / and I’ve always been / a wolverine bunny cage xenocide forum asshole”? The poems teem with a density of reference, evincing the strange magnetic power of labels, names, and data in a culture drowning in signifiers: “Dag Hammarskjold rolls off our lips as easily as Lassie,” Boyer writes. “I just killed the Pillsbury dough boy,” the speaker of one of Gardner’s poems announces, before quickly bouncing off toward Terry Gross, “Charman” Mao, Shelley Duvall, Wallace Stevens, Minnie Driver, and Dan Rather.

Other poems crackle with the upending of clichés (“Same old job, / same old Diplodocus bong water orgy” — Gardner again). They frequently delight in the twisting of expectations, as in these lines by Mohammad, where the hackneyed language of romance is infused with militarism and violence:

love is a Pakistani Mirage fighter jet frozen, strange like it had, you know, bubonic plague

I’m a bit less crazy about Flarf’s fondness for goofy, supposedly “transgressive” scatology and the sometimes exhausting levels of zaniness — poems where we learn that “I have to conduct snot viscosity experiments / with ass-lint,” (Mitch Highfill) and so on. But although the movement has been maligned for focusing too much on play and hijinks, for being just a bunch of friends “fucking around with google on the man’s dime” (as Gardner himself once put it), Flarf can in fact be fiercely political: poem after poem takes aim at toxic masculinity, American warmongering and imperialism, virulent racism, the intersections between porn and rape culture, and the penetration of neoliberal capitalism into every sphere of daily life. I fully expected to find that revisiting Flarf at this particular historical moment would feel like stepping out of the Tardis into the now distant days of “Shock and Awe,” where John Ashcroft makes jokes about Abu Ghraib over the sound of Howard Dean’s scream and ends up in a spider hole of denial. But many of the poems feel surprisingly timely, very much in touch with our own batshit zeitgeist. “I hate the high levels of jerk war around here,” Gardner writes in “Skylab Wolverine Bunny Cage Nub” (Twitter, anyone?). Benjamin Friedlander’s potent poem “When a Cop Sees a Black Woman” has a different charge in a post-Ferguson world:

            Black hair is more fragile than most.

It requires TLC when a cop sees a black women he can’t think

everything through. She is the shiznit. She tempts and she taunts. She speaks in a bold

outspoken manner. But bypassing a metal detector, his forced and never-bending

monotone drone is not a factor in her arrest.

The same could be said of Gardner’s “How to Watch a Police Beating,” which follows its title with these scathing opening lines: “First off, there should be two sets of laws — / act like an ox and try not to be nonwhite…”

Other poems repurpose gender codes and tropes in ways that resonate powerfully in the #MeToo era. Consider Nada Gordon’s “I Love Men” (“I love men, but they wear me out with all their confusing issues. One day they / say they love you and the next they see someone with bigger ass. // I love men, muscles, sex, porn, and chocolate”). Or Katie Degentesh’s “I Was Horny,” which stitches together a series of found statements, substituting the word “boy” for “owl,” creating an affecting, creepy commentary on predatory masculinity and the culture that fosters it:

Boys are interesting creatures.

[…]

The boys tear their prey, swallow it whole, and spit up pellets. They prey on small things. Boys fly silently. They see well in the dark, hunt at night and sleep in the daytime. They scare others by fluffing up.

[…]

I hope boys never go extinct and I hope they never get endangered. I love boys.

¤

In the decade and a half since Flarf emerged, strategies of appropriation of the sort these poets deploy have spread far and wide. It is worth noting that they have proven particularly useful as vehicles of political critique and dissent for a long list of poets of color not affiliated with the (largely white) Flarf coterie itself, who have seized on such tools to create works that take aim at racism, US foreign policy, police brutality, oppression, and misogyny, often more directly and powerfully than Flarf. In her award-winning collection Look, for example, Solmaz Sharif incorporates euphemistic phrases from a Department of Defense manual but scrutinizes, dismantles, and subverts them, redeploying this found material for both intimate personal reflection and for expressing coruscating outrage at contemporary racism, xenophobia, and anti-Muslim policies. I would recommend reading this anthology of Flarf alongside other contemporary poets like Sharif, Tracy K. Smith, Robin Coste Lewis, Philip Metres, Layli Long Soldier, Shane McCrae, and Tyehimba Jess to get a fuller sense of the ends to which such tactics have been put in recent poetry.

Faced with the daily calamity of the Bush years, Flarf testified that verbal play, and the creative détournement of our culture’s own language, could be a liberating act of resistance. Its antics were a valuable method of pushing back against what Wallace Stevens called, in another dark time, the almost unbearable “pressure of reality.” Perhaps right now we desperately need art forms that can seize on the language of our time, expose its absurdity, its deceit, and its sinister designs on us, and repurpose it for different ends. But in 2018, the online culture of misogyny, racism, stupidity, and hatred that Flarf exposed doesn’t need much further unearthing: it seems to be everywhere. As we gasp for air and sanity in the depths of Trumpworld, Flarf seems prescient but also somewhat redundant. To paraphrase Man Ray’s famous remark about why Dada could not survive in New York: Flarf cannot live in America. All America is Flarf, and will not tolerate a rival.

¤

Andrew Epstein is the author, most recently, of Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture.

The post Funks of Ambivalence: On Flarf appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2LBSmbD via IFTTT

“A PROTEST POETRY intended to induce funks of ambivalence.” That phrase appears in Stan Apps’s “Free Dolphin Radio,” the opening poem of Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf. While its placement may have been fortuitous (given the book’s alphabetical arrangement by author), it seems a fitting motto for the entire collection, as well as for the movement the book presents as a whole. “Flarf” refers to a self-styled avant-garde collective that sprung up around 2000 and was devoted to exploring the web, then in its “wild west” phase, as a resource for making poetry. On a private email list, its members developed a technique they refer to as “Google sculpting,” which calls for the poet to trawl the internet for preexisting language, usually by putting combinations of intentionally silly or offensive keywords into a search engine (“pizza” and “kitty,” “Rogaine” and “bunny,” “pussy” and “turtleneck”) and then creatively arranging the results into strange, funny, and unsettling collages. Voilà: “Arthur Treacher grabs my assclown / Assclown grabs my squid / Squid signs me up for the NOW Action Alert list.” (This is from Sharon Mesmer’s “Squid Versus Assclown.”)

The name “Flarf” is a neologism, which one of its founders, Gary Sullivan, defines as describing “a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. ‘Not okay.’” It is also, he explains, a verb, meaning “to bring out the inherent awfulness, etc., of some pre-existing text” (thus, one can “Flarf” any unsuspecting piece of writing). Flarf, you might say, is what poetry would sound like “if pirates pumped the stuffed-up airwaves full of dolphin hymns and rat speak,” to quote another line from that same opening poem.

In the early 2000s, Flarf was a big cartoon thumb stuck in the eye of the poetry establishment. Pumped full of “rat speak” by pirate poets sailing the high seas of the internet, Flarf poems were disjunctive works made from the ugly feelings, vulgarity, and raucous surreality that colors our everyday experience in the digital age. With language extracted from chat rooms, message boards, and the underbelly of our online lives, the poems were deliberately messy, abrasive, and distasteful. But Flarf was also ostensibly “a protest poetry”: from the start, the Flarfists explained that they were supplying a subversive response to the nightmarish absurdity and deceit of contemporary culture in the post-9/11 era. Mostly, though, it seemed custom-designed to provoke misgivings from arbiters of taste and to induce “funks of ambivalence” about its aesthetics, its politics, and its worldview from both staid cultural gatekeepers and other avant-garde poets.

The funk continues to linger over Flarf, now more a period style than a going concern. While it has been claimed as a powerful and enduring intervention in the development of American poetry, some see it as little more than an extended prank; others insist it was only a tired retread of Dada and other earlier avant-garde experiments. Some claim its practice of borrowing language from “ordinary” people on the internet (often riddled with misspellings, stupidity, racism, and xenophobia) is ultimately patronizing, elitist, a form of punching down. Flarf has been dogged, too, by ethical questions about whether the reproduction of hateful, offensive language perpetuates rather than critiques harmful stereotypes and prejudices.

This anthology will probably not put such questions to rest. For one thing, it’s not clear why the Flarfists decided to publish this collection of their work (co-edited by five of its members) now, at a time when many of the poets themselves have moved on, and the more heated debates about the movement have subsided. Is the anthology meant to provide a snapshot of a vital and ongoing phenomenon, like Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry? Is the timing of its appearance intended to suggest that Bush-era Flarf is now newly relevant in the dark age of Trump? Or is it more a bid for canonization, an enshrinement of a now-defunct avant-garde in poetic history?

It’s even harder to answer these questions because, unlike many such collections, Flarf is completely devoid of scholarly apparatus and critical framework: it has no preface or introduction, no manifestos or statements of poetics. There’s no effort to define Flarf or trace its origins or goals, no attempt to explain its methods or sketch out its intellectual or poetic investments. It is nearly impossible to tell when the poems were written, or whether any of the material in the book is new or recent, or if it all dates from Flarf’s heyday, over a decade ago. Of course the editors’ decision to remove all context and helpful framing is probably deliberate, in keeping with the anarchic spirit of the movement, which is as allergic as Dada was to high seriousness, “official” institutions, the canon, and so on. But if that’s the case, then why produce an anthology at all? At the very least, a few signposts would have helped orient a younger generation of readers who missed the Flarf moment the first time around.

What we are left with, of course, are the poems themselves, giving us the opportunity to take stock of Flarf’s achievement, as it gathers in one place many of its best-known, and best, works, including Drew Gardner’s “Chicks Dig War,” Jordan Davis’s “Pablo Escobar Shopping T-Shirt,” Michael Magee’s “Mainstream Poetry,” Sharon Mesmer’s “Annoying Diabetic Bitch,” K. Silem Mohammad’s “Mars Needs Terrorists,” and selections from Katie Degentesh’s The Anger Scale. Left to fend for themselves, these poems do make a sort of argument for Flarf’s value, and relevance. From the vantage point of 2018, Flarf can be seen as a compelling extension of the long, vital tradition of avant-garde collage, appropriation, and remix, updated for the internet age in intriguing ways. The best Flarf poems use the resources of search-engine technology to capture the exuberance, the strangeness, and the cracked beauty of what Anne Boyer calls our “electronic vernacular.” Jordan Davis suggests as much in one poem when he writes, “‘What I love about the chat rooms / Is that they’re already halfway to poetry, / What’s poetry but lines, what’s a chatroom,’ / He started rubbing the squid.” Where else can one find a poem titled “Humanism Is Cheese” or another with lines like these: “Phoenix is the land of milk dowsers, / and I’ve always been / a wolverine bunny cage xenocide forum asshole”? The poems teem with a density of reference, evincing the strange magnetic power of labels, names, and data in a culture drowning in signifiers: “Dag Hammarskjold rolls off our lips as easily as Lassie,” Boyer writes. “I just killed the Pillsbury dough boy,” the speaker of one of Gardner’s poems announces, before quickly bouncing off toward Terry Gross, “Charman” Mao, Shelley Duvall, Wallace Stevens, Minnie Driver, and Dan Rather.

Other poems crackle with the upending of clichés (“Same old job, / same old Diplodocus bong water orgy” — Gardner again). They frequently delight in the twisting of expectations, as in these lines by Mohammad, where the hackneyed language of romance is infused with militarism and violence:

love is a Pakistani Mirage fighter jet frozen, strange like it had, you know, bubonic plague

I’m a bit less crazy about Flarf’s fondness for goofy, supposedly “transgressive” scatology and the sometimes exhausting levels of zaniness — poems where we learn that “I have to conduct snot viscosity experiments / with ass-lint,” (Mitch Highfill) and so on. But although the movement has been maligned for focusing too much on play and hijinks, for being just a bunch of friends “fucking around with google on the man’s dime” (as Gardner himself once put it), Flarf can in fact be fiercely political: poem after poem takes aim at toxic masculinity, American warmongering and imperialism, virulent racism, the intersections between porn and rape culture, and the penetration of neoliberal capitalism into every sphere of daily life. I fully expected to find that revisiting Flarf at this particular historical moment would feel like stepping out of the Tardis into the now distant days of “Shock and Awe,” where John Ashcroft makes jokes about Abu Ghraib over the sound of Howard Dean’s scream and ends up in a spider hole of denial. But many of the poems feel surprisingly timely, very much in touch with our own batshit zeitgeist. “I hate the high levels of jerk war around here,” Gardner writes in “Skylab Wolverine Bunny Cage Nub” (Twitter, anyone?). Benjamin Friedlander’s potent poem “When a Cop Sees a Black Woman” has a different charge in a post-Ferguson world:

            Black hair is more fragile than most.

It requires TLC when a cop sees a black women he can’t think

everything through. She is the shiznit. She tempts and she taunts. She speaks in a bold

outspoken manner. But bypassing a metal detector, his forced and never-bending

monotone drone is not a factor in her arrest.

The same could be said of Gardner’s “How to Watch a Police Beating,” which follows its title with these scathing opening lines: “First off, there should be two sets of laws — / act like an ox and try not to be nonwhite…”

Other poems repurpose gender codes and tropes in ways that resonate powerfully in the #MeToo era. Consider Nada Gordon’s “I Love Men” (“I love men, but they wear me out with all their confusing issues. One day they / say they love you and the next they see someone with bigger ass. // I love men, muscles, sex, porn, and chocolate”). Or Katie Degentesh’s “I Was Horny,” which stitches together a series of found statements, substituting the word “boy” for “owl,” creating an affecting, creepy commentary on predatory masculinity and the culture that fosters it:

Boys are interesting creatures.

[…]

The boys tear their prey, swallow it whole, and spit up pellets. They prey on small things. Boys fly silently. They see well in the dark, hunt at night and sleep in the daytime. They scare others by fluffing up.

[…]

I hope boys never go extinct and I hope they never get endangered. I love boys.

¤

In the decade and a half since Flarf emerged, strategies of appropriation of the sort these poets deploy have spread far and wide. It is worth noting that they have proven particularly useful as vehicles of political critique and dissent for a long list of poets of color not affiliated with the (largely white) Flarf coterie itself, who have seized on such tools to create works that take aim at racism, US foreign policy, police brutality, oppression, and misogyny, often more directly and powerfully than Flarf. In her award-winning collection Look, for example, Solmaz Sharif incorporates euphemistic phrases from a Department of Defense manual but scrutinizes, dismantles, and subverts them, redeploying this found material for both intimate personal reflection and for expressing coruscating outrage at contemporary racism, xenophobia, and anti-Muslim policies. I would recommend reading this anthology of Flarf alongside other contemporary poets like Sharif, Tracy K. Smith, Robin Coste Lewis, Philip Metres, Layli Long Soldier, Shane McCrae, and Tyehimba Jess to get a fuller sense of the ends to which such tactics have been put in recent poetry.

Faced with the daily calamity of the Bush years, Flarf testified that verbal play, and the creative détournement of our culture’s own language, could be a liberating act of resistance. Its antics were a valuable method of pushing back against what Wallace Stevens called, in another dark time, the almost unbearable “pressure of reality.” Perhaps right now we desperately need art forms that can seize on the language of our time, expose its absurdity, its deceit, and its sinister designs on us, and repurpose it for different ends. But in 2018, the online culture of misogyny, racism, stupidity, and hatred that Flarf exposed doesn’t need much further unearthing: it seems to be everywhere. As we gasp for air and sanity in the depths of Trumpworld, Flarf seems prescient but also somewhat redundant. To paraphrase Man Ray’s famous remark about why Dada could not survive in New York: Flarf cannot live in America. All America is Flarf, and will not tolerate a rival.

¤

Andrew Epstein is the author, most recently, of Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture.

The post Funks of Ambivalence: On Flarf appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2LBSmbD