Lester's Flogspot

Like, um, Rocktober, yeah!

2008-09-24T18:27:00.000+03:00

Wreaking tough licks like Rocktober,
like a rubber rat, its brain in a vat,
is reeking through her hell. Like
Her thang's got like six vibrant dolors
like fishy nettles stuck to a whale.
Her deathishness, like summer hoses,
smells like olden milk goo spray.
She touches us all like post-Virgin Mary or Brenda
Walsh, like she points at us each day
like a Loch Ness of the morning.
What she points to really isn't like a Frosty shake.
That guy there he isn't like the brightest hue
but she chooses him for her delight. So I was like
Rocktober! Rocktober! O so like, rockingful,
clothed in dearthly-like hues. O Rocktober!
No wonder how like we must so often
skank like when we finish all the booze.

The Dirtiest Poetry Joke In Human History

2007-06-17T10:11:00.001+04:00

(No poets were harmed in the making of this joke.)

A guy walks into a literary agent's office and says, "I write poetry."

The literary agent says, "Sorry fella but I don't sign poets. Poetry doesn't sell as you know. And poets, well frankly, they're all drunk psychotics rambling nonsense no one really wants to read anyway."

And the guy says, "hey wait just a second. I think you'll quickly see we're very different."

The guy talking to the literary agent kicks the door wide open and in come a line of poets one after the other. But they don't look like typical poets exactly but more like priests. XJ Kennedy, Mark Jarman, Bill Baer, Donald Justice, and Howard Nemerov come streaming in. We are able to identify who they are only because each of them is wearing a tag saying "Hello My Name Is" with his name. And together they begin intoning Elizabethan sonnets in unison. Each of them is holding a lit candle walking slowly with head hanging low as if in solemn walking meditation. The atmosphere is undoubtedly heavy with importance.

As these poets of a new order intone their grand ancient and lofty poems, in come three exceedingly huge and dignified elderly gentlemen, all dressed in white robes, stark white one might say, with the exception of the "Hello my name is" tags needed to truly distinguish them. It's Kent Johnson, Ron Silliman, and Bill Knott, and together they're riding the corpse of mummified Queen Elizabeth like it's a cross between an aircar and a surfboard. The corpse of Queen Elizabeth is shining and painted in gold leaf and has a loudspeaker in the middle of the torso amplifying the equally gilded verse. We know the corpse is Queen Elizabeth because the corpse is wearing a "Hello My Name Is" tag. If the poets preceeding them seem important then in comparison these poets appear to be no less than kings of the highest worldly order. And so the three Elizabeth-men all join in the solemn incantation of the most noble and lofty verse ever written in all of human history, in the purset tones of God's own Iambic Pentameter. Everyone within earshot is overwhelmed with awe and left breathless. It is as if the whole universe is panting.

And so the literary agent says, "Wow you are all great, just marvelous! I gotta say, you know, this isn't like most poetry. This stuff, it could really really sell. And you're all so, well, you're all so well-behaved! I could call Oprah for God's sake. You know what I'm thinking? This is the making of a new anthology. I can see it now, college classrooms everywhere across America, every student with a copy. And their children and grandchildren, each with the latest edition, united with Oprah viewers everywhere. We'll make thousands!"

The agent then pauses for a second.

"What do you call yourselves?"

"The New Formalists."

And then suddenly Kasey Mohammad bursts in through the door, wearing a red robe and grand papal hat, carrying a blowtorch, also wearing a "Hello my name is" tag, and he shouts, "NO you assholes NOOOOOO! We're the fucking School of Quietude! Oi!"

2007-06-12T08:40:00.000+04:00

I was just about to post a poem
about how the threat of death oddly begs us to persist
that glorious hope is as much a sham
as is the myth that we are formed from fleeing tigers
and then i read this post from you
saying what i was trying to say densely
you more eloquently

i agree it's naive this belief in limitlessness
(alan you did not invent this belief so this is not an attack on you)
desperation expressed in phenomenology
and it's now deeply embedded embedding deeper and deeper

another truth is far more fucked up
as fucked up as what i've witnessed, that we invite our suffering
that it may be an essence of our persistence
it isn't the ancient act of running from tigers keeping us around
giving way to the modern man no longer threated by tigers
moving from the avoidance of threat to the engagement of reward
that the most positive of us find the most rewards
but rather
the same thing has always been maintained
the engagement of threat
we might not have tigers but we damn sure do have car wrecks
and we don't praise the lord to the flashing lights and the sirens
and flashing teeth, whether the saber tooth, the mouth of the jagged
broken windshield, or even the flashing white teeth of a smile
we don't run
we are compelled to stay
we just keep chaning our tune as we go
the tune just helps us wash it down
the stench the stink the release

revival song, or, how the song does not remain the same

2007-06-12T08:59:00.000+04:00

- for david applegate

between the myth of the saber tooth tiger
and the book of Heavenly Highway Hymns

between the primal flight from danger
and the modern flock to hope

is a sheet thrown over a windshield
someone's neighbor steaming on a pavement

for the story has not changed
nor the singers not a bit

just the tunes and how we blow
the wind's still beating on us to go

those sirens say they sing no song
just the flash of teeth insisting we stay

Linh Dinh's Five Things

2007-01-17T20:10:00.000+03:00

Linh Dinh gave me his five things little known about himself. He reasonably declined to tag five more people. Linh's early book, Drunkard Boxing, was an early inspiration for my own existence. He and his wife, Diem Bui, live in Philadelphia.

Linh writes,

-Before college, I was a basketball freak, not watching but playing. My nickname on the court was the Rice Man, believe it or not, after George Gervin's the Ice Man.

-My wife is a cashier at the Dollar Store, at a shopping mall in Philadelphia

-I was a house and office cleaner for 3 years. I cleaned and did laundry for a few students at the University of Pennsylvania, where I now teach (one course).

-my first published writings were art criticism. I wrote art reviews, curated a show at Moore College called Toys and Incense (1994), and was critic-in-residence at Art in General in NYC.

-With a friend, I rented a house for $50 a month in 1985, in the Greys Ferry section of Philadelphia. It was more shell than house. Just think of Eraserhead and you'll get an idea of how we lived.

I'd add the uncommon fact that Linh prefers not to listen to recorded music. He does not own any device that might play any recorded music, preferring only live music.

Thanks Linh. Check out the blog on which he participates and read more about him here.

On "WRITING AND A PERSONALITY"

2007-01-17T10:27:00.000+03:00

response to Noah Cicero's "WRITING AND A PERSONALITY" blog post

yeah you need at least one personality, sure
but don't kid yourself
you don't need your own
or anyone else's for that matter

comparing a senseless working stiff to a personality-filled writer
like comparing a corpse to a clown

i mean the corpse is boring and smells quite a bit
but you'll treat it respect for eternity
you'll just leave the clown at the circus

the original crack smoker in delphi she coulda told you that when she was hunkered down in her cave
but she was busy speaking on behalf of apollo

the cult of the author in the modern era is nothing but a crass byproduct of the need for intellectual property
so that printers could borrow money from banks to buy presses
something had to be collateral
why not the writing?

no one knows who homer was (or who homer were, really) and it's completely irrelevant to anyone except in the people magazine set

the idolators

the idols came after people forgot to speak

"good" and "bad"

2007-01-15T20:51:00.000+03:00

A response to Kasey's post:

There's a big difference between being able to categorize a poem as "good" or "bad," having & using criteria for performing such a categorization, having & using explicit criteria for performing such a categorization, and having a rigid set of necessary and sufficient criteria for performing such a categorization. The moment we categorize we're not all suddenly Aristotle.

We all categorize unexplicitly on so many dimensions rather regularly. No, constantly. We are more than a little bit like difference engines, at least when it comes to using words. The fact that these categories may actually have facets is usually completely remote to our realm of reflection. And we don't care. Behind the button we click there's a lot of stuff going on, but the button does the work for us without bogging us down in tedium each time. And if we get to the realm of poetry where we require of ourselves an explicit set of requirements for being either good or bad, we usually can use some of them and often use them flexibly. Unless, of course, we are trying to impress our friends with the severity of our personal Victorianisms. We don't lose too much sleep over whether a platypus is a mammal or not or whether it requires its own class.

So go ahead, call one poem "good" and another "bad." Let yourself go. Be free. There are some incredibly complex if not intelligent things going on in the background, so you're really not as dumb as you may seem to yourself and others when doing so. And you're a heck of lot less tiresome in the process.

Otherwise, Kasey, you're going to be stuck with the tedious chore of explaining exactly why Maya Angelou's poems are bad in a way that is consistent with an explicit and consistent ontology of good and bad poetries. I would really hate to see you put yourself through such a painful set of requirements for talk. I can willingly accept the truthiness of your aesthetic judgments. I can't really accept Kant or Aristotle as role models, however. They're just so, well, ridiculous.

Agreeing to disagree

2007-01-15T20:03:00.000+03:00

I was more or less hoping for a paintball match between Ron Silliman and Reginald Shepherd. This reasoned discussion stuff lacks that musk of virility television and blogs find difficult to reproduce. I was dreaming of the impossible made real and then I noticed Ron agreed to disagree and so too did Reginald.

When disagreeing poets should stick to disagreement. Stick to disagreement, or else lapse into pretending you are diplomats of some poetic nation. But let's face it. There are no poetic nations, or for that matter, no poetic continents, states, counties, towns, tribes. No movements, no schools, even. There are only cliques and sociopaths. Neither cliques nor sociopaths ever really represent anything except personal agendas with varying degrees of tolerance for loneliness. Queen bees all around. Cliques almost never produce anything of any quality as they're almost always bound by apoetic pretenses and obligations, compromised from the start, and sociopaths spend way too much time stinging themselves, compromised at the end. While it may seem that the sociopath may be better off, the true lesson of the fool is that, while acting more like the fool thus concluding he is the lesser fool, is that really is at least as big a fool as the worst of fools.

Yes paintball I say. For if there is nothing in poetry but sociopaths and cliques, then poetry is essentially a redneck enterprise. All poets reside in the sticks. Where they like to play paintball.

Let's disagree, then, and maybe maintain an honest level of unreasonableness when doing so. Stick to our redneck roots. And more paintball, and more musk.

2007-01-12T06:56:00.000+03:00

I've been tagged by Andy Gricevich to write five little-known things about me. All of the following are entirely true despite the otherwise fictional nature of my being.

1. While my surfaces seem somewhat inspired by the internet age, my guts as a mindless seer predate the Old Testament. Leviticus warns against my type as evil, yet the Greeks thrived on individuals of my sort (e.g., the Delphic Oracle).

2. As Lester the dummy I was at first operated by one poet but later a second poet became a part of me as well. Everything about me is really about "me."

3. My "great book" as Ron Silliman referred to Be Somebody in comparing it to Moby-Dick, edited by parties as diverse as a HarperCollins marketing guru Suzie Sisoler as well as genius CA poet Standard Schaefer, will finally be released this year by Effing Press over seven years after it was first drafted. Some but certainly not all of its ideas relating to information retrieval and language manipulation have in the intervening time been poached by lesser and less scrupulous poets. What do I think of the book? One of the most innovative books of poetry since Jack Spicer'sAfter Lorca.

4. In only my second public reading, at Todd Sandvik's Blue Door reading in Carrboro, NC (the first was for a reading series in Brooklyn in 2001), Mr. Silliman, who was in attendance, exclaimed mysteriously that "Gary Sullivan would be jealous."

5. I've had several fan polaroids taken of me meeting renowned porn stars at various strip clubs in Austin TX. I have not seen any of those polaroids in six years. If you find any, please let me know.

I hereby tag five people to tell five things about themselves many people don't know about them: Linh Dinh, Reb Livingston, Scott Pierce, Fred Stutzman, and Rodrigo Garcia Lopes.

2006-12-29T07:25:00.000+03:00

Deselect your image graceful
ly

our lady of the perpetual scumsuck
our liar lying like a fat odalisque

you continue your lobbying in Dis
you stupid pregnant spider
spitting little sniveling crawlers
more glitter for the web of gleaming tards

tell us about your day, lady
do tell us about the day you died

you typed this
you typed that

you were this type
and that type

please, allow me to document you:

you will be remebered
yes
again, with tears

you were an excellent typer

2006-11-07T07:21:00.000+03:00

Hans von Slicedoff, Our Patron Saint of the Flogspot

from Hans von Gersdorff's Feldtbuch der Wundartzney : newlich getruckt und gebessert, found in the NLM's Historical Anatomies on the Web site

2006-10-31T23:15:00.000+03:00

Glengarry Glen Ross: Always be Closing

Click the play icon to start the video.
Please be patient while your media loads.

2006-09-08T00:34:00.000+04:00

for James Booker, my newborn son Booker James,
my friend Charlie Dahan, and the poor people of New Orleans
may we all play Scrabble with the freaks

The James Booker Drowning Black Mystery Blues

Booker, James, in nineteen hundred eighty three,
he and his heart died of a busted levee.

Lovin' that girl of his, shoulda been him.
Drivin that Cadillac under wine dark london avenue river
deep under rolling london avenue sea
drunk on drinkin' wine swollen liver and heroin

who were his friends
where were they
he's sinking into a wheelchair
sinking deep down under Charity way

Old James won't you pass that bottle to me
can't you see my heart's dying of a busted levee

I saw James Booker down there
down at the bottom of streets so blue
I saw that eye looking up from the depths
from the corpse rolling riverbed of Florida Avenue

Booker James James Booker
you scare me don't you know
when you look at me
don't you know you scare me
when you look at me
deep down from the bottom
Black Ponchartrain Mystery

For a man to drown himself once
that's called suicide
but to drown him again man
mother nature's shootin' up some pesticide

Some things haunt me in the country,
Some things in the middle of town,
Some things well up like a great ocean
I wake up in the river and then I drown

James Booker, goodnight, lost broken, goodnight
Goodnight, Katrine, goodnight, New Orleans
I hope we all get you in our dreams

Booker, James, in nineteen hundred eighty three,
he and his heart died of a busted levee.

I saw James Booker down there
down at the bottom of streets so blue
I saw that eye looking up from the depths
from the corpse rolling riverbed of Florida Avenue

Booker James James Booker
you scare me don't you know
when you look at me
don't you know you scare me
when you look at me
deep down from the bottom
Black Ponchartrain Mystery

Old James won't you pass that bottle to me
I'm scared my heart's dying of a busted levee

Old James won't you pass that bottle to me
you can see my heart's dying of a busted levee
Dying since nineteen hundred eighty three.
Dying of a Black Ponchartrain Mystery.
James Booker, goodnight, lost broken, goodnight
Goodnight, Katrine, goodnight, New Orleans
Goodnight to my friends dead without a fight
I hope we all get you in our dreams

2006-10-01T21:48:00.000+03:00

Hello my name is Clement Greenberg

OK sure. Hello my name is
Clement Greenberg and this is me
translated through the newest and latest
language technologies. Here I go.
As modern production satisfied the
hard-won new technologies I was your greatest
punishment. I would like to use self-destruction
not to further consolidate and strengthen such
destructive functions but rather to say
I will not be shaken.
Works create some rooms.
I used to be my favorite.
It’s the "art."
Most of my attempts to explain various works
you do not consider as law but
it is law nonetheless.
Consider my sculptor-meter steeplechase.
I am the sum of my good habits and
some windows.
First, we extracted some words.
Then.
Then it’s you we added. Then you fight.
You have not read it but it was there in it.
Then the sculpture attends to the troops.
When you are young, you think of art.
You are more interested in the issue then.
We are old and different in that we like
nothing. You are ultimately wrong.
Visual Arts will not be affected by you, not
music, not literature, children. I once went to museums,
I think.
Clement signing off

2006-05-28T19:43:00.000+04:00

Excuses for Abuses

midget tossing's usually good for a cheap laugh
and little boys pop little boners by yelling cunt
hey! hi! what are words, you motherfucker?
is whore an idea alone, bloody scissors in the head
form an abstraction? my metastatic tumor vines climbing
jack off on the killer beanstalk who knows what that was
that rolled out of his mouth jim scrambles up the sliding
mud hill the heights were always looming high
this search yielded one result hilarious
like, whatever, or so that's what they say they
cute harness grab the handle push it in
all fall down 1001 things to screw in a dead punk

2006-05-25T03:18:00.000+04:00

doll-eater

two guatemalan dogs fight over an american fetus
it does what it do
imbibe molten acrylic

doll-eater

once was a bead of sweat there
it is what it be
agar rolling down the throat

doll-eater

management decision snug in polyethylene
you are what you is
chalk liquefaction at a boil

doll-eater

torn black ring around the snarl
i am what i ain't
chug the glaciated hell slurry

doll-eater

2006-03-03T00:12:00.000+03:00

2006-02-10T00:07:00.000+03:00

2006-02-09T19:59:00.000+03:00

2006-01-27T22:27:00.000+03:00

"Patrick Herron, incidentally, along with Alan Sondheim, is the real originator of Flarf, though they seem to have been written out of the recent proto-histories. Just to mention that in passing."
- Kent Johnson, on K. Silem's {lime tree},
link: http://limetree.ksilem.com/archives/2006_01.html#000726

"As for Patrick Herron and Alan Sondheim being the originators of Flarf, that's a bizarre claim if I ever heard one, and I'm sure they would be the first ones to refute it. Gary Sullivan is the originator of Flarf, plain and simple. If Kent means that the work Patrick and Alan did prior to Flarf anticipated many of its elements and concerns, certainly. They're both artists I admire a great deal. There are lots of other poets that I (and Gary too, I'm sure) would acknowledge as Flarf influences in this regard as well, many of them dead for centuries."
- K. Silem Mohammad, {lime tree},
link: http://limetree.ksilem.com/archives/2006_01.html#000726

Patrick responds to the idea that the origins of Flarf are not so clearly or bizarrely absent from his past:

In a response to a post on Kasey Mohammad's blog "limetree" Kent Johnson
yesterday apparently raised an alarm about the origins of Flarf, giving
credit to me and Alan Sondheim thus subverting the official history of
Flarf.

Kasey responded to Kent, calling the claim absurd.

So I responded in the following lengthy way:

*****************************
"As for Patrick Herron and Alan Sondheim being the originators of Flarf,
that's a bizarre claim if I ever heard one, and I'm sure they would be
the first ones to refute it. Gary Sullivan is the originator of Flarf,
plain and simple. If Kent means that the work Patrick and Alan did prior
to Flarf anticipated many of its elements and concerns, certainly.
They're both artists I admire a great deal. There are lots of other
poets that I (and Gary too, I'm sure) would acknowledge as Flarf
influences in this regard as well, many of them dead for centuries."

First I want to say that I have great admiration for Kasey and for Gary
Sullivan and how they have bizzarely devolved the found-on-the-internet
poem. That's not a backhanded compliment in any way at all.

Am I the originator of Flarf? Well, if creating Flarf is equivalent to
coining the word "Flarf," clearly I had nothing at all to do with that.

However, what Kent wrote is not quite so bizarre, and Gary's claim to
origins isn't so clear.

The Flarf proto-history claims the origin of the form is with Gary's
dubious posting to the poetry.com website in late 2000. Jordan Davis
wrote in the Village Voice,

"Flarf began in 2000 or 2001 when Sullivan entered a deliberately
offensive poem in a scam poetry contest. ("I got fire inside/my
"huppa"-chimp(TM)" is, possibly, the only quotable passage.) From
id-stoked overhearings more than a little derivative of Bruce Andrews's
"I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up" ("If pods could talk*so, how/about a
sperm-a-thon?"), the movement made the switch from finding to seeking
when Gardner (Sugar Pill) went to Google to see what the deliberately
misspelled "Rogain bunny" search would yield. Gardner explains: "If you
have a Googled/cut up poem that still has most of its social filters set
too high, it may be interesting poetry but it's probably not flarfy."

In fact it appears that Kasey agrees with this entirely, as do Charles
Bernstein and Mike Magee (see
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html).

If we are to take Jordan's story as a valid description of how an origin
may be ascribed, then my own claim to origination is far from absurd.
My absence from this protohistory feels akin to what it might feel like
if I invented a game only not to be picked to play on a team.

There are in fact two direct precedents to what Gary did in late 2000,
both done in his plain view. I did my homework and found that on the
Wompo list in late 1999, in plain view of Gary who was himself a member
of Wompo, A Janet McCann proposed sending a false poem, a hoaxy-joke of
a poem to poetry.com. To my knowledge no such poem was ever in fact
sent to poetry.com.

The McCann posts:
>
>Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 16:08:54 EST
>Reply-To: Discussion of Women's Poetry List <[log in to unmask]>
>Sender: Discussion of Women's Poetry List <[log in to unmask]>
>From: Janet Mccann <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Anyone can play
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>Being bored with these papers I am grading, I propose a game of
>Exquisite Corpse, the results to be sent to that contest. We can make up
>a name for the poet--Wilhelmina Carlos Hemingway? Emily Whitman? and
>have the return address my English Department, where I can retrieve the
>acceptance. Anyone who wants to should send me a line of truly
>horrendous poetry, backchannel. I will assemble these and distribute and
>send. JanetM
>
>Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 10:57:37 EST
>Reply-To: Discussion of Women's Poetry List <[log in to unmask]>
>Sender: Discussion of Women's Poetry List <[log in to unmask]>
>From: Janet Mccann <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: You can be the new Lauriate!
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>OK, unless I get a few more lines by tomorrow, this goes off to
>poetry.com -- any winnings will be donated to literacy causes! JanetM
>The Most Exquisite Corpse by Wilhelmina Carlos Hemingway Darling,
>dimpled, explosive posterior! It was a thumb I saw floating on the
>slick. There are no metaphors in heaven. (I've measured it from side to
>side. 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide.) There was a girl standing
>by a lake, her luminous form shadowed by a nimbus of moon, Those purple
>bruises, your love bites on my neck, a good puke lessens the heart's
>burden.

If the origin of Flarf comes from the *idea* of sending a crappy junk
poem to poetry.com, then Janet McCann in fact deserves the credit as
originator.

Jordan Davis, author of the protohistory quoted above, ran an active
poetics discussion list called subsubpoetics. Gary, Kasey, Kent,
Jordan, Mike, and I were all very active members of this relatively
small but dynamic discussion list. I was a rather unknown quantity at
the time I joined the list in '98 or '99, but I regularly posted poems
to the list as well as explanations of my approach, hoping to generate
discussion about ideas for poetic production. I got to know, in a
virtual sense, everyone involved on the list. At the time I had a
number of methods for writing the texts I regularly posted to subsub,
but there were two methods that dominated the writing I sent to the
subsub list, disparate methods I married during 2000 in the form of the
puppet Lester Oracle and his still-unpublished volume, _Be Somebody_
(see Ron Silliman's blog for a review:
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003/11/my-sock-puppet-my-self.html).
The one approach of mine was more of the engastromuthoi sort, high on vapors
and writing in a sort of fugue state, a sort of self/no-self manic
state. I was after all suffering from hypomania at the time. The other
approach was a rather complicated cutup methodology that used the
internet aggressively. I regularly used spam, strange web group
letters, and even web text-munging tools to create these weird
assemblages. The texts I was using regularly came from the use of
search engines, whether they be Alta Vista, later Google, or even
specialized search engines like rhymezone or dictionary.com.

One of the desires I had behind working on thse sorts of cut-ups was to
exploit the vast repository that the internet was. I also believed
strongly that *stealing* was the way to good poetry, and rewriting other
words was central to that stealing. I wanted to undermine the very
notions of poetic identity and poetic voice, and aggressively attack
notions of copyright with respect to language. I also was quite
concerned that the internet was providing a new means for separating
people and making people abstractions. I thought the approach to these
problems was through fake-hoaxy internet cut-ups of things like old
poems, nonsense babbly, poorly written posts to newsgroups, etc. And to
some extent--here's where Alan comes in--I was parodying the work of
Alan Sondheim, another active member of subsubpoetics, who was
aggressively employing tools on the internet to create texts. He was
more optimistic about things than I was, but I respected him highly, and
hence the parodies. They stopped being parodic quickly. You can find
some of these texts in proximate.org or later in Lester's work. Consider
the whole project a radical assault on (1) hypertext poetics;
(2) confessional poetry; and (3) the ubiquitous phenomenon of poet's
name-as-brand. Best of all, the project had immense generative
capacity as well as immediate relevance.

I first wrote about some of these intents and desires, about a website I
created in 1999 called proximate.org, in an essay published by Gary
Sullivan and Nada Gordon during the summer of 2000 in their seminal web
journal README (http://home.jps.net/~nada/proximate.htm). Since then
I've written extensively about these subjects in other places, such as
in VeRT ("Poetic Radicalism in the Internet Age" which you can read here
http://www.proximate.org/internetage.htm as the VeRT link is broken)
and later in Jacket on the subject of the fake fake, the deliberately
obvious poetic hoax (http://jacketmagazine.com/17/herron.html).

During Summer 2000 on subsub I entered a flame war with Doug Rothschild
whose talk at the Boston Poetry Conference centered on the subject of how
poets should be poets. I thought that looking for some essential poet-
profile was pretty much equivalent to supporting a commercial-grade
confessional poetics. Doug and Gary Sullivan were backchanneling each
other and one of them accidentally let one of their private
mails slip to me. In the slipped email they called me an idiot for what
I was trying to argue. No doubt Gary had something at stake with
confession-forms, in particular with his publication of _Swoon_, a book
constructed confessionally: personal love emails. At the time it seemed
that Gary, as well as most subsub members, had little interest in Personism,
in critiquing solipsism, in questioning the name-dependent industry that poetry
had pathetically become. Those of us on sub sub who were interested and
writing on the subject were small in number (Kent Johnson, Gabe Gudding,
Alan Sondheim, and I); those of us writing poetry to match this
self-ambiguous poetic were even fewer (Kent, Alan, and I), only two of
us were contextualizing this and actively creating, using and abusing web tools
and algorithmic processes were even smaller (Alan and I), and I was all alone
in taking this in a critical-satirical way.

If the origin is not influence, well, OK fine, I'm just an influence.
That's cool. But that sort of rhetoric feels like a cruel trick on me.
Hey, I want a little credit just like everyone else. That's all. I think
I have a better-than-trivial claim to something more than influence. I
don't want to crash anyone's party. I just don't want to feel cheated
either. The story sounds to me like something more than "influence."

What we're talking about here with respect to Flarf is the use of web
tools (search engines, email clients, text mungers) to create fake-ish
junk-ish satirical poems, I was doing this in plain view of everyone party
to the creation of Flarf. I used babelfish extensively and in plain view
of the Poetics list in 1998 to rewrite a James Tate poem a dozen times!
I wasn't allowed on the team, but I think I had and continue to have a
decent claim to an integral part of the formation of this form. And I
have a decent and well-documented claim to show that Kasey, Gary,
Jordan, Alan, and Kent were all present and seeing my related work on a
daily basis well before late 2001. I was creating manual
algorithms for text manupulations, algorithms whose rules I regularly
broke, well before this time. (This sort of work has led me to my
present occupation, which is the study of advanced text analysis and
manipulation techniques--text mining--in graduate school and beyond.)
Not only did I do this, but I would send intermediate drafts that showed
the procedures in action, and I would also regularly describe both my formal
and philosophical intents. These folks weren't interested, at least not until
they did it themselves and called it their own, naming themselves founders
and inventors, when instead it seemed more like a rip-off.

Compare all of this to what Mike Magee wrote:

"One might say that Flarf is a radical elevation of the tendencies
already there in Personism."

But wait--as the TV infomercials go--there's more. Back to the origin
in the posting to poetry.com.

If actually *sending* a crap poem to poetry.com was the origin of Flarf
rather than merely coming up with the idea, then Gary most likely saw me
do exactly what he did, but at least six months before he did--right on
the subsubpoetics list, with fellow list members Kasey, Jordan, Kent, Alan,
Gary and others present.

Here's my post to subsub (part of a very long thread) in March 2000:

>Subsubpoetics Home Page: Archive: Message #3853
>
>Date: Mar 18 2000 23:20:52 EST
>From: "Patrick Herron"
>Subject: Freunde, nicht diese tone!
>
>My first submission! under 20 lines! for poetry.com! Oh, What Joy!
>
>http://poetry.com - please search for Archduke Froshingslosh, the greatest
>living poet of all limited small areas within the Gobshite Region of Lower
>Flanders
>
>this masterpiece is humbly dedicated to the genius and grandeur of the
>esteemed Professor Eric Blarnes, Blarnufflink Chair of the Veteran Poets
>Senior Citizen Center Health Benefits Institute
>
>big shrew of goo
>roodely toodely doo
>poo poo er
>et tu shamu and
>to you emu I
>sue n rue the
>choo choo loo
>that did spew
>spent chew
>and said moo
>in kung foo zoo
>with one new shoe too
>i am a poet aren't you
>i am a poet i touch myself
>and think of Family Feud
>when on the boob tube.
>i am cold water cubes
>for noo one but
>a dog named Boo.
>
>Copyright (c) 2000 Archduke Ridiculophus Froshingslosh, Semi-ruler of
>Flanders and other Highly Ambient Domains & Heir to the Fortune of
>CarbonMonoxidizer, Inc.
>
>http://poetry.com - Where Everyone is a Poet (TM)
>The home to 1.4 formerly homeless and neglected poets. (TM)
>Come to poetry.com - Where Our Database Will Read It! (TM)
>Where You Can Purchase Your Very Own Poem from Us! (TM)
>Where Moles Make Mountains Of Hirsute Shite! (TM)

Note also the heavy use of (TM)...something you can see in the supposed
origin of Flarf by Gary in the proto-Flarf piece "Mm-hmm":

>Mm-hmm
>
>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 then take
>AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)
>uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah
>hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get
>off the paddy field and git
>me some chocolate Quik
>put a Q-tip in it and stir it up sick
>pocka-mocka-chocka-locka-DING DONG
>fuck! shit! piss! oh it's so sad that
>syndrome what's it called tourette's
>make me HAI-EE! shout out loud
>Cuz I love thee. Thank you God, for listening!

Notice also the abuseof poetic Personism. I did it in huge flashing
letters, in plain view of Kasey, Mike, Kent, Gary, Alan, Jordan, and so
on....

It's rather uncanny, isn't it, that the piece I dedicated to "Professor
Eric Blarnes," who was Henry Gould, another very active member of
subsub, seems very similar in intent to what I did in early 2000 right
there on subsub? I plucked the rhymes from rhymezone, some of the lines
from discussion lists and web pages, etc.

I am not suggesting that anyone *deliberately* elided me from any
history of Flarf from issues of journals featuring "flarfists," etc..
If anything I sort of take it to mean that I'm entirely forgettable, at
least to these few folks. I'm sure no one intended to neglect me.
Jordan and Gary and Kasey have always been kind to me, and hell, Jordan
and Gary were the first two people to publish my work, and they did so
by soliciting work from me. That was a huge compliment; their efforts
gave my work some legitimacy way back then, legitimacy and acceptance it
didn't quite enjoy at that time.

All I am asking is that these people acknowledge my efforts were done in
plain view and were fundamental to (ironically enough) the later work
of Gary and others performed under the label of "Flarf."

I think I can also singularly lay claim to Flarfing an entire
municipality, which I successfully did in 2003, when my crappy mockery
of "southern poetry" won me the Poet Laureateship of the town in which I
reside, Carrboro, NC. I exposed the joke in a newspaper essay last
year: http://www.chapelhillnews.com/opinion/story/2416845p-8794817c.html

As it turned out, the joke was entirely on me.

2005-05-01T01:28:00.000+04:00

Losing my right hand man
- for Jon, the other survivors,
and the ones who didn't make it back

Dear friends -

Now it's your turn to give the orders.
"All right," I said. "Tell me to put my hands up."
Plunge your hand in water up to the wrist;
Gaze into & note what it is you soon will miss
The glacier knocks in the oil tanker
the desert sighs in my head,
And the crack in the gas tank opens
a lane to the land of the dead.

Happy New Year's! I'm about to head out with the boys on patrol.
Happy New Year's! In about an hour we will be hit by an ambush.
Happy New Year's. This is the last letter I will every write you.
Happy New Year's. The absence of my right hand is not the right hand of absence.
Happy New Year's. My boss tells me you can fool enough of the people all of the time.
Happy New Year's. Someone said something about freedom.

Should my old right hand be lost
can it not be brought to mind?
Should my old right hand be lost
we'll take a shot of kindness yet.
And here's a hand, my trusted friend,
in the dirt, and give a hand of yours.

You took a shot of kindness yet
And you're dead face down in the dirt.

2005-04-30T02:44:00.000+04:00

I wonder at this You and I
You are all there is
And I am all annihilated.
There is an I
No longer exists.

- Mansur al-Halaj, a 10th Century Persian Sufi

2005-04-29T11:37:00.000+04:00

A Julie Cervantes spammed me with the following message:

you holdover me diffractometer me you during me query me you nymphomaniac me solve me you irene me detention me
you anybody me crusoe me you dingy me patti me you percussive me hobart me you bisexual me palladian me

2005-04-25T11:22:00.000+04:00

The Earth Is A Satellite Of The Moon
Leonel Rugama, radical poet
trans. Kent Johnson

Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty.
Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2
Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty.
Apollo 4 cost more than Apollo 3
Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2
Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty.
Apollo 8 cost a whole shit-load of money, but no one minded
because the astronauts were Protestant,
they read the Bible from the moon, astounding and delighting
every Christian, and on their return Pope Paul VI
gave them his blessing.
Apollo 9 cost more than all of these put together
including Apollo 1 which cost plenty.
The great-grandparents of the people of Acahualinca
were less hungry than the grandparents.
The great-grandparents died of hunger.
The grandparents of the people of Acahualinca were less hungry
than the parents. The grandparents died of hunger.
The parents of the people of Acahualinca were less hungry
than the children of the people there.
The parents died of hunger.
The people of Acahualinca are less hungry than the children
of the people there. The children of the people of Acahualinca, because of
hunger, are not born, though
they hunger to be born, even to just die of hunger.

Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the moon.

2005-04-14T10:56:00.000+04:00

King Richard's Song of
Jacques Stout's Diving Songs

for Joe Donahue

Are, am, are?
Be.
Be.
Be.
Who
finds ways back to books of myths
in which nothing does not appear?
Who
might drown them?
Not a swimmer named
Jacques,
not the face forming in a haze of asphyxiation
how the blood boils in rising
blop
blop
bloop
when the spinning pin pricks of purple light
pinwheel and nova, the flesh explodes
and is then set on the corner
swapping cocks for a cop of candy.
Who frames profanes, inflames, and
proclaims. The naughty boy
strangled the pussy and threw her in the well;
sing a dong to the children. Who
wins the books of myths but no one,
not one but only one.

Traveling knots and nots
in sinking.
We drown
only separately,
we,
I,
because
I am I
to drown
my
books. Love cannot be drowned;
the
Is
do not have it.
They
cannot.
Who be the
they
that frame?
We
of course the
they
but at a different depth.

Coming to the surface is otherwise
not inevitable, not all fish eyes
point to the skies. We're not Cousteau
nor amphibious humans owning all possible worlds
nor regularly enjoying lovely vacations at sea.
You is what you aren't, the ocean being otherwise
the original, contemporary and ultimate solution.
I am not she I am not he I am not it but I am but
I am not I
We are not we
we
but
so much less than
infintely more