Berrigan's Influence

"What [Ted] Berrigan's Sonnets granted in some sense was permission -- to cut up and collage diary entries into poems, to cannibalize friends' letters, to collaborate with other writers and artists, to leap remorselessly from image to dialog to signs in the world, to let B-movie icons commingle with literary luminaries, to transpose lines from one poem to another, to use disjunction and disruption as (un)conscious strategies, in short to stuff the stuff of life into the suitcase of art. This influence is felt deeply (though very differently) in the work of [Anne] Waldman and [Anselm] Hollo."
~ Ravi Shankar, "Anne Waldman, Anselm Hollo, and the Authentic Avant-Garde" (in The Quarterly Conversation, Summer 2008)

[via wood s lot]

Making Unfamiliar

"Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war.... And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important."
~ Victor Shklovsky, "Art As Technique" (transl. Lee T. Lemon & Marion J. Reis)

[via Ravi Shankar, via wood s lot]

Accidental Aphorism #1

"Don't crowd flowers and candles or petals could be singed."

In the Process

"[Robert] Creeley's first principle is that you find out what you have to say in the process of saying it: poetry becomes a way of making not representing. This presents a stark challenge to an approach to poems that begins with ideas or sentiments or messages and then represents or approximates them in the poem. Composition (including editing and recomposing) becomes the active agency of the poem. Immediacy and immanence of expression precedes essence."
~ Charles Bernstein, "Hero of the Local: Robert Creeley and the Persistence of American Poetry"

.OOOOOOO.

"The poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity."
~ William Carlos Williams, cited by Creeley in "The Release" (The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley)

Packing & Unpacking

"Our metaphors for the poetry are generally those of packing and unpacking: Clark Kent pressing coal down to diamonds (Emily Dickinson) or Mallarmé distributing words over a chosen field. The question of poetics is how extensive or intensive the distribution should be. All poetic form is arbitrary, strategic, and emotional. The task of the author is to decide, how much 'jack' to pack into or out of the given box. The heroic couplet and Ron Silliman's 'new sentence' gaze out differently at the same rainy day."
~ Paul Hoover, "Black Painting Divided by a White Painting"

[via wood s lot]

Fate

"This is probably what we mean by the term 'fate'; were it not inevitable, we would not employ that term; we would, instead, speak of bad luck. We would talk about accidents. With fate there is no accident; there is intent. And there is relentless intent, closing in from all directions at once, as if the person's very universe is shrinking. Finally, it holds nothing but him and his sinister destiny. He is programmed against his will to succumb, and, in his efforts to thrash himself free, he succumbs even faster, from fatigue and despair. Fate wins, then, no matter what."
~ Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

See also:
PKD Official Site

About Flarf

Gary Sullivan, interviewed (May 2006) by Tom Beckett at E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S:

"Many have seen a connection between Flarf and Language Writing. The connection, so far as I can tell -- other than many of us having been influenced as much by Language Writing as by anything else -- is in the extent to which we seem focused on decentering and exploring subjectivity."

* * *

"So, though I've been talking largely about Flarf as a sensibility and how appropriation plays a role in that, there is the other issue, which is very easily summed up: We literally appropriate other text for our work. But not just any other text. A key aspect of most of the text we appropriate is that it is a manifestation of some other person's subjectivity."

* * *

"I wrote a lot about flarf on my blog several months ago after noticing that the word 'flarf' seemed to be getting around. What I noticed was that flarf was being used as shorthand for 'Google-sculpting.' I felt that it was important at the time to talk about the word's origin. Not because ownership was an issue, but because I felt it was important to distinguish flarf from Google-sculpting. Important because Google-sculpting, considering everything available on the Web, could look and sound like anything. Flarf, on the other hand, doesn't."

Derivative

"Makes me feel bookish as hell -- all these being poems made out of other pieces of writing. Then again, I've always carried as a touchstone a weird little moment of television I caught on a moniter in an airport when I was in highschool: a young Italian fashion designer was being interviewed by a woman who accused him of being derivative. 'I combine the things I love, the things that fascinate me, things that have already been made. I am not ashamed of this.'"
~ Robert Archambeau, "Two New Poems" (at Samizdat Blog)

Music #3

"F.U.R.B. (Fuck You Right Back)," Frankee

"Oh My," The Gray Kid

"Think," James Brown