To Examine "It"

"I don't write to express myself. I write to examine 'it.' There is a lot of 'it' out there. This is what my poetry does. That I have standpoints emerging from my social locations (class, religious culture, gender, national origin) is a true statement; that I make intricate weaves of these elements is true; that I can learn more about any social location and respond to it if sufficiently moved is also true. I begin by setting out from myself, as you say -- precisely, because by beginning I get beyond the boundedness of 'self' into something more. As for 'me,' -- forget 'me' or 'I.' It's as if we are yearning toward a new pronoun to understand something else than what subject positions emerge from the pronouns we already know and use."
~ Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in an interview with CAConrad

Rules of Thumb

Mary Biddinger: "My Unwritten Poetry Rules" -- with several others sharing their own self-imposed guidelines in the comments section.

.OOOOOOO.

"Craft and style are essential to honing emotional content into something greater than mere confession or less appealing forms of monomania -- I'm not wholly enthralled with the idea of poetry being a substitute for therapy or group-groping apologetics -- but the continual emphasis on poets and poetry as subject matter represents a flight from the standard practice of poetry as an extraordinary way to fathom that unexplainable condition of being human."
~ Ted Burke, "No More Poems About Poetry"

.OOOOOOO.

Young Poets
by Nicanor Parra

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

(trans. by Miller Williams)

Working Class Poem

"To assume that the 'true' working class poem is only a narrative exposition of working class 'experience,' is to buy into normative reading patterns established by post-WWII academic poetries in the U.S. This assumption precludes the full possibilities of language, isolating working class poets to a particular kind of expressionism. It would be difficult to find a parallel prescription placed on the depiction of class in other art forms."
~ Kathy Lou Schultz, "Talking Trash, Talking Class: What's a Working Class Poetic, and Where Would I Find One?" (1998)
[via wood s lot]

Theory

"There is no such thing as a poem without a theory."
~ Ron Silliman (12 August 2008)

"When a writer says that he or she 'has no' theory or just simply writes whatever they may be 'given' to write, it does not mean that there is no theory, but rather that they refuse to look at these things, and that that is a critical, indeed foundational, part of their own theory, i.e. their own practice as poets."

One-Liners

"Poetry today has as one of its tasks that of clearing public life of images and giving us art instead."
~ Lyn Hejinian, "The Sad Note in a Poetics of Consciousness," in Poetry and Public Language (2007)
[As cited by Catherine Martin in "No Way Out" (Pores, August 2008)]

__________

"Too often, the focus on literal truth presents us not with the essence or core of the poet's being, but with the patio furniture of his or her life."
~ David Alpaugh, "The Professionalization of Poetry" (2003): Part One, Part Two

__________

"There is a weather report in almost every folk poem. The sun is shining; it was snowing; the wind was blowing.... The folk poet knows that it's wise to immediately establish the connection between the personal and the cosmic."
~ Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (2008)
[Excerpt at Poetry Daily]

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]

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]

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)

Card-Poems

"In the early 1970s, on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, and in complete ignorance of each other, Russian poet Lev Rubinstein and American poet Robert Grenier initiated a series of poetry raids on the fortress of the book: both began composing poems on small cards, a practice that would culminate in Grenier's Sentences (1978), a box of 500 such card-poems, and Rubinstein's own boxes of serial cards (beginning around 1974)."
~ Philip Metres, "Installing Lev Rubinstein's 'Farther and Farther On': From Note Cards to Field Walks"

* * *

"Rubinstein catalogs remarkable speech fragments, disjointed bits of various discourses and staggeringly bad 'traditional' rhymed poetry. These found objects he presents as poems, which the reader or listener feels she must have heard somewhere hundreds of times before without noticing."
~ Northwestern University Press (re: Rubinstein's Here I Am)

Free Meaning

"The practice of making photo albums from found photographs is similar to Surrealist film practices. Both practices rely on fragmentation and de-contextualization, followed by an imaginative recombination that does not respect the intentions of the original owners. For the Surrealists, existing films were 'found objects' to be fragmented and used. Finding obscure details within a film aided in the dissolution of the film, and thus to the interruption of its ideological effects."

* * *

"Is it any surprise, given their interests in fragmentation, that the Surrealists became collectors and exhibitors of found objects? The Surrealists understood that context 'fixes' meaning. They tried to free meaning by destroying or altering context."

~ Barry Mauer, "The Found Photograph and the Limits of Meaning" (Enculturation, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 2001)

Some Definitions

from Wikipedia:

Flarf poetry can be characterized as an avant garde poetry movement of the late 20th century and the early 21st century. Its first practitioners practiced an aesthetic dedicated to the exploration of "the inappropriate" in all of its guises. Their method was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays, and other texts.

Found poetry is the rearrangement of words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages that are taken from other sources and reframed as poetry by changes in spacing and/or lines (and consequently meaning), or by altering the text by additions and/or deletions.

Spoetry or Spoems are poetic verses made primarily from the subject lines of spam e-mail messages.