1) "I donÂ’t know, to choose PC as a target these days in America seems a little misguided, to put it generously." (Anonymous, Chris Chen, I think)
After reading all the posts this week and chatting with Kate and Michael about it, I have to say that I don't think the poem works. Or, more accurately, I don't think that the way "Their Guys, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay" works is particularly useful. It was interesting to hear from Michael about the poem's relationship to Yeats, but I would have never caught that on my own, even with poem in hand. In the end, the poem still reads to me as a critique of PC, I think because despite the fact that the poem is collaged and thus stops and starts in small fits, there is a loose narrative, the narrative of a Point of View, the Point of View of a fairly cohesive white "I." The irony has the effect of an acting out, a "there I said it" followed by a smile. The voice is more engaged in floating through the stereotypes, rather thancritiquingg them.
2) "Technically, tho, I think anything that pulls language down off the Web--whatever that language is--might be thought of as a kind of documentary approach. Very different in not just technique but in intent, to great extent, than people who consciously write "out of" other voices that they have internalized."(Gary Sullivan)
In relationship to this poem at least, I couldn't disagree more. The language may be borrowed, but is cut together to become it's own thing. It's definitely a whitefish salad, rather than a goldfish in anaquariumm.
3) "i like flarf. in the end, because it is useless (and annoying) to try to legislate via poetry." (kevin.thurston)
As for flarf in general, I don't have many ideas about it, other than it is collage and I'm all for collage and the flarf I know best is Rodney's and I really like Rodney's verbal energies. That's all I can say about flarf in general.
But I don't know what you mean by legislating via poetry. What I do know is that we are all involved in an underground community because we live in a culture that doesn't value something so economically useless as poetry. And this makes me particularly protective of the community. And thus I think it important to discuss work as being in good or bad faith because it affects relationships in the community. When I heard the poem, I felt embarrassed and as a knee jerk reaction immediately scanned the room to make sure there were only white people there. There weren't. And that made me feel bad, because suddenly I worried that the community space was a space most comfortable for whites only. And I think though I feel a little silly about this reaction, mostly because it's the reaction I had as a kid when my parents were talking about race in front of people outside the family, I think it's valid in so far as poetry does not exist in a vacuum. It's a public conversation we are having, at least until we're dead. It has very much to do with how we end up relating to one another. And I think most of us write these poems, at least to some degree, in order to figure out a satisfying way of discussing the world with one another. And I find it sad, though not surprising, that the only Asian American willing to come on this blog did so anonymously at first. Meanwhile, the poem was generating tons of discussion among Asian American poets on another blog. In that sense, the poem reified the separation of poets by race: "Can one imagine “Their Glittering Guys” being read in front of a group of Asian Americans, and in that context would the poem be an example of “Yellowface” or of something else?" (Chris Chen)
OK. Over and out. And for me, hopefully, over. Thanks to everyone for their energy and thought-provoking comments.
Best,
Maggie
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Friday, May 26, 2006
aw, today
is my BIRTHDAY!
today.
i'm 34.
yay!
as for this Flarf discussion:
yes... we Minor Americans were raised by our Mothers... which means we believe strongly in Polite Table Manners...
and this Blog is our Table.
so... we thank everyone for not allowing this blog to become Negative.
we, and i think i'm speaking for both maggie and i, have never had the intention of 'attacking Flarf.' and i believe that you all know that. and i believe that we never did that. and i thank michael magee for being ... well... receptive and understanding re: this sometimes uncomfortable discussion of his poem.
but discomfort is good.
and open honest questioning is good.
and anne boyer and michael nicoloff are ROCKSTARS, i believe, for being so willing to engage in this discussion and genuinely so.
and also ANON [i think i know who you are ANON!]
and Gary
and EVERYONE.
thanks.
maggie has more to say re: Flarf. i'll let her take over.
happy my birthday to everyone.
take the weekend off... monday, too.
today.
i'm 34.
yay!
as for this Flarf discussion:
yes... we Minor Americans were raised by our Mothers... which means we believe strongly in Polite Table Manners...
and this Blog is our Table.
so... we thank everyone for not allowing this blog to become Negative.
we, and i think i'm speaking for both maggie and i, have never had the intention of 'attacking Flarf.' and i believe that you all know that. and i believe that we never did that. and i thank michael magee for being ... well... receptive and understanding re: this sometimes uncomfortable discussion of his poem.
but discomfort is good.
and open honest questioning is good.
and anne boyer and michael nicoloff are ROCKSTARS, i believe, for being so willing to engage in this discussion and genuinely so.
and also ANON [i think i know who you are ANON!]
and Gary
and EVERYONE.
thanks.
maggie has more to say re: Flarf. i'll let her take over.
happy my birthday to everyone.
take the weekend off... monday, too.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
More.
dear minor american readers,
we have decided to leave the comments in the comments section now that we are convinced that we have you hooked into reading our blog religiously. [= we think you get it and want to stop cutting and pasting now].
as i said before, i am really grateful for this conversation [especially the eavesdropping we get to do on Nicoloff and Boyer]... because it has truly helped me understand Flarf a little more. [a lot], or, at least, it has helped me to think about Flarf in different ways.
i am wondering... way back to Magee's reading... to the beginning of blog thread... and specifically wondering about the public performance of 'Their Guys' which seemed to cause such a stir amongst the attendees. after this reading... there were a lot of discussions about racism and a lot of upset/offended/concerned/scoffing poets all chattering about "asian chicks" and "what was that about?" and, in fact, i must confess that i was surprised by these conversations... and i don't know if it is because i was michael magee's opening act and still recovering from my opening act jitters and therefore unable to concentrate... or if it was because i was not offended... or what... but i was surprised, although, in understanding after the fact.
and so... these others... who have not joined in our discussion [but who are, in fact, reading these posts] i really would like to invite you into this discussion. and to specifically address *what* offended you... *why*... *if* ... all these things.
because it is really easy to simply write something off as *not my thing* and never go into why or share the why with yr fellow viewers... but it doesn't do the work of this poem, or any other poems, any good.
and i can see why the work of this poem is being called into question and also, i can see why people might think there is no work to this poem.
and so. i am wondering about this statement that Anne [excuse the familiarity] made way back in her first response to Michael Nicoloff:
"However, I know enough about Flarf out-loud to know it can create the effect of monody. This is one way I find Flarf to be cunning. It is understandable, then, that MZ would hear this poem and think it is a poem with a fixed subject position about a stereotypical Asian “chick” – it sounds that way, sometimes, read aloud by a single speaker at a literary event."
and i am wondering if that does anything for the audience members who attended this reading.
is the out-loud detracting from the work of the poem?
is the performance?
would yr reactions have been different had you encountered the work on the page first?
how was this "cunning" lost on so many of us at the event?
there seems to be something lost in the translation from page to performance [not performance on the page] here...
or is that not true?
anyway.
there. i said something. maggie can stop beating me now.
we have decided to leave the comments in the comments section now that we are convinced that we have you hooked into reading our blog religiously. [= we think you get it and want to stop cutting and pasting now].
as i said before, i am really grateful for this conversation [especially the eavesdropping we get to do on Nicoloff and Boyer]... because it has truly helped me understand Flarf a little more. [a lot], or, at least, it has helped me to think about Flarf in different ways.
i am wondering... way back to Magee's reading... to the beginning of blog thread... and specifically wondering about the public performance of 'Their Guys' which seemed to cause such a stir amongst the attendees. after this reading... there were a lot of discussions about racism and a lot of upset/offended/concerned/scoffing poets all chattering about "asian chicks" and "what was that about?" and, in fact, i must confess that i was surprised by these conversations... and i don't know if it is because i was michael magee's opening act and still recovering from my opening act jitters and therefore unable to concentrate... or if it was because i was not offended... or what... but i was surprised, although, in understanding after the fact.
and so... these others... who have not joined in our discussion [but who are, in fact, reading these posts] i really would like to invite you into this discussion. and to specifically address *what* offended you... *why*... *if* ... all these things.
because it is really easy to simply write something off as *not my thing* and never go into why or share the why with yr fellow viewers... but it doesn't do the work of this poem, or any other poems, any good.
and i can see why the work of this poem is being called into question and also, i can see why people might think there is no work to this poem.
and so. i am wondering about this statement that Anne [excuse the familiarity] made way back in her first response to Michael Nicoloff:
"However, I know enough about Flarf out-loud to know it can create the effect of monody. This is one way I find Flarf to be cunning. It is understandable, then, that MZ would hear this poem and think it is a poem with a fixed subject position about a stereotypical Asian “chick” – it sounds that way, sometimes, read aloud by a single speaker at a literary event."
and i am wondering if that does anything for the audience members who attended this reading.
is the out-loud detracting from the work of the poem?
is the performance?
would yr reactions have been different had you encountered the work on the page first?
how was this "cunning" lost on so many of us at the event?
there seems to be something lost in the translation from page to performance [not performance on the page] here...
or is that not true?
anyway.
there. i said something. maggie can stop beating me now.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Michael Nicoloff - Anne Boyer: FLARF continued.
Hi Anne--
Thanks for this very interesting post. First, to tackle my use of “redneck”—in hindsight I wish that I hadn’t used that word, because it taps into the particular narrative that you’re talking about in such a way that it ends up overwhelming what I was actually intending to point to in that statement. I think this was a product of piling on descriptors in order to tease out what I was actually thinking but then forgetting the weight that “redneck” has acquired with regards to Flarf. But what I was really getting at is the part of that sentence after the dash: “a kind of stereotypically lower class racist redneck-type who’s had little access to education—that lack of education being the particularly highlighted point.” Because those moments when certain Flarfy poems appropriate statements that contain bad spelling/messed-up grammar or glaring racist/sexist/homophobic stupidity gleaned from the internets—and particularly when those statements contain both of these things—the spots where this happens frequently end up feeling like a class of folks (regardless of socioeconomic position) who are brainy and schooled (self-taught or otherwise) are just taking easy potshots at the uneducated for their being uneducated. In a different light, it’d have a very “Revenge of the Nerds” quality to it. But from here I think we can see where the jump to “redneck” is made: racist/sexist/homophobic + lack of education invariably = redneck. In light of what you say regarding a lack of textual evidence for the existence of a Flarf Redneck Assault Team (hmm, FRAT)—and you’ve most certainly read more of this work than I have, so I’m betting that you’re probably right—this equation becomes less evidence of something within the work and more of a look into the kind of associational models that are floating around. It’s like racism and bad grammar automatically lead to a lower-class quasi-Southern idiocy—a stereotype that I’m not proud of perpetuating in my last post and which other people writing about Flarf should also shut up about and do some textual analysis (and also quit it with the threats and man-rage)—when in fact racism and bad grammar exist in, um, quite a few other segments of American society, as you’ve said. But these associations, true or not, and fucked-up as they are, are facts of the American landscape, and unfortunately that means sometimes they’ll determine our writing in ways outside of our intent. Therefore, taking misspellings and racist bile out of one context and placing them in another has to be done, obviously, with a great deal of care. As poets (especially of the “avant-garde” set) we are, again rightly or wrongly, associated with a kind of privilege with regards to language, and so our appropriation of languages that aren’t always our own is frequently going to carry the stamp of something like “class” (though that’s not exactly the right word), and that’s simply something that each poem is going to deal with successfully or not. I think that KSM in “Deer Head Nation” frequently does this kind of appropriation in a way that activates it towards fascinating, nuanced, and on-point uses, but at other times (though I don’t think this is my central problem with “Their Guys...”), Flarfy work does seem to be smarty-pantses minstrelizing (not a word, but I’m going with it) a bunch of less-than-privileged folks because of their lack of education. It probably comes down to a case-by-case basis for when this appropriation is on-point or not—and there’d be a lot of subjective disagreement here.
I’m not sure if I’ve really addressed these questions quite to my satisfaction or yours, but this nonetheless seems to be a convenient spot to return to “Their Guys...” and the specific discussion we’re having around how to read this poem—and I have to say that I’m glad that Maggie raised these questions with regards to a specific poem, because so often these Flarf Wars (or discussion of anything, really) have fallen into a kind of vague generality that, in spite of often being necessary, makes me feel more than a bit wary of making any definite statements (despite the fact that that’s what I was just doing in the paragraph above). Anyway, that aside—I think that a certain amount of our disagreement over how we feel about Magee’s poem is going to come down to our individual subjective responses to the language therein. I’m thinking particularly here about your statement that you find the textual surface of “Their Guys...” to be really interesting. I think it’s been established that, while this certainly isn’t the least interesting poem I’ve ever read on the “surface” level, I do not share this same fascination. But it’s pretty difficult for one of us to say that the other is “wrong” in this regard—without some extraordinarily extreme digging into the genealogies of our own subjectivities, unconscious minds, blah blah, etc., to understand the juridical power shaping how our particular “I just (don’t) like it” factors operate, and I’m not sure if it’s really possible to do that, and if it is, it will probably provoke me to have a freak-out/extended personal crisis.
But this said, in aspects of your reading of “Their Guys...” there are things I both agree and disagree with. I also read Magee’s poem as in a sense taking the various at-times-contradictory perceptions of Asian people—the Asian “takeover”; mentions of height; the title and its plays on the perceptions of Asian men as gay (or at other times, feminized or asexual); the Dragon Lady, etc.—and collecting them into a sort of sprung quasi-narrative of illogic. In the context of this piling on of stereotyped perceptions, I don’t think that the ironic moves being made here are going to be lost on most readers. As you say, the critique is obvious. But maybe that’s exactly the problem: when I pose the question to myself of what the actual critique is, all I end up with in response is something like “dudes—racism is fucked-up.” Which takes me back to my initial response to this poem, which was not that I felt so much as though it was racist but that it made me feel bored and annoyed—the kind of extreme language and the extreme reactions it is trying to provoke didn’t give way to any sense of deeper or more nuanced critique, and since, as I said above, I don’t find the textual surface all that interesting, I was left with very little to keep me engaged. It feels like all provocation and no pay-off. So I guess I’d say, yeah, it is an anti-racist poem, but I’m going to have to disagree with it being all that complex.
There’s more that I’d like to say here about the issues that Joanne raises regarding Magee’s position as a white male poet and the way that that interacts with his poem, but I’m gonna hold off on that (must articulate better). I’m very interested, though, about what you’ve said about KSM and the convenient “forgetting” about him being Arab that I agree does occur in a lot of these discussions. I’d definitely be all for him weighing in here on that and everything else.
Michael
(Also--I am super interested in your rumored Feminist Flarf Suite and would be very thankful if you would backchannel it to me if it is in a state anywhere close to done and/or meeting with your satisfaction. Thanks!)
Thanks for this very interesting post. First, to tackle my use of “redneck”—in hindsight I wish that I hadn’t used that word, because it taps into the particular narrative that you’re talking about in such a way that it ends up overwhelming what I was actually intending to point to in that statement. I think this was a product of piling on descriptors in order to tease out what I was actually thinking but then forgetting the weight that “redneck” has acquired with regards to Flarf. But what I was really getting at is the part of that sentence after the dash: “a kind of stereotypically lower class racist redneck-type who’s had little access to education—that lack of education being the particularly highlighted point.” Because those moments when certain Flarfy poems appropriate statements that contain bad spelling/messed-up grammar or glaring racist/sexist/homophobic stupidity gleaned from the internets—and particularly when those statements contain both of these things—the spots where this happens frequently end up feeling like a class of folks (regardless of socioeconomic position) who are brainy and schooled (self-taught or otherwise) are just taking easy potshots at the uneducated for their being uneducated. In a different light, it’d have a very “Revenge of the Nerds” quality to it. But from here I think we can see where the jump to “redneck” is made: racist/sexist/homophobic + lack of education invariably = redneck. In light of what you say regarding a lack of textual evidence for the existence of a Flarf Redneck Assault Team (hmm, FRAT)—and you’ve most certainly read more of this work than I have, so I’m betting that you’re probably right—this equation becomes less evidence of something within the work and more of a look into the kind of associational models that are floating around. It’s like racism and bad grammar automatically lead to a lower-class quasi-Southern idiocy—a stereotype that I’m not proud of perpetuating in my last post and which other people writing about Flarf should also shut up about and do some textual analysis (and also quit it with the threats and man-rage)—when in fact racism and bad grammar exist in, um, quite a few other segments of American society, as you’ve said. But these associations, true or not, and fucked-up as they are, are facts of the American landscape, and unfortunately that means sometimes they’ll determine our writing in ways outside of our intent. Therefore, taking misspellings and racist bile out of one context and placing them in another has to be done, obviously, with a great deal of care. As poets (especially of the “avant-garde” set) we are, again rightly or wrongly, associated with a kind of privilege with regards to language, and so our appropriation of languages that aren’t always our own is frequently going to carry the stamp of something like “class” (though that’s not exactly the right word), and that’s simply something that each poem is going to deal with successfully or not. I think that KSM in “Deer Head Nation” frequently does this kind of appropriation in a way that activates it towards fascinating, nuanced, and on-point uses, but at other times (though I don’t think this is my central problem with “Their Guys...”), Flarfy work does seem to be smarty-pantses minstrelizing (not a word, but I’m going with it) a bunch of less-than-privileged folks because of their lack of education. It probably comes down to a case-by-case basis for when this appropriation is on-point or not—and there’d be a lot of subjective disagreement here.
I’m not sure if I’ve really addressed these questions quite to my satisfaction or yours, but this nonetheless seems to be a convenient spot to return to “Their Guys...” and the specific discussion we’re having around how to read this poem—and I have to say that I’m glad that Maggie raised these questions with regards to a specific poem, because so often these Flarf Wars (or discussion of anything, really) have fallen into a kind of vague generality that, in spite of often being necessary, makes me feel more than a bit wary of making any definite statements (despite the fact that that’s what I was just doing in the paragraph above). Anyway, that aside—I think that a certain amount of our disagreement over how we feel about Magee’s poem is going to come down to our individual subjective responses to the language therein. I’m thinking particularly here about your statement that you find the textual surface of “Their Guys...” to be really interesting. I think it’s been established that, while this certainly isn’t the least interesting poem I’ve ever read on the “surface” level, I do not share this same fascination. But it’s pretty difficult for one of us to say that the other is “wrong” in this regard—without some extraordinarily extreme digging into the genealogies of our own subjectivities, unconscious minds, blah blah, etc., to understand the juridical power shaping how our particular “I just (don’t) like it” factors operate, and I’m not sure if it’s really possible to do that, and if it is, it will probably provoke me to have a freak-out/extended personal crisis.
But this said, in aspects of your reading of “Their Guys...” there are things I both agree and disagree with. I also read Magee’s poem as in a sense taking the various at-times-contradictory perceptions of Asian people—the Asian “takeover”; mentions of height; the title and its plays on the perceptions of Asian men as gay (or at other times, feminized or asexual); the Dragon Lady, etc.—and collecting them into a sort of sprung quasi-narrative of illogic. In the context of this piling on of stereotyped perceptions, I don’t think that the ironic moves being made here are going to be lost on most readers. As you say, the critique is obvious. But maybe that’s exactly the problem: when I pose the question to myself of what the actual critique is, all I end up with in response is something like “dudes—racism is fucked-up.” Which takes me back to my initial response to this poem, which was not that I felt so much as though it was racist but that it made me feel bored and annoyed—the kind of extreme language and the extreme reactions it is trying to provoke didn’t give way to any sense of deeper or more nuanced critique, and since, as I said above, I don’t find the textual surface all that interesting, I was left with very little to keep me engaged. It feels like all provocation and no pay-off. So I guess I’d say, yeah, it is an anti-racist poem, but I’m going to have to disagree with it being all that complex.
There’s more that I’d like to say here about the issues that Joanne raises regarding Magee’s position as a white male poet and the way that that interacts with his poem, but I’m gonna hold off on that (must articulate better). I’m very interested, though, about what you’ve said about KSM and the convenient “forgetting” about him being Arab that I agree does occur in a lot of these discussions. I’d definitely be all for him weighing in here on that and everything else.
Michael
(Also--I am super interested in your rumored Feminist Flarf Suite and would be very thankful if you would backchannel it to me if it is in a state anywhere close to done and/or meeting with your satisfaction. Thanks!)
.... sidestepping....
maggie is on a plane home right now which makes me very happy! i'm sure she's looking forward to delving deeper into this conversation.
in the meantime i cut and pasted Anne Boyer's well-articulated response to Michael Nicoloff's response and Maggie's questioning in the post below. i am so pleased that this discussion is happening in the way that it is.
i, myself, have yet to articulate a response to these posts. i am still contemplating. and i am not as good at open questioning and investigation as my partner is... so i'm choosing to remain silent at this moment.
i have asked more folks to join our discussion.... and i hope they do.
***
i received in the mail lovely surprises from erica kaufman: two belladonna*[s] [rae armantrout and karen weiser] [YES!] and two erica jane kaufmans. i am really excited about this. and i think there needs to be more random free poetry mailings in the world. there has been a little bit of this with suzanne stein's TAXT press chapbooks... although the mailings couldn't exactly be considered random [though, i suppose, someone on the receiving end might think so]. actually, let me clarify... there has been [and will continue to be with her next chapbook which will be coming from David Buuck [and i can't wait to see it] a LOT of FREE poetry coming from suzanne's TAXT. just not exactly random. not exactly not random.
anyone who would like to send us, Minor Americans, free poetry in the snail mail email us and we will probably let you.
and anyone who would like for us to send you free poetry, especially beautiful free poetry like that from TAXT... email us and send us yr address.
i have a lot to read, now. and a day off to do it.
in the meantime i cut and pasted Anne Boyer's well-articulated response to Michael Nicoloff's response and Maggie's questioning in the post below. i am so pleased that this discussion is happening in the way that it is.
i, myself, have yet to articulate a response to these posts. i am still contemplating. and i am not as good at open questioning and investigation as my partner is... so i'm choosing to remain silent at this moment.
i have asked more folks to join our discussion.... and i hope they do.
***
i received in the mail lovely surprises from erica kaufman: two belladonna*[s] [rae armantrout and karen weiser] [YES!] and two erica jane kaufmans. i am really excited about this. and i think there needs to be more random free poetry mailings in the world. there has been a little bit of this with suzanne stein's TAXT press chapbooks... although the mailings couldn't exactly be considered random [though, i suppose, someone on the receiving end might think so]. actually, let me clarify... there has been [and will continue to be with her next chapbook which will be coming from David Buuck [and i can't wait to see it] a LOT of FREE poetry coming from suzanne's TAXT. just not exactly random. not exactly not random.
anyone who would like to send us, Minor Americans, free poetry in the snail mail email us and we will probably let you.
and anyone who would like for us to send you free poetry, especially beautiful free poetry like that from TAXT... email us and send us yr address.
i have a lot to read, now. and a day off to do it.
ANNE BOYER....
said...
This is an interesting discussion, and I actually have two reactions here: the first, a response directly to Michael’s reading of “their guys,” and the second, a response to the popular narrative that MN repeats – that the Flarf “ends up mocking some really easy targets—most frequently, it seems, a kind of stereotypically lower class racist redneck-type who’s had little access to education.”
On the issue of “Their Guys,” I, of course have the privilege of reading the poem (rather than simply hearing it) and further, being able to read it right up next to the Yeats poem about glittering little “Chinamen” and “Hysterical Women” it critiques. I think Mike’s poem is relentlessly and complexly anti-racist, and further, I think it has a fascinating textual surface & a jittery subject position: ie, it is not “bad” in the sense of funny-naïve or uncrafted (not, say, like the Polar Bear Poem that follows it on the Mainstream site w/ the barfing poop.)
However, I know enough about Flarf out-loud to know it can create the effect of monody. This is one way I find Flarf to be cunning. It is understandable, then, that MZ would hear this poem and think it is a poem with a fixed subject position about a stereotypical Asian “chick” – it sounds that way, sometimes, read aloud by a single speaker at a literary event.
Of course, with time to read the poem I think the work becomes entirely something else. Pardon my super-long metaphor, but I read it as on a map drawn by Yeats (of a city, Orientalism) (and outside of this map, a country of the “Great” Western Poetry). Somehow all over the map are the lines and drawings of noisy racist perceptions about Asian folks – that there is a “predominately female culture,” that Asian people are hipper or smarter than white folks, that “they” will take over everything, that “they” exist merely as pornographic objects or cultural threats.
Then it is as if – upon this document, drawn first by Western literature, second by popular Western perception – Mike poured some crazy flarf-solvent, and everything got blurry and terribly wack, so Yeats pops up again and again, and dumb racism, and poetic language, and not so poetic language, and it is all distorted: the haziness what makes the critique obvious. And nothing is in THE PROPER ORDER nor is there a PROPER assigning of “unacceptable” notions to THEM, some evil ignorant other, nothing absolving liberal white folks of these notions, or even absolving the poet, who stands up and reads this work knowing full well the perception of monody that occurs when Flarf is read aloud.
It is hard to imagine, for example, that when reading the last bit, one can read this as anything other than an anti-racist poem:
“The others turned to see one of their men had fallen. Indeed, despite his glittering
blues, greens, and silvers (“As we retreated two white guys on bikes appeared...”) they had him tied up in their old Frontier”
So yeah, tied to their old Frontier, I think it brilliant, and tragic, and well-crafted, and right on taking Yeats to task, and also INAPPROPRIATE in the best way, which is the way it is considered entirely INAPPROPRIATE for white people to do anything other than pretend that racism is a concern for people of color. Say, look at a literary journal & you will find very few works by white poets about race: Flarf, at the very least, does not pretend to live in a culture of normative whiteness.
And (2) of course, the “redneck” story – which I’ll admit drives me batty, because I can’t find the textual evidence for it. So Michael, if you read this, please tell me what poems you had in mind: it could well be they exist, I just don’t know them, so I spent a great deal of time googling Flarf and redneck to see if I could figure out why this perception exists.
My first theory is that it has something to do with Deer Head Nation, which as you probably know, basically involves a half-Yemeni guy with an Arab name googling up a meditation on a “symbol” of white American culture in the wake of 9/11. If folks associate Deer Heads with rednecks, they might think that the book is full of “redneck” speak, but mostly I find in it teenage chat-room speak and the fragmentary language of porn and news and internet commerce.
But when I google up “Flarf” and “Rednecks,” I do find this complaint from Lucipo:
“The sentiment Kent seems to read from Flarf is "those dumb rednecks" rather than "we dumb rednecks." I agree that I get the same feeling Kent does.”
If the redneck narrative around Flarf really does refer specifically to KSM’s work, how can these people who complain that it doesn’t sound like “we dumb rednecks” ignore the fact that an Arab guy culturally isn’t ALLOWED to be a redneck? Check out (if you have the stomach)
http://www.jackshiles.com/Muslim_Humor/Redneck_Page1.html>You Might Be A Redneck Muslim . I was talking to KSM about this & he generously thinks people just forget that he is Arab, that explains it, but I don’t think white people complaining about the oppression of white people in poetry easily “forget” that an Arab man is the one writing the work, esp, when, at least in some popular opinion, (though not necessarily in textual reality) he is “stealing” the words of white people and doing funny fucked-up shit with them. It goes on, right, with the critical meditations upon KSM’s “dick wagging,” which seem to be a projection of fantasies of Arab male hypermasculinity into the critical material surrounding Flarf. There are the weird threats of violence that seem to show up in the anti-Flarf rhetoric, too, guys talking about aiming guns and ass-kicking, and that seems to indicate the rage about Flarf might have a kind of racial undertone (not to mention the all out racist stuff about "anyone named Mohammad" etc.)
But maybe I’m over-reacting. Probably, maybe. I’ll probably later be really ashamed of that first theory. The second theory of the “redneck myth” around Flarf is the idea that people associate racist language with poor people. Or they associate stupid internet speak with poor people. Of course, I think stupid internet speak is the province of people who have the luxury of spending all day or night fucking around on the internet – not the working class – and that racist and sexist language is in no way the sole possession of poor white folks, but some of the Flarf critiques I've read (Daniels, Johnson) seem heavily invested in the idea of equating stupid with poor. Also, there is the weird critical trick going on where these people (Daniels, Johnson) pretend that Flarf is only written by affluent white men, thus continually writing the rest of us out of it’s narrative, and charging critiques of the Flarf with a feeling of “unfairness” & makes it more cunning.
But Michael – I am not saying YOU are doing this – only that you have triggered my speculation on all this by repeating the narrative of the redneck-Flarf that has always confused me. I do think Flarf is one of the few poetries actively engaging with issues of race and with various constructs of whiteness, so it is bound to make us, esp. white folks, feel shaky and weird. We don’t know whether to laugh or cry or throw up. I find writing Flarf causes me to feel pathologically vulnerable: as if all the cultural scabs are being peeled up, as if the WESTERN CANON I sometimes love or hate is flaking off and looks just awful, and to make it worse the Flarf doesn’t come accompanied with any kind of theoretical windbreaker to protect us from the shit storm of language and culture. Just all that.
Oh this is very long. I hope it added something other than word count to the conversation.
Best,
Anne
AND...
Oh, I messed up the links --
racist muslim redneck jokes that will make you probably throw up:
http://www.jackshiles.com/Muslim_Humor/Redneck_Page1.html
Yeats poem that at least might make you queasy:
http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/777/
This is an interesting discussion, and I actually have two reactions here: the first, a response directly to Michael’s reading of “their guys,” and the second, a response to the popular narrative that MN repeats – that the Flarf “ends up mocking some really easy targets—most frequently, it seems, a kind of stereotypically lower class racist redneck-type who’s had little access to education.”
On the issue of “Their Guys,” I, of course have the privilege of reading the poem (rather than simply hearing it) and further, being able to read it right up next to the Yeats poem about glittering little “Chinamen” and “Hysterical Women” it critiques. I think Mike’s poem is relentlessly and complexly anti-racist, and further, I think it has a fascinating textual surface & a jittery subject position: ie, it is not “bad” in the sense of funny-naïve or uncrafted (not, say, like the Polar Bear Poem that follows it on the Mainstream site w/ the barfing poop.)
However, I know enough about Flarf out-loud to know it can create the effect of monody. This is one way I find Flarf to be cunning. It is understandable, then, that MZ would hear this poem and think it is a poem with a fixed subject position about a stereotypical Asian “chick” – it sounds that way, sometimes, read aloud by a single speaker at a literary event.
Of course, with time to read the poem I think the work becomes entirely something else. Pardon my super-long metaphor, but I read it as on a map drawn by Yeats (of a city, Orientalism) (and outside of this map, a country of the “Great” Western Poetry). Somehow all over the map are the lines and drawings of noisy racist perceptions about Asian folks – that there is a “predominately female culture,” that Asian people are hipper or smarter than white folks, that “they” will take over everything, that “they” exist merely as pornographic objects or cultural threats.
Then it is as if – upon this document, drawn first by Western literature, second by popular Western perception – Mike poured some crazy flarf-solvent, and everything got blurry and terribly wack, so Yeats pops up again and again, and dumb racism, and poetic language, and not so poetic language, and it is all distorted: the haziness what makes the critique obvious. And nothing is in THE PROPER ORDER nor is there a PROPER assigning of “unacceptable” notions to THEM, some evil ignorant other, nothing absolving liberal white folks of these notions, or even absolving the poet, who stands up and reads this work knowing full well the perception of monody that occurs when Flarf is read aloud.
It is hard to imagine, for example, that when reading the last bit, one can read this as anything other than an anti-racist poem:
“The others turned to see one of their men had fallen. Indeed, despite his glittering
blues, greens, and silvers (“As we retreated two white guys on bikes appeared...”) they had him tied up in their old Frontier”
So yeah, tied to their old Frontier, I think it brilliant, and tragic, and well-crafted, and right on taking Yeats to task, and also INAPPROPRIATE in the best way, which is the way it is considered entirely INAPPROPRIATE for white people to do anything other than pretend that racism is a concern for people of color. Say, look at a literary journal & you will find very few works by white poets about race: Flarf, at the very least, does not pretend to live in a culture of normative whiteness.
And (2) of course, the “redneck” story – which I’ll admit drives me batty, because I can’t find the textual evidence for it. So Michael, if you read this, please tell me what poems you had in mind: it could well be they exist, I just don’t know them, so I spent a great deal of time googling Flarf and redneck to see if I could figure out why this perception exists.
My first theory is that it has something to do with Deer Head Nation, which as you probably know, basically involves a half-Yemeni guy with an Arab name googling up a meditation on a “symbol” of white American culture in the wake of 9/11. If folks associate Deer Heads with rednecks, they might think that the book is full of “redneck” speak, but mostly I find in it teenage chat-room speak and the fragmentary language of porn and news and internet commerce.
But when I google up “Flarf” and “Rednecks,” I do find this complaint from Lucipo:
“The sentiment Kent seems to read from Flarf is "those dumb rednecks" rather than "we dumb rednecks." I agree that I get the same feeling Kent does.”
If the redneck narrative around Flarf really does refer specifically to KSM’s work, how can these people who complain that it doesn’t sound like “we dumb rednecks” ignore the fact that an Arab guy culturally isn’t ALLOWED to be a redneck? Check out (if you have the stomach)
http://www.jackshiles.com/Muslim_Humor/Redneck_Page1.html>You Might Be A Redneck Muslim . I was talking to KSM about this & he generously thinks people just forget that he is Arab, that explains it, but I don’t think white people complaining about the oppression of white people in poetry easily “forget” that an Arab man is the one writing the work, esp, when, at least in some popular opinion, (though not necessarily in textual reality) he is “stealing” the words of white people and doing funny fucked-up shit with them. It goes on, right, with the critical meditations upon KSM’s “dick wagging,” which seem to be a projection of fantasies of Arab male hypermasculinity into the critical material surrounding Flarf. There are the weird threats of violence that seem to show up in the anti-Flarf rhetoric, too, guys talking about aiming guns and ass-kicking, and that seems to indicate the rage about Flarf might have a kind of racial undertone (not to mention the all out racist stuff about "anyone named Mohammad" etc.)
But maybe I’m over-reacting. Probably, maybe. I’ll probably later be really ashamed of that first theory. The second theory of the “redneck myth” around Flarf is the idea that people associate racist language with poor people. Or they associate stupid internet speak with poor people. Of course, I think stupid internet speak is the province of people who have the luxury of spending all day or night fucking around on the internet – not the working class – and that racist and sexist language is in no way the sole possession of poor white folks, but some of the Flarf critiques I've read (Daniels, Johnson) seem heavily invested in the idea of equating stupid with poor. Also, there is the weird critical trick going on where these people (Daniels, Johnson) pretend that Flarf is only written by affluent white men, thus continually writing the rest of us out of it’s narrative, and charging critiques of the Flarf with a feeling of “unfairness” & makes it more cunning.
But Michael – I am not saying YOU are doing this – only that you have triggered my speculation on all this by repeating the narrative of the redneck-Flarf that has always confused me. I do think Flarf is one of the few poetries actively engaging with issues of race and with various constructs of whiteness, so it is bound to make us, esp. white folks, feel shaky and weird. We don’t know whether to laugh or cry or throw up. I find writing Flarf causes me to feel pathologically vulnerable: as if all the cultural scabs are being peeled up, as if the WESTERN CANON I sometimes love or hate is flaking off and looks just awful, and to make it worse the Flarf doesn’t come accompanied with any kind of theoretical windbreaker to protect us from the shit storm of language and culture. Just all that.
Oh this is very long. I hope it added something other than word count to the conversation.
Best,
Anne
AND...
Oh, I messed up the links --
racist muslim redneck jokes that will make you probably throw up:
http://www.jackshiles.com/Muslim_Humor/Redneck_Page1.html
Yeats poem that at least might make you queasy:
http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/777/
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