Flarf is Officially Dead & Stop Laughing at 'Cock'!

So some claim that flarf died after Dan Hoy's essay "The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf: What Happens when Poets Spend Too Much Time Fucking Around on the Internet." Others claim flarf suffered a "mob attack" during the controversy surrounding Michael Magee's poem "Their Glittering Asian Guys are Gay." Others blame flarf's untimely death on the timely publication of the flarf folio in Poetry Magazine. Some even say that flarf died when Gary Sullivan--one of its founders--cut his hand.

Despite all the drama, flarf managed to survive...until december 5, 2009, when flarf took its last gasp at the bowery poetry club in new york city. r.i.p. (rest in prosody).

who killed flarf, you might be asking? the answer will shock you! read below to see which member of flarf destroyed the movement.

now i wasnt there, but here's what i've heard through the blogvine: someone was performing flarf at the bowery and NADA GORDON(!) just couldnt take it anymore. posted on her facebook then made public on her blog, she explains why she killed flarf:

[...] the nervous macho laughter after each "dirty word" was distracting and incongruous. [...] I am hardly a prude. I am known as something of a humorist. There was something about that laughter, though, that made me feel almost violent. [...] It was not judgmental so much as an emotional, visceral observation on my part. I didn't want to censor the laughers at all, but I did want to tell them that I resented their laughter and was annoyed by it.

[...] Yeah, her laughter felt macho to me, too, like it was piercing the text in a really interruptive and egotistical way. [...] I don't know. Maybe I was totally off base in making what I called that "intervention," [...] I didn't give them a withering look, and even if I had, how would they have seen, since their backs were to me and it was pretty dark in there?

yes, i know, this is the critique that many have leveled against flarf in the past, but it's different when it comes from within. but since surrealism survived breton, perhaps flarfers/laughers can stand up and keep going even after being indicted by one of their own.

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i am only kidding! flarf is alive and well. nada gordon was not actually referring to flarf, but to an equally strange phenomenon: laughing after each 'dirty word' ...at a poetry reading.

on 12/5/09, arianna reines read at the bowery, and a few people laughed throughout the reading at the 'dirty words'. in the middle of the reading, reines gave the audience an opportunity to speak. gordon 'intervened.' causing quite a stir.

one of the 'laughers' (Jenna) writes for JEZEBEL magazine. she captured the experience in an article titled: "Let the Laughers Stand Up!": Scenes from the World's Most Annoying Poetry Reading."

According to Jenna, the following scene occurred after gordon's intervention:

"Let the laughers stand up!" shouted a woman who I think was Eileen Myles. "Let's interrogate the laughers." Eileen fucking "rock star of poetry" Myles was mad at us. (Was she serious? I couldn't tell.) A few people I didn't know stood up, then sat down again. Others raised their hands. I stood, copped to being a laugher, then felt sheepish, like I was taking up the flag of a country I wasn't sure I could defend. We tried to make a case for ourselves — "I laughed, 'cause it was good," I offered, kind of lamely, over the shouts; my girlfriend sat, open mouthed. My guy friend said, "I thought it was an absolutely savage satire of the idiocy of pornography."

"There was laughter as soon as the word 'cock' appeared!" shot back a man who found our defense unconvincing. It was then that I realized, these people weren't questioning our etiquette: they were questioning our politics. This man had appointed himself to the task of stopping me and the other laughers from ganging up on the nice lady poet. To this crowd, we might as well have been frat boys crushing cans on our foreheads. We were making people "uncomfortable" with our "snickering" and it was time to "interrogate" that.

wow, sounds a little like the laughers are justifying flarf to a flarfist who's interrogating their motives.  is the universe spinning the wrong direction?

you can listen to the entire reading & interrogation here on pennsound. you can here flarf die (the intervention) about midway thru (though i recommend you listen to whole thing to hear the 'laughers') (it's only about 10-15 minutes total).

q: what do you think about this whole fiasco? what do you find annoying /inappropriate/in-need-of-intervention at poetry readings? what does the future hold for flarf?

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so this reminds me of a reading at st mark's i went to when i was in NYC in 2008. the readers were steve mccaffery, marjorie welish, and karen mac cormac. i was sitting by myself, and who ends up sitting next to me: the one and only charles bernstein! because i am a huge bernstein fan, i was too nervous to speak to him. so instead, i listened to him. even tho he wasnt one of the readers, he was making all kinds of interesting noises during the reading. at first, i found it distracting. but then i started to really listen to how his body was responding to the poems...and i started hearing the poems through his noises. a new kind of hermeneutics perhaps. and even though i couldn't tell what orifices some of bernstein's sounds were emerging from, so many new and exciting orifices of meaning opened up in the poem for me.

you think i'm kidding? i took pics of the readers and when i set my iphone on my lap it accidentally took a pic of my neighbors. see the weird angle (pick image to enlarge):