Briefly: I am fascinated by the role of language and narrative in identity and meaning-making, but I’m still searching for the right words to speak about it. Maybe I, too, should turn to Google for the answers. 10 tips on how to write a poem: “If you are writing a poem because you want to capture a feeling that you experienced, then you don’t need these tips. Just write whatever feels right. …If, however, your goal is to communicate with a reader…writing what feels right to you won’t be enough.” Reader: I’m preemptively grateful for your consideration of the following. Perhaps, in the style of the audience of these new [art?] forms, you’ll read some new meaning into the matter I lay out below.
I’ll leave the poetry to Jordan and Abigail, and to Jessica too. The fact that I’m struggling with originality here only belabors my point. Forgive me if I sound like a broken record but—there’s nothing new about flarf, or about conceptual poetry. At least Dworkin nods to his inheritance as an ancestor of modernism in the internet-age. If I had a Twitter I’d @kg_ubu: “If you have to call yourself avant-garde, are you really?” (Note: If you’re bored, absolutely take a moment to read through Goldsmith’s Twitter and roll your eyes with me). Dworkin helpfully points out that “the rejection of a concept is itself a concept” (“The Fate of Echo” xxxiii) but I want to force our awareness to the fact that the concept itself demands scrutiny beyond our blasé dismissal of yet another batch of self-congratulatory artistes.
I don’t understand how a [Flarfer? Conceptualist?] can conceive of sitting down to create something meaningless. “Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s?” (Goldsmith, “Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo,” 2). As Bernes points out, “detached from its context, [a statement] magnetizes to itself all kinds of projected material, confirming the deep anxieties…that the initial statement might have assuaged” (774). In other words, someone else’s words take on a meaning of your own. Why do we not understand the bestowal of a new magnetic charge to a fragment of text as a creative act in itself? Does not the conferral of a new meaning to words beyond what their original speaker intended not constitute communication? These words, if they do not reflect the authors’ identities, at least enter into discourse with their audience. These are not empty words if they awaken something in us, bring us to consciousness of a new set of connotations and consequences for the way we, too, use words in our quotidian. This is what we saw in Embassytown: that the ability to infuse words with new meaning, to live in the powerful in-between space of the metaphor, is a fundamental part of our human identity.
I read “The Swiss Just Do Whatever” and I want to understand, but I don’t. “The Swiss Just Do Whatever” reminds me of my human cognitive abilities (limitations?) and creates in me the bizarre urge to find parallels between Sadam Hussein and Neil Patrick Harris. I read the notes on “Fact” by Craig Dworkin and I’m irritated on the artist’s behalf that a piece of self-reflexive writing needs to label itself “self-reflexive” to facilitate comprehension but—from whence this need to be understood? Someone’s subjectivity is being revealed here. I’m not sure if it’s mine, or the artist’s, or some deeper cultural awareness, but there’s clear meaning behind this self-proclaimed process.
Dworkin also suggests that “compositional tactics are never inherently significant, but that they do always signify; their meaning simply changes with the cultural moment in which they are deployed” (“The Fate of Echo” xlv). We might do well here to inquire about the dangers of the unreflecting jumbling of words. I’m grateful to Jordan for linking us to “Chicks Dig War,” which I read with a suppressed laugh and promptly sent along to some radical femme friends who will understand it as a tongue-in-cheek critique of warmongering and gender roles. I don’t know anything about Drew Gardner, the title of whose other works could lead a careless reader to suspect that he hates Flarf as much as I do, but, out of a need for meaning, I read sarcasm and anger and something a little revolutionary in his recycled phrases. Words are tools, but they’re heavy, and ought to be wielded with care so as not to destroy the structures they build. Goldsmith invites us to “pick our poison,” unconscious, perhaps, of the connotation that, like poison, an artist’s medium and material still need to be carefully selected and distributed, with an eye to their target (context) to ensure the intended effect.
