Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry

Six | Between Friendship Network and Literary Movement: Flarf as a Poetics of Sociability

six | maria damon Between Friendship Network and Literary Movement Flarf as a Poetics of Sociability flarf, which was hailed as one of the (first) two “avant-garde super­ powers of the twenty-first century,”1 is both a method of writing poetry and a de facto friendship network. The method is characterized by so-called “google-sculpting” (generating material through google searches for key words and phrases and stringing together the results with some authorial massaging) and other internet features, and by its humorous and knowing deployment of “sublime terribleness.”2 While the term “Flarf” and the characteristic embrace of assaultive, funny, and parodically politically incorrect content are attributed to “founder” Gary Sullivan (many others in the poetry world before Flarf’s inception have experimented and continue to do so with using internet materials ), the energy with which a group of loosely connected friends coalesced around this method and sensibility has made it a collective enterprise. Today Flarf comprises a listserv of about fifteen members, though over the past decade-plus many poets and fellow travelers have passed through stages of active participation. In the friendship network that now comprises the listserv and characterized it in the past, no particular friendship stands out as especially germinal, although several members are or have been domestic/romantic couples, and the collective mutates in response to friends getting friends “on the list.” (The Flarflist is now closed, though there have been festivals, readings, and individual book and anthology projects, as well as an open and highly active “Postflarf ” listserv.) I will thus not be addressing one singular friendship in what follows, but rather exploring both some literary friendships as cross-millennial influences, and the success and productivity of this affective circle as a model of anti-dyadic friendship in the contemporary techno-poetiscape. Between Friendship Network and Literary Movement | 131 Flarf’s generational reinvention of and its relation to the recent or distant literary past have been noted with regard to the Surrealists and Dadaists, Oulipo, and certainly the New York School (indeed one could loosely describe the Flarf aesthetic—its casual veneer, its insistence on the detritus of daily life as subject material—and its members as third generation New York School). There are differences between Flarf and these groups as well: earlier avant-gardes, for example, sometimes evolved into fairly rigid and exclusionary structures, with a kingpin calling the shots—André Breton among the Surrealists, Filippo Marinetti among the Futurists, or Guy Debord among the Situationists. No such mechanism has arisen in Flarf. Nor is there a Flarf manifesto; such a thing would be considered too serious, too coercive. Any Flarf poem, the more vulgar the better, could be a manifesto, but it would not speak for the group (poems are not collectively composed, but shared on the collective list). There are counterintuitive forebears as well, primarily Dante Alighieri’s and Brunetto Latini’s dolce stil nuovo circle—my focus here. Such older antecedents suggest that, while Flarf’s origins were organically rooted in a friendship network, it can be placed (and to some degree, depending on which “Flarfie” you ask, places itself) in a self-conscious literary tradition of iconoclasm that nonetheless retains a malleability responsive to its shifting contexts. Flarf’s deliberately awful parody of contemporary poetic tics and allout revels in the most banal internet detritus raised to the status of poetry are a form of demotic revolution, a poetic claim for the vernacular, the “life-giving” vulgar, which at least one friendship-based poet—Frank O’Hara—has explicitly linked with love. In this essay, the rubric of friendship and mentorship firmly linked to the vernacular (Dante’s and Latini’s poetics emphatically advocated use of the demotic) arches over the paired phenomena of collaborative friendship and un/timeliness; that is, the phenomenon of being out of step with one’s times, a step ahead, behind, or both simultaneously. It does so through calling up a curious (but not completely misplaced) intertext; if Flarf provides a snapshot poetics (hello Allen Ginsberg) of the present moment, then Book XV of Dante’s Inferno, which chronicles the (fictional) meeting of Dante the pilgrim with his maybe-sodomite mentor, the encyclopedist, banker, lawyer, poet, orator, exile, and statesman Latini, looks backward 132 | m aria da mon to a paradigmatic recognition of the linguistic and homosocial queerness (I intend “queerness” both in terms of sexuality and in broader terms of torqued, deliberate “wrongness”) of literary and civic mentorship in the wake...