Yo, poetry fans. Actually, I'm not in Romania yet -- not until Thursday. But who'd read a post called "Hello from Brooklyn"?
The Ovidius International Poetry Fest, sponsored by the Writers Union of Romania, sounds rockin'. Just look where they're putting us up:
Hotel Cocor, Black Sea Coast
First thing, I'm getting a mud bath. And definitely checking out those "sonorous bathroom facilities."
For coincidence fans: the last time I blogged here I posted a thing about the poetry and mythology class I was about to teach at the New School. I'll be teaching that class while at the fest, and in fact I'll be teaching Ovid -- "Calliope's Song" from Metamorphoses -- while I'm in the coastal town where he was exiled (Constanta, then called Tomis). Why was Ovid exiled? In Tristia he writes that it was "carmen et error": a poem and a mistake. Speculation runs that his Ars Amatoria influenced the granddaughter of the emperor Augustus to commit adultery. Those were the days, eh poets?!!
And speaking of Ovid, and 'cause I'm still in Brooklyn, here's an excerpt from my fellow flarfist Rodney Koeneke's poem "Tristia," from his totally excellent Rules for Drinking Forties (Cy Press, 2009):
Go, little book, to her, where I can't enter
and serve as her doorjamb, or bookshelf prop, or coaster
or a clean spot on the floor for her to drop
her T-shirts or negligee (forbidden!), or be that place
where she can indolently tuck her billets-doux
that accumulate, and she pushes them aside irresponsibly
to look at maybe when she gets moderately loaded
on warm fall evenings . . .
Don't tell how I comport myself at orgies
with the stateliness of a dowager, how frequently in love I resemble
a lapsed blog or a model train enthusiast. Speak if you have to just
nonsense
... I'm here, deep in Thai donut
shop radio stutter, reminding the crullers
of carmen et error, the dull irk of distance,
how gorgeous she made even loam.
What is "flarf"? Thanks.
NB
Posted by: Noah Burke | June 08, 2009 at 11:20 AM
Hi Noah. Thanks for asking. If you don't mind, I'm just going to send you (below) the postscript for my book, Annoying Diabetic Bitch, which has a pretty complete answer:
In 2003 Gary Sullivan asked me if I wanted to join a poetry listserv: a handful of poets were entering outrageous and/or inappropriate word combinations into the Google search engine and making poems out of the results, then emailing them around to each other. Lines from the emailed poems could then be reworked in equally outrageous and/or inappropriate ways and sent around again for further recombining. Gary said the poems were called "flarf." I was delighted with the invitation, and the prospects: I'd been collaging text material in poems almost since I first started writing, in 1978, and had always been drawn to running funny, vulgar, non-"poetic" language — the beef-tongued, stockyards parlance I grew up with on the south side of Chicago — up against "beautiful" words (after all, as a poet I am attracted to "the Beautiful"). It seemed like a generous, wabi-sabi kind of poetry that could inhabit bodies very different from the poet's own and allow them to speak. Plus a certain amount of control (i.e., ego) would have to be surrendered, allowing the word-image to come under the influence of chance. Who knew who would be speaking? People I didn't know, certainly. People I didn't necessarily like.
The community aspect of the project appealed to me as well. The poems seemed to have been written by a meta-mind: in my poems I could see traces of my friends' poems, and in theirs I could see my own. By constantly incorporating bits of the posted poems into new poems, the content of each subsequent poem reflected the collective sensibility, while still containing the indelible stamp of its lowly origin. And while the original poem might remain inviolate, we could watch it morph again and again, creating hilarious, outrageous fractal integers of itself, as if composed by a team of comedy writers in the Darwinian TAZ of tin pan Googleland.
There's a scene in Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of "Nosferatu" where the citizens of a town gripped by plague dance and sing and carouse among corpses rotting and burning in the town square. In a way, flarf does pretty much the same thing. But without that awful stench.
Posted by: Sharon Mesmer | June 08, 2009 at 11:28 AM
Thanks. Sounds like fun.
NB
Posted by: Noah Burke | June 09, 2009 at 04:12 PM