Flarf Appreciation Day

After spending a couple hours last night, sifting through you-tube to try and find the perfect flarf video to show during my in-class presentation, I feel that I have a new appreciation for the genre. However, it seems that by simply writing flarf, one can’t get the full effect of the message. After watching numerous performances, it is clear that flarf authors have a very particular feeling in mind when writing their flarf poems - feelings that simply can’t be captured by mere text.
Take Gary Sullivan, for instance. I would describe his recitals as unprovoked explosions of electricity. (Of course, I only use that description because I can’t think of anything better). At the 2006 Flarf Festival, his presentation of “Poetry Phone” gave off a vibe that simply couldn’t be elicited by a mere individual reading of the work. He knows which statements he wants to emphasize, where he should take pauses, and all the other nuances of his work. These little distinctions make flarf poetry, it seems, more of a performance art than merely a textual one.
That having been said, there is something wonderful about stumbling across a piece of flarf and being able to interpret it your own way. While reading different sections of the flarf section of Jacket magazine, I experimented with reading a few aloud. Besides the fact that my roommates thought I’d gone a little batty, I had a lot of fun trying out different characterizations as I was reading through these poems.
When you’re just reading to yourself, it’s very easy to just scan over the words, not really allowing the finer points of the words to sink in. Yet flarf seems to be an art that pushes the English language to its limits – thus it deserves to be both written and spoken. If I had to characterize it into a genre, I would not hesitate to call it a performance art.
The work of Rodney Koeneke provides me with a case-in-point. Though Gary Sullivan has some real winners (he should, he’s the originator of the genre), Koeneke’s works really left an impression on me.
I first discovered him while sifting through videos from the 2006 Flarf Festival, where he presented his flarf poem “Pizza Kitty,” then recognized his name again while reading selections from the July 2006 edition of Jacket magazine. His were actually the first poems I experimented with reading aloud – yet having already heard his performances of “Pizza Kitty” and “On the Clamways,” I think I already had in the back of my mind an idea of how these should be presented.
I guess what I’m really getting at is the tension I’ve felt when reading these poems as to whether I can really appreciate them without hearing them from the mouth of the original author.