Abstract In this essay I aim to evaluate the effectiveness of stupidity as an anti-system gesture. All movements in the art world begin as a rebellion against an idea of an entrenched manner of thinking, generally characterised as belonging to an Institution. In the Reith lectures, artist Grayson Perry says that rebellions are now actively encouraged by the art world and so rebellion has become a part of the established art community. The only stable currency of the art world, Perry goes on to say, is seriousness. By reveling in its own stupidity, I suggest in the course of this essay that writing Flarfist poetry is a one effective way to rebel against Institutionalism. I evaluate Flarf’s success and the success of stupidity as a means of undermining current ideas about art and about poetry in particular. In this, Avital Ronell’s Stupidity has been an invaluable source of philosophical theories about the workings of stupidity and the manner in which it effects literature. Flarf is generally regarded as a waste of time. It is not serious enough to warrant the consideration of most academics, or the time of most critics. It does what it is not supposed to do as a poetic act and this is what makes it particularly fascinating and worth our consideration as it not only presents a challenge to what we consider to be poetry but an insight into the lengths to which art must now go to enact a rebellion. Key Words: Flarf, Stupidity, Rebellion, Anti-system, Institutionalisation

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There’s Nothing Worth Saying About [Flarf]’: Evaluating the Success of Stupidity as an Anti-System Gesture.1 ‘We are now in the end state of art,’ said Turner Prize winning artist Grayson Perry,

‘Anything can be art now, we’re kind of agreed.’2 The art world, Perry goes on to say,

actively encourages rebellion against the Institution, to the point at which rebellion has

become institutionalised. I realise I appear to have debunked my essay within two sentences

as it is difficult to make an anti-system gesture when the system encourages such things.

The answer to this problem lies within one of Perry’s other lectures in which he postulates

that the most valued currency in the art world is seriousness, whether that means taking

yourself or your art seriously or creating serious art.3 An anti-system gesture targets the

things most valued by the Institution and so a rebellion against seriousness would cross the

final frontier. This essay will ask whether the plunge into stupidity taken by the American

Postmodern poetry movement ‘Flarf’ is enough to save it from the open arms of the

Institution.

Stupidity. What is it? Notoriously hard to define appears to be the first answer to that

question. Avital Ronell in Stupidity ‘hesitates’ to define it and the majority of the

philosophers who have contemplated stupidity have considered it in regard to the

ignorance/intelligence binary.4 To define stupidity for the purposes of this essay, I would like

to suggest that the differentiating factor between stupidity and ignorance is choice.

Stupidity, writes James F. Welles, is an informed and deliberate mentality.5 While you

1 Michael Robbins, ‘Ripostes’, Poetry Magazine (July, 2013) 2 Grayson Perry, The Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery: 2013, Nice Rebellion, Welcome In! (Londonderry: BBC Radio 4, 2013) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03f9bg7 [Accessed 9th May, 2014]. 3 Grayson Perry, The Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery: 2013, Democracy Has Bad Taste (London: BBC Radio 4, 2013) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03969vt [Accessed 9th May, 2014]. 4 Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003) p. 3; Ronell, on several occasions, draws attention to the fact that ‘stupidity does not allow itself to be opposed to knowledge in any simple way’ (p. 5). 5 James F. Welles, Understanding Stupidity (Mount Pleasant: Arcadia, 1997).

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cannot help but be ignorant, you choose to be stupid - it is a course of action rather than an

attribute - and it is thus characterised by Gilles Deleuze as not a fact of character but a

‘structure of thinking’.6 Stupidity, therefore, knows the rules that govern society (or in this

case, poetics) but chooses to subvert or simply ignore those rules. The difference between

an act of rebellion and an act of stupid rebellion is that

a stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of

persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.7

As Roland Barthes discusses in Barthes to the Third Power, stupidity obsesses authors

because it is the thing they most fear.8 It enfeebles because ‘nothing keeps you down like

the mark of stupidity’.9 Flarf is an act of stupid rebellion therefore, as in a peer culture

obsessed with avoiding stupidity, being ‘flarfy’ is likely to leave you as a social pariah.10

Flarf deliberately breaks the laws that govern society - one of its key goals is ‘doing what one

is not supposed to do’ - and is therefore, by the terms of this definition, stupid.11 It does

what one is not supposed to do in a way that is detrimental to itself and to others. Its

stupidity, I would like to argue, is its key asset and what sets it apart from the other acts of

rebellion within the art world.

6 Gilles Deleuze quoted in Ronell, p. 21. 7 Carlo M. Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (2007) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dA-ZoY25k0PWtG2ffjHBBt3iWp0yJN1E1sa31Q-zcgo/edit?pli=1 [Accessed 9th May, 2014] p. 6. 8 Roland Barthes quoted in Ronell, p. 11. 9 Ronell, p. 27. 10 Gary Sullivan defines ‘flarfy’ as ‘to be wrong, awkward, stumbling, semi-coherent, fucked up, un-P.C. […] doing what one is not supposed to do.’ Gary Sullivan, ’A Brief Guide to Flarf Poetry’, Poets.org (2003) http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22109 [Accessed 14th April, 2014]. 11 Ibid.

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‘A Boatload of Vacuous Bullshit’12

In ‘A Brief Guide to Flarf Poetry’ Flarf’s founding father, Gary Sullivan, describes Flarf as ‘a

kind of corrosive, cute or cloying awfulness’, adding that it is ‘wrong. Un-P.C. and out of

control’.13 These descriptors, along with two proposals by Ronell will shape my reading of

the way Flarf harnesses stupidity. The first that ‘stupidity exceeds and undercuts materiality,

[…] fatigues knowledge and wears down history’ and the second that stupidity is a ‘domain

where language meets its unmaking’.14

Stupidity unmakes language not by refusing to speak but by taking speech and

blocking transmission of meaning through disturbing the structures that are used in its

manufacture. In ‘Prince Charles, Intently Observing The Behavior of An Hedgehog’, Drew

Gardner adopts the parataxical arrangements encouraged by Ron Silliman’s ‘New Sentence’

but they are adopted to such an extent as to totally destabilise even the initial construction

of sense.15 Gardner does this by taking two clauses that are independently meaningful such

as ‘the cracks in the wall’ and ‘a slap in the face’ and joining them together with a

conjunction that frustrates any possible causal link. The line thus reads: ‘the cracks in the

walls between a slap in the face’ (l.4). This is then repeated on a larger scale with the subject

matter of the poem, which in this case ranges from Dracula to cormorants to anti-imperialist

hedgehogs. In playing with the manner in which language relies on context for the

12 Michael Robbins’ description of Flarf from Michael Robbins, ‘Ripostes’, Poetry Magazine (July, 2013) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246092 [Accessed 6th May, 2014]. 13 Sullivan, Gary, ’A Brief Guide to Flarf Poetry’, Poets.org (2003) http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22109 [Accessed 14th April, 2014]. 14 Ronell, p. 3; Ronell, p. 6. 15 Drew Gardner, ‘Prince Charles, Intently Observing The Behavior Of An Hedgehog’ in Chomp Away (Cumberland: Combo Books, 2010) pp. 20-21; Stupidity is the main distinguishing factor between Flarf and its predecessors, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. Flarf, as I will go on to demonstrate, shares their concerns about the lack of distinction between high and low culture, speech as a naturalised, social construction which causes an emphasis on poetry as mechanism. The key difference is that while L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry went on to spawn Conceputalism and Flarf, Flarf is so nonsensical and wilfully stupid that it vetoes the possibility of poetic growth down the avenue it forges.

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production of meaning, Gardner frustrates sense and unmakes the systems by which

communication operates. Reading Flarf is a disorientating process. So conditioned to search

for meaning, an encounter with the nothingness of non-meaning generates a sense of

linguistic otherness. The structures that govern English syntax remain firmly in place but the

end to which they work is absent. Ronell writes, ‘it is the nature of stupidity to stump – to

enfeeble and intimidate – but also to release’.16 It is difficult to accept that there is no

rationale behind the absence of a full stop at the end of the poem (apart from, perhaps, to

allow for a pun about it being point-less) but once done, there is curious beauty in the

disparate words and phrases. Perhaps this is because of Flarf’s engagement with the cute

and the cloying, comforting readers with the ‘marvelous hedgehog in a bowl of milk’ (l. 9)

and the familiar concrete and proper nouns of the poem root it in a material world as

familiar as the dearth of meaning is disturbing. Language, therefore, meets its unmaking in

Gardner’s sustained use of parataxis.

In a manner similar to Gardner’s corrosion of language, K. Silem Mohammad’s

Sonnagrams ‘exceed and undercut materiality’.17 Mohammad creates sonnets by running

the lines of a Shakespearean sonnet through an anagram generator.18 The letters, the

material building blocks of the poem are therefore left entirely the same but the original

sense is lost. Language, however, does not meet its unmaking in Mohammad’s work as it

does in Gardner’s. The Sonnagrams are about the reinscription of meaning rather than the

destruction of sense. Thus, ‘Vac-U-Cash Devo Vogue’ reads:

Through subway tunnels hardly worth a token

Nightmarish offshore lurkers make their way

Towards a Gypsy shelter in Hoboken,

Where everything authentic is outré.19

16 Ronell, p. 7. 17 Ronell, p. 3. 18 K. Silem Mohammad quoted in Hoover, p. 727. 19 K. Silem Mohammad, ‘Vac-U-Cash Devo Vogue’ in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology ed. by Paul Hoover, 2nd edn. (London: Norton, 2013) p. 731.

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The Sonnagrams are corrosive in taking what is considered to be high culture and

reinscribing it with the Gypsy shelters and lurkers of low culture. The rewriting prompts a

consideration that ideas about culture are entirely socially constructed and the material

make-up of any form of written culture is always the same rearrangement of twenty-six

letters. In the Sonnagrams, Mohammad ‘wears down history’ by dismantling a literary

monument.

Flarf fatigues knowledge in so far as it deliberately stretches the boundaries of what

its readership can be expected to know. It is largely constructed using obscure cultural

references. ‘Leggo my eggo’ for example is a reference to an advertising campaign for a

brand of American waffles.20 The arm of Flarf that engages in Googlism takes this to new

extremes as it uses the results of random searches to create poetry. The changing nature of

the site’s search mechanism makes it impossible for any amount of educated reading to

retrace the process of construction. Flarf, however, does not simply force its readers to

search for obscure references. It fatigues knowledge by problematising the notion that

finding a source for a reference will aid understanding. Even if you knew where Flarf’s 2004

obsession with clambakes stemmed from, you would be no closer to understanding ‘Booby

Clambake’.21 Similarly, understanding the allusions to John Grey’s Men are from Mars,

Women are From Venus and the London West End show The Book of Mormon in

I'm blaming Mormon hormone replacement therapy

that Women are from Venus, Men are from the Book of Mormon

where God has blonde chicks hanging all over him!

20 Drew Gardner, ‘Why Flarf Is Better Than Conceptualism’ in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology ed. by Paul Hoover, 2nd edn. (London: Norton, 2013) pp. 944- 946. 21 Flarf Collective, ‘Booby Clambake’ (Feb. 2004) http://mainstreampoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2004/02/booby-clambake.html [Accessed 11th May, 2014]

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does very little to aid understanding.22 Flarf therefore problematises the link between

knowledge and comprehension and fatigues the idea that understanding goes hand in hand

with a Google search.

‘Against Stupidity the Very Gods Themselves Contend in Vain’23

We have seen the strategies that Flarf employs and the question that now awaits us is

whether Flarf can employ its stupidity in contending with criticism. In 2010, after Vanessa

Place, a Conceptualist poet, delivered an essay entitled ‘Notes on Why Conceptualism is

Better than Flarf’, Drew Gardner responded with ‘Why Flarf Is Better Than Conceptualism’.24

I would like to draw your attention to Vanessa Place’s point 10, mirrored by Gardner’s

‘Conceptualism has one answer…’ (Appendix A). Gardner replicates Place’s passage but

replaces ‘evil’ with ‘Sandy Duncan’. As suggested earlier, a Google search for Sandy Duncan

will not reveal anything particularly evil about the American celebrity, it is simply a puerile

means of graffiting Place’s text. During his trip to the Orient, Gustave Flaubert encountered

a column inscribed, in giant letters, with ‘Thompson’. For Flaubert, stupidity supplanted the

monument in a violent act of appropriation.25 So it is with Gardner and Place for, in

inscribing the monument of her text with ‘Sandy Duncan’, Gardner pulls it ‘from a context it

might have enjoyed without his appropriative signature’.26 Flaubert saw ‘Thompson’ as

leaving ‘a huge turd where a monument once stood’ and the name of that turd, in this case,

22 Flarf Collective, ‘I Am Mormon-Hot’ (Feb. 2010) http://mainstreampoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/i-am-mormon-hot.html [Accessed 11th May, 2014] 23 Friedrich Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans), trans. Anna Swanwick (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2007), Act III, sc. vi. 24 Vanessa Place, ‘Notes on Why Conceptualism is Better than Flarf’ (April, 2010) http://conceptualwriting101.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/vanessa-place-notes-on-why.html [Accessed 9th May, 2014]. 25 Gustave Flaubert discussed in Ronell, pp. 12 -14. 26 Ronell, p. 13.

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is ‘Sandy Duncan’.27 Rather than debate with Place, Gardner simply negates her argument,

ruins her monument. At an early point in his text, Gardner cuts Place off entirely and

supplants her argument with ‘blah blah blah blah’.28 This raises the most dangerous facet of

stupidity in a society it troubles– stupidity can only be met by another stupid act.

‘Greatness,’ writes Jean Paul, ‘should not scorn stupidity’ for how could Place give a

reasoned response to Gardner’s appropriation of her text?29

We Are All Individuals (I’m Not)

When stupidity is so effective at shutting down criticism, it might come as a surprise that not

all writers put it to work like the Flarfists. It must not be forgotten, at this point, that

stupidity is socially unacceptable. It breaks codes that govern ‘adult’ behaviour by acting ill

advisedly and, because it is socially unacceptable, it damages the person who chooses to act

stupidly. Ronell writes, inspired by Roland Barthes assertion that stupidity is what writers

fear the most, ‘it seizes your autobiographical effort, taking the place of your ‘I’, henceforth

enfeebled, dominated by shame’.30 In the same way that ‘Thompson’ appropriated

Pompey’s column, so stupidity appropriates and reinscribes a writer’s work, taking the place

of the ‘I’. It manifests in readers’ comments of ‘the writer was stupid’ in which stupid and

the writer become synonymous. Thomas Pynchon too writes that writing ‘abandons you […]

to the experience of your own stupidity’.31 There is a sense that stupidity and the writer are

different entities, that stupidity has a will of its own that can ‘hijack’ the body.32 For

Pynchon, he is the object of writing’s abandonment and finds himself mired in stupidity

27 Ronell, p. 12. 28 Gardner, ‘Why Flarf Is Better Than Conceptualism’, p. 944. 29 Jean Paul, quoted in Ronell, p. 15. 30 Ronell, p. 11. 31 Thomas Pynchon, quoted in Ronell, p. 25. 32 Ronell, p. 26.

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against his will. This is perhaps symptomatic of a fear of the conscious, wilful acts of

stupidity I detail in this essay. If stupidity hijacks the writer then the most subversive facet of

stupidity, the element of choice, is neutralised.

For the Flarfists, stupidity can be an active gesture against the system because, for

the most part, the group functions as a collective. On their blog any poems posted are

authored by ‘Flarf collective’ and Sharon Mesmer says of the process, ‘the poems seem to

have been written by a meta-mind’.33 This destruction of authorial authority removes the ‘I’

that stupidity would otherwise have subsumed and anonymity absorbs any social shame.

Abandonment becomes liberation and many of the Flarfists emphasise that ‘the poet is

many people in Flarf’.34 The huge range of sources that shape the arm of Flarf poetry that

uses Googlism further disintegrate the ‘I’ that stupidity subsumes.35 The internet certainly

encourages stupidity, enabled by the anonymity the interface can grant its users. I would like

to propose, in response to Dan Hoy’s statement that as ‘television already does what the

Flarfists do’ they should leave poetry and ‘go intern at Fox news’, that stupidity is the

differentiating factor between the two mediums.36 Take a programme such as You’ve Been

Framed as an example. We, the collective laugh at you, the ‘I’, the column appropriated by

stupidity. On the internet, acts of stupidity generate from the hive mind and so cannot

33 Sharon Mesmer, ‘Flarf is Dead, Long Live Post-Flarf’ (2010) http://www.thescreamonline.com/poetry/poetry7-3/flarf.html [Accessed 9th May, 2014]. 34 Drew Gardner, ‘Flarf is Life, the Poetry of Affect’ Boston Review (Feb. 2014) http://www.bostonreview.net/poetry/drew-gardner-flarf-life-poetry-affect [Accessed 9th May, 2014]. 35 In Dan Hoy’s ‘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’, he points out that Flarf, by failing to emphasise the poetic choices involved in their writing and the nature of Google as a selective machine often portray their poetry as more natural than it is. Perhaps, I would tentatively suggest, this is because of a fear of subsumption of the ‘I’ by stupidity. Dan Hoy ‘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’, Jacket Magazine (April, 2006) http://jacketmagazine.com/29/hoy-flarf.html [Accessed 6th May, 2014]. 36 Hoy, ‘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’.

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stupidity cannot subsume a single subject. Reddit is a prime example, as its users post

embarrassing, potentially incriminating facts about themselves to its feeds.37 These

confessions of stupidity can be shameless because the ‘I’ is a faceless entity, thus humour is

generated at stupidity as a concept rather than directly channelled at a subject. For those

Flarfists who do step out from under the cloak of anonymity, the inability of critics to

counter their actions with anything other than a complaint that mirrors their intentions

(you’re being stupid) mostly silences objections.

There is, however, one objection that does raise a potential roadblock for the

Flarfists. Jaron Lanier writes ‘it is safer to be an aggregator [as the Flarfists are when they

sort digital material] of the collective. You get to include all sorts of material without

committing to anything’.38 Joined with the sense of alienation that the sort of parataxis

employed by Flarfists like Gardner can cause for readers, Flarf’s desire to be an aggravator of

social morality could create a nasty cocktail. Gardner writes that ‘Flarf channels socially

problematic material as a way of addressing the problems’ but as it rarely provides a

solution to the issues it raises, Flarf could be accused of raising contentious issues purely for

shock value.39 This is a difficult complaint to assess as those who go looking for it often find

offence. It is entirely possible that poems such as ‘A Copy of the Koran Written in Root Beer’

and ‘I am Mormon-Hot’ may cause offense to members of those communities but as I do not

belong to either of these social groups I do not feel entitled to speak for them. 40 However,

Flarf’s desire to be un-P.C. and offensive does create a potential comparison between it and

37 See, for example ‘What’s the worst idea you’ve had’ on ‘AskReddit’ reddit: the front page of the internet (2014) http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1uggjn/whats_the_worst_idea_you_had/ [Accessed 10th May, 2014]. 38 Jack Schofield, ‘Jaron Lanier on the stupidity of the hive mind’, The Guardian (May 2006) http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2006/may/31/jaronlanieron [Accessed 10th May 2014]. 39 Gardner, ‘Flarf is Life: The Poetry of Affect’. 40 Drew Gardner, ‘A Copy Of The Koran Written In Rootbeer’ in Petroleum Hat (Berkeley: Small Press, 2005) pp. 27-28.

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internet trolls.41 Trolls too are offensive, puerile, respond where no response is required, do

harm to others as well as themselves and are very difficult to put down. Mohammad’s ‘The

The The The The The The The The The Death (Hey Hey)’ certainly makes them seem this way

with its gratuitous use of profanities which seem to be directed at readers.

Hell yeah, this is an English sonnet, bitch:

Three quatrains and a couplet, motherfucker.42

However, the ‘bitch’ that the poem refers to is not the singular individual plagued by the

internet troll. The poem is targeted but at the Institution not the individual as Mohammad

preemptively responds to possible calls that he scrawled ‘Thompson’ over the monument of

literary culture that is Shakespeare. Unlike cybernetic bullying, this “bullying” of the poetry

world has occurred since the day it solidified into an Institution.

Nice Rebellion, Welcome In!

This brings us neatly back to Grayson Perry and to the initial question as to whether Flarf’s

stupidity has allowed it to escape institutionalisation. The possible outcomes of a successful

anti-system gesture are threefold. The gesture may prove more popular than the system

causing the system to be overthrown in favour of the gesture that then becomes a new

system. The gesture may be absorbed into the system at which point it fails to function as an

anti-system gesture. Finally, it may be passed over by the system, neither replacing it nor

subsumed by it, and the system continues as it ever was. With regard to this, Flarf does not

appear to solicit the first outcome – the closest I have found is Gardner’s ‘eventually all

Conceptualist poets will Flarfists’ but as Conceptualism is as anti-Institution as Flarf it seems

more likely that this is a play on Place’s ‘Flarf looks like poetry’ and ‘poetry looks like

41 Sullivan, ‘ A Brief Guide to Flarf Poetry’ 42 K. Silem Mohammad, ‘The The The The The The The The The The Death (Hey Hey) in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology ed. by Paul Hoover, 2nd edn. (London: Norton, 2013) pp. 731-732.

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Conceptualism’.43 Gardner makes the snake eat its tail, as although Flarf is one facet of

Conceptualism, Conceptualism will one day become Flarf. Gardner favours these circular

arguments as they function like a pun or other linguistic trickery to appropriate Place’s case.

Similarly, the Flarfists’ decision to call their movement ‘Mainstream Poetry’ seems more

tongue-in-cheek than an effort to replace what is conventionally seen as poetry. After all, if

all poetry looked like Flarf, there would be nothing wrong or awkward about it and it would

no longer be Flarf.

With regard to the second outcome, Flarf has made a rod for its own back in the fact

that its poems follow the formal stanziac pattern of Western poetry. Place is right when she

complains that Flarf looks like poetry. It does seek to ‘upend and offend’ but through

content and not through form.44 This makes it more likely to be absorbed into the existing

poetic Institution as, although its content troubles what poetry can say it does not, unlike

Conceptualism, trouble notions fundamental to what poetry is. Flarf also takes a socially

problematic act, being stupid, and demonstrates that through anonymity or, in the case of

the named Flarfists, it can be defused simply by removing the writer’s ego. It more than just

a defusing, however, as Flarf celebrates stupidity as a glorious excess, using it to complicate

and question the construction of meaning and liberate the poet from the crippling weight

felt by Barthes, Ronell and Pynchon. It is an amelioration of stupidity, which is to say, a

legitimisation of stupidity as a poetic method. Unfortunately, to avoid subsumption into the

Institution, Flarf needs hate. It needs to be ‘slammed by reactionaries’ otherwise it will

become socially acceptable and fall foul of Perry’s ‘Most Advanced Yet Acceptable’

43 Gardner, ‘Why Flarf is Better than Conceptualism’; Place, ‘Notes on Why Conceptualism is Better than Flarf’. 44 Place.

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category.45 As long as Flarf’s stupidity is enjoyed by the majority of its readers, this

legitimisation is unavoidable.

This brings me to my last point. In writing this essay the legitimisation and

institutionalisation of Flarf has already begun. I discovered Flarf because it was anthologised

by Paul Hoover in the second edition of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American

Poetry and categorised as the type of poetry accepted by the academic body as suitable for

study. In being studied and critically analysed, each of its successes legitimise its methods.

Those critics like Robbins who choose not to speak about Flarf do it a greater service than I,

who, by absorbing it into the circle of texts that can be academically studied, nullify its anti-

system gesture. The best Flarf could hope for now is to be ‘the crushing uselessness which

comes to nothing’ as Ronell describes stupidity but, I feel, after Hoover’s anthologising, that

prospect is long gone. As Sharon Mesmer wrote ‘Flarf’s funeral was the release reading for

the Norton Postmodern’ and as the founders of Flarf clamour to proclaim its death, Flarf’s

life within the Institution is only just beginning.46

3,169 words.

45 Perry, The Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery: 2013, Nice Rebellion, Welcome In!. 46 Mesmer, ‘Flarf is Dead, Long Live Post-Flarf’; K. Silem Mohammad wrote, early on in the movement and anticipating the dangers of Institutionalisation ‘There is no such thing as Flarf. Useless to declare that now’. K. Silem Mohammad in ‘The Flarf Files’ (2003) http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html [Accessed 10th May 2014].

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Appendix A From Vanessa Place: Notes on why Conceptualism is Better than Flarf 10. Conceptualism has no answers, but is, instead, interrogative. Through the deployment of multiple strategies that serve to destabilize text (extant or made) via reframed reiterations and multiple sites of rhetorical deployment, conceptualism is neo-Kantian, epistemologically concerned with the ongoing sobject and the instantiation of radical evil, in other words, the affirmative will to evil that manifests the fact of will itself. In other words, the instantiation of that which is consciously contra-textual in the sense of all that has made text make contextual sense, the rendering immaterial of every materiality of poetry. The contra-text being the new con-text, con-, as I have pointed out elsewhere, in the sense of being a cunt. Conceptualism is, as the term indicates, primarily a cortical engagement. - Vanessa Place, April 2010

From Why Flarf Is Better Than Conceptualism Conceptualism has one answer, and that is: being boring without being alienating. Through the deployment of multiple strategies that serve to present writers as destabilizing texts (extant or made) via reframed reiterations and multiple sites of rhetorical deployment, conceptualism is neo-Canadian, though it doesn't seem to read enough Dan Farrell, epistemologically concerned with the ongoing subject and the instantiation of Sandy Duncan, in other words, the affirmative will to Sandy Duncan that manifests the fact of Sandy Duncan herself. In other words, the instantiation of that which is consciously contra-textual in the sense of all that has made text make contextual sense to Sandy Duncan, the rendering immaterial of every materiality of poetry. The contra-text being the new con-text, con-, as I have pointed out elsewhere, in the sense of Sandy Duncan. - Drew Gardner, April 2010

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Bibliography Primary Sources Flarf Collective, ‘Booby Clambake’ (Feb. 2004) http://mainstreampoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2004/02/booby-clambake.html [Accessed 11th May, 2014] Flarf Collective, ‘I Am Mormon-Hot’ (Feb. 2010) http://mainstreampoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/i-am-mormon-hot.html [Accessed 11th May, 2014] Gardner, Drew ‘A Copy Of The Koran Written In Rootbeer’ in Petroleum Hat (Berkeley: Small Press, 2005) pp. 27-28 Gardner, Drew, ‘Prince Charles, Intently Observing The Behavior Of An Hedgehog’ in Chomp Away (Cumberland: Combo Books, 2010) pp. 20-21 Gardner, Drew, ‘Why Flarf Is Better Than Conceptualism’ in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology ed. by Paul Hoover, 2nd edn. (London: Norton, 2013) pp. 944- 946 Mohammad, K. Silem, ‘Vac-U-Cash Devo Vogue’ in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology ed. by Paul Hoover, 2nd edn. (London: Norton, 2013) p. 731

Secondary Reading ‘What’s the worst idea you’ve had’ on ‘AskReddit’ reddit: the front page of the internet (2014) http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1uggjn/whats_the_worst_idea_you_had/ [Accessed 10th May, 2014].

Cipolla, Carlo M., The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (2007) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dA-ZoY25k0PWtG2ffjHBBt3iWp0yJN1E1sa31Q-zcgo/edit?pli=1 [Accessed 9th May, 2014] Fischer, Shell, ’Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously?’, Poets & Writers (July/August, 2009) http://www.pw.org/content/can_flarf_ever_be_taken_seriously?cmnt_all=1 [Accessed 19th April, 2014] Gardner, Drew, ‘Flarf is Life, the Poetry of Affect’ Boston Review (Feb. 2014) http://www.bostonreview.net/poetry/drew-gardner-flarf-life-poetry-affect [Accessed 9th May, 2014] Hoy, Dan, ‘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’, Jacket Magazine (April, 2006) http://jacketmagazine.com/29/hoy-flarf.html [Accessed 6th May, 2014] Mesmer, Sharon, ‘Flarf is Dead, Long Live Post-Flarf’ (2010) http://www.thescreamonline.com/poetry/poetry7-3/flarf.html [Accessed 9th May, 2014]

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Mohammad, K. Silem, ‘The Flarf Files’ ed. Michael Magee (2003) http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html [Accessed 10th May 2014] Naik, Gautam, ‘Search for a New Poetics Yields This: ‘Kitty Goes Postal/Wants Pizza’, The Wall Street Journal (25th May, 2010) http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704912004575252223568314054 [Accessed 19th April, 2014] Place, Vanessa, ‘Notes on Why Conceptualism is Better than Flarf’ (April, 2010) http://conceptualwriting101.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/vanessa-place-notes-on-why.html [Accessed 9th May, 2014] Perry, Grayson, The Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery: 2013, Democracy Has Bad Taste (London: BBC Radio 4, 2013) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03969vt [Accessed 9th May, 2014] Perry, Grayson, The Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery: 2013, Nice Rebellion, Welcome In! (Londonderry: BBC Radio 4, 2013) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03f9bg7 [Accessed 9th May, 2014] Robbins, Michael, ‘Ripostes’, Poetry Magazine (July, 2013) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246092 [Accessed 6th May, 2014] Ronell, Avital, Stupidity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003) Schiller, Friedrich, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans), trans. Anna Swanwick (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2007), Act III, sc. vi. Schofield, Jack, ‘Jaron Lanier on the stupidity of the hive mind’, The Guardian (May 2006) http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2006/may/31/jaronlanieron [Accessed 10th May 2014] Sullivan, Gary, ’A Brief Guide to Flarf Poetry’, Poets.org (2003) http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22109 [Accessed 14th April, 2014] Welles, James F., Understanding Stupidity (Mount Pleasant: Arcadia, 1997)