I was talking with another poet about the notion of Flarf as a kind of anti-Swoon, or backlash to its hyper-intimacy.
Satire was really Gary's default mode. Swoon was an anomaly. I think those poems are his best, but I'm biased.
When he couldn't maintain that totally blended intimacy (I always wanted us to keep writing to each other, even though we lived in the same tiny apartment), or deal with the quotidian fact of my really being present and the challenges of a real committed relationship (money, chores, habit), he went back to that parodic space. Of course, he's a master of it.
I never considered myself a satirist, really, before my relationship with him. I learned a lot about it from him, though. Steve McLaughlin mentioned to me a few months ago, when he was interviewing me, that he thought my flarf poems are different from the others'. More emotional, he said. Am I emo?
In Scented Rushes, I really return to my troubadour impulses, although there are parodic elements, too.
Gary was always talking about how he hated "earnestness" in poetry... and yet, if the Swoon poems aren't earnest, what are they?
Well. Just a thought.
1 comments:
I've always read your poems as if you (they?) were indeed in earnest. Which is not to say satirists don't care. But your poems have never seemed distanced, really. It's probably a terrible thing to say, but you (they?)'ve always seemed quite sincere.
Of course, you can chalk that up to me being a bad reader if you want ...
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