Julie Hunt
Professor Jennifer Ashton
English 500
12/9/2008
Dickinson versus Flarf and the Expansion of Poetic Idea
Gary Sullivan, the first poet to produce flarf, provides a definition for the genre. “Flarf: A quality of intentional or unintentional ‘flarfiness.’ A kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. ‘Not okay.’” (Flarf Files, 2). Sullivan’s first flarf poem was a deliberately bad and offensive poem submitted to poetry.com. From that point flarf exploded as a genre, evolving into a form using an extensive amount of google searches to produce diction fodder. Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson is a book of flarf poetry constructed from the words produced by google searches for the name “Angie Dickinson” coupled with other words, sometimes bits of Emily Dickinson poems. The purpose of this book, Magee explains in his introduction, is to, “Evoke in my own readership that combination of shock, bewilderment, excitement, pleasure (a process of dis-orientation and re-orientation) that I imagined Dickinson’s earliest readership must have felt when reading her work.” I am most greatly concerned with this statement of purpose in this paper. First of all, why is Magee concerned with mimicking Dickinson’s form and purpose in his book? Secondly, is this what Dickinson’s readers felt and feel when reading her work? Is it the same feeling that Magee’s work evokes? And finally, was it Dickinson’s purpose as well to shock, bewilder, etc.? Through examining her poetry as well as Magee’s work it becomes possible to answer these questions. I believe that Magee both succeeds and fails in his attempt mimic the works of Dickinson, and in so doing, creates a work that, like Dickinson’s, is an advancement of form and idea in the world of poetry.
The immediate question, upon reading Magee’s introduction to My Angie Dickinson, is why Emily Dickinson? What is it about Emily Dickinson that makes her relevant to the work being produced today, especially this work? The answer may lie in the way that Dickinson’s work is both embedded in the historical context during which it was written, but is also a sharp break from the work of other poets writing just before and at the same time as she produced her work. In My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe asserts that Dickinson’s work must be read exactly as it was written to begin to understand what Dickinson was attempting to evoke. She also states, “Givens of Dickinson’s life…all carry the conditions for her work in their wake” (Howe, 13). This means that Dickinson’s work is deeply embedded in the circumstances of her life. Yet Dickinson broke away from these circumstances in a self-imposed isolation that may have allowed her work to break free from the context of its maker. What is interesting about Dickinson is the way that she was able bend grammar, syntax, and punctuation into a kind of poetry that was entirely novel while using common meter. Of Dickinson, Howe writes, “She exploded habits of standard human intercourse in her letters, as she cut across the customary chronological linearity of poetry,” (11) and, “she found meaning in the chance meeting of words” (24). How incredibly relevant, then, the work of Emily Dickinson is to flarf poets who also find meaning in the chance meeting of words, and the exploding of human intercourse.
Magee’s work succeeds, then, in its ability to take human intercourse—words written by other people for various uses—and bend it into something completely new. He finds meaning in the chance meeting of words just as Dickinson does. To Magee, flarf is, “interesting for a number of reasons — its collaborative texture, its anthropological implications (the sampling of an enormous variety of public speech based on a single word or phrase shared in common), its comic (not to say unserious) frame” (Flarf Files, 9). Yet, while Dickinson seems largely interested in interrogating herself and recording her ideas, regardless of how they fit in with mainstream ideas and the mainstream poetry of her day, Magee is highly interested in ideas of the mainstream in his flarf poetry. Though we cannot go back and ask Dickinson what her main purpose in writing was, it may be fair to say that, given her isolation and her minimal efforts to publish her work, she was not terribly interested in examining or working against poetry of her day and age. Her work presents itself as a quiet examination and expression of the soul. Magee’s work, on the other hand, is working to redefine mainstream poetry, with bells and whistles. Magee states,
My own contribution was to invent the “Mainstream Poetry Movement.” It is, first and foremost, a perhaps ludicrous attempt to appropriate the term “Mainstream Poetry,” which as you of course know has come to mean any poems running the gamut from new-formalist-but-not-too-strident-from-respectable-press to MFA or post MFA-generated autobiographical lyrics in a free (though basically iambic) verse structure. I had the epiphany that nothing could be stupider than labeling this “mainstream.” In the mainstream of what? (Flarf Files, 9)
It seems that both Dickinson and Magee are doing work that strives to redefine the parameters of poetry. Dickinson did so quietly, and her reshaping of syntax and grammar, among other things, has helped to shape the way many poets after her chose to shape their poems. In many ways, the “MFA-generated autobiographical lyrics” that Magee speaks of are a direct result of Dickinson’s work. She shaped a genre. Magee is also redefining what mainstream poetry is and can become by showing the ways in which language can be inserted into poetry. Through using the language of google searches for the diction of his poems, he is able to create a body of work that is incredibly embedded in its historical context and is also meaningful on a colloquial level. His poetry seems to address the masses and come from the masses by using, literally, the language of the masses. It is also a new movement.
We can see the ways in which Magee and Dickinson are similar in their endeavors when we look at how they are both historically embedded poets and how they both succeeded in bringing a change to the world of poetry in a very earthy, colloquial-ized, personal way. Yet how are these two poets different? How does Magee fail in his attempt to mimic the works of Dickinson? Perhaps the first way is in diction choices. Magee uses a mélange of google produced words for his poems, creating an, “overall effect a little like viewing the world through a TV that gets only two channels: E! & Turner Classic Movies” (Silliman). The diction in Dickinson’s work is quite different. It is not riddled with pop-culture references from her day. The closest she comes is in using words that may have been common in the bible. Mostly her language is simplistic compared to her grammar and syntax, which is what really creates bewilderment when reading her poetry. Perhaps Magee’s poetry is perplexing, but largely in that it combines a large array of unlike and often offensive pop-culture references. The fact that the perplexity caused by these two poets comes from two different methods within their poetry separates them, and makes their poetry achieve different results. On the one hand, we have what seems to be a single person’s postulation on very grand ideas in a very unique way grammatically and syntactically. On the other hand, we have a poet who amasses an incredible amount of verbiage and organizes it loosely in a Dickinsonian structure. Magee’s work, while using quite a few dashes and loose common meter, does not follow the strictness of Dickinson’s work. It is often bereft of any kind of rhyme, and common theme. It may be said that many of Dickinson’s poems are a bit meandering from beginning to end, but I would assert that, when reading most of her poems, the reader can find the thread of an idea that runs throughout the entire poem. This often seems to be lost in Magee’s poetry for the sake of flarf. Often the idea or theme of the poem shifts suddenly due to flarf’s requirements that the poem not fit a form, and that the poem should be absurd and offensive. Let’s take two poems, one by each author, and examine them in order to better see their differences.
1106
We do not know the time we lose —
The awful moment is
And takes its fundamental place
Among the certainties —
A firm appearance still inflates
The card — the chance — the friend —
The spectre of solidities
Whose substances are sand —
(Dickinson)
003
Poetry should be happy, NOT
All gloomy like ANGIE Dickinson
her “deer-in-the-headlights” gaze
as—model—after—model
walk down three times a year
(spring, fall and winter)
the magical image—of the winter—
fairyland—of a class—
Katie Miller pleasures herself…
(Magee, 3)
We can see already that the poets are using different devices in their work, though the form is largely the same. Dickinson’s 1106 follows common meter perfectly (4-3-4-3), while Magee’s 003 does not (4-5-3-4-3-3-3-3-3). In fact, the meter of Magee’s poem is incredibly difficult to interpret, and I’m sure other scholars may be able to determine a different pattern of stresses than I have. Also, each of Dickinson’s lines seem to stand alone or at least to not run on into the next line. Her line breaks are soft and bereft of enjambment. We cannot say the same about Magee’s line breaks, which seem to follow a much more contemporary form of heavy enjambment. These differences of form create a different kinds of poems. Dickinson’s work comes off as serious, heavily structured, inquisitive, and perplexed. Magee’s poem comes of as a rambling examination and presentation of various names and objects. We can still find the idea of loss in the end of Dickinson’s poem, but we cannot find the idea of poetry needing to be happy or Angie Dickinson being gloomy in the end of Magee’s poem. In terms of diction, Dickinson usually leans on verbs and undefined nouns (“the friend”, “a firm appearance”) to create images and convey ideas, while Magee leans on specified nouns and common sayings (“Katie Miller”, “deer-in-the-headlights”). In short, Dickinson’s language often does everything it can to disassociate itself from a specific time or place or person, whereas Magee’s poetry does everything it can to do the opposite. This creates a great difference in purpose between the two poets. One presents a portrait of a person outside of time, the other presents the portrait of a society in a very specific time. In this respect, Magee’s attempt to create the same kind of “shock, bewilderment, excitement, pleasure (a process of dis-orientation and re-orientation)” that Dickinson’s work creates fails.
Even though Magee’s work falls short of its goals in mimicking Dickinson, it still succeeds in furthering the genre of flarf, which is a genre that is still seeking to clearly define itself. Some scholars insist upon connecting flarf with older movements, such as Dada-ism. “Flarf, for all of its manifestations, can productively be viewed as a form of Neo-Dada by virtue of its enthusiastic embrace of humor, collage, and caustic social critique” (Snyder, 14). And though flarf does seem to be a re-invention of this form, its use of google searches creates an entirely new genre of poetry that is useful for representing and critiquing the language being used in contemporary society. The fact that flarf can be plugged into a form as rich and strict as Dickinson’s and cause that form to be expanded and create a new body of ideas is a testament to its strength as a genre. That said, it is possible to effectively mimic Dickinson. A group of students and faculty from the University of Michigan, as a part of a six-week long literary immersion program, hold a yearly contest in which students and faculty, many of whom are Dickinson scholars, attempt to pick a real Dickinson poem out of thirty or so fake Dickinson poems which were produced by the same set of faculty and students, one each. Every year the success rate, even among Dickinson scholars is incredibly low. Dickinson’s poem above was the real poem among the fakes several years ago, and, “the ONE person who correctly identified it was the student whose FAKE received the most votes,” said Aric Knuth, director of the program. Clearly, it is not terribly difficult to mimic Dickinson’s rigid form effectively. Still, it must be said that while mimicking Dickinson is not hard, mimicking her form in an attempt to create a new body of work that speaks to new ideas is, in fact, incredibly challenging.
In his work My Angie Dickinson, Michael Magee sets out on the task of putting flarf poems into a Dickinsonian form. While he does not necessarily succeed in his goal of producing the exact kind of perplexity in his readership as Dickinson did in hers, it is clear that he does create a new kind of perplexity with his work. This book is deeply entrenched in the society it was written in. He pushes the boundaries of a new type of literature, and in so doing, succeeds on a level beyond what he intended.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Bartleby.com: New York, 2000.
This website offers a comprehensive collection of Emily Dickinson’s works, organized by category. Her works, as many older works of literature, are easily accessible online, and this website was incredibly useful academically.
Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. North Atlantac Books: Berkely, CA, 1985.
This piece of literary criticism about Dickinson’s work argued that the materiality of the text was paramount to understanding it. As such, Howe provides original copies of Dickinson’s work, including her alternate word choices. This work is a backlash against the earlier movement that had reshaped Dickinson’s poems into what was perceived to be the correct lyrical form.
The critical essay in the introduction to this piece was very helpful in understanding Howe’s ideas concerning Dickinson. Howe views Dickinson as a revolutionary writer and a fascinating female character. Using her arguments to this end in conjunction with my own was very insightful in fine tuning my argument about the ways in which Dickinson’s work was revolutionary.
Knuth, Aric. “NELP Dickinson Challenge.” Email to Julie Hunt. November 20, 2008.
Aric Knuth is director of the New England Literature Program, which was cited in the paper above. As a participant in the program, I found the Dickinson Challenge fascinating in terms of what Magee was trying to do with his work. Aric is also a scholar on Dickinson, and can be found once every year at a remote camp in Raymond, Maine teaching University of Michigan students the nuances of her work.
Magee, Michael. Flarf Files. August, 2003 http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/ flarf.html
This scholarly article on where flarf came from and where flarf is going is a text compiled by Magee featuring work by himself, K. Silem Mohammad, and Gary Sullivan. The article spends a great deal of time situating flarf as a genre that is at the forefront of contemporary poetry. It also spends a great deal of time assessing the way flarf addresses pop culture and modernity.
Though I found this article very insightful and poetic, I found that it left me with more questions than answers at to what the nature of the flarf genre is. In fact, I wonder if flarf is a genre or if each poet working on flarf is doing something completely different. Rather than make clear what flarf is and isn’t, this article does a better job of making clear just how complicated the world of flarf is.
Magee, Michael. My Angie Dickinson. Zasterl Press: New York, 2007.
This is the main text I criticized in my article. It is a book of flarf poetry written from google searches for the name Angie Dickinson and various other terms, including bits of Dickinson’s own poetry. The search results were assembled into poems following, loosely, the style of Emily Dickinson.
Silliman, Ron. “Monday, February 12, 2007.” Silliman’s Blog. December, 2008.
This blog entry from a popular and well written blog on modern and contemporary poetics is largely a review of My Angie Dickinson, but also it touches on a few aspects of flarf and how flarf works within the book. I found the article insightful both because it provided the perspective of a scholar who, like me, does not actually write flarf poetry and who is also, like me, relatively new to the genre. It was a good starter article to take survey of the issues at hand and the initial reactions thereof.
Snyder, Rick. “The New Pandemonium: A Brief Overview of Flarf.” The Jacket Magazine. October, 2006. Accessed December, 2008. http://jacketmagazine.com/31/snyder-flarf.html
This scholarly article on flarf examines the genre and its development in great detail, with particular focus on what shapes the genre within the context of today’s society. Ultimately, the article placed flarf as a genre on a timeline that connected it to the Dada movement. I found the article well written and informative about the genre on a large scale. It was also helpful to look at the way similar genres have worked in the past.