by Neal Whitman

Created on: September 04, 2009

"Circling the Drain"

I predict that 21st century poetry will circle the drain and be flushed down the

Wait, a sec. Block that metaphor. Let's be more poetic. Okay, 21 century poetry will take the first commercial space shuttle to Neptune where its only readers will be residing.

Back to the "circling" metaphor for a moment. Let's walk around contemp(t) poetry as if it were a piece of sculpture and look at it from different angles. Let's circle last issue of a pobiz standard and look.

1. Clive James wrote in July-August 2009 Poetry that, "Almost everyone writes poetry, but scarcely anyone one can write a poem." I imagine him circling the 30 pages that preceded his commentary. This was a special section, "Flarf and Conceptual Writing" edited by Kenneth Goldsmith who introduces these new forms of poetry by admitting that "no one has written a word of it. It has been grabbed, cut, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry."

2. One of the "flarf" poems is entitled, "Why do I hate flarf so much?" by Drew Gardner. Confession: I had to consult the footnotes because I was not sure if it was a flarf or an editorial denouncing it. It is a flarf.

3. One of the "conceptual" poems is one of Goldsmith's own: "Metropolitan Forecast," a transcription from the New York Times, September 11, 2001. This poem, the weather report, appears in his book, The Day, in which he transcribed every word of the paper that day. He did this once before on September 1, 2000, in Day.

4. As I circled the 45 of pages of "regular" poems that precede the 30 pages of "flarf," my eye was caught by another "f" word: "Blowing the Fluff Away" by Robyn Sarah. Here I found more weight than flarf in her ode to "a sprig of an unknown bloom" that, over time, "had turned to fluff some months ago." A poem full of wonder. Her words lifted off the page like, well like fluff. Her words had the power to lift me too.

5. I thought I had my full of flarf and fluff until my copy of July-August American Poetry Review arrived. There on the cover, a photograph of Gary Snyder standing on a mountain top. Windblown. Grey beard. Ruggedly handsome. From my angle, looks like an advert for Ralph Lauren designer sunglasses. Turn the page and there they are: frags by Gary Snyder nine of 'em. Here is one:

"White Rumps"

Northern Flicker

Pronghorns

Dwarf stars

Receding

Am so jealous. Wish my name

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>