CHRONOLOGICAL COMMUNIQUÉS FROM THE DIRECTORATE

 
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April 6, 2006:

Comrade Daniels informs us that he’s fighting off a cold and working too hard at his job. Nevertheless, he’s finding the time to make room on his cheap plaid shirts to fit the many badges of honor we’ve bestowed upon him for being the object of the stumbling, pop-culture damaged, moralizing opprobrium of uptight liberal aesthetes, the shrieking near-libel of sycophants and the ignorant, sniggering disdain of certain reactionary “hipster” poets of the gringo petty-bourgeoisie.

He’s readying himself intellectually and spiritually. We salute his courage and await his next word.

•

April 7, 2006:

Earlier this evening, we visited cmde Daniels in his modest, book-crammed bungalow in a pleasantly sleepy East Bay neighborhood. After raising himself from his sickbed to embrace us in turn and whisper to each a few beautiful words of love and human solidarity, he sank back, exhausted. We sat with him until he regained some strength. Though concerned by his weakened state, we felt reassured to see his eyes burn with all their familiar revolutionary zeal when we asked him his opinion of the curiously stunted critical abilities of a bizzare personage named Jimmy Behrle, whom our comrade once called “...a gadfly without a critique and a perfect example of failed humanity in a declining empire”.

“Mr Behrle”, he whispered, “is a kind of disembodied court jester. If his barely post-adolescent antics are encouraged by a certain group of poets, one can only assume it’s because those poets derive a sickly, vicarious thrill from witnessing Mr Behrle’s abysmally irrational self-humiliation and are pleased by his abject flattery. Those are but two probable causes for Mr Behrle’s continued acceptance on the poetry scene. Another would be that he does all the things that most people are either too intelligent, too adult, too ‘professional’ or too chickenshit to do themselves”.

With that, our beloved cmde sighed, asked us to feed the ravens in his back yard, closed his eyes and slept. We kissed his high, pale forehead and left him to rest. We wish him a speedy recovery. Long live cmde Daniels!

•

April 8, 2006 (AM):


“Is the royal ‘we’ part of the revolutionary chic? It sounds pretentious as hell, ‘comrade.’”

The Revolutionary Chic! Ah, what withering sarcasm!

Last time we checked, like this afternoon, dude, remember how we were all like it’s so totally cool how being into Marxism gives us hella sneering hipster cred?

Since you’re so fond of lists, here’s an exercise: name one public figure in America, right now, who’s an avowed Marxist.

Okay, name two more.

We’re waiting...

So, okay, then, we aren’t “comrades”.

Maybe “Commie Red” would suit you better?

No?

How about “Pinko”, you hapless red-baiter?

Still too sincere for you?

Well, then, allow us to apply our smirks.

Hold on... not yet...

Hey, give us a fucking minute, will you?

Aw, jeez...

Well, we guess politics is just uncool like that... stomping on a book is so much cooler, we know, but we’re trying our best!

(Despite everything, Dr Jonathan Mayhew seems like a decent enough sort. Perhaps he should meditate not only upon the music, but also upon the lives and times of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Monk, Mingus, Coltrane and Shepp and the incredibly inspiring resilience of their ancestors. Obviously, he’s in over his head.)

•

April 8, 2006 (PM):

Flarf is like dada, full of “anti-conformist” feeling. The “powers that be would like to shut it off”.

If anticapitalism — or “Marxist snobbery” — ever became the regnant ideology of the “powers that be” in the USA, it would be very good news, indeed.

Perhaps one could label cmde Daniels an apparatchik, an intolerant political hack like Zinoviev, but he’s hardly a mobbed-up, sneaky literary player like Zhdanov (or, indeed, some of the most notable living “experimental” poets!).

To say that calling for an argument about class and poetry (and class and culture generally) somehow represents cultural “conformity” is, to put it generously, grasping at the most mildewed of straws. Or have the NEA and every MFA program in the country suddenly begun to call for relentless sessions of Maoist self-critique in order to maintain Party unity?

As for “dada”, contrary to popular belief, cmdes, we’re not in Zurich during WWI, are we? Bourgeois culture now means the infantile right-wing libertarianism of South Park; tightly-controlled “reality” shows in which people (many of whom, both male and female, are addicted to cosmetic surgery) ingest blended goats’ eyes; and museums that exhibit fecal matter smeared over paintings of the Virgin Mary.

If you’re in the shock-and-awe anti-conformity game, we have potentially heartbreaking news for you: bourgeois culture is kicking all our asses out of town and right on down Indifference Road toward the over-populated city of Irrelevance.

We end for now with a very simple question: After we’ve managed, through transgression, perhaps, to offend the likes of Dana Gioia and Ann Coulter, is there not still very far for us to go?

•

April 9, 2006:

“The argument was put forward recently that *flarf* is mainly a parody/ appropriation of working class/ uneducated discourse. Looking at Petroleum Hat, I don’t find that at all to be the case. It is a polyphonic language. It includes slang phrases, journalese, political discourse, ‘mainstream poetry,’ and the kitchen sink.

“These words and phrases are scrambled with other phrases, none of which seems specifically proletarian. Indeed, the internet is not the repository of specifically working class language. It is the language of all of us, with an endless number of registers.”

Our rough-hewn and emotional cmde Daniels probably was not specific enough and he should have sprinkled his tart diatribe with sweet caveats, but “at least some of the time” does not mean “mainly”.

Tell us, what exactly does “specifically proletarian” mean?

Flarf is a loose process (or set of procedures) utilized in different ways by different poets. Its origins are controversial, but the process, in many ways ingenious, is not at issue here, nor is it in the least bit controversial. How could it be, after Schwitters, Duchamp and Cage?

If the source material of a typical flarf poem (if such a thing exists) were “the language of all of us”, flarf would be overwhelmingly macaronic and wildly incomprehensible to all of us. It’d be written in every alphabet or syllabary or code or set of symbols currently in use and all the ancient alphabets, even those as yet undeciphered. It would truly reflect the multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-positional, multi-informational welter that is the Internet, assuming that the Internet were used a source material.

We’re not trying to tar and feather anybody, least of all those poets who use the procedure(s) in their various ways. Any one of them may very well turn out to be the best thing since Starbuck’s, for all we know. But, as many of its critics and supporters have pointed out, part of flarf’s transgressive power (at least in its earlier incarnations) comes not from being purely a “polyphonic discourse”, but a “wrong” or “cute” or “cloying” discourse that’s primarily dependent on ridiculing “uneducated” discourse or discourses that the poet would presumably not be willing to claim as an accurate representation of his or her own subject-position.

There’s no way around it. Flarf very often uses the language of the naïve, the sentimental, the “fucked-up”, the unschooled, the ignorant, the misogynist, the right-wing, homophobic, racist, fundamentalist christian, the sly politician, the populist demagogue, the citizen confused and mortally wounded by intellectual, spiritual and political tyranny. You name it. Often enough, flarf is clearly satirical, or at least parodic.

In his most recent work and thought, Mr Sullivan seems to be grappling with his original definition of flarf, perhaps because he has recognized that “un-PC” “wrongness” can draw poets uncomfortably close to the entirely un-ironic right-wing attack on “PC wrongness” (more on this, later). Though the meaning of that which one is not supposed to do is still very unclear to us, we salute him, despite the objections of cmde Daniels, but we wish that Mr Sullivan and his fellow flarfistes would continue to explain this apparent change of heart, for it would clear up much of our confusion; and, as language is our million-year-old endeavor, we wish that all poets would take to heart the understanding that language is humanity’s greatest invention. As far as we can tell, it’s the only thing we’ve ever managed to make as a collective that still hasn’t been thoroughly co-opted and corrupted by the ruling elites and their servants. It belongs to all of us. All of us. All of us.

•

April 10, 2006:

“The possible sexism and (though I’m trying to think of an example) racism would be apparent in so far as the poem is taken to simply channel the views of certain sources. But the charge of ‘classism’, I think, could be levied only on the ‘mockery’ reading, i.e., that the source is quoted in a somehow ironic manner.”

This is a substantial point, indeed. But this is also where some of the flarfistes want to have their cake and eat it too.

“PC” has been designed to deal with race and gender, while leaving any sort of class consciousness or class critique (“revolutionary consciousness”) out of the equation. Liberalism has tried to configure “PC” as the only significant locus of political struggle. Conservatives (and certain right-wing “liberals”) have been more than willing to heap scorn on this phenomenon. Not very deeply buried in the conflict is a belief that if speech patterns are changed or even simply challenged for long enough and often enough, then the underlying conditions that cause exploitation and oppression must, somehow, disappear.

Of course, “PC” goes far, far beyond this when it’s related to issues like affirmative action. Nobody should have to endure being harrassed by racial epithets and/ or sexist remarks, and affirmative action deserves full support (especially now). We’re asking if “PC” isn’t just window-dressing, a pretty bandaid for problems that require more radical and militant solutions. We believe that “PC” has become a palliative for the professional classes, a pat on the back in return for their own “tolerance.”

In Stop Me Before I Vote Again, (see also the blog of the same name), Michael J. Smith writes:

Most people who grow up to be liberals have faithfully kept their side of the social contract as it was represented to them, and have found that the other side has kept its promises to them, too — at least until recently, when the dukes and earls of corporate America have undertaken, like epigonal Henry Tudors in suits, to dissolve our little monasteries one by one.

Meanwhile, out there in the sticks, there are all the people who didn’t get on the escalator; who didn’t go to the good schools, or couldn’t pay attention and buckle down in the schools they did go to; who never acquired much culture, learned a foreign language, or cultivated refined tastes in food and drink. Our liberals may feel sorry for these unfortunates, but they neither respect nor trust them. Hoi polloi haven’t studied, they haven’t learned, they have no expertise, none of the professional man or woman’s intellectual or personal discipline, and they do have all kinds of odd and poorly-founded ideas. By all means we must better their lot, and raise them as much as possible from their degraded state, preferably by more, and more relentless, education, but — let them run things? That would be a disaster.

We must continue to argue that irony is central here. Irony can allow one to “enjoy”, or derive a transgressive charge or aesthetical satisfaction out of racist and/ or homophobic and/ or sexist and/ or fundamentalist Christian language, while also allowing one at the same time to disavow or seem to disallow one’s involvement with, or one’s contempt for that language and the people who use it.

This is the irony we hear when Rush Limbaugh calls feminists “bra-burning feminazis who need to get laid” while chuckling through eructations of bile, like the doped-up, high-living, populist demagogue that he is.

Limbaugh’s is a very privileged form of irony. It issues forth from one who has never been on the cold receiving end of such epithets, or felt the brutal quotidian effects of the system that propagandists like him and Bill O’Reilly work tirelessly to uphold.

There are those who use irony to insulate themselves in one way or another and therefore look upon these matters quite differently from us, though we suspect that deep down, we’re on the same side. We call such people “hipsters”. But when slick, knowing urbanites ridicule the hicks and rubes while, at the same time, they “let their guard down” by engaging in some refreshing and titillating “un-PC” talk, there must be a subtle ideological confusion at work. We must always be vigilant, lest we attack “PC” from the right.

What does “un-PC” mean in a society that possesses no widespread public language with which to talk clearly and rationally about the class struggle?

•

April 11, 2006:

Cmde Daniels has asked us to remind one and all that a working class background is no sure defense against reactionary ignorance. He’s happy to refuse categorical self-exemption. Ultimately, he too will keep his fateful appointment with the people’s tribunal at The Hague.

•

April 12, 2006:

“The spirit of your post wasn’t comradely.”

We must acknowledge that starting a blog post with “flarf this, you fucking yuppie” is a declaration of war, not an expression of solidarity. We tried to reason with cmde Daniels; we warned him not to use such crude tactics to begin a discussion of class, which is so little understood and yet can’t help but be a contentious issue when it’s brought up.

Unfortunately, our rough-hewn and emotionally overwrought cmde is “fucking intransigent” (as he put it this morning before delivering the following rhetorical gem):

As long as we take our social cues from certain pompous and/ or reptilian exponents of the currently entrenched, wholly reformist, self-proclaimed avant-garde; as long as certain people dissumulate or see the issue at hand as a matter of ethics in Public Relations, I’ll make an irrepressible farce of their immoderate objectification.

We’ve reminded him that “Free samples of moral perfection for those desirous are furnished by all the editorial offices” and warned him against making molehills out of mountains.

Cmde Daniels is pointed and rawly aggressive, but again we must inquire as to whether a certain backhandedly heartless and apparently unanswerable aggression isn’t obviously present in any number of tongue-in-cheek flarf poems (“New Orleans looks like a burnt snowman / single mother chat rooms make my skin creep”), not to mention the more obvious aggression of pure, unreasoned, uninformed, petulant argumentum ad hominen:

you fucking mosquito
the college culture will be successful
so please go thinging about the rah rah Hoy
cheers

We ask all poets to consider the following words from cmde Daniels, who is currently under house arrest:

Well, of course I take flarf seriously! Isn’t that obvious? I understand why others might want to distance themselves from online arguments, which immediately become quite unpleasant and personal, or might think of flarf as a silly thing and therefore not worthy of serious critique. I hope a few people will think about what I’ve written, regardless of their opinion of flarf per se.

Intelligent critique is the highest form of respect, although it may not appear to be so respectful when cmde Daniels and innumerable others engage in wild speculation as to who might truly deserve a one-way ticket to Buffalo.

In 2005, 68% of the population of our country was directly connected to the Internet. The widespread belief that the citizenry of the US is predominantly middle class is the result one of the most successful propaganda campaigns ever devised. In our times, when the US “middle class” is being systematically immiserated, we ask our fellow poets to use their imaginations and to think about what a certain very great, once-revolutionary poet said about Minute Particulars.

Meanwhile, we’re struggling against cmde Daniels for the sake of his own ideological purity and to ensure that he remains immune to the temptations of vanguardism. He’s responding so nicely to the placard that we expect to be able to dispense with the dunce cap, but until we’re convinced that he’s gained a measure of control over his Messianic yearnings, we’re forbidding him to turn back on the comment feature of his blog and we’ll continue to post in his place for the foreseeable future.

•

April 13, 2006:

When we arrived at cmde Daniels’ bungalow this morning, we saw immediately that something was very wrong. His study had been cleared of everything but his foam futon. He’d nailed to opposite walls with six-inch spikes his copies of Art as the Cognition of Life and The Sacred Wood. Tensely he stood in the middle of the room, occasionally shuffling from left to right, as if unsure of where to turn. It took him several minutes to notice us. When he did, he collapsed to the floor. “I can’t think”, he sobbed repeatedly. “Dear God, I can’t think anymore!”

Our last session with him might have been overly strenuous. We fear for his emotional stability.

•

April 14, 2006:

By this morning, things had obviously gone from bad to worse for cmde Daniels. When we arrived at his bungalow, we discovered that he’d barricaded himself in his study. Try as we might, we couldn’t break down the door. Luckily, he’d taken the blinds off the large front window, so we could see him and, by shouting through the door, we could communicate, after a fashion. He’d moved all his books back into the study. They were in piles all around him. After a few minutes of cajoling, he slipped an envelope under the door of his study and told us to leave. “Deathless embrace”, he shouted, “with Sainted Southwell at Tyburn!”, then “Lampos! Phaeton! Gee, by the lamb! Time for us to get some!” He poured gasoline over himself and, smiling beatifically, lit a match. We turned away in horror. When the fire began to consume the house, we fled. We heard sirens as we drove away. The whole thing took about fifteen minutes.

We hope it will be instructive for all poets to read the final, reactionary ravings of our once righteous comrade who was the scourge of the petty-bourgeois vanguardists and the author of a remarkable sonnet entitled Antiphon to Slave Owners, but who was unable to maintain his sanity under the intellectual pressure of the stern truth of our critique.

Everything They Say Is True!

Send me home to Bellevue!
Give me shock therapy
till I forget Portuguese!
English as written in the boroughs
is the only language fit for poetry
and everything they say
about the working class is true!

I want my work inscribed in gilded letters
on the walls of every Wal-Mart!
My transportation must be MacPriusized!
My housing must be MacUrbanized!
My reputation must be Super-Sized,
for everything they say
about the working class is true!

Give me a liver transplant!
I want to get blind drunk at will
on Jaegermeister and mint juleps!
Let poetry perfume the silicon empyrean
heroically with rich, Prelapsarian scents
of burnt cork and sweaty wool!
Hoopla-ho! Three cheers for rolling back jubilo!

I who was blind
am now fit to lead,
oh my fellow poets!

Swiftly, swiftly, currite noctis equi!

I’ll burn my books!

I believe to my soul that
capital is the life of poetry
and America leads the way!

Everything they say about the working class is true!