WELL, YOU CAN CALL YOURSELF A POET ALL YOU LIKE, BUT EVERYONE KNOWS YOU’RE A BUREAUCRAT, SO —

FLARF THIS, YOU
FUCKING YUPPIE

(Tamil Tigers get very pissed off when gringos disrespect working people.)

Look, no way we’re trying to make anybody feel ashamed. We want poets to educate themselves to a point where they can begin to see their ideological confusion clearly and unashamedly. We have every right to request that of our fellow poets. In a time like the one we live in, it behooves us to get our politics in order, and that means a lot of legwork, which always includes self-critique.

We’re very forgiving. Everybody needs a wake-up call, sometimes.

We’re not saying that poets shouldn’t use every imaginable resource when they make poems. We know the history of the Internet. We know that we’re all up to our necks in compromise.

Google away! Subvert the motherfucker, comrades! But remember that irony won’t save you.

We’re not saying that there’s no place for cultural critique in poetry. We’re saying that cultural critique without revolutionary consciousness stops short of the facts and that’s just what the ruling elites ordered.

We’re not claiming to be political activists. We’re asking our fellow poets to be careful and to think deeply and humanely about what they do. It’s been alleged often enough that poets have imaginations, so we’re asking poets to use their imaginations, if only for a moment, to wonder whether or not the lives of working people and the words they write exist to be plundered for the sake of the amusement and advancement of a clique of middle class poets.

When highly-educated (or highly self-educated) middle class poets trawl the “internet chat-room drivel” of people who can’t spell or punctuate “correctly”, are poorly educated, inarticulate, sentimental, religious fundamentalists, perhaps, confused rednecks, maybe, but no less human for all that, no less capable and deserving of love and warmth and kindness, no less deserving of a decent, humane society in which to live and work and play and love and raise children (are you able to understand that we’re talking about the majority of the global population?);
                when middle class poets do this in the service of a “poetics” — whether or not they deny the existence of a “poetics” (keep in mind that in our country and indeed all others, “poetics” is the “intellectual property” of the educated middle class; of course, Queen Mab sold like crazy to workers for decades and there’s every reason to hope that something similar will happen again to the work of a contemporary poet possessing a sophistication and radical clarity — however problematic — approaching Shelley’s, given certain conditions — Kevin Davies and Rachel Loden come to mind as possible examples);
                when middle class poets do this thing in order to produce “wrong, awkward, stumbling, semi-coherent, fucked-up, un-P.C.” (please, please, remember that one of Bill O’Reilly’s — and Ann Coulter’s — favorite epithets is “politically correct”) poems for the sake of their own amusement and then use it for their own advancement in the caste-bound world of bourgeois poetry in one of the global centers of accumulation, there’s an extremely high probability that they’re using the written language of working people (and others), unwittingly, perhaps, to reinforce their own feelings of personal, political and cultural superiority to the people whose inner lives they so witheringly mock.

“Father, forgive them” be damned: by destroying solidarity with working people, they are doing exactly and classically what the ruling elites want them to do.

All poets should try to understand that the relatively protected, ideologically hyper-conditioned petty-bourgeoisie is unable, without intellectual struggle, to see social conditions as clearly as the working poor who bear the brunt of oppression and whose lives are fully exposed to the naked economic exploitation that plunders the very fabric of human existence and deforms all moral and ethical values.

The flarfistes ought to know, but obviously have no idea that while many of the people whose words they appropriate aren’t articulate and many don’t know from irony, most can see quite clearly throughout their daily lives that something is terribly wrong with our society. If they’re unable to “theorize” or “aestheticize” or “externalize” that perception, if they’re misled by the powerful propaganda that works implacably to blind, to a greater or lesser extent, each and every citizen of the United States, it’s because working people are denied all the economic and social privileges that give the majority of middle class people (and a very small percentage of working class people) the educational resources and disposable time they need to become, for example, “experimental” poets.

Under capitalist rule, working people exist only to be exploited. The petty-bourgeoisie is instrumental in that exploitation. Over the past decade or so, the flarfistes have proven themselves to be petty-bourgeois liberals. (See What’s the matter with... liberals?, from Michael J. Smith’s Stop Me Before I Vote Again.)

Given a reasonable understanding of the above, no one would deny that the flarfistes disrespect ordinary working people in the most patronizing manner, at least some of the time. There’s no way to get one’s self out of doing it except to learn how to stop doing it.

Racism and classism ooze like a polluted aquifer through all too many poems by the flarfistes. Sexism’s there as well, for sure, to some very problematical extent, whether or not one cares to admit it. What’s worse, most of it is ornamented with a smirk (“wrong, awkward, stumbling, semi-coherent, fucked-up, un-P.C.”; “internet chat-room drivel”; “rants”; “Flarf (3) (verb): To bring out the inherent awfulness, etc., of some pre-existing text.”).

The sly, preppy, Bush-like smirk of the flarfistes is present in some of their most well-known public utterance and deflects criticism by offering up a loveless assurance. “Fellow experimental poets”, it whispers in the soothing intonations of a mass media pundit, “we know just as well as you how awful these poems are, but isn’t their deliberate and self-conscious awfulness just so amusing? After all, look at the sources from which we appropriate the raw materials for our art! We know that just like us, you’re socially and aesthetically enlightened, unlike those unsophisticated rubes who allow themselves to be gulled by Poetry.com. Anyway, we’re just having fun! What’s wrong with having a little fun? Unlike you, those other poets are simply incapable of recognizing sarcasm! Besides, what’s wrong with expressing our opinions? Everybody has the right to express their opinions”, ad nauseam. The ruling elites couldn’t ask for more effective accomplices.

If there is “no such thing as Flarf”, if “Flarf is not a movement”, then why are the flarfistes so quick to defend themselves and each other? If the flarfistes consider themselves to be leftists, which a few of them them seem to do, then why do their arguments have so little, if anything, to do with class? These contradictions are very telling.

It would have been much better if they’d heeded the “shrewd” suggestion of one of their number and kept it strictly between themselves, for anybody with a modicum of class consciousness would recognize that self-condemning smirk immediately and distance themselves from the haughtiest of the flarfistes. Unfortunately, while a certain safe, mushy, liberal “tolerance” is all the rage, class consciousness isn’t exactly rampant among poets, since the petty-bourgeoisie is by its very nature unconscious of the deepest political realities.

We’ve always wondered why certain poets bothered with poetry at all; why they didn’t earn an MBA and become middle-managers. That’s about the size of it: petty-bourgeois place-seeking and shrewd adherence to rigidly-enforced mediocrity have overwhelmed certain poets who would otherwise have given up by now.

We know how difficult it is to resist the seductive call of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. A young poet can all too easily make the mistake of looking up to the flarfistes and taking to heart the things they say.

One really should come clean, for even the most cynically clever irony is bound to come unraveled at some point. Most of us are deluded and our work is historically dispensable. There you have it, in a nutshell. AWP can’t help a bit.

We’re wise to you. Be careful. It’s not that we care about you even less than you care about us, but that we understand you and your motivations better than you can imagine.

Finally, to those well-meaning poets and critics who will say that we expect too much from art and artists, we respond respectfully that we’re no longer intellectually, politically or artistically willing to take such an easy a way out.

Keep in mind that while comrade Daniels was raised to be an artist and a bohemian, he spent most of his adolescence and all of his adult life (to the age of 40) sweating his days and nights away in the kitchens of fancy restaurants, hotels and private clubs that he himself still can’t and never will be able to afford to frequent. He labored to feed wonderful meals to thousands and thousands of yuppies. Sometimes they even tipped him. For years, on Sundays, during the brunch rush, he made one perfect omelette every 35 seconds for up to two hours at a time (yes, he timed himself and he was quite proud of his skills). He dutifully joined various hotel and restaurant workers’ unions when he had to, paid his dues and went to meetings, where he and his fellow workers were nickeled and dimed to death. In those days, he didn’t know how to stand up for himself. In his free time, he read voraciously, played the electric bass extremely well, tried to write good poems and self-medicated with every kind of opiate there is, plus cocaine, amphetamines and horrific draughts of hard liquor. It took him a long, long time to understand the misery in his life. When he finally did, it hurt like hell and still does, from time to time. His hands and arms were scarred by slipping knives and hot oil splashes. He’s unable to forget, ignore or forgive the brutal fact of exploitation and he detests the ruling elites, their accomplices and their toadies with every fiber of his being.

While he no longer makes his living as a cook, he’d eat most of the customers and all the union officials for breakfast. Most poets, too, if they weren’t so godawful insipid, uptight and devoid of appetizing texture. All things considered, he’d rather help them learn to cook for themselves.

Comrade Daniels has never pretended to be a theorist or a critic of any kind. He’s a self-taught artist and he admits that he’s too stubbornly proud of his auto-didacticism. He has an enormous, flinty working-class chip on his shoulder. Part of his personal struggle is to whittle away at that chip till he has an arsenal of arrowheads. Therefore, he’ll never stop learning, always with the help of others who share his convictions.

He does the best he can and has no illusions about his place in the world. He knows he’s exceedingly small potatoes and sometimes that really gets to him. But he also knows that all such considerations are beside the point. He yearns for a great-hearted, critical solidarity and his comrades give it to him, even when he’s temporarily unable to give in return.

He gets terribly frustrated when people who pretend to know better (and who really should know better) obviously don’t know shit about anything real in the world.

When he descends into confusion, he takes full reposibility for his own foibles and/ or outright failure. He’ll stand and fall with and for his comrades and their work with all his heart till the day he dies and he’s willing to go public about it. That’s why we value comrade Daniels.

We’re unable to publish your manuscripts and we’ll never, ever flatter you (that’s always been your real problem with the likes of us, hasn’t it?). We can afford to be forgiving because we accept that most people are unwilling and/ or unable to change very much until social and economic conditions force them into revolutionary self-transformation and they desire to become part of the beginning of a solution. When the conditions are right, we’ll start to organize — all of us, together, as poets. We’ll find a way to ally ourselves with working people. We’ll delight and inspire. Most of all, we’ll learn.

We feel that to gain a true comrade is the best reason for jubilation and you can count on us never going away.

April 1, 2006

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“Listen to me, people: break out of your prisons.
Break the chains that make slaves of you;
break the bars that make fools of you”.
    — Patrícia Rehder Galvão (Pagú)