Sometimes, like yesterday, the comments stream is a lot more interesting than the blog note that provoked it. Some of Nada’s comments – that my own poetry could be examined along the axes of those four questions I asked concerning flarf and uncreative writing – were both pointed & to the point.

Still, I found it beyond fascinating that a discussion that could include the first list I’ve ever seen of flarf books – 17 to date – included not one example of uncreative writing, so-called. The only comment I could detect as to why these two literary tendencies – which in some respects appear to have so very much in common – are not instances or faces of the same larger social phenomenon appears to be a question of joy? As in Flarf is fun, Uncreative Writing is not? Let’s take a third literary tendency – Canadian Neo-Oulipo, an example of which might be Christian Bök’s Eunoia – and just think how they run up against these four questions (warning - generalizations ahead):

One set of questions has to do with systematization, the use of computers, games, any sort of gimmickry in the construction of the poem

Uncreative Writing utilizes systems ruthlessly to achieve its goal, such as every weather report for the year 2003, or all of the New York Times, or the uses of thongs in Google.

Flarf uses systems sometimes – Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson would seem to be the clearest instance – but more accurately utilizes Google sculpting in a variety of ways to come up with texts, and need not use systems to achieve its effects.

Neo-Oulipo employs systems, but where uncreative writing does so with the eye of an historicist, focusing on the origin of the content, Neo-Oulipo tends to focus on the system itself.

 A second set of questions has to do with the anti-aesthetic, the deliberately awful, the troubling.

Flarf is interested in the idea of poetry as kitsch, as well as poetry as linguistic disaster – it’s desire to reach the “so bad it’s good” stage, what I think of as the Ed Wood effect, is not unrelated to some aspects of New York School heritage.

Uncreative Writing is interested in social uses of language on display and seeks, as Kenny Goldsmith has written, to be boring. This seems to be a test of sorts, but it’s a radically different mode of awful than flarf.

Neo-Oulipo is unafraid of beauty. Eunoia has become the best-selling book of poetry in Canadian history precisely because it is so aurally gorgeous.

 A   third set has to do with the appropriation of non-literary materials.

All art does this to some degree. The Russian Formalists saw it as the historic imperative of new art, to show what has emerged in society.

Uncreative Writing is interested in the non-literary as social documentation. Again, this is the poetics of New Historicism.

Flarf is interested in the non-literary as language – these poets mostly deploy anti-literary discourses, but do so with an aesthetic frame that is fine-tuned to the level of word and phrase. Uncreative Writing might see that as a residual form of creativity and as something to be stamped out.

Neo-Oulipo seems neutral on the issue of social language as a source for its work, but fascinated in identifying new ways of using language that are not necessarily within the traditional frame of literature.

 A fourth set has to do with the role of acquaintance & friendship in the creation of literary tendencies.

Flarf came into existence because of the internet – its sense of what is possible here has been fueled by the ways that the web is reorganizing social space. Flarf is not centered around a single strong male personality, such as Bök or Goldsmith.

Uncreative Writing rose earlier and seems only peripherally involved with the internet. Its practitioners are spread out geographically, however, but have made less use of the web in establishing their sense of group identity.

Canadian Neo-Oulipo is the most old-fashioned of these groups, in that it can be placed with regards to specific cities in a way that neither of the other two modes of writing can.

One might argue further that all of these are, to one degree or another, an outgrowth of a broader phenomenon, conceptual poetics, essentially the incursion of conceptual art into poetry. Tho, from John Perrault & Hannah Weiner & Steve Benson, there have been precursors, tho perhaps more performance oriented. Kathy Acker once did a piece that consisted of sending three of her current & former lovers to discuss her. Jim Rosenberg “published” an oscilloscope print-out of one of Pound’s Cantos. He put words on clear plastic that could float in a swimming pool so that readers could paddle from one word to the next. But none of this work took on the quality of literary movement or tendency. But in Russia, at the same time, there was an explicit movement of conceptual poetics, centered around Dmitri Prigov.

Interestingly, while conceptual art was making a large splash in the visual arts world in the United States, relatively little of it seemed directly to speak to issues then inherent in poetry. Joseph Kosuth & Art Language didn’t publish in little magazines – it would have debased the gallery value of the work. Tho one might argue that the signage of Jenny Holzer & Barbara Krueger, the magnified words of Lawrence Weiner & Ed Ruscha all approached poetry, but did so always from on the far side of that intangible border.

Now, however, we see a similar impulse popping up in group formations, but from the impoverished side of the visual art/poetry border. Nada is not wrong to wonder

And frankly, the endless reification and echoic verbiage on all sides is to me at once totally annoying and utterly flarfy. Like... how did this happen? From Gary goofing off to... A NEW AVANT-GARDE FORMATION! Jeez!

That, Nada, sounds exactly right.