The ruckus over Flarf started about a week or two before Hoy’s article appeared in Jacket. Kent Johnson dropped a bombshell on Kasey Mohammad’s blog which stated that Alan Sondheim and I were the inventors of flarf, thus at least implying that there are twin issues of social exclusion and lack of attribution at the center of the discussion regarding Flarf. While I did not agree with Kent that either Alan or I invented Flarf in any way, I did publically agree that the claim was not “completely absurd” as Mohammad described it.

I posted my response to Kasey’s blog but it did not appear there. So I posted it to the Lucipo list on 20 January as well as to Lester’s blog (Lester is my puppet).

Here’s my post to Lucipo:
http://tinyurl.com/lvwjp

I was quite active on Jordan Davis’ now-defunct subsubpoetics discussion list during the period 1999-2001. I had extensively articulated and demonstrated a ventriloqual (Lester, my puppet; see http://tinyurl.com/3e8es for Silliman’s review of the manuscript Lester wrote in 2001) web-based poetics that relied heavily on web tools and on critiquing and parodying an internet poetics. I had published poems and articles on the subject in journals Gary and Jordan ran (among others). Between my website (proximate.org) and my puppet Lester’s work, they were for better or worse familiar with what I was doing. When I found a year later there was this group getting credit for this innovation, and this group was getting credit for something described in the terms I set forth for my own work, I was bummed. Heck, Lester’s *only* public reading was with a reading series Nada ran, back in 2001. It was crushing and peculiar to find my name wholly absent from any element of discussion.
It felt quite creepy. Further, when I read that the “first shot” of Flarf was identical to something I did in front of the person who authored that “first shot”–only I did it six months earlier–I felt I had a legitimate issue with Flarfists on the subject of attribution. I don’t know whether the issue is plagiarism–I don’t even know what the terms of such a discussion would be–but the issue is in that neighborhood.

After this post, Gary joined the lucipo list to take aim at what I had written. Then Kasey joined, Tim Peterson joined, and so on.

It was in the wake of this discussion on Lucipo that Hoy’s article came out. His article backed up, in effect, what I had been saying, my claims to attribution etc. I was saying that the official description of Flarf did not match the actual work of Flarf; Hoy was saying the same thing. I was saying that this mismatch occurred because the description was lifted from my own descriptions from that period, but the work of the Flarfists did not reflect those descriptions. This shortcoming was the smoking gun that supported what I had been saying. Hoy, from out of nowhere, came into the picture plucking that single characteristic I felt was missing in Flarf but in my own work. (Yes tooting my own horn–how classless.) That characteristic was the web-critical dimension.

But you’ll continue to find my name absent from much of the discussion. I feel strongly that the absence of my name functions to de-legitimize my claim. Meanwhile you’ll see a lot of Flarfists joke about “no, *I* invented Flarf,” which is a mean-spirited jab at what I claimed. My argument has been spun beyond recognition, and it’s surprising because I thought I was for over seven years on friendly terms with many of the Flarfists.

Patrick Herron
http://proximate.org/bio

Still short-lived
Like a machine that is used
But is not good enough
But gives promise of a better model
Work for endurance must
Be built like
A machine full of shortcomings.

- Brecht, from “About the Way to Construct Enduring Works”

Great review. I’m so excited that Drew’s extended parallel clauses made someone else think of George Herbert! I had the same response just last night reading these lines from “The Beast”:

“…able
to read minds, setting up in Japan, coming to
Cleveland, abbreviated in good company, interested in
the calibration, one of the least hairy people I hang with,
the kind of engineer we look for but couldn’t hire,
working on getting better in that Pacman game,
growing every day, giving his crew
directions, a representing link to an okay new president,
awake and smiling at the camera, an idiot,
one of the first tae kwon do schools
to open in Toronto, a master, Walden Pond,
awesome in good company, abbreviated as jealous,
known as ‘the beast’….”

Funny to think of these lines in connection with a poem like Herbert’s “Prayer.”

Best,

Kasey