As some of you may have heard, I've been anthologized in For Godot, Issue 1 the 3,000-odd page long anthology that includes Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound – although nothing that I (or they) have ever written actually appears in the e-text. That's because this anthology is an e-text in the truest sense of the word: generated entirely by computer. Yes, just when you thought that America couldn't have more disdain for poetry, I present to you a flarf anthology. Here is the poem that appears under my name.
"An intermittent fern-odor"
Between these brooks
. and those brooks
A good-by unmoved bird looks
. from a blue majority at
. . a sovereign bar of hope
They haunt the
. fern-odor, meet the journey
They explore the school, suffer the
. fly
Its lip a pace in
. the barn
Make, make, like
. a flower
Intermittent school by it on a slope
This gag reminds me, fondly, of my childhood. Or rather, it reminds me of a person whom I was fairly fond of, as most boys my age were, in childhood: Melissa Joan Hart. In an episode of early the 90's Nickelodeon television show 'Clarissa Explains It All', Clarissa / Melissa uses her dos-operating PC (the future is now!) to compose a poem for her English class without having to actually produce it herself. 'Writing poems is hard!' may have been a line of dialogue.
I also despair. It means that years of 'post-avant' theorizing and poetical experimentation have finally caught us up to a 1993 episode of a middling show in which the primary motivation is laziness. These truly are great minds at work, folks.
2 comments:
Probably the best poem you never wrote. Could Fergus have done better?
Actually, your name appears under that poem.
Just sayin'.
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