Saying hey

Via Ben Friedlander on Twitter, I was recently treated to Anne Boyer's "Damnatio Memoriae." Please read it--it's short and brilliant.

As Miriam Posner points out, it's oddly moving, not in spite of its repetition of the hilariously banal phrase "saying hey," but because of it. It serves as a subversively anti-dramatic counterpoint to the question, "Can the subaltern speak?" After all, here they are, saying hey. Only they're saying hey across the centuries, across the continents, "across deep time." These mysteries of the low register are the genius of flarf and the reason it's poetry, even if it's irritating poetry. Why does lameness sometimes flare out in the form of awesomeness?

[Better than Storify? Worse? I sometimes think Twitter conversations amount to more than the sum of their parts, but it can be difficult to render them usefully on a blog.]

Over the line

I need to return to that Berssenbrugge/Regretsy thing for a moment, because while there's a real element of embarrassment in Nest, there's also something inappropriate about the Regretsy comparison. Nest is over the line, but not in a flarfy way. Regretsy, on the other hand, is over the line in a flarfy way.

In fact, flarf is the Regretsy of poetry. (I expect this to become the canonical definition of flarf eventually.)

Yeah, you know this is going to come down to puerility sooner or later.