Doesn’t everyone — on some irrational, Ptolemaic level — think that their own constellation of influences is or should be everyone else’s constellation of influences?
This is a big problem!
Author: Nada Gordon
skirt artist
entertainer
ESL teacher
poet
My items are perfect for costumes, Lolita, French maid, square dance, adult sissy baby, sissy girls, cross dressers, drag queens, Halloween, cosplay, rockabilly, Mardi Gras, fetish, 50’s style, pageants, pouf bunnies, cancan, anime girls, rave, club, pretty boy, big cuties, fantasy.
I tried in two browsers to leave a comment on Ron’s blog re: torque but it just wouldn’t go through. Maybe he’s blocked me? Am I such a troublemaker? Anyway, here’s my two yen:
I was a bit thrown by the meth mention, too, until I un-torqued the sentence a little. At any rate, that would have been an interesting powder in the word salad.
Why don’t more poets under 40 employ much torque (it makes me glad I’m 43 — just made it under the torquing wire!)? A very good question. I wonder, are they afraid of it? Do they feel its usefulness has been played out? Do they find it boring?
I don’t know if it’s because Coolidge, Seaton, et al were like mother’s milk to me, but for me it’s an essential quality to the poeticization (i.e. the calling of attention to itself) of language. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a modern device, either. Milton strikes me as quite torqued, as does Donne. Maybe I am conflating “torque” and “complexity”? Even Byron seems torqued in that the sense in the lines must be twisted around to accommodate the witty rhymes.
If a poet doesn’t torque (v.) it makes me feel that they take grammar for granted, that they haven’t really thought about how to stretch, pummel, rip, dysraph, glue, knead, decorate, and deform it — and that kinda bores me! I want to see maximum attention at the microstructural level, not just a bunch of plain statements sitting there on the page like hard-boiled eggs.
Awkwardness is endearing; gracefulness*, not so much.
(Gracefulness differs from grace, right?)
Scooters, vacation, fall.
The idea that one shouldn’t like language poetry because it is weird or amusing but rather because it opens out rippling utopias of new ways of thinking seems to me incredibly recondite. It spells out L=E=I=S=U=R=E.
See Aragon on novelty, below.
Sniff the chicken.
See if it’s OK.
The problem with hero worship is that everyone, including one’s heroes, is basically phony. I don’t see how anyone can’t or won’t recognize that.
Flarf is primarily a wild party, and that is what so many people seem to have a hard time with. I don’t mean by that description to denigrate its function in the slightest.
I am not interested in the hillbilly/ white trash aspect or strain of flarf. It might make me laugh sometimes, but I am basically not interested in it. It doesn’t even sound exotic to me.
I think that flarf in many senses has devolved from its initial Schwitters-ish/ Hugo Ball-esque, Tourette’s-y sonic impulsion. Everything has to devolve. But that makes me a little sad.
I’m as guilty of using “plain statement” in a poem as anyone.
Otohime 