T O N Y T O S T
______________________________________________________BLOWING UP JUST TO SAY SOMETHING TO US:
K. SILEM MOHAMMAD AND THE SUB-POETICS OF FLARF
In reviewing Mohammad's Deer Head Nation , Aaron Kunin locates the book's appeal in a social context: “a poem establishes an artificial community among its readers. Everyone who reads a poem is connected to it and to its other readers--an occult fact that Mohammad cheerfully exploits . . .”1 I would like to extend Kunin's insight; Mohammad's Flarf poems establish a community not just among the readers of his poems, but also among the readers and the speakers/sources of his poems.
Even though Mohammad's Googling process may suggest a certain anonymity and randomness, I believe his poems skillfully and often subtly enunciate a wider range of emotions than most poems are willing to offer, shifting from anger to loneliness in a startling fashion while still reveling in the humor of the socially unacceptable statements that his searches discover. The juxtaposition of raw emotion and linguistic naiveté is often illuminating. One of the most appealing poems in the Combo “Flarf” issue is Mohammad's “The Led Zeppelin Experience,” which cultivates a dreadful authority that is only accentuated by its often child-like use of language and comical/frightful misspellings, most notably of the word “retarded.” Here is the poem in its entirety:
The Led Zeppelin Experience
what are you retarted making fun of dead people?
if your popin shit like that i don't even know youman I swear I would kick you're a$$ if I ever saw you
you or knew who the f*ck you are cuz no play?you can't even make sense when I'm REALLY drunk
are you retarted serious questionnot doing homework, thats for sure
go to a library! just look up Henry James duhre: Dumb & Dumber: are you retarted, that movie was great
you sound excited about it. . . .do you wanna see me puke? What are you retarted?
no (than whats your fucking problem)well unless you are retarted like this dumb ho
then you know what napster isso here is a list of some hot songs:
fuck i don't know any songs. . . .you are an anus mouth , are you retarted
this has damage bonus fruitcakefuck up u are obviously have some kind of obsesion wit me
it's a wonder why your husband left you and you're all aloneyou venture into my valley and you then ask for your life??
you will not leave this valley alive little dwarf
Part of the poem's appeal is its juxtaposition of phrases that illustrate a general state of some type of obliviousness (cultural, emotional, political, linguistic) with phrases like “it's a wonder why your husband left you and you're all alone” that reveal a full and sinister awareness. Mohammad's Flarf poems use the outsider language as an entry point to emotions, social situations, and value systems that are usually not represented or given voice in contemporary poetry.
The poem “Peek-a-Boo” from Deer Head Nation also utilizes Google techniques to sinister effect. It begins “ September 9, 2001 .” With Mohammad's Googling process known beforehand, this is an ominous note with which to begin a poem, highlighting a kind of innocence or human obliviousness to events of which we, in the future, are now aware (contrast this with the burgeoning genre of “Post 9/11” poems, many of which view the day's events in the safety of hindsight with the muted language of hindsight, incorporating the events into pre-existing elegiac stances2). The rest of the opening stanza consists of rapid cuts between fairly infantile utterances (“peek-a-boo” “smile”) and phrases that offer no continuity of thought:
bluselpilka . bloody cisma smilesjgrins
facial expression [also. shriek
this would be the shaft and
seventeenth-order non-stiff bloody
threatening rows of perfect teeth
Mohammad's presentation of these lines seems to be strategic; the rest of the poem, in comparison to these lines, is lucid. The above lines present an un-filtered presentation of the Google-sculpting technique; odd word combinations and punctuations are included, causing a reader to confront Mohammad's language as material to be sculpted and collaged. The lack of complete thoughts or emotions in these lines also hints at a certain difficulty of utterance and address: it is not clear who is speaking or who is being spoken to. Only in the last line of this opening stanza (“threatening rows of perfect teeth”) do we get a complete utterance or observation. Overall, the stanza emphasizes both Mohammad's technique and an awareness of the difficulties for many speakers to master the language at hand.
The opening of the second stanza mirrors the first, beginning “Tuesday, September 11.” Flarf, or at least Google-sculpting, seems uniquely equipped to deal with traumatic periods: the language presented is a language of immediacy, as opposed to the language of careful introspection or correct impression. A direct treatment of the event is possible for the Google-minded poet if she or he desires to mine chat-rooms, listservs and blogs from a certain day or week and then use this material for poetry; this is true even years down the line as long as the original material is still available. It's highly unlikely, of course, that the language from this particular poem is from September 11 th , though an argument can be made that 9/11 helped solidify the necessity for a Flarf aesthetic. According to Gary Sullivan, “Not too long after 9/11, people began posting again, though now all of the flarfs—many of which were parodies of AP News items—in some way shape or form addressed the aftermath of 9/11, including media portrayal of same. [. . .] I started a ‘sadness' series-doing searches on ‘The horrible sadness,' ‘the awful sadness,' ‘the unending sadness,' etc., in response to what was becoming a kind of stifling national(ist) mourning.”3
The visceral death-and-carnage reality of September 11 th is embedded in “Peek-a-Boo” much more directly than in many of the “mainstream” post-9/11 poems that airbrush out the gore of the day and focus more on the political, social and psychic impact of the events on the nation. Mohammad's poem obsesses over a handful of words; one can venture that teeth , animal and bloody are among the search terms used for “Peek-a-Boo.” The word teeth is used eleven times in the poem, animal is used fourteen times, bloody occurs seven times. The rest of “Peek-a-Boo” circulates around these three words and appears to be constructed from phrases that attach themselves (collateral phrases?) to these key terms when Googled.
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1 Rain Taxi . Online edition. Winter 03/04.
2 The website of the Academy of American Poets (www.poets.org ) has a “Post 9/11 Poetry Resources Page” that maintains links to poems and collections of poems pertaining to 9/11 and/or written in its wake. Stephen Dunn strikes a representative chord in his poem “To a Terrorist”: “I'm just speaking out loud/to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,/doomed to become mere words.”
3 “The Flarf Files.” http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html This is likely the best collectio of Flarf-related material.
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