The approach Jasper Bernes uses in his review of FLARF: An Anthology of Flarf is that of a poet identified with one group attempting to diminish a rival group. This is a common enough pattern of behavior—attempting to gain influence for your group by attacking rivals. Creating an enemy as a way of consolidating power does not have a great history behind it though, and, as Bernes’s piece demonstrates, this may not be the best approach for a book reviewer.
Bernes could have honestly identified himself as a poet associated with a group of poets involved in a “documentary” approach that he believes opposes the group of writers associated with Flarf. Instead, he attempts to play the role of the neutral literary critic. The result of this approach is problematic, because it ends in a book review that ignores much of the content of the book under discussion and makes some odd claims using questionable evidence. The fact that he conceals his competitive position is understandable though. If he had broadly and thoroughly looked at the poetry in the Flarf anthology, it wouldn’t have supported his argument, so he uses things other than the poetry in the book to characterize Flarf. He seems more interested in artistic in-group/out-group competition than in exploring or understanding the book he is reviewing. It would have been better if the editors at Chicago Review had addressed some of these issues, because this is, in fact, positioned as a book review. Critical writers should themselves demand editing, especially if they are poet-critics writing in a context that incentivizes them to follow self-serving lines of argument.
One problem in his essay, something Bernes is trying to slip past the reader rather than make a clear case for, is his attempt to associate Flarf with right-wing trolls. He argues that Flarf is a form of left-wing satire attacking right-wing thought, à la Stephen Colbert; and, at least with “Chicks Dig War,” this is partially true. But he goes on, using a tortured logic, to imply that Flarf somehow reflects the form, and therefore the values, of right-wing trolls:
The troll will tell you that they have no avowed commitment to the content of their challenges. Their interventions are purely a question of form—the offensive content is therapeutic, or it’s there to prove a point about free speech, to attack the sanctimony and self-righteousness of the politically correct. In the Trump era, however, when the trolls show up with knives and guns, such claims have little ground to stand on.
None of this has anything to do with the poetry in the anthology under review. Bernes is attempting to label Flarf as both left-wing trolling and right-wing trolling without ever establishing a credible argument that is any kind of trolling. Trolling is not the same thing as satire. He tries to sneak this misdirection past the reader by pivoting away from the poetry, employing extensive, extraneous quotes from Gary Sullivan about Sullivan’s personal psychology and about his relationship to his father.
I shouldn’t have to point out that Sullivan’s statements about his own psychology and family are not an equivalent to the various poems by the twenty-four different poets represented in the Flarf anthology. Bernes’s unspoken assumption here is that Sullivan is an authority figure and that any of his statements about his own personal or poetic tendencies can define Flarf as a movement. Sullivan’s “origin story” may say something about how the Flarf poets came together socially, but it has much less to do with the poetry that’s actually in the anthology. The anthology is how Flarf developed, not how it started. People repeat this origin story ad nauseam because there’s a tendency to unconsciously reproduce the speech of whoever is assumed to be an authority, and because readers are accustomed to think of literary groups as having central authorities who can stand in for the whole group. Unexamined narratives of authority tend to warp the mind.
Flarf was always based on a horizontal structure, a loose collective. There were never any leaders or authority figures. The statements of Sullivan’s that Bernes uses in his argument have virtually nothing to do with the poetry in the anthology. If Bernes wanted to write a piece about Sullivan’s poetry and personal motivations for writing, he should have done that, but he’s writing a book review, and his thoughts should be based on the poetry that’s in the book. Sullivan himself never wrote a full-length book of Flarf poetry.
Bernes also repeats many of the mistakes that other poets attempting competitive literary journalism about Flarf have made over the years. He doesn’t actually trust his own insights and judgments about the poetry he’s supposed to be reading, and he doesn’t want to bother with the labor involved in gathering accurate information about the group and its history the way a real journalist would, so he latches onto a few dubious statements about the work and doubles down on the error by picking a misleading spokesperson he considers to be an authority figure to serve as a guide for his thoughts.
Why does Bernes need his thoughts as a critic to be guided—positively or negatively—by any authority figure, real or imagined? He only trusts himself to discuss things in the anthology that have already been most talked about, such as “Chicks Dig War” and The Anger Scale—in other words, topics that have been preapproved for discussion by a form of social authority. Bernes is deferring to the authority of consensus. Again, this shows a problem with Bernes’s underlying attitude toward authority. Don’t get me wrong, I like it when Katie and I are talked about, but there are other poems in this anthology besides “Chicks Dig War.” We’re in a time in which we can’t afford to unconsciously defer to authorities, or to defer to them consciously if we feel it serves our interests. This insecurity and deferral to phantom authority figures is part of a larger problem in journalism, and an even larger problem in mass psychology and society that makes fretting over these poetry matters seem insignificant indeed.
When Bernes makes the absurd assertion that Flarf in some way involves “contempt for [the] poor,” he returns again to Sullivan’s autobiographical statements to support this idea. I’ve heard this assertion once or twice, usually from antagonistic poets largely unfamiliar with the poetry of Flarf. Over the years I’ve gradually come to understand what is happening when poets make this claim. Flarf is involved in finding and being inspired by the poetic nature of common speech on the internet, speech that is often poetic despite not showing “elevated” registers associated with higher education. When poets like Bernes see language that is not displaying the kind of overly-refined diction that is used in poetic educational status signaling, but rather a kind of poetic register that seems diametrically opposed to this, they project their own disdain for the less educated by assuming mockery is taking place in Flarf poetry. Actually, there is a kind of recognition of a poetic language. Because poet-critic professors like Bernes assume any poet’s role to involve, by definition, a display of elevated educational status, they automatically assume that any poem using “low” poetic language that doesn’t reflect that kind of status must be some kind of mockery of it. Ironically, what poets like Bernes are actually doing with this kind of claim is showing their own contempt. The superciliousness of Bernes’s writing in this essay and in others further suggests that he may have fallen into this pattern.
Bernes lauds Katie Degentesh, and that’s great, but he’s missing just how subversive her work is, and he’s repeating the clichéd maneuver of pointing to a writer as an exception in order to attack a group he feels his own group to be in competition with. He’s wrong that she’s an exception in this anthology. Why didn’t I hear his thoughts about Anne Boyer’s poems after he had brought up her name when discussing her blog? Or Mel Nichols? Or Ben Friedlander? Or Edwin Torres? Or Rod Smith? Or Elisabeth Workman? All of these poets and more have poems in the anthology that contain qualities that he’s pointing to in Degentesh’s work. The reason why he picks her out for praise is self-serving: he’s arguing that her poetry is a form of documentary poetics akin to his own.
Bernes does show some understanding of a few aspects of Flarf he had ignored or been unaware of in his previous writings—the joy in it, and the vulnerability in it. I would have been curious to hear more about how he thinks Flarf could complement the kind of documentary poetry he’s involved with, rather than just point out where it reflects documentary poetics he already approves of. In the Trump era, we need to move toward solidarity rather than splintering, if history is to be any guide.