2008 Woodie Awards
Flarf and Duff poems
New Writing series offers up two poets for UM
Benjamin Costanzi
Issue date: 4/10/08 Section: Style
The New Writing Series was lively on Thursday, April 3 as it welcomed Rodney Koeneke for his first appearance with the series and UMaine's own Benjamin Friedlander made his third. Those on hand were treated to a dynamic demonstration of poetry's potential.
Professor Friedlander is the author of four books of poetry, a book of experimental criticism and the editor of several collections including the recent "Selected Poems of Robert Creeley" (University of California Press).
He remarked on the particular pleasure of reading for the "home crowd" with a series of poems he has translated from German and Italian with help from his wife, professor Carla Billitteri. The first of these, titled "The Fox, The Cook, The Cock," by Giovanni Gherardo de Rossi, was a sardonic ode to the catch-22 of a farm chicken's life.
After his translation work, he read some originals that ventured into the realm of "Flarf" - the modern poetry movement that utilizes the cognitive jumble of Internet searching. He noted that his "favorite thing about Flarf is the birthday poems" which was reiterated later by Koeneke's comment that "Flarf, like Soylent Green, is people." Memorable moments from Friedlander's Flarf were the poems "Somebody Blew Up America," which at one point seemed to describe poetry as "just the folds of old sound where meaning collects." His poem "Hillary Duff" captured the tone, passion and futility of a user review internet face-off over bubblegum pop, while "Eliot" examined the recent political turmoil in Albanin, and "The Chinese Written Characters as a Medium for Poetry" was dedicated in memory of Professors Burt Hatlen and Sylvester Pollet.
Rodney Koeneke is the author of "Rouge State" (Pavement Saw Press), "Musee Mechanique" (BlazeVOX Books) and a new manuscript called "Etruria." He prefaced his reading with some observations as a newcomer to Maine, joking, "I've already learned what a meat raffle and a racino is."
His performance was marked by expressive body language and use of inflection, strengthened by his recitation of many poems by heart. He engaged the audience by generously handing out a copy of each of his two books. He went in chronological order, and began with several poems from Rouge State, the first of which, "Summer Acrostic Hotshot," featured the vocal elongation of many words as a sort of stammer to achieve a mesmerizing effect. Next he read from "Musee Mechanique", his self-proclaimed "Flarf book" and takes its title from a former job in a San Francisco arcade. Included in the work were the frenetic "Pizza Kitty" which has apparently found a following among Japanese feline enthusiasts, and "The Adorno Corollary" which seemed to eschew the philosopher Theodor Adorno's stricture that "to still write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric" (a statement which he later recanted).
Koeneke closed out the set with poems from "Etruria" including a "birthday poem for Ben Friedlander" and then stepped out of convention with a Japanese live-narration styled reading juxtaposed over a 1957 Bollywood film called "Pyaasa." This "neo-benshi" experiment proved quite entertaining, blending wry philosophy and poetic humor freely with lines like "I saw the best minds of my generation crucified by bookishness" and the mantra "We weep, not because we are sad, but because sometimes we feel like weeping."
The NWS will convene again on April 10 at 4:30 p.m. in Soderberg Auditorium for a reading by Julia Elliott. For more information about the NWS and its writers, visit nwsnews.wordpress.com.
Professor Friedlander is the author of four books of poetry, a book of experimental criticism and the editor of several collections including the recent "Selected Poems of Robert Creeley" (University of California Press).
He remarked on the particular pleasure of reading for the "home crowd" with a series of poems he has translated from German and Italian with help from his wife, professor Carla Billitteri. The first of these, titled "The Fox, The Cook, The Cock," by Giovanni Gherardo de Rossi, was a sardonic ode to the catch-22 of a farm chicken's life.
After his translation work, he read some originals that ventured into the realm of "Flarf" - the modern poetry movement that utilizes the cognitive jumble of Internet searching. He noted that his "favorite thing about Flarf is the birthday poems" which was reiterated later by Koeneke's comment that "Flarf, like Soylent Green, is people." Memorable moments from Friedlander's Flarf were the poems "Somebody Blew Up America," which at one point seemed to describe poetry as "just the folds of old sound where meaning collects." His poem "Hillary Duff" captured the tone, passion and futility of a user review internet face-off over bubblegum pop, while "Eliot" examined the recent political turmoil in Albanin, and "The Chinese Written Characters as a Medium for Poetry" was dedicated in memory of Professors Burt Hatlen and Sylvester Pollet.
Rodney Koeneke is the author of "Rouge State" (Pavement Saw Press), "Musee Mechanique" (BlazeVOX Books) and a new manuscript called "Etruria." He prefaced his reading with some observations as a newcomer to Maine, joking, "I've already learned what a meat raffle and a racino is."
His performance was marked by expressive body language and use of inflection, strengthened by his recitation of many poems by heart. He engaged the audience by generously handing out a copy of each of his two books. He went in chronological order, and began with several poems from Rouge State, the first of which, "Summer Acrostic Hotshot," featured the vocal elongation of many words as a sort of stammer to achieve a mesmerizing effect. Next he read from "Musee Mechanique", his self-proclaimed "Flarf book" and takes its title from a former job in a San Francisco arcade. Included in the work were the frenetic "Pizza Kitty" which has apparently found a following among Japanese feline enthusiasts, and "The Adorno Corollary" which seemed to eschew the philosopher Theodor Adorno's stricture that "to still write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric" (a statement which he later recanted).
Koeneke closed out the set with poems from "Etruria" including a "birthday poem for Ben Friedlander" and then stepped out of convention with a Japanese live-narration styled reading juxtaposed over a 1957 Bollywood film called "Pyaasa." This "neo-benshi" experiment proved quite entertaining, blending wry philosophy and poetic humor freely with lines like "I saw the best minds of my generation crucified by bookishness" and the mantra "We weep, not because we are sad, but because sometimes we feel like weeping."
The NWS will convene again on April 10 at 4:30 p.m. in Soderberg Auditorium for a reading by Julia Elliott. For more information about the NWS and its writers, visit nwsnews.wordpress.com.
Be the first to comment on this story