Drew Gardner's "Chicks Dig War"/Is Flarf "Scorching Irony" or "Living through the Fantasy"?

Drew Gardner's "Chicks Dig War" became something of an anthem for the Flarf Collective and its supporters, but it was not without its critics, including Gary Sullivan on his blog, Elsewhere:

Does google "lead" people to this ugliness? Hell yes. It's there all over the place in our virtual world...certainly there are more intelligent ways of pointing to it and commenting on it. Just spitting it back out is suspect. There are no flarf poems about how funny lynchings are--are there? So why is it funny to dehumanize women (e.g., "Chicks Dig War")? Is that just an easier target? Something you can still get away with "in the community"? As said the wise man Pee-Wee Herman, "That's so funny, I forgot to laugh." If "Chicks Dig War" is the "Howl" of our generation we've got a big problem here. Problematic doesn't even begin to describe it.

Might I also add, in addition to its uneasily-exultant relationship toward women, is its replication of another of the cultural detritus swept from the web: the pacifist as pathological. All of which to say is that flarf courts the very opposite of critique, and even Douglass' notion of scorching irony--it courts just being retrograde as a camp gesture.

Here is yet another possibility: that Flarf is (if you're willing to defend it), engaging in the dangerous Zizekian "living through the fantasy." In other words, by becoming medium to these variously retrograde language-utterances of the web, we acknowledge their claim over us, in us, and own up to them in a way that p.c. language refuses. In the owning up, perhaps, is the possibility of paying out.

Here's Drew reading the poem at the Flarf Festival:

Fugazi's "Turnover"/Wars Abroad, Wars at Home

Fugazi, pride of Washington D.C., plays "Turnover," around the time of the first Gulf War (1991), under an ominous sign that reads: "THERE WILL BE TWO WARS." How often has one war led to another? In recent history, our foreign wars--and the false unanimity that it brings on the homefront--have ended when disaster strikes at home, demonstrating the racial and class inequities that oppress and divide us. Vietnam abroad, conflagrations in our northern cities. Gulf War abroad, the L.A. riots. The recent wars on terror, New Orleans. Fugazi's song, "Turnover," as with so many of their songs, tests the limits of inner violence and tries to end its nightmarish hold over us.

"Behind the Lines" review in PEACEWORK

This is the first review of Behind the Lines, by Michael True, in PEACEWORK Magazine, affiliated with the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers).

True wrote an influential book, An Energy Field More Intense Than War: The Nonviolent Tradition and American Literature--which was an early touchstone for my understanding of how poetry and writing might contribute to the cultural work of peacemaking.

In a way, that book's generous breadth--one of its great strengths--turned out to offer a lot of avenues of further inquiry. We differ, for example, on what constitutes "anti-war rhetoric." For True, Levertov, for example, is the model of a successful poet who melds peace activism and poetry; for me, I see her as both enormously important from a cultural point of view, but whose poetry was deeply problematic and divisive in all sorts of ways.

Guided by Voices' "Everywhere with Helicopter"

Guided by Voices, the brainchild of indie savant/graphomaniac/outsider artist/former grade school teacher Robert Pollard, performs "Everywhere with Helicopter," a song written "in the wake" of 9/11. Unlike most of their songs, which are wrapped in the postmodern mythos of Pollard himself--trash-compacting classic rock heroism into two minute nuggets of indie rock gold--this song is infused with the amphetamine high and blindness of righteous rage that so many felt after the towers were struck. Rock and roll has a way with dramatizing such feeling so much more easily than poetry, somehow, but great rock songs contain within them a kind of self-subversion, as this one does. When Pollard sings, "we know the answers," we know he knows we're lost.



"Everywhere with Helicopter"

Eyeline [I line] the driveway
Eye [I] black the door
Sky all around me
Levels life from roof to floor

Trees and knees are lovely
Seek it, find the core
I have grown to life
Like all in silence
Wait for more

Everywhere with helicopter
Hard to follow/swallow
When I'm slow
Everywhere with helicopter
Sending off where lightning goes
(censor of the lightning ghosts)

I will try to fight them
I will let them nowhere [know where] to go
Try escape the pace
I'll say "God bless you"
Let me know

We know the answers
We fill us in
I do not diminish
Start to finish
Front to end

Everywhere with helicopter...

Some Thoughts on "Operation Homecoming"

I've been of two minds about "Operation Homecoming," the National Endowment for the Arts' initiative to hold writing workshops for American soldiers, from which an anthology has now sprung.

On the one hand, this project enables a unique opportunity for U.S. troops to articulate and give form to experiences that they might not otherwise; it also enables those of us on the homefront a way to listen to these stories, from writers who want to tell them. Obviously, soldiers in the modern era have played a critical role in representing war in ways that have made the politicians' doublespeak about its glories less tenable. Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Randall Jarrell, Karl Shapiro, Michael Casey, Yusef Komunyakaa, and recently Iraq War veteran Brian Turner (among many, many others)--all of these poets have contributed critically to our understanding of war, with poems that are beautiful and terrifying. Clearly, the NEA has scored serious patriotism points along the way.

On the other hand, I'm wary that such stories will replicate, too often, what Miriam Cooke calls the paradigmatic "war story"--the kind of story told from a young male perspective which privileges certain accounts of war that end up making it tidier, less bloody, and more masterable than war actually is, for the vast majority of those who experience it. Will this writing make war ultimately more exciting and glamorous than it may be?

I was particularly pleased to see, on the recent story on npr, that a soldier's mother was one of the writers included in the project--because if we believe that war is, as everyone from William James to Paul Virilio suggests, "the endless preparation for war," then we need to look at the "homefront" experience.

Yet will the writings of "Operation Homecoming" enable us to understand Iraqi experience any better, or will it perpetuate the Orientalizing representations of inscrutable irrational otherness that haunt war accounts of colonized powers?

Finally, how will soldier-writers, once they have done this writing, be received by fellow-soldiers (not to mention the Defense Department), particularly if their writing explores painful, difficult, or even illegal experiences? Is there a place for dissident writing in "Operation Homecoming," and how might writers be protected to explore the full range of experiences and issues that those experiences raise?

Mark Halliday's "Fort Brag"/Why Do "Git 'Er Done" and Vietnam almost rhyme?

Mark Halliday, coiner of "ultra talk" and one of its principal progenitors, wrote a poem some years ago that, as far as I can tell, has never been published--even though it has always made me laugh. Apropos of the question, "what would a New York School war resistance poem look like," "Fort Brag" takes on the peculiarly American discourse of hypermasculine cocky effectuation with great elan. Everyone has had a coach or teacher or boss or father who sounds like this. In a sense, it gets at what is one of this nation's gifts and banes--our boundless, and thus reckless, optimism in our own abilities to "git 'er done." Listen to Mark read "Fort Brag" and other poems at his John Carroll University appearance.

"FORT BRAG" by Mark Halliday


It was cold outside so we built a fort.
We hauled insulation on barges and camels
and we hoisted joists. Maybe the spanners would pop a strut,
maybe the G-men would call in a shrapnel jockey but
it was fourth down and goal to go
and no amount of raggin’ was going to fix the wagon
so we heaved one more time and Bonzo thudded over
and he tore up his thigh but we scored.
We put the numbers up where they can’t be jimmied off.
It was hot so we harnessed rivers to make ice
and packed up the cakes in hard cubes,
one squad per ten cubes, it was an all-day job
but what was was

and we knew that like we knew our own cashews
so when our biceps twanged like busted gut
we bent at the knees and took the stairs saying
“Watch the corner” and “Let me just shift my grip” and “Heuh.”
What we had to get was our ground beef
like what is chopped by the thick chopper at Foxie’s Deli
who knows to chop and charge because he has to support his thighs
that want new molecules like our own thighs
so we blew sweat off the tips of our noses and said “Heuh”
as we hunkered and yanked. Because

as explained we did have to get our ground beef
so we have yanked and pumped and piled things up at the fort.
If we have lots of piles at the fort, and we do,
it has been for the ground beef and that’s how it makes sense,
as Yogi Stengel once said “When the mudhen flies south
all the badger lips point north” – you hear what I’m saying,
you grasp the thrust of my remarks.

So thus and forthwith as a result we have this fort
such that nobody else gets in
but still we had better stack up some 500 more sandbags
just in case of the unforeseen eventuality
because inside we have some 500 packages of ground beef
punched into slots, and wouldn’t those squirmy Beagle Boys
from Shoshone Creek adore to get their mitts
on such burger materials? You better bet they would.
The situation explains itself.

World Leader Pretend/"PeaceMaker" Computer Game

(image by David-Baptiste Chirot)

"In the video game 'PeaceMaker,' my character is the Prime Minister of Israel. And a suicide bomb has just gone off in Jerusalem..."; so begins Robert Smith's piece on the new video game, PeaceMaker.

In the other story on npr, Steve Inskeep also took the role of the Israeli Prime Minister, and guess what? suicide bomb in Jerusalem. (See the transcript below). At first, I was a little annoyed that, per usual, our fearless reporters could only imagine (and we, by proxy--that they could only imagine that we would understand) being Israelis. And that those nutty Palestinians are always making trouble and suicide-bombing "us."

But actually, the story comes around to suggest that the makers of the game (one of whom was an Israeli soldier) created the game, in a sense, to attempt to understand the Palestinian side of the conflict--and what might need to happen to create peace.

If only our fearless leaders were as creative as gamers.

(some transcript)

INSKEEP: News report: suicide bomber kills 18 and injures over 100 in West Jerusalem. We have a picture of a burning bus.

Mr. BURAK: And you can actually watch the event, so we have footage from, you know, past events like that. And again, you get the idea that this is a game, but a game about current events, about real events, and it's not only about two sides. You got the public, you've got the settlers.

INSKEEP: The people who have moved and done settlements in the West Bank.

Mr. BURAK: The U.S.A. and the Arab world. And next to each one of them there is this thermometer.

INSKEEP: Oh, showing how tense or how engaged or unhappy they are at the moment.

Mr. BURAK: With you, with your policy.

INSKEEP: Oh, okay. Let's figure out some things that we can do. Let's not do the most extreme thing.

Mr. BURAK: Let's do something that is...

INSKEEP: We got to get some troops out on the street.

Mr. BURAK: Yes. Security, but kind of more moderate. And by the way, you have advisers.

INSKEEP: Oh, okay.

Mr. BURAK: So let's look at them.

INSKEEP: We're thinking about sending army units and - oh, I have advice from a hawk and a dove, so to speak.

Mr. BURAK: Right.

Mr. BURAK: What do they say?

Mr. BURAK: Each one of them will try to pull you in another direction. So the hawk will tell you definitely send the army because it will raise your security. But the dove will tell you that the presence of troops will actually hurt the Palestinian quality of life.

INSKEEP: Okay. Not because it's automatically a good idea or a bad idea, let's do it because we want to proceed and see what happens with the game.

Mr. BURAK: Let's try to do that and let's send army units to - we can choose different objectives. Let's do something simple as securing the area.

INSKEEP: Okay.

Mr. BURAK: Now time passes.

INSKEEP: Okay.

Mr. BURAK: So you kind of...

INSKEEP: Several days just went by.

Mr. BURAK: Skip the week, yeah.

INSKEEP: Okay.

Mr. BURAK: Yeah. If you look at the score, that's interesting. We don't have only one score. We have two. So on the Israeli side, we got actually positive score because people approved of our action.

INSKEEP: Are we trying to get to a hundred points? Is that what we're trying to do to win?

Mr. BURAK: On the two sides.

INSKEEP: On the two sides. So we've got four points. We got a good start. And on the Palestinian side, we're at negative seven.

Mr. BURAK: Right.

INSKEEP: We've lost a bunch of points.

Mr. BURAK: So yeah. And I want to show you something that in Peacemaker it's - we made it so it's not - I mean, you see the complexity in a way that is counterintuitive. So for example, if a naive user just did what we did and sent the army and got this response from the Palestinians and says, oh, you know what? Let's send them aid.

INSKEEP: And try to buy them off, that will make them unhappy.

Mr. BURAK: Yeah. Let's give them, you know, directly medical aid.

INSKEEP: Okay. Let's send them some aid and see what happens. See if we can improve our opinion among the Palestinians. Your request rejected.

Mr. BURAK: Yeah. Because...

INSKEEP: They don't want it.

Mr. BURAK: Because yeah, the game has a memory in the sense that you just did something that is perceived as a security action.

INSKEEP: No one believes that such an effort is genuine, it says

Mr. BURAK: Yeah. And they just don't believe you.

INSKEEP: Okay.

Mr. BURAK: Because of what you did just a week before.

INSKEEP: So I got nothing; although I got another point of the Israeli side.

Mr. BURAK: Right.

INSKEEP: But the Palestinians aren't happy.

Mr. BURAK: Right.

INSKEEP: So I'm starting to get tense. What can we do now? I don't like to lose. All right. Help me out here. Give me an idea. We've clearly - I clearly lost control of the situation. There's more red dots all over the map, more terrible things happening. How would you get out of this situation? How do you ever get out of this situation?

Mr. BURAK: I mean, one thing that happens with Peacemaker a lot is that you'll play it several times and the first time that you play it you will probably lose the game. Part of that losing is part of the lesson, you know, to see that frustration and lack of control that you have. I mean we played it for five minutes. You can't win in five minutes something, you know, 60 years is - you can't really solve.

INSKEEP: I want to ask because you're an Israeli. You're an Israeli army captain. You must have played this game any number of times from the Palestinian point of view.

Mr. BURAK: Right.

INSKEEP: Have you learned things you didn't know?

Mr. BURAK: Yeah, definitely. I mean, not only by playing it but actually the process of working on the game; and we used Palestinians, people that helped us in writing the content and translating it. I mean it was a huge thing for me because what I realized is that the first time that I actually talked to Palestinians and understood their perspective was when I came to the U.S. after 33 years. So that's a big deal.

INSKEEP: When you came to the U.S., because when you were in that tense situation...

Mr. BURAK: Yes.

INSKEEP: ...it was hard to...

Mr. BURAK: It was very hard to communicate with Palestinians. It was very hard to see their perspective. And I think it's true for almost any conflict. I mean if you're in a certain place, what you get through the media is a one-sided - even though you think you get the objective story, you don't get it.

INSKEEP: That's Asi Burak. He and a colleague, Eric Brown, invented the computer game Peacemaker.

David-Baptiste Chirot's "See Scrawls"/Where Poetry and Visuality Collide

David-Baptiste Chirot's collage work, it seems to me, is an attempt to bring a poetic sensibility to the visual image--while the images seem to confront us with the incommensurability of our language to describe the new conditions of "Pure War," of the "War on Terror," they offer something close to a new lexicon, a way of naming by showing.

"Homeland Security" by Halvard Johnson

I love how this poem uses the language in which we talk about the Iraqi government to our own.

"Homeland Security" by Halvard Johnson

Large tanks marked PROPANE, lying in rows in the sun.
You’ve watched the scene in commercial satellite photos
with an aim of splitting the opposition, doing the dirty work

that needs to be done. A near-earth fly-by deflected
suspicion onto certain of our neighbors whose names you may
know or may not, refusing to believe that any court

could be objective in this matter—our zero percent market share in
gasoline pumps. The government/industry test execution team
says our new government should be a federal democracy, and money

should remain the state religion. Does that sound familiar?
Most of the delegates have been in exile for decades,
their heinous crimes against humanity almost totally forgotten.

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile petrochemical
corporations to their coming decline—those are our aims.
Sites near the town of Jumpstart, Nevada, were of a type that could

be used for making nuclear weapons, links to your future, and ours.
Visits there never complete without souvenirs from the gift shop—
you know, something for the wife and kids.

"Murder Machine" by Kurt Schwitters

How does power itself become its own justification? How does property itself become a will to violence?

"Murder Machine" by Kurt Schwitters


Welcome, 260 thousand cubic centimeters.
I yours.
You mine,
We me.
And sun eternity glitter stars.
Suffering suffers dew.
Oh, woe you me !
Memorandum:
5,000 mark reward !
A crate is crooked, especially your crate.
There is no more property, only communism still
acknowledges property.
I wilt the reed, for there is no more reed.
I left the clock, for there is no more clock.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, seven.
Sunday greens warmth.
The elephant.
The fat elephant.
In case more than one person should lay claim to the
reward, we shall retain the rights of distribution
admitting of no appeal.
The magistrate of the royal capital and residence.


I. V. Weber


--Kurt Schwitters


tr. Harriet Watts


in Three Painter-Poets: Arp/Schwitters/Klee
[Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974]