KJ: The phenomenon’s largely for­got­ten now, but in ret­ro­spect, 20-some years since its apogee, how would you regard Flarf?

Foster: Well, the Flarf reduc­tion of post-​avant lyri­cal abstrac­tion to buf­foon­ery, dis­gust, kitsch, and unem­bar­rassed super­cil­ious mock­ery was noted, back in the century’s first decade, by cer­tain crit­ics like you, the late Michael Rob­bins, Ben­jamin Buchloh (who just cel­e­brated his 100th birth­day!), or Peter Schjel­dahl. Curi­ously, I think neo-​geo paint­ing of the 1980s offers a good heuris­tic model for its his­tor­i­cal fram­ing, now that we have a bit of per­spec­tive. Neo-​geo: Sounds fun­nier than Flarf when you say it outloud…

On another note, here is a review of four promi­nent books from the Flarf pan­theon. In the group’s spirit, I have [with excep­tion of my own brack­eted com­ments] pla­gia­rized it. (see Ben­jamin Buchloh, “Parody and Appro­pri­a­tion in Picabia, Pop, and Polke,” in Neo-​Avantgarde and Cul­ture Indus­try: Essays on Euro­pean and Amer­i­can Art from 1955 to 1975. Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. 532 pages, $50).

Every time the avant-​garde appro­pri­ates ele­ments from the dis­courses of low, folk, or mass cul­ture, it pub­licly denounces its own elit­ist iso­la­tion and the obso­les­cence of its inher­ited pro­duc­tion pro­ce­dures. Ulti­mately, each such instance of “bridg­ing the gap between art and life,” as Robert Rauschen­berg famously put it, only reaf­firms the sta­bil­ity of the divi­sion because it remains within the con­text of high art. Each act of cul­tural appro­pri­a­tion, there­fore, con­structs a sim­u­lacrum of a double nega­tion, deny­ing the valid­ity of indi­vid­ual and orig­i­nal pro­duc­tion, yet deny­ing equally the rel­e­vance of the spe­cific con­text and func­tion of the work’s own prac­tice.

[Part one of this con­ver­sa­tion is here.]

John Bradley: Now, I wonder if you could talk more about my pre­vi­ous point, if you don’t mind going back to it: that polit­i­cal fig­ures are more deserv­ing of satire. They run for public office and know­ingly enter the tor­nado zone of public wrath. Writ­ers, how­ever, don’t deserve such scorn as they are not really public fig­ures. And their book photos should be off limits. Crit­i­cize the writ­ing or lit­er­ary move­ments, but not how a writer appears. That’s too easy and per­haps cruel. And don’t epi­grams about poets, epi­grams that name par­tic­u­lar poets, rein­force in some way the figure of Authorship?

Kent John­son: Only in the sense, I’d say, that words like “queer” or “nigger” rein­force big­otry when retaken and wielded openly in the faces of the bigoted…

[Ed. Note: A ver­sion of this exchange between Kent John­son and John Bradley appeared in Plantarchy #5, 2008. Thanks to Justin Katko for per­mis­sion to reprint. John Bradley is the author of Ter­res­trial Music (Curb­stone), War on Words (BlazeVOX), and You Don't Know What You Don't Know (Cleve­land St. Univ. Poetry Center, forthcoming).]

“Only those deserv­ing of scorn are appre­hen­sive of it.”
– La Rochefou­cauld

John Bradley: You’ve recently pub­lished a book titled Epi­grami­ti­tis: 118 Living Amer­i­can Poets (BlazeVOX, 2006), a large gath­er­ing of epi­grams and accom­pa­ny­ing pic­tures ded­i­cated to indi­vid­ual con­tem­po­rary poets. You’re now expand­ing it to fifty or so more. I think it’s safe to say there hasn’t been any­thing like this in poetry for a long time.

I’ve been think­ing about the grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity of social and polit­i­cal satire with news­pa­per, online, and book ver­sions of The Onion. On TV, there’s South Park, The Daily Show, The Col­bert Report, and a BBCA show called The Thick of It. In film, there’s Bull­worth, Wag the Tail, Thank You for Smok­ing, and Borat. Amer­i­cans seem fairly com­fort­able with social and polit­i­cal satire, but not with lit­er­ary satire, specif­i­cally satire that goofs on writ­ers. What do you make of this curi­ous dichotomy? Is the poet seen as off limits? What con­tem­po­rary poets have been effec­tively employ­ing satire? Is it pos­si­ble that poetic satire is more accepted when it mocks social trends or celebri­ties as opposed to par­tic­u­lar writ­ers, lit­er­ary move­ments, and poetry politics?

Kent John­son: Yes, it’s an inter­est­ing thing.