Continuing our exploration of contemporary poetry, we bring you some experimental work by Walter Mackey, courtesy of White Sky Books.
Mr. Mackey’s work here falls into that genre of poetry known to aficionados as flarf. Without my indulging too much in a historical essay, one can easily sense the strain of absurdity in his collection literalley 10 reasons why im a lil bitch. Like many hyper-serious movements, Flarf originated as a joke. Fed up with the indulgences of oral slam poetry and the preciousness of poetry contests, Flarf writers returned to the anti-elite, pre-MFA strains of American poetry via colloquial speech–in this case, Google web searches. As the Poetry Foundation defines it “flarf also celebrates deliberately bad or ‘incorrect’ poetry by forcing clichés, swear words, onomatopoeia, and other linguistic aberrations into poetic shape. It is wrong, un-P.C., out of control and ‘not okay.'”
literalley 10 reasons why im a lil bitch is definitely “not okay.” And thank goodness for that.
Download EPUB version here.
Download PDF version here.
