Saturday, October 04, 2008



There's a curious hoax afoot.

The perpetrators are a group of "poetic researchers" named Vladimir Zykov, Steve McLaughlin, and Gregory Laynor, who have published a 3785 page journal of poems called For Godot.

The journal is full of spam-like poems (flarf?) which they have attributed to different writers alive and dead. I happen to be one of them. Many other folks I know and admire are in it, too. Maybe even you!

Here's the poem they published under my name, which I didn't write:

Of intensity

Invincible as a possession, angry as a dew
Only as a time, long as a time

Long and unretentive

They have feet
Late at night they acquit
him

Like a black way

They can see the noise of the
hand, between these invasions and those invasions
Early in the morning they answer him
Into a driven
flame a bad
hour appears
The ages concentrate as if they
see it

(pg. 1453)


Here's Mathias Svalina's poem:

Mankind

Mankind
A suit
Writing mankind with humanity

Air and flying
An other cherry
Suffocating

A cherry of
suits
Throttled
A man of
crumbs
A kind of cherry
Fitting panic

A sort of rioting
Like an imbecile
The sandy visions
Of wilderness
People

The towering glances

(pg. 1272)


Here's Blake Butler's poem:

Lands changed inside admiration

After now it skulked you, exiling, skulking, a sort of country

(pg. 1595)


Here's Gary Lutz's poem:

A flag

An added leap

Like a dome
Like a grave
A forest
A hint of bodices
Thirst written into nature

Sure lights and wise triumphs

Of fame
Like a trade

Nodding creation
True reasons and altered
rotations
Anguish
Good hillsides and untravelled earths
Like a hillside

Like a company
Brave midnights and
livelong worlds
Silent asphodels and wounded flags
Slow nails and light prints
Cautious breasts and old nights

(pg. 2829)