gooooooggling flarf- googling flarf by Michael Gottlieb- from jacket again - oh jacket

quoting Michael..."Does poetry have a job? Is there something that is it supposed to do? Do for us? To us? I would suggest if what we are now calling Flarf has a role in our life, jointly or severally or individually – in, say, our literary life, its role is not, cannot be substantially different than that which previous methodologies or schools or movements have taken upon themselves. Its job – and I do think I believe that poetry indeed does have a job – is to crack open this terrible world and give it back to us in a way so we see it – at once, whole, entirely anew and, simultaneously, completely familiar. Its job is to enable us to see it in a way that we never could before, and never could now — without the aid of this new work. If we can adduce that this is art’s, poetry’s job – or, better perhaps – its responsibility, in every age, then we can, we have to, perhaps, stipulate that with every age poetry must needs find new tools to make it — as someone dead once proclaimed — to make itself new, to make itself over, anew. The old tools don’t work anymore, at least for the time being – they are tired. The terrible vistas they once revealed now seem merely pretty. This is a commonplace: it is virtually impossible to look at Van Gogh or Matisse or read Eliot or Williams and grasp how uncompromising – how ugly, brutal, honest – they once seemed. It is our curse, is it not — as artists, to become picturesque? We should live so long.

That’s why we need these folks, and every tool they can lay their hands on..." 

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