Here's the deal about flarf, or language poetry, or anything for that matter. I don't care whether you like it or not. It's not some vegetable that will turn you into Popeye. There are a lot of things I don't like: Celtic folk music and Philip Larkin, for example. Many novels I teach in class are ones I don't particularly like. I just think it would be interesting or useful to teach a particular novel sometimes. What I like or dislike is not particuarly interesting, on the other hand. Why should it be? I like enough things to be pretty wide-ranging in my reading and listening, but I don't like everything either.

However, I do have a problem if you say that flarf is not adding anything to the conversation. That's just wrong. I do have a problem with you saying "real poets could not possibly be interested in flarf." That's as close to an error of *fact that an error of *judgment can come. Maybe you love the Chieftans. I am not banning you from the blog because of that. Everything's part of the conversation if you want it to be. I would never say: You don't need to know abou Philip Larkin. This woud be hypocrisy. After all, I know about him, why shouldn't you too?

There's also a point at which I lose patience with people who simply don't know very much about poetry. There's a reason we use a Greek word for "parody," which is that the Greeks had parody too. I know it's frightening to think that poetry has a long history with lots of genres, some lyrical and others satirical, elegiac, epistolary, etc... that it isn't just whatever a narrow sector of people want to agree it is, at some particular point in time.