Scofflaw asks what the 835th flarf poem might contribute. Presumably nothing. Maybe someone should have told Haydn to stop writing symphonies. Stop with the fugues already, Johann Sebastian! After all, what's "yet another" symphony or fugue going to add? Don't we have enough already? Yet it is easy to see how fallacious this argument is: there's no way of knowing what the next poem will be like. Maybe the 836th will be brilliant, followed by 100 more that don't contribute anything, then 10 that do. And so on. I'm wondering what the 100,000th "fishing trip with father" or "trying on grandmother's shoes" poem contributes to "serious examination of the human condition." Don't we already know about the "human condition" by now? Will a few more poems tell us the little we don't know? Like 100,027? Then we can all stop writing poems. The godamned human condition will be completely explored. That's just a tired phrase used by people with nothing substantive to say, to defend boring art. You know it's dull, because that's the only thing you can say about it: it explores the human condition.

It's kind of ironic that "835" would seem like a large number of poems in a particular style, when for twenty or thirty years a lot of poets in Iowa and Nebraska and Oregon and California have been writing hundreds of thousands of the same kind of flat, autobiographical lyric explorations of the human condition. When is it going to be enough? Wouldn't you need 10,000 flarf poems just to make a dent? Surely the argument from quantity is not a winning one for the enemies of flarf, unless the idea is that all flarf poems are just the same poem. But that's no more true of flarf than of anything else. Why didn't Petrarch stop after one or two sonnets? Aren't they all the same, really? Even if they were -- don't we want a lot of them anyway?