the seamy side of poetry... I like seeing the process 'in action'... WCW's postcard to Olson, of course: leave the dirt on the roots... Olson himself in those Maximus that are the barest of notes, suggestive of what he was researching...I wish we had Dickinson's fascicles (or if 'we' have them, I wish I did... with flarf, I get nervous/bugged by the criticism that can't get past the seams... Dan Hoy invented a generic unread 'flarf' poem and for that mattered imagined poet as well to criticise the motives and mayhem of his target: that's not really the seams, yet he thought he had landed a mighty solar plexus punch... I like to see the poem read as poem, not as simulacrum of some imagined critical event, some ploy of a critic in heat... the social and political occur in the poem, and need not be invented on the outside... when I wrote that I didn't want to talk about flarf qua flarf I did so so that I could use the word qua (of course) but also just to note that I wanted to start with what's on the page (or screen, whatev)...flarf has a collborative energy that I like, collaboration with those Googled souls as well as with each other flarfist... that 2nd bit of collaboration is very evident in, for instance, the New York poets (O'Hara et al.), and even those devilish LANGUAGE gazabos... that's pretty pissa stuff, that sharing and rebound... Dan Hoy did not exert himself to the point of sweating with his clumsy surgery upon flarf... the world is in the poem, and I don't mean that facetiously... with flarf, the process is up front, as also, say, Jackson Mac Low and his aleatoric work... note how carefully JML describes his method, that method is part of the poem, I mean should be read so... so when I read Mainstream with its Gidget colour scheme, I'm seeing these intersections, interjections, dare I say ejaculations, and various purposes, some of those purposes are Magee's, but like all good poetry, some of them are not, and the tussle in that midst is the point, of poetry, of reading, of taking this all seriously...