Hi Everybody--Kasey Mohammad here. Thanks for inviting me to this forum. This is in response to Laura and Eve's questions.
1) Is all of the poetry in Deer Head Nation "flarf"?
It's flarf in the sense that all the poems were first posted on the flarf e-mail group that I participate in with several other poets, and that they were all composed using the Google collage method that I began using as a result of being in that group, adapting techniques used by Drew Gardner and Gary Sullivan for their poems. The poems are also often very "flarfy" generally, in that they are built on absurd or irreverent juxtapositions of sometimes scurrilous found material. Like other members of the group, however, I tend to make a loose distinction between "pure" or "hard" flarf, which is sometimes (though not necessarily always) played much more for laughs, and the perhaps more ambitious stuff that engaging in that practice frees me up to write. Though there are certainly plenty of hard-flarf elements in DHN, I guess--especially in poems like "Keep Honking, I'm Reloading," or generally in the use of misspelled words and even non-verbal characters.
2) What do you feel that flarf does that other forms of poetry don't do? Why do you use it?
As I just mentioned, for me, flarf provided a freeing-up, both of the poetic materials and the compositional attitude. In this way it's not really that new a thing; the sense of permission-giving it involves is very much akin to the Blakean/Beat dictum "First thought, best thought." Or, as Gary Sullivan rephrased it for flarf purposes, "Worst thought, best thought." Flarf started as a game Gary played to see how bad a poem he could get past the entry page at Poetry.Com (try it), and it quickly became obvious that the frontiers of badness were limitless, so he (and we) just decided to run with it. I'm still running because I feel that there are still new things to be done with it, though I may eventually feel that I'm running in place and switch to some other mode of composition.
3) Can you talk specifically about the process of flarfing? Do you use only the Google results short blurbs or do you go into the website?
The former. I begin by setting Google's "advanced search" option at 100 results per page, and then inserting some combination of search terms with the goal of getting anywhere from 20-100 results: enough to have enough material to work with, but few enough to preserve a certain sense of uncommonness in the combination of terms. I then just cut-and-paste the result page into MS Word and start whittling away at it. I start by removing all color text and URLS, etc., using search-and-replace to get rid of unwanted characters like ellipses (unless I decide to use them, as in some of the DHN poems, and just generally getting rid of language I don't find interesting. It can actually be a prolonged, obsessive process of shaping and polishing, though I don't necessarily have a clear image in mind beforehand of what the finished product should look like. (By the way, the Google-collaging came after the initial formulation of "flarf," which gradually began to incorporate bits of chat-room dialogue, spam, etc., in addition to more free-form verbal diarrhea.)
4) I have listened to you on the internet reading from Deer Head Nation at the University of Buffalo, and understand that the punctuation in "Hey Boo Boo" is meant to look like an American flag, but can you explain the punctuation in say, "Mars Needs Terrorists" and "False/Vodoun Democracy?"
Again, the use of serial ellipses in "Deer Head Suite" and other pieces in DHN comes directly out of what showed up on the Google search result pages. Through messing around, I came up with a search-and-replace that changed the spaces before ellipses into a paragraph return, which produced what I thought was an elegant pattern, and I began to tweak that a bit. The colons and other characters you mention in other poems are a variation on that: bits of "junk" text that I use mainly for ornamental value, or that I felt looked graphically suggestive, as in the case of the "flag." I can't think of any specific iconic significance of the punctuation in "Mars" and "Democracy."
5) In addition, I saw the poetry (the message or idea behind the poetry) more clearly after listening to your reading. Can you speak about performance of your poetry? Do you think performance enhances your poetry, as it did for my reading of it? You do a great Yogi Bear voice by the way.
At the particular reading you mention, I had about a 103 degree temperature, so I'm surprised I was able to make any articulate sounds at all. I cringe when I play it back and hear my attempt at a Yogi voice, but thank you! All I can think of to say about this is that I enjoy reading, and that the poems in DHN are fun to "perform." Sometimes I use a toy plastic voice-changer (settings: spaceman, alien, robot) at readings to attempt the equivalent of the distortions provided by the colons and ellipses, etc.
6) Can you speak a little bit about the politics of your poetry? What drives your poetry politically and how does flarf help your message(s)?
The flarf is the message, baby! But seriously, what drives my poetry politically is the same thing that drives every other aspect of my political conscious, underdeveloped as it is: my visceral feelings of outrage, fear, dread, disgust, absurd amusement, and so on. Flarf feels like a good vehicle for me because it's noisy, chaotic, uncomfortable, ridiculous. To quote Gary again, "not OK." This has got to be the most not-OK political period so far in human history, and it calls for a poetry, if any poetry is relevant in such conditions, that maximizes its acknowledgment of that.
