Flarf is Life: The Poetry of Affect

Conceptual poetry is an umbrella term for a spectrum of writing practices, and the name is sometimes so vaguely applied that it could include virtually all of literary modernism and its descendants. A useful starting definition of conceptual poetry comes from the name: the idea is up front and its manifestation is perfunctory. The clearest example of this might be the La Monte Young verbal sound score that instructs musicians to feed a bail of hay to a piano. Unless creatively interpreted, the manifestation is impossible. Conceptual writing appropriates this idea from the art world. A good example of this kind of writing is Darren Wershler-Henry’s The Tapeworm Foundry, where the text is a series of proposals or formulas for poems that are often whimsical or impossible.