Vlarf

In the early 2000s, flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches. Jason Camlot's Vlarf pursues expressions of sentiment that may have become unfamiliar, unacceptable, or uncool since modernism by mining Victorian texts and generic forms with odd inclinations, using techniques such as erasure, bout-rimé, emulation, adaptation, reboot, mimicry, abhorrence, cringe, and love.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 88 pages
Publication date: 15 November 2021
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

In the early 2000s, flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches.

In "Vlarf," Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, much like one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and feelings in poetry. "Vlarf" pursues expressions of sentiment that may have become unfamiliar, unacceptable, or uncool since the advent of modernism by mining Victorian texts and generic forms with odd inclinations, using techniques that include erasure, bout-rimé, emulation, adaptation, reboot, mimicry, abhorrence, cringe, and love.

Erasures of massive volumes of prose by John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin become concise poems of condensed sadness; a reboot of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" is told from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy with an imaginary albatross pal; recovered fragments from an apocryphal book of Victorian nonsense verse are pieced together; a Leonard Cohen song about Queen Victoria is offered in a steampunk rendering; and a meditative guinea pig delivers a dramatic monologue in the vein of Robert Browning.

Camlot moves through Victorian literature as a collector in a curiosity shop, seeking the oddest forms of feeling in language to shape them into peculiarly affective poems.

Dimension: 191 x 127 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780228008132