
Can poetry compete with the Internet? Why try, drones Davis: “Click here to watch / a video of otters / floating, holding hands.” But he who once lived by flarf need not die by flarf, as the poems’ self-undermining snark gets inflected by a belated compassion traveling in the wake of ideologically poisoned heteroglossia (vis-à-vis “New Words 1939-1945”), on brightest display in plainspoken translations from the Turkish in “My Orhan Veli”: “When the sea tears / who do they get to sew it up? / Yours truly.” My twin the moral mosaic poet wears his Baudelairean borscht-belt halo with flair.
Published on January 30, 2019 14:38