I find the combination of these three authors’ works quite interesting. They are so different in style, subject/content, and approach. However, it is obvious why they share spaces in the same book. I love how different and interesting these passages are! I think I might be even more interested in the creation of the poems than in the poems themselves. That has never happened to me before and I really like that.

Mohammad: This is so cool! The “that’s what you get” attitude of the website description of flarf is absolutely entertaining and intriguing. I loved the Goldsmith explanation of making something so boring/bad that no one actually wants to read it. Like I said above, I really found his technique for finding content to be super fun. It reminds me of the Bing commercials where people repeat random facts about a keyword

And I love that my mind is trying so hard to find meaning in the texts, but I think that part of the point is to contemplate the fact that there is no meaning in some of it. Search engines give us such a grab bag of “hits” that we have to sort through them and find the relevance…or put them all together and admire our nonsensical work.

The other part of his work that made me laugh was the anagrams of Shakespeare’s sonnets. They are wonderfully ridiculous and I think remind us (or at least me) to remember that Shakespeare used the same 26 letters we use and that his letters can make many different poems/works. Very often we are so serious in our interpretations of Shakespeare, this is playful and I think, based on his comedies and such, that perhaps Shakespeare would have been entertained by this (sorry for the speculation). Mohammad was by far my favorite because it is fun and nonsensical.

Banner: This is a little more serious, I think, that Mohammad. Banner’s writing is pretty unique. I am not sure how to define it. It is an interpretation of an dramatization of events that could have happened in history (somewhat realistic fiction). What she is writing is new, but she is describing a film, very interesting. I found myself visualizing the movie and keeping interest, all while keeping in the back of my head that I am getting the same kind of commentary a sportscaster gives of a baseball game over the radio. Very unique experience.

Her art work is so cool too! I think I would like to go to an exhibit of her art because it would confuse me and make me think, some pieces more than others. My favorite was the Stamp Out exhibit, such a cool concept.

Philip: I save Nourbese Philip for last because her work is the heaviest for me. I find it interesting that she is compared to Vanessa Place and could be compared to Kenneth Goldsmith in her use of nonfiction text. I think that her work is what the others were trying to do, done right. Her work can be a political and poetic statement at the same time. Not to say that others do not do this all the time but that her message is quite clear in both ways when Place and Goldsmith’s messages were difficult to find.