Holmes entered the cabinet / of the respectable reverend / (who was in
fact a closet naturalist) / and found so many Victorian things. 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, as 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.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780228009290
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
ACP - McGill Queen's University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter