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.
