Poetics of Guilt

catch—with these riches come questionable content, free of any depth? If these are the themes righteous artists feel compelled to trumpet nowadays, maybe conceptual poetry and flarf are the best mediums to capture this preoccupation. And that is basically all Timmons does, piecing together a parodistic jungle of pseudo-intellectualisms and sound bites illustrating the shifting definitions of what constitutes the New in this post-’net society. Transition is the key thread tying his flarf together. Nothing is ever settled, and all that is hep and happenin’ is already morphing into the next new, or The New Next. Everything is passé, including (or especially) what’s hip. We are experiencing “the past of modernity.” That’s not to say Timmons flirts incessantly with Bob Dylan territory of “Look out, Kid” Subterranean Homesick Poetry. If so, he would start to read like tired slogans. And although admittedly he does come close to that at times (such as “The New Concept”’s in-your-face anti-industrial spin and the most blatantly flarfy “The New Night”), generally Timmons achieves something truly remarkable: subtlety from the Internet. The wonderfully perverse “The New Kitten” rips apart our endless delight in such animal-themed crazes as LOLcats, revealing what’s really at the bottom of such kitschy fads: modern pet-owners displacing their maternal and paternal affections onto creatures pretty much incapable of returning human affection. We are growing increasingly incapable of coping with personal relations, finding in the wide, blank eyes of a numb, newborn critter a comforting substitute. The poem is a mash-up of random instructions gleaned from online cat experts, providing disturbingly cozy tips on how to warm the kitten up to its new environment, and vice-versa.