Having completed my first flarf poem on my own, my mood is one that’s unusually giddy (I say unusual because this is not often the affective state I find myself in when I’m writing reflective blog posts). I don’t know why I’m particularly surprised; Kelly and I had a wonderful time coming up with the rest of these poems yesterday at Circa. But there are some undeniable difficulties to working collaboratively. This was especially evident in constructing Poem #5, in which Kelly and I both had to write “poetry” around the phrases that our special guest – Matt Deneka – had chosen from Beacon. There’s definitely some nervousness in bearing your creative self to someone else. In other words, I couldn’t help thinking, is Kelly going to like the changes I’ve made? What if she was thinking of an entirely different place to put the word “crony”? On the other side of this, some of my reservations came from not wanting to overstep my bounds. I wanted to make sure we had relatively equal input in the writing process and the balance can certainly be skewed when one person is more extroverted, or simply has the louder voice.

In looking at our completed Poem #5, I think our “teamwork” was solid. One reason I say this is because, for the most part, I can’t actually remember which of the edits were made by me and which were made by Kelly. The contributions of the individual, in other words, the idea of “solo” authorship, becomes erased when we look at the poem as a totality. The second reason is because, from what I can tell, not only did we both feel good about the poem, but we also were both eager to show the final product to our “guest” and third author, Matt Deneka. And then of course, we were happy that Matt was happy (and we could guess Matt was happy both from his general demeanor and from the fact that he didn’t want to take his name off the poem). I remember feeling especially satisfied that Matt could translate the German “klein” into “small” on his own (this was, by the way, definitively Kelly’s contribution – I know this because I don’t speak German). And when we parted ways, he seemed eager to know the outcome of our upcoming presentation, a request to which we readily agreed (Facebook is a wonderful thing).

I want to think about this shared affective state of what I’ll call enthusiasm, maybe even exuberance. I don’t know how much of this came from the actual aesthetic quality of the finished poem and how much of it came from the fact that Kelly and I were able to execute this project in a way that felt successful. And it’s hard to determine how much of Matt’s eagerness was a reflection of our own enthusiasm, or how much of it came from genuine interest in what we were doing, or whether or not this really even matters. I would like to think that even three strangers at one of our speculative kiosks would be capable of this same collective affective state (hopefully one that is similarly characterized by its “exuberance”). I would hope that judgment of the finished poem’s “artistic” qualities would be less important than the fact that the poem was completed by three strangers in the first place. Indeed, when the search queries are already given, there is perhaps already some aestheticism built into the poem, and therefore some sense of joy already “built into” the process. This sounds like I’m locating the joy in the aestheticism, but I’m not quite so sure this is correct either. Is it in the novelty of something like Beacon? The feeling of authorial control? The process of collaboration itself?

This brings me back to the joy I felt in composing my own flarf poem (Poem #4). There was an undeniable sense of pride in getting this done, an excitement in having the freedom to extend and break and fuck with the search queries in the way I wanted to, without having to be accountable to another author. However, I found that I had to remind myself that I could not actually take full credit for this poem. Not only did Kelly and I choose the phrases together, we harvested (one could even say stole) the phrases from Beacon, which actually has millions of other “authors” behind it. Even if I put both my name and Kelly’s name on the poem, that doesn’t acknowledge the fact that when it comes down to it, the material is not actually our own. There’s a fundamental tension here; the technology of Beacon allows me think of myself as creative individual, while simultaneously dismantling the idea of creativity as an individual process.