ORIGIN MYTH


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The reputed first flarf poem, as received by the author in January 2000 from Poetry.com.

In an age when memoirs by authors found to have fabricated the circumstances of their lives can lead to the recalling of thousands of copies of books, one wonders about wholly fraudulent arts organizations such as Poetry.com--to say nothing of the countless questionable practices of generally-assumed-to-be-above-board publishers, organizations, etc.

One is tempted to conclude that we are, culturally speaking, far more invested in individual responsibility than we are in corporate or collective responsibility. Or that we just assume that the individual is a good soul, the collective corrupt, so why bother attempting to reform the latter? The bad individual offends, no matter how slight the slight. Corporations are supposed to fuck us over, ruin the environment, etc.; that's their job.