Maya’s poem “Co·quette- /kōˈket/ and Mob·Wives-/mäb wīvz/ an Enemy to Lovers Relationship” will be published in the 2024 issue of HIKA. “Co·quette- /kōˈket/ and Mob·Wives-/mäb wīvz/ an Enemy to Lovers Relationship” previously appeared in the HIKA Fall preview.
“People also ask: What is the mob slang for wife? What is the coquette controversy- YouTube Murder? What is a coquette girl? Can coquette boy? Gender? No… Not Gender? People also ask / What is the mob wife culture? / To gain the attention and admiration of men. For Men. MEN.”
— from "Co·quette- /kōˈket/ and Mob·Wives-/mäb wīvz/ an Enemy to Lovers Relationship"
Your Poem, “Co·quette- /kōˈket/ and Mob·Wives-/mäb wīvz/ an Enemy to Lovers Relationship” is classified as a Flarf poem. What does Flarf poetry mean to you and when and how did you discover it?
Poetry has always been a part of my life. This is a very subtle brag and kind of embarrassing that I still think about it, but in fourth grade, I got published in two books of poetry for my poem, “Oh Brothers, Oh Brothers,” about how sucky it is to have a brother sometimes. It was a fun poem. I still like it. Poetry has been a part of my life in that respect, but I took a break because I really only do poetry when it’s something I need to do for class. I have been trying to expand into doing it outside of class, but I just never feel like I have enough time. And so, that leads to where I discovered Flarf, which was in Andrew Grace’s Prosody and Poetics class. It was sort of an offhand. We were learning about different forms that have to do with random selections and stuff like that, the type of form where you pick up a book, flip to a random page, pick the first word, and you have to use that word in your poem. One of the poems that we read was a Flarf poem. It was on Unicorns and Hitler*, and I found the medium really interesting because it kind of encompasses the double-edged sword that is the internet. There are all these micro-cultures and things that happen on the internet that would be absurd to anyone who doesn’t use the internet. Flarf is a critique of something while also using the internet in a productive way but making it as absurd as possible.
What millennials who started the genre of fluff wanted was to be as cringe as possible. I don’t necessarily only want [my Flarf] to be cringe, and I don’t want to make my Flarf feel offensive in any way. The Hitler one was a little on the cusp, and then there were others shown as examples that were very millennial humor and a little dated. I was trying to bring Flarf into the modern age and into Gen Z slang. That’s where “Co·quette- /kōˈket/ and Mob·Wives-/mäb wīvz/ an Enemy to Lovers Relationship” came in. For anyone who doesn’t know what happens on social media — this was about a year ago now — there are micro trends on the internet for fashion. Two of them that were back to back were the “Coquette” trend, which is very girly and pink and flouncy and ballet shoes and very ballerina core but using ballet in the wrong way, and then there was the “Mob Wife” trend immediately after. The switch-up was crazy because you go from this coquette girly really flouncy look, and then people are shaming the Coquettes on the internet because ‘Mob Wife’ is the new trend, and that’s the complete opposite of what ‘Coquette’ is. ‘Mob wife’ is a trend where you wear a lot of dark black and red lipstick and are supposed to be new money grunge ‘I can murder you if I want to’ style. By placing them in this poem I was critiquing the micro trends that happen on the internet. In another year no one’s gonna remember that ‘Coquette’ and ‘Mob Wife’ were a thing and the people that do are gonna be like, ‘Oh, that was such a cringe-era of fashion.’ So there’s this enemies-to-lovers relationship between this push and pull of different fashion trends that both end up irrelevant in the end because we’ve moved on to a spin on ’70s chaotic teacher’ vibes.
How do you go about finding the topics for your Flarf poetry? What is your writing process?
So it really started with finding the cringiest things I could possibly think of because that’s what the form was originally used for. I’ve written other poems as well and a lot of them talk about issues like neopronouns, wokeness, and fashion trends. So I usually go about picking a topic by thinking about what is incredibly trending right now. The point of Flarf is that it will be dated in less than a year, already this poem is pretty dated because of how quickly trends are moving. It’s a moment in time that will never come back. I keep a running list of ideas. I have been playing with the idea of overconsumption but in the form of a poem where everything is too much in the poem and it takes up the entire space on a page.
For Flarf you start out with two words, and then you Google the words. You can only use the words that you copied from [the Google search results]. I like the idea of how freeing it is to not have to be serious in my poems because I think that that’s something that I get lost in, how serious poetry has to be because of how old the art form is. The point of Flarf is not to be bored, the point is to be heavily entertained, kind of confused, and also a little offended in some ways.
Can you tell me more about your method for forming the poem from the Google search results?
When I’m copying a page [from the search results], the bottom doesn’t get highlighted, and it all depends on how much I highlight. Whenever I highlight a Google page, it ends up being seven or eight pages on Google Docs that I narrow down. Many words are lost through the process, and I do take some liberty on capitalization for some of them, although I think in this poem, everything is original capitalization. When it comes to these trends and the fact that Google is probably one of the number one sellers of these trends, I think about how if someone heard the word ‘Coquette’ and didn’t know what it means they would go to Google. This is why Google has Wikipedia pages on these things or has dictionary definitions of coquette, because it’s something that facilitates knowledge but also [allows you to] look up ‘Coquette’ and then buy ‘Coquette’ related things. Then if you look up ‘Mob Wife’ you can buy ‘Mob Wife’ accessories and hair pieces.
I appreciate that your Flarf poetry speaks to overconsumption. I feel like, in some ways, Flarf as a genre critiques the overconsumption of information on the internet.
When Flarf first started, the internet was very new. It was a way to process all of this information, but now we’re at the point where the internet is so much larger than it was before and so I feel like these forms that are very internet-focused kind of went out of style. The internet isn’t a new craze anymore, it’s a way of life. I also think that eventually, [the internet] will be something that is dated as well. The internet is not going to last forever, I think that there’s going to be something new that someone’s going to come up with. I just think it’s really interesting how the internet is its own trend but also facilitates trends like never before. Overconsumption is definitely a topic that I focus on in my Flarf.
Do you write or create in other forms? How would you describe yourself as a creator?
I had a really weird time where I would wake up at 1 a.m. and just have a poem in my head which is especially weird for me because I don’t have a voice in my head. I don’t have pictures in my head but I would just have to write for some random reason. I’m glad that I’m past that because I didn’t get much sleep during those months. It was a series called “Midnight Madness” and some of them were good and some were bad. I wrote a lot of freeform poetry that was sort of repetitive and kind of unsettling. That was the start of me [thinking that] maybe I should take a poetry class. I took the poetry class and it helped me expand my forms, every week we had a different form. I do write other poetry. Usually, it has to do with repetition because that’s what I’ve liked doing since I was a kid and usually it’s very surface-level. I think in my other poetry, I want it to be pretty more than anything else, which is fine. I mean there’s a whole subgenre of internet poetry which I think is pretty good and there are some people that I think are really cool on the internet that do poetry, but there is a specific genre of really pretty poems that are very easy to digest and I like reading those. I like writing them. I think Flarf is a little more than that despite the name. It’s supposed to appear so surface-level that you think that there has to be more going on.
How does your art, particularly your sculpture, inform your writing?
A lot of my art is really trying to tell a story, and I think there are a lot of reasons for that. I find art more interesting when it says something with words. I have trouble looking at art sometimes because I just get stuck at the surface level, and so I think that’s something that I try to bring to my sculpture and graphic design. I was in a sculpture class, and sculpture is my preferred medium. I like the hands-on element. I also do pottery, which is similarly kind of hands-on with clay. My first project in sculpture class, aside from sculpting a hand, was collecting one hundred objects. Because I’m a little bit of an overachiever and also someone who needs to be excited about a project to actually want to do it, I ended up collecting animal figurines, which is one of the things I collected as a kid. So I had about fifty sent from back home—those were ones that I had had as a kid—and then I bought fifty more at thrift stores around here. You’d think it would have cost hundreds of dollars, but it ended up costing only fifty dollars, so it was pretty reasonable. One of the ways that I tied in writing and reading was creating a book where I told a story about each of the animals. For every animal, I wrote a small poem, some of them were pretty bad, and some were pretty good, and they were all less than three lines long. I got this book called The Swing** from the bookstore, and I added my poems throughout the book along with the name of the character. These [poems] were all typewritten on my friend’s typewriter, and I think that they added so much more meaning than just having the figurines. You have to have a little bit more of a message in art, and you have to have an implied meaning that’s not obvious sometimes. You’re not necessarily trying to just tell everyone what you mean, you need to go a little bit underneath the surface. This is sort of what my Flarf poetry does as well. This project really overlapped with my interest in poetry at the time. I just think that art overlaps with English a lot, and I think an artist statement is one of the hardest thing things an art artist can do because putting that much information into a bite-sized piece that someone can digest is really hard, and so having both is really important to me
Is there anything else you would like to say about your poem or about yourself as a writer?
I’ll say don’t get too caught up in the trends. I think that’s something that too many people do and I think this poem is partially about getting caught up in the trends. Trends die so quickly that there’s no keeping up with [them] anymore. At this point, you should just focus on building your own style and try not to think about what others do.
* “Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas” by Nada Gordon
** The Swing by Britta Teckentrup
hika. 
Leave a comment