Lytle Shaw

Culminating in an all-Flarf twelfth issue, Combo is known to have been the first print publication to gather a full collection of Flarf poems. Published in the same year as K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation (poems from which were also first published in Combo) the magazine stands as the original print vehicle for the listserv-generated poetry movement. Magee’s Flarf manifesto “Mainstream Poetry” is first published here, and the editor’s and contributor’s notes are ideally suited to the collection (see Combo no. 12). As Jordan Davis writes in his 2004 Village Voice article “O, You Cosh-Boned Posers!”:

Magee's small-press magazine Combo broke the flarf story first, in early 2003. A significant finding in that issue, currently required reading for Charles Bernstein’s literature students at the University of Pennsylvania, is that Google searches on the phrase "aw yeah" yield more socially acceptable results as the number of w's in "aw" increases.

Anne Tardos created a poem that consists (mostly) of lists of adjectives and adjectival phrases that she'd "picked up" from a reading given by Lytle Shaw in the Segue series. In December 2002 she gave her own reading in The Line Reading Series, where Lytle Shaw introduced her, and so she began with the aforementioned poem, "For Lytle Shaw." Here is the recording. And here is the link to PennSound's Anne Tardos page.