Flarf poetry

Flarf poetry can be characterized as an "avant garde" poetry movement of the late 20th century and the early 21st century. Its first practitioners practiced an aesthetic dedicated to the exploration of “the inappropriate” in all of its guises. Their method was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays, and other texts.

Overview

The term flarf seems to have been coined by the poet Gary Sullivan, who notes that it variously "has been described as the first recognizable movement of the 21st century, as an in-joke among an elite clique, as a marketing strategy, and as offering a new way of reading creative writing" [http://jacketmagazine.com/30/fl-intro.html.]

Critics of flarf point to its hodge-podge assortment of Google searches and grammatical inaccuracies as evidence of a movement not to be taken seriously. Fans of flarf believe that it is a new, edgy, and clearer representation of our culture by poets and artists.

Joyelle McSweeney wrote in the "Constant Critic":

Dan Hoy wrote in "Jacket Magazine":

Joshua Corey, poet and cultural critic, comments on his weblog [http://joshcorey.blogspot.com/ "Cahiers de Corey"] that:

In 2007, Barrett Watten, a poet and cultural critic, long associated with the so-called Language poets observed that:Quotation|It is precisely, however, to the degree that Flarf does something new performatively and with its use of the detritus of popular cultural and the internet, treading the high/low distinction until it breaks under the weight, that it reinvents the avant-garde. In a larger aesthetic economy, it seems, "the truth will out." Flarf's recent productivity shows how the injunction against the sentence, paragraph, narrative, and even discourse from some sectors of the Language school intersects with actual conditions of language use. Any such thing as stylistic norms in the avant-garde must inevitably intersect with "life." [ [http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/index.html How "The Grand Piano" Is Being Written] ]

Discussion about Flarf has been broadcast by the BBC and published in magazines such as The Village Voice, The Nation, "Constant Critic", "Jacket", and "Rain Taxi". Further discussion has taken place on dozens of blogs and listservs across the United States, and in Australia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Holland, Mexico, and elsewhere.

What is Flarf?

"Flarf" has become a much-contested term in the contemporary poetic community, one for which it has proven difficult to establish one "correct" definition. Three main senses, however, encompass most of the contexts in which the word is generally used:

1) "Flarf" was first applied in reference to poems and other creative texts produced by the Flarflist Collective, a group of writers including Maria Damon, Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Rodney Koeneke, Michael Magee, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, and Gary Sullivan. The term was coined by Sullivan in late 2000, when he submitted deliberately bad poems to Poetry.com's poetry "contest" (actually a marketing scheme) as a way of testing Poetry.com's supposed standards for excellence. (It should be noted that the practice of Poetry.com-baiting predates flarf itself; many other individuals, including North Carolina poet Patrick Herron and syndicated humorist Dave Barry, have engaged in similar pranks.)

The title of one of these early poems of Sullivan's is "Flarf Balonacy Swingle," hence the origin of the term. Early or "old-school" flarf is marked by a certain distinctive tonal "dialect": it is often peppered with phrases like "aw YEEEAHH," intentional tpyos, mildly offensive language (e.g., childish references to bodily functions and faux furs rubbed against the Irish), oblique political "statements," and incongruous animal imagery. Sullivan at one point described the dominant tenor of flarf as "A kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. 'Not okay.'" At a fairly early point, some flarfists began using the Google internet search engine as a generative device for their poems.

A fair amount of critical attention was given to Mohammad's use of the Google-search procedure in Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises Press, 2003), which may have been partly responsible for a general misconception that "flarf" means any and all poetry written via such a method. It is true that Google-derived text plays a considerable part in many flarfists' works. Drew Gardner's Petroleum Hat (Roof Books, 2005), for example, combines collaged Google search results with word-substitutions and other procedures.

2) "Flarf" has, as just mentioned, also become a catch-all term for any poetic composition that makes use of Google or other search engines. This implies a retroactive application of the term to authors who were using such devices well before the Flarf Collective, such as Robert Fitterman, Alan Sondheim, and others. Some of these writers, naturally, may resist such connections, as their work deserves to be considered on its own terms without the imposition of anachronistic categories.

It is probably too late, however, to object to the increasingly widespread use of "flarf" to refer to a wide variety of research-software-based modes of composition. Sometimes the word is used as a verb in this sense to describe any procedural deformation of a preexisting text via the use of a search-engine or other internet mechanism (such as the BabelFish translation engine): Gardner, for instance, flarfs Dana Gioia's poem "Money" in Petroleum Hat.

3) Another, perhaps even more widespread general definition of "flarf": any intentionally bad, frivolous, or wacky poetry; any textual or verbal doodling or nonsense of any sort. "What's this gibberish?" "Oh, just something I flarfed during my lunch break." "What did that guy say?" "I don't know. Sounded like flarf to me."

ee also

*Cut-up technique
*Spoetry
*Googlism
*Spam Lit
*Word salad (computer science)

References

External links

Poems on-line

* [http://mainstreampoetry.blogspot.com FLARF: MAINSTREAM Poetry for a MAINSTREAM World] a weblog, active since January 2003, devoted to the poetics of flarf
* [http://jacketmagazine.com/30/ Flarf Feature at "Jacket Magazine"] includes work from some of this movement's more recognizable practitioners including: Gary Sullivan, Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Rodney Koeneke, Michael Magee, Ryan Daly, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, & Rod Smith
* [http://poemsmadefromspam.blogspot.com Anthology of Spam Poetry] a collection of works from bards of flarf and spam around the globe

Essays and discussion

* [http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html "The Flarf Files"] @ the Electronic Poetry Center
* [http://jacketmagazine.com/29/hoy-flarf.html "The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf"] an article by Dan Hoy at "Jacket Magazine"
* [http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0434,essay,56171,1.html "O, You Cosh-Boned Posers!"] this essay from the "Village Voice" is subtitled: "Awful poems sought and found: From spam to Google, flarf redefines random"
* [http://jacketmagazine.com/31/snyder-flarf.html "The New Pandemonium" essay on flarf by Rick Snyder]
* [http://jacketmagazine.com/31/gottlieb-flarf.html "Googling Flarf" by Michael Gottlieb]
* [http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/02/i-know-that-some-people-are-going-to.html Ron Silliman on Michael Magee's My Angie Dickinson]