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Flarf poetry

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Flarf Poetry is 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" [1]

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 McSweeny wrote in the Constant Critic:

Jangly, cut-up textures, speediness, and bizarre trajectories … I love a movement that’s willing to describe its texts as ‘a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness.’ This is utterly tonic in a poetry field crowded by would-be sincerists unwilling to own up to their poems’ self-aggrandizing, sentimental, bloviating, or sexist tendencies.[2]


Dan Hoy wrote in Jacket Magazine:

The proliferation of flarf and its hybrids recycles an industrial era excitement over human ‘progress’ with no hesitance toward the embarrassing hubris of such a perspective. It’s retro-Futurist, and it’s indicative of their reliance on the virtual realm as a method of navigating reality... If there’s a difference between flarf and its progenitors it’s that Cage and Oulipo researched or created their generators of deterministic randomness, whether it be the I Ching, the weather, or mathematical formulas. They were aware of how each generator distinguished itself as a context and control variable, and their selection of each context and control variable was part of the content. [3]


Joshua Corey, poet and cultural critic, comments on his popular weblog Cahiers de Corey that:

I admire the subversive energy of the project, the daring of setting out to write deliberately bad poetry so as to put our received ideas of "the poetic" into question. It's become a genuine movement, and the evidence of this is that critics (like Dan Hoy) and assorted flarfists are now struggling to control its reception. This is the final gesture by which a movement or poet or technique becomes canonical, I think: after this it's all consolidation and textbooks. Which does not necessarily negate flarf's subversive potential; but I think the energy behind flarf, the desire to upset the apple-cart, is bound to move on toward something else. [4]


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 typos, mildly offensive language (e.g., childish references to bodily functions and faux slurs 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."

See Also

Cut-up_technique

Spoetry

References

  1. ^ http://jacketmagazine.com/30/fl-intro.html.
  2. ^ http://flarffestival.blogspot.com/
  3. ^ http://jacketmagazine.com/29/hoy-flarf.html
  4. ^ http://joshcorey.blogspot.com/2006/02/spa-was-sinfully-luxurious-my-favorite.html

Poems on-line

Essays & Discussion


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