Inital Reaction to Flarf Poems

A goofy non sequitur avant-garde poetry that favors typos and other
ways of being “wrong,” flarf is often built from collaged Google search results
and Internet chat-room texts (and so distills something elemental of our era).
The technique is sometimes called “Google sculpting.”

-Greg Cook/Boston Phoenix/January 7, 2008

***

..In other words, the life of Willie Norris in a couple of sentences. I've never wholly enjoyed reading anything as much as I did when I was reading poems of the Flarf genre. The hardest part of the whole situation was actually finding these gems. I can usually find a plethora of poems and anthologies, and then have a hard time actually getting around to reading them. To be honest, I got most of my poems from one site, and then a few from various other sources online. It was near impossible to get my hands on a hard copy of any of these poems. I'm not even sure if anyone has ever put together a book of Flarf poems. Anyway, though it may seem that flarf is.. well a bunch of flarf.. I was surprised at how many age old techniques that it employs. It's experimental in the sense that it uses unusual sources for composition, but it still holds on to some classic poetry conventions, etc. Let me first get into what Flarf is...

According to Wikipedia, "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."

Poets of the School of Flarf will employ results from Internet search engines and translators, as well as Internet chatrooms and other interactive sources. It is often described as being intentionally bad or wacky, though this is a catch-all definition for those whom don't appreciate and understand Flarf. For example, if a mumbling man was walking by two other people, and one of those other people asked "WHAT WUZ HE SAYIN?" the other may respond with "SOUNDED LYKE FLARF 2 ME!#"

a hem.

Flarf draws resemblances to spoetry and spam lit, which both focus around messages and text in spam e-mail messages. While I could consider spoetry to be a hybrid of flarf, I would not consider it being entirely a part of the Flarf school.

One of the inital purposes of Flarf was to expose the workings and mechanization of online websites such as Poetry.com. A man named Gary Sullivan submitted a deliberately bad poem to the website, as he had heard from others that no matter what poem you submit you will be offered the chance to be published. The website gives tremendous praise to many unsuspecting poets, and send them a letter in the mail saying that their piece has been selected for publication. Greg Sullivan created a theory that no matter how horrible, heinous, obscure, meaningless, or vulgar a poem was, it would nonetheless be treated as a masterpiece. Thus, he sent in a poem he titled "Mm-hmm." Here is an excerpt from "Mm-hmm."

Yeah, mm-hmm,

it's true big birds make

big doo! I got fire inside

my "huppa"-chimp(TM)

Sure enough, he did soon get a letter in the mail asking him if he was interested in publishing his masterpiece.

***

Now, this post is starting to become more about the history and theories of the Flarf school itself, so let me get on to talk about reading the actual poems themselves.

It is rather obvious that Flarf is inventive. It takes moden-day sources, namely the internet, as the bulk of a poem. This can be compared to any type of poetic inspiration. Some poets get inspired by nature, the ocean, etc. The Flarf method is simply much more direct. The entirety of the poem is not dictated by what a search engine spits out, but it is rather a combination of that and "bridges." This is what the Flarf poet uses to link together the basis of their poems. Let's take the poem I talked about earlier, by Gary Sullivan. This is one of the most talked about Flarf poems in existence. See the link above for the full poem, as it will not allow me to post it here with the full formatting.

One of the unifying elements of this poem is the cut and paste look and sound. This is literal and figurative. Chances are, this poem was first conceived on a computer, completely skipping any hard copying. Gary Sullivan likely CtrlC'd and CtrlV'd the results from his Internet content into his word processor. When looking at this poem, I literally see a cut and paste makeup. It's almost as if I can see words being glued to a sheet of paper. Not quite. But almost.

Flarf is strange, inventive, quirky, and very surprising. However, it's not entirely separated from more conventional poetry, and employs techniques that other forms of poetry do. In the poem excerpt below, from Drew Gardner's "As Dolphins Languor," it's almost as if a "real" (for lack of better words at the time) was written, and then typical Flarf techniques were threaded in:

awe yea I open a photo album I found under my bed

uhhuh, The dusty, leather cover decaying and smelling of the years

awe yea baby Regrets mingling with my tears

as I methodically turn the pages, you see

...and look at it without what I consider Flarf techniques:

I open a photo album I found under my bed
The dusty, leather cover decaying and smelling of the years
Regrets mingling with my tears
as I methodically turn the pages, you see

A fairly normal poem, eh? (Please excuse my use of "normal" and "regular," etc. I can't find an appropriate word. No, I do not have a definition of a normal poem.")

Upon further examination, and myself wanting to know the origins of the poem, I typed "The dusty, leather cover decaying and smelling of the years" in the Google search bar. Low and behold, I found the "normal" poem in its entirety on a xanga site. So Drew Garden somehow managed to come upon Tiffany's Xanga site and then added extreme flarf elements to her original poem. This could be considered stealing. Or hilarious. Or cruel. I hate to say this, but Tiffany sounds like the exact target of a Flarfer. Her interests are as follows:

Interests: I enjoy spending time with others. I never like time to myself, because I feel like I'm wasting time by doing nothing. I love to write, sing, dance, and I hope to be an actress some day or a modle.

Yes, model was spelt wrong.

After Drew's first couple of lines, of which don't seem too Flarfy, this line breaks that:

"I like to dress up in REALLY tight underwater pumpkin beavers... "

Now, if that's not an element of Flarf, I do not know what it. The origin of that line is unknown, but it is most likely the result and combination of a Google Search. It fulfills some ideas of Flarf... it's seemingly unfitting, wrong, and in my opinion, absolutely hilarious.

Anne Boyer's poem, "A Vindication of the Rights of Women," could pass for a non-Flarf poem in some senses. However, when the whole thing is read, there are clear elements of Flarf, and it is a poem of the Flarf genre. This is not to say that it can not be taken seriously. I think that some poets use the Flarf genre to bring attention to a topic in obscene ways. It's almost as if they are laughing that a certain topic is still prevalent, and the laughter can be see through their words. Laughing at it because there is nothing else to do, almost.

That’s not a feminist primer. Try barefoot kids running goats

and sheep over rocky pastures invading your facial orifices.
A lot of people would probably not understand how a staunch

feminist

could justify participants and many spectators dousing one

another’s

Read the rest on the link provided.

I think that I've touched upon some of the main concepts of Flarf poetry. However, it is rather difficult to draw parallels, as one element of Flarf is that everything is extremely, for the most part. Taking topics or previous poems, and adding humorous, unecessary, and vulgar elements is what holds many of the poems together; allowing for any sort of unity.