Flarf Poetry Information
Flarf poetry can be characterized as an avant garde poetry movement of the late 20th century and the early 21st century. Its first practitioners utilized 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.
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Overview
The term flarf was coined by the poet Gary Sullivan.
Joyelle McSweeney 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.[1]
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.[2]
Joshua Corey, poet and cultural critic, comments on his 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.[3]
In 2007, Barrett Watten, a poet and cultural critic, long associated with the so-called Language poets observed that:
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." [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.
See also
References
- ^ Flarf Festival April 20-22 at Medicine Show in NYC
- ^ Jacket 29 - April 2006 - Dan Hoy: on Flarf: The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf
- ^ Cahiers de Corey
- ^ How The Grand Piano Is Being Written
External links
Poems on-line
- FLARF: MAINSTREAM Poetry for a MAINSTREAM World a weblog, active since January 2003, devoted to the poetics of flarf
- 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 Daley, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, & Rod Smith
- Anthology of Spam Poetry a collection of works from bards of flarf and spam around the globe
- JB Wock an automated blog that mines the Internet for texts, manipulates them using different online services and publishes them as blog posts.
Audio & textual practice: essays and discussion
- The Flarf Files @ the Electronic Poetry Center
- The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf an article by Dan Hoy at Jacket Magazine
- 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"
- "The New Pandemonium" essay on flarf by Rick Snyder
- "Googling Flarf" by Michael Gottlieb
- Ron Silliman on Michael Magee's My Angie Dickinson
- Studio 360: Schreiber, Flarf, Redman discussions, interviews, and readings of flarf poetry
- Flarf vs. Conceptualism controversy
- Why Conceptualism is Better than Flarf: Vanessa Place Poet and lawyer Vanessa Place's talk recorded on March 11, 2010 at AWP 2010: Denver, "Flarf & Conceptual Poetry Panel"
- Why Flarf is better than Conceptualism by Drew Gardner K. Silem Mohammad has called this piece "Drew Gardner's answer to Vanessa Place"
- conceptual or literal? American poet-critic weighs in on the controversy
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Categories: Genres of poetry | Poetry movements | American poetry | Random text generation
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