Flarf.

Inspired by my fellow blogger, Mark Bruckner’s fascinating last post on internet poetry, I’m going to take a moment and plug for one of my favorite 21st century poetic movements – flarf.

Flarf poetry…is…well it’s a….well why don’t I show you a flarf poem real quick.

This is “Why do I hate flarf so much” by Drew Gardner

She came from the mountains, killing zombies at will. Some people cried “but that was cool!” and I could only whisper “we should NOT be killing zombies!” What have you gotten yourself to do? Did it ever occur to you that you may in fact hate yourself? I know I do . . . I’m not nearly high enough yet—and you’re not helping. My group got invited to join the Flarfist Collective, set up some hibachis and do what we do best, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with this writing if it were a library and I checked out the entire world as if it were a single book. Strike “helpful” off your list. The 4th quarter gets pretty intense and the announcers are usually trying to figure out who is going to become overwhelmed by their own arrogant nightmares. It would upset the stomach of the balance of nature. I always go red over the stupidest things and I have no clue why. Whether it’s speaking in front of the class or someone asking me why I think I have the right to say anything. Why do I need an enemy to feel okay about what I’m doing? Observe yourself as you browse with sophistication through the topic of Authorship & Credibility. Why do I hate the surface of the world so much that I want to poison it? Why do I hate this so much? Well . . . you Hate Your Fucking Dad! Why is the screen so damn small? And why does the car turn so sharply? And why is the only sound I hear the sound of a raft of marmosets? BECAUSE I’m fucking ANXIOUS AS HELL about EVERYTHING.AAAAAAAAARGH. It’s even worse: “I’ll tell you later.” The medium is literally made of thousands of beautiful, living, breathing wolves. Why do I hate the moon so much? Unpublish your ideas in reverse. People hate any new way of writing. My girlfriend really hates it. There is not so much daytime left. Life is like spring snow tossing off mercurial Creeley-like escapes from life-threatening health problems. In summer we love winter in winter we love summer—all poetry is written in social mercurochrome. Since I hate the abridgement of life, a function of needing to please unpleaseable parents is more what this is about. Hate and love—if those are the options I just want to love and hate lobsters. The oddity is not so much that Blake held these eccentric views for most of his life, but that in modern civilization they not only extend the hand, so that it could not complain about complaining about something it hadn’t even bothered to read, and instead formed a halfway decent indie rock band. I’m actually starting to get much more interested in white people than I used to be. Why do I hate Flarf so much? Because it is against everything good this country once espoused. Why do I hate Flarf so much? Because of the awful conflict it places the law-abiding or police-fearing poets under.

Alright! That was a bit long, but hopefully you hung in there and it was worth it. That is flarf. Flarf is an umbrella term. It encompasses a group of poets who use the internet and new technologies to generate poetry. It’s really more of a found poetry than the traditional “sitting on a beach late at night looking at the stars being emotional” kind of poetry. The most famous flarf technique is to google something and use the results (and the text on those pages) to generate poems. Other techniques might be something akin to using google translate on a poem to transform it into a mass of confusing word structures and interesting double speak.

The creators of flarf initially had a listserv and created these monstrous poems only for each other’s enjoyment. But somewhere along the line something really interesting and maybe even beautiful(?) came out of it. Flarf is profane, disgusting, devoid of poetic gesture, inane, heartless, and sometimes total nonsense. But it’s also fascinating because of those very reasons. Comparisons are often drawn to the artistic movement know as Dada, for both the similarities in the nonsensical name and also the anarchist and joyous artwork that was produced. And I think that’s why I love flarf. It is anarchy at its best. A love and a disregard for everything.

Whether you love flarf or hate it, it certainly has character and offers a really interesting take on this weird post-modern world we are a part of. Check out some more flarf here. Make your own flarf poem! Recite some for friends! Family! There is no better gift for a loved one than a flarf. And may yours days be filled with rewarding and confusing google searches.