What is Flarf?

The following reading is taken from:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html

The Flarf Files


Michael Magee provided this response to my requstion about "Flarf". Magee is the editor 
of Combo, whose #12 issue is devoted to (or anyway realted!) to Flarf. His own Flarfesque works can 
be found at "My Angie Dickinson". For furhter readings, check out Mainstream Poetry. 
--Ch.B. (August 2003)



As for Flarf, I'll give you as much stuff as I have in the way of statements. 
First, here's what Kasey [K. Silem Mohammad] and Gary Sullivan have written on 
the origins of Flarf:

KASEY: Flarf came about a couple of years ago when Gary Sullivan submitted a deliberately bad poem 
to Poetry.com, one of those vanity companies that lures the unsuspecting with lavish praise of 
their poetry and then offers to "publish" it for an exorbitant fee. Theorizing that no 
submission, no matter how heinous, would ever be treated with anything other than solicitous 
fawning, he sent in a poem titled "Mm-hmm":

Yeah, mm-hmm, it's true
big birds make
big doo! I got fire inside
my "huppa"-chimp(TM)
gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god
wanna DOOT! DOOT!
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!
oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take
AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)
uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah
hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get
off the paddy field and git
me some chocolate Quik
put a Q-tip in it and stir it up sick
pocka-mocka-chocka-locka-DING DONG
fuck! shit! piss! oh it's so sad that
syndrome what's it called tourette's
make me HAI-EE! shout out loud
Cuz I love thee. Thank you God, for listening!

Sure enough, he received a full invitation to have his timeless piece of 
literature enshrined for all posterity, etc.

Gary shared his poem, the style of which he promptly dubbed "Flarf," with 
members of the Subpoetics mailing list, and before long a few other participants began 
posting poems to Poetry.com, including myself, Drew Gardner, Jordan Davis, and a handful 
of others. Eventually, we formed a separate mailing list.

The initial aesthetics of Flarf went largely unarticulated, but they can 
probably be approximated by the following recipe: deliberate shapelessness of 
content, form, spelling, and thought in general, with liberal borrowing from 
internet chat-room drivel and spam scripts, often with the intention of 
achieving a studied blend of the offensive, the sentimental, and the infantile.

Flarf has largely become stylized out of existence, made inseparable from the 
usual writing habits of its practitioners, as Gary and Nada and others have 
pointed out.

Maybe the problem was ever announcing "Flarf" as a concept, suggestive of a 
movement, etc., in the first place. There were those among us who shrewdly warned about 
the dangers of such a move-Katie Degentesh, for example. The truth is, Flarf is not a 
movement, never was, because it has no principles as such, beyond some characteristic 
compositional techniques that developed along the way (collaging Google search-engine 
results, etc.).

There is no such thing as Flarf. Useless to declare that now!

***

GARY SULLIVAN:

Flarf: A quality of intentional or unintentional "flarfiness." A kind of corrosive, cute, 
or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. "Not okay."

Flarf (2): The work of a community of poets dedicated to exploration of 
"flarfiness." Heavy usage of Google search results in the creation of poems, 
plays, etc., though not exclusively Google-based. Community in the sense that one example 
leads to another's reply-is, in some part, contingent upon community interaction of this 
sort. Poems created, revised, changed by others, incorporated, plagiarized, etc., in 
semi-public.

Flarf (3) (verb): To bring out the inherent awfulness, etc., of some 
pre-existing text.

Flarfy: To be wrong, awkward, stumbling, semi-coherent, fucked-up, un-P.C. To take 
unexpected turns; to be jarring. Doing what one is "not supposed to do."

The (unbearably) long answer [and my apologies to readers, especially 
flarflisters, who have heard this 4,000 times already (you're free to link 
elsewhere!) is:

A couple of years ago, if you'll remember, on the Women's Poetry list, a number of people began 
posting in horror at finding their names, with poems they hadn't written, on poetry.com. I remember 
going to the site and realizing immediately it was one of those "poetry contest" scams. A 
year or so before that I had spoken on the phone with my grandfather, not many days before he died, 
and he had told me then how proud he was that he had won some sort of poetry contest, and that he 
had ordered the book, etc. I had always felt bad about that, and once I was on the poetry.com site, 
I wrote what I thought would be the most offensive poem I could manage, and submitted it to the 
"contest":

Mm-hmm
Yeah, mm-hmm, it's true
big birds make
big doo! I got fire inside
my "huppa"-chimp(TM)
gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god
wanna DOOT! DOOT!
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!
oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take
AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)
uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah
hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get
off the paddy field and git
me some chocolate Quik
put a Q-tip in it and stir it up sick
pocka-mocka-chocka-locka-DING DONG
fuck! shit! piss! oh it's so sad that
syndrome what's it called tourette's
make me HAI-EE! shout out loud
Cuz I love thee. Thank you God, for listening!

To my amazement, I received, about three weeks later, a letter from poetry.com, 
with my poem fully visible through the cellophane window of the envelope. The 
letter, in part, read:

"Gary, over the past year, we have conducted an exhaustive examination of over 1.2 million poems 
that have been submitted to us. Only a small percentage of individuals whose poems we have reviewed 
were selected to be part of this distinguished project. "'Mm-hmm' was selected for publication 
because it sparks the imagination and provides the reader with a fresh, unique perspective on life. 
We believe it will add to the importance and appeal of this special edition. _Of course, Gary, as 
always, you are under no obligation whatsoever to submit any entry fee or subsidy payment, or to make 
a purchase of any kind_. Your poem will be presented in the most elegant way possible. This 
coffee-table quality book will feature an 'Arristock leather' cover stamped in gold and a satin 
bookmarker …"

And it went on like that. I can't remember if I said anything about this on the 
Women's Poetry list (I might have unsubscribed by then), but I was on the 
subpoetics list at the time, and posted something about it, and encouraged 
others to submit poems to poetry.com. There were a few takers, including Kasey 
Mohammad and maybe Drew Gardner. Meanwhile, Nada, Mitch Highfill and I began 
writing more of these awful poems, and submitting them to the site under a 
variety of different names.

Somewhere in all of this, the word "flarf" materialized-it may have been Mitch's word, or Drew's, or Nada's, I'm not sure. But somehow, 
"flarf" began to take on a meaning: "having the quality of flarfiness." We now began to look at other things and to see them as 
"flarfy." I was never 100% sure what it meant-something akin to "campy," but with somewhat different resonances. More awkward, 
stumbling, "wrong" than camp. The flarf "voice" in my head was that of my father, a transplanted southerner, who likes to 
pontificate, and who has a lot of opinions that kind of horrify me.

I liked being on the subpoetics list, but at times it felt a bit stifling-very P.C. So I began using "flarf" 
on the list as a way of keeping my own tendencies toward repression-which the list seemed to help foster--at bay. 
During a reading in New York, I read one flarf I'd sent to the list, "New Year's Post," and surprisingly, it 
went over incredibly well. My notions of what might be "bad" or "wrong" were being questioned by 
the response. (I wound up publishing it in How to Proceed in the Arts.)

Meanwhile, I think both Drew and Kasey were doing a fair amount of flarfing of their own. 
Drew began to do odd word-combo searches on Google for things like "Rogaine 
bunny" and wrote poems using the results. I don't think, at least at first, that he 
thought much more of these poems than that they were kind of hilarious monstrosities. 
Drew and Nada and I used to send a lot of three-way e-mails back and forth, often with 
poetry-related jokes, parodies, and-increasingly-flarf.

In March or May of 2001, a number of us started the flarflist-I'm not entirely 
sure who all was on it then: Me, Nada, Drew, Mitch, Jordan Davis, Carol 
Mirakove, Kasey, Katie Degentesh. Soon after, Maria Damon, Erik Belgum came on.

The first post to the list was "Angry at God," a play I'd written doing a Google search on the words "awww" 
"yeah" and "God." (Published in the first issue of Pompom.) This was quickly followed by posts from Kasey 
("Crucifixion Xing":

THE worst thing that could happen
A familiar barking dildo slurped up
In correspondence school, a LADY FUZZ CRYSTAL
Mildewed and sucked out of folderol
Zinging and zigging and zanging AWL NITE LONG
Cos' your master got a LAMBKIN SYNDROME
Lodged in his epiglottis like DR. STRANGE
ICBM turkey nads; tho lately the aspidestra
Colony seems curtailed, sock putty for retards
As gaseous as gaseous gets, uh huh
An' I wonder if dimity tassels
Mine these purple hog hallers (BADA BING)
Th' hordes o' socklickin' provosts fall out
& thus frailness depletes their futon buildup […])
Drew ("Denise-isms":
so i had to find the P-Uter train so I could get to
Boston cause there was nooo
way I was driving to Boston cause that would be insane!
... animal rights, antibacterial thingies, awkward
moments of silence, big fluffy pillows,
I wantedto BE the Beverly hick-in-the-muds
In with my shirts? […])

… and Jordan (untitled poem beginning: "wim-o-weh wee-ooh wim-o-weh wee/
PARIS SMUH 1967/05")

Initially most everyone was using Google in some capacity, and the work tended to be corrosive, awful, though 
not so much in a Bruce Andrews Shut Up way, it's more awkward, less self-aware or overtly politically 
pointed, mistakes are left in as found, and certain "cute" words ("fluffy" 
"cuddle" etc.) begin to pile up in the poems.

Here is an excerpt from Drew's "As Dolphins Languor":

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
I like to dress up in REALLY tight underwater pumpkin beavers...
and I take a deep, painful breath
Because staring back at me from the tattered oragami licences
oh baby yea Are black and white visions of faraway hearts uh huh
Mistakes where made and moments lost
But I take the blame all for myself
awe yea You see, sobody's done messed up
my latvian women's soccer team fantasy REAL bad,
oh pagers make of cheese,
Isn't that cute? The fluffy pumpkins I mean
you can't HANDLE the fluffy pumpkins...
If I could just steal away one
tender moment from my past
And trap it in my heart
ohhhhhhh baby It would unravel the regrets
woven deep into the tapestry of awe yea baby my life
awe yea the Whiteness glimmers in […]
... Take the love Romeo and Juliet had, multiply
it by infinity, take it to the depths of
forever and you will still have only a glimpse of how to
bungee jump outa my moist sitar B.O.! […]
Katie began taking interoffice memos she received on the job and flarfing them:
TO: All New York Office Employees
FROM: Human Resources Loveroll
DATE: May 8, 2001
RE: Hot Hatred and Hot Business Coital Attire

In the spirit of the upcoming season, hot hatred and business coital attire 
will begin on Monday, May 21 and end on Friday, August 31, 2001.

Hot Hatred

As hot approaches we are pleased to remind all employees that we will be 
milking a condensed milk week. During the hot months, there will be extended 
office hatred Monday through Thursday, allowing for a * day on Friday. Please 
see the guidelines below:

Regular office hatred will be 9:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 
9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. on Friday. In order to accommodate this schedule, lunch 
periods, which are unloved, should be limited to 45 pieces of popcorn. 
Department heads may allow an individual to adjust his/her core milking hatred 
while still milking the full weekly hatred. All employees
will milk their regularly scheduled hatred within a week (barring evacuation or 
jail time) regardless of starting or ending time.

The office will remain open on Friday afternoons for those of you who wish to 
complete pregnancies or have regular milk to finish, however, there will be no 
mailroom or reception services beyond 1:00 p.m.

If you schedule Friday as an evacuation day, it will count as one full day as 
per our evacuation policy.

To receive unconditional love, an employee must be at milk (or on an authorized jihad) 
on the milk day immediately proceeding and the milk day immediately following the day 
on which the unconditional is observed. If an employee is absent on one or both of 
these days because of sexual activity or illicit affairs, the Company reserves the 
right to verify the reason before approving unconditional love. […]

People on the list would respond to each other's posts with other posts picking up on words, word-combos, themes, forms, etc. But 
by September 2001 the list became relatively silent. Not too long after 9/11, people began posting again, though now all of the 
flarfs-many of which were parodies of AP News items-in some way shape or form addressed the aftermath of 9/11, including media 
portrayal of same. I remember, for instance, Katie's "We'll rebuild the Twin Towers-on your Pizza" (which I think was 
published in the latest online edition of Arras). I started a "sadness" series-doing searches on "The horrible 
sadness," "the awful sadness," "the unending sadness," etc., in response to what was becoming a kind of 
stifling national(ist) mourning.

Some listmembers dropped out and in time others came on board: David Larsen, Rodney 
Koeneke, Michael Magee, Rod Smith, Daniel Bouchard, Sharon Mesmer. Some are silent 
observers, others participate regularly. Some consider the list a kind of joke list among 
friends, others use it to develop longer work (e.g., Kasey, Deer Head Nation, Michael 
Magee, My Angie Dickinson, and Jordan's series of fairly matter-of-fact 
"expose" poems about Senators and Representatives).

While I haven't been very active on the list for the last couple of months, I was using it for 
about a year or more to generate plays and poems, not all of which necessarily had the quality of 
"flarfiness" (the Bollywood poems, for instance), though each came up initially as an 
attempt to do something I "wasn't supposed to" do.

******

Okay, now for my own thoughts:

MIKE MAGEE:

The "separate mailing list" Kasey mentioned came to be known by its members as the "flarflist" - a sort of ad hoc 
listserv whith remains active with about a dozen members including myself. It's heavily weighted toward new poems rather than discussion. 
Most members took out hotmail accounts and invented pseudonyms for the occasion. One joins the list by being "invited" by someone 
already on the list (really, simply given all the email addresses) and sending a poem along. My own understanding of it went something like 
this: "Flarf" is a collage-based method which employs Google searches, specifically the partial quotes which Google 
"captures" from websites. In its early manifestations it was VERY whimsical and went something like this: you search Google for 2 
disparate terms, like "anarchy + tuna melt" - using only the quotes captured by Google (never the actual websites themselves) you 
stitch words, phrases, clauses, sentences together to create poems. To me, it's interesting for a number of reasons -- its collaborative 
texture, its anthropological implications (the sampling of an enormous variety of public speech based on a single word or phrase shared in 
common), its comic (not to say unserious) frame. Gradually people got more ambitious both in their use of the technology (somewhat) and in 
the poems themselves.

My own contribution was to invent the "Mainstream Poetry Movement." It is, first and foremost, a 
perhaps ludicrous attempt to appropriate the term "Mainstream Poetry," which as you of course know 
has come to mean any poems running the gamut from new-formalist-but-not-too-strident-from-respectable-press 
to MFA or post MFA-generated autobiographical lyrics in a free (though basically iambic) verse structure. I 
had the epiphany that nothing could be stupider than labeling this "mainstream." In the mainstream 
of what??

As you can tell by going to the www.mainstreampoetry.com website, the poems can 
seem positively juvenile and silly. But this to me is not at all to its 
detriment - sometimes it's a scorchingly ironic silliness, sometimes a frantic 
post-9/11 silliness or a wonderful gender-bending silliness, like Carla 
Harryman meets Bugs Bunny. And given the relative stability of the method the 
variety produced and dare I say uniqueness which each poet brings to these 
compositions is to me quite remarkable. In a statement for the recent Poetry 
Project Newsletter, I had this to say about my own motivations for turning to 
the comic and even the stupid in this work:

*************

I would like, would very much like, to say exactly what Williams said in his 
introduction to The Wedge:

The war is the first and only thing in the world today.
The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for 
relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector 
of the field.


Williams's introduction is an argument, a great one, for poetry's usefulness 
and relevance. But the context in which he wrote it differs greatly from our 
own. First of all, Williams believed the United States was fighting a 
relatively just war; and, however reluctantly the U.S. may have bumbled into 
it, and whatever the contradictions and failings of their engagement, I would 
tend to agree. Also, Williams had a greater faith than I can muster in the 
poem's ability, not only to be peculiar (in a form intrinsic to content) but to 
maintain those qualities for more than a New York minute.

The state has always attempted to co-opt the language of dissent and so de-fang it, and the 
democratic-capitalist state (yes, I know) does it better than any other because it can couch the 
very act of co-optation as either "dialogue" or as the marketing of a revolutionary new 
product (cool). Or, worst of all, can simply adopt the symbols of dissent and none of its politics: 
hence Nixon's flashing of the "peace" sign. Peace or victory? No matter, the collapse 
is/was precisely the point.

If "younger people are unable to sustain utopian visions" as Hejinian suggests, it's because the language of 
utopian visions goes from our minds to our voices to the street and the magazine and finally to the advertisement (for 
Old Navy or for The Marines, no matter) in the blink of an eye. I suppose Barrett Watten's argument is that the Berkley 
Free Speech and Vietnam Anti-War movements identify this problematic and address it, and that Language Writing likewise 
addresses it. True. But Kerouac, Miles and Ginsberg in their khakis? Or more to the point "the revolution will not 
be televised" -- until it is, in a Nike commerical, where, incidentally, we are informed not that "the 
revolution will be live" (Gil Scott-Heron's closing words) but that "the revolution is about basketball and 
basketball is the truth" (KRS-One's words, as dictated by Phil Knight). Ugh. I don't believe that we lack our 
defining big bad political moment -- it's here brothers and sisters. But like a crafty virus, the problem of language 
has mutated.

I reject out of hand the notion that poets of my generation are practicing mere 
experimental aestheticism. Of course there's some of that, there always has 
been; the mere imitating of a style for whatever gain. But to say that Rodrigo 
Toscano, Heather Fuller, Mytili Jagannathan aren't writing vital poetry both 
political and experimental to its very bones? C'mon. And I could name two dozen 
others off the top of my head. If you ain't seeing it you ain't looking in the 
right place.

As I say, the problem seems to me to have changed and so the solutions will be different. One can at least 
propose that Nixon and Kissinger were able to perpetrate their crimes because they were devious. George W. 
Bush is an utter dumbfucking fool achieving the same effect. Amazingly, everyone seems to understand this, 
even many of the people who vote for him. I feel compelled in the face of this to interrogate dumbness, 
ridiculousness, stupidity; to work undercover in the middle of it, to pretend to be it if necessary, all the 
while reporting back to the reader. I have in mind, always now, Frederick Douglass's words, "At a time 
like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument is needed" (1852). I've been composing a series of 
poems called "Fascist Fairytales." In one of them, a poem-play, Margaret Thatcher has a dialogue 
with The Sphinx, who is initially skeptical of her politics but eventually falls in love with her. It closes 
with a nuclear catastrophe, a loving embrace, and Thacher's proclamation, "Bomb Turks, I'm in 
love!" Isn't that precisely what she meant?


***

Kasey followed up my "Mainstream" idea with this statement:

***


KASEY:
Towards a Mainstream Poetics

Want to take seriously [Pixar-esque weasel/clown-faces behind me fleer and 
moue] for a bit here Mike Magee's reconfiguration of the poetic Mainstream.

Others have pointed this out before, of course, but "mainstream poetry" as 
usually construed by its opponents is anything but. What on earth, as Mike asks, is 
mainstream about Robert Pinsky? A mainstream is a forceful, central current that carries 
in its path all the debris and livestock and entire vacationing families that get 
vortexed into it. It is not a carefully constructed iron walkway that escorts the effete 
peripatetic poet safely above a scenic view of the countryside and its filthy horizon. In 
the mainstream, you have to shout to be heard above the roar of the already-tired water 
metaphor I'm spinning out here. In the mainstream, the weasels with clown faces have 
uzis. The mainstream is the scary global video game we live in, everyday, and it has 
nothing to do with some absurd publishing scam within which a few bloodless surrealists 
and failed classicists and Tools of the Homespun False Consciousness get to define what 
is normative.

If you want to break it down by sales figures and numbers of readers, the 
margins between the Big Names and the small press world are negligible in light 
of the overall money-losingness of poetry. Most of the poetry read on a daily 
basis in this country, I'll wager, is amateur poetry circulated between 
individuals and posted on the internet.

So what would it mean for poetry to be truly mainstream? It would have to be 
aggressively public, perhaps--distributed via mass mailing or spam messages, 
say. It would have to be as shameless as television in its bid to engage new 
readers, and even, potentially, make money. Imagine that: poetry that made 
money. Do you feel a bristling in your blood at the hint of sacrilege? What 
shall I do with all the money my new, Mainstream poetry is going to make...? 
After I pay off my student loans and credit card debts, maybe I'll finance a 
series of poetry billboards that respond electronically to the radio signals 
from passing cars and compose digital aleatory compositions designed to 
influence the way people shop for fabric. Maybe I'll fund a political party 
whose platform involves the legalization of plagiarism. Maybe I'll pay some 
high school kids to translate the Iliad homophonically and have homeless people 
read the results on cable access TV. Although it would make more sense to pay 
the homeless people, wouldn't it? You see how anarchically irrational and 
unfair poetry in the real world would be!

Let's start a lo-fi, low residency MFA program dedicated to the advancement of 
guerilla Mainstream poetics. As Juliana Spahr recently mentioned, there are 
certainly enough unemployed poets with Ph.D.'s out there to band together and get 
such a thing accredited. I don't know how that stuff works, but basically don't you 
just take out an ad in Poets & Writers or whatever and then people pay you 
money to entertain them in the countryside for a weekend or two? Give the thing 
some hip jazzy name like the Institute of Post-Avant Poetics, and you're all set. 
And stop at nothing--T-shirts, coffee cups, bumper stickers, mouse pads.... Invite 
big-name poet-celebrities to our conventions: Suzanne Somers, Leonard Nimoy, and 
Jewel alongside Lytle Shaw, Anselm Berrigan, and Lisa Jarnot. Special musical 
guests. Softball games. Cotton candy. And in the background, the weasels with clown 
faces, always softly stalking and slavering.

*****

Lastly, I'll include a short thing I wrote a sent to the Flarflist in Oct 2002 - to mixed 
reviews. Some of the folks on the Flarflist were/are not crazy about the literary critic 
in me, at least as it pertains to flarf. Anyway, this compares flarf to O'Hara's 
"Personism":

MIKE MAGEE:

******
The use of Google being extremely common, the flarf method resembles in some sense: 
a) the use of a thesaurus; b) eavesdropping and quoting; c) sampling; d) collage / 
cut-&-paste (for which I can think of many many precedents from Eliot to 
Langston Hughes to Berrigan and just about every experimental writer from that 
point on). What makes the flarf methodology different, to my mind, is the willful 
democratization of the method: the EXTENSIVE and even sole use of Googled material 
and the hyper-collaborative quality of the CONSTANT exchange -- the SPEED (or 
seeming speed) of composition.

This will sound needlessly hyperbolic but it seems to me that there's an analogy to be 
made between flarf and O'Hara's Personism -- which itself was a 
technology-based/generated poetry: to borrow a formula, the web is to flarf what the 
telephone was to O'Hara: 1) a way to gather and exchange information very very quickly AS 
A FORM OF POETRY; 2) a way to undercut and/or render flexible the idea of authorship; 3) 
a way to, as Duncan said of O'Hara, "restore to poetry its trivial uses."

One might say that Flarf is a radical elevation of the tendencies already there 
in Personism.

If the occassion called for it I could make this claim in very very very 
intimidating THEORYSPPCCHHHChhgggccchh ARF ARF ARF.

But anyway it's true.

To steal another formulation from O'Hara, flarf being surer and quicker than 
poetry, it is only just that flarf finish poetry off.

*******

I myself am not exclusively writing flarf-poems, but the tone(s) of everyone's 
flarf poems is already finding its way into the poems written without any use 
of Google whatsoever.

One of the things which was a revelation to me was the quasi-oldSkool sounds of what I equate to 
either manic b-boy Instant Message ranting, or manic teenage (grrrl) IM chat (eg "I am 
soooooooo interested") -- that this was a kind of speech which was everywhere and which had an 
architecture of its own but was sort of unrecognized too. Flarf brings that to the fore in a way 
that seems much closer to the lived experience of having to scurry one's self-expression 
through/into THE MEDIA than any other web-based poetry I've come across. All of this is offered 
with the simple proviso that a number of the founding "Flarfists" consider flarf itself 
to be dead.

--Michael Magee