The Joy of Flarf

Hi Everyone,
Laura and I have a very interactive presentation planed on K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation, some of which has to do with exploring the strengths and joys of creating Flarf, so I just wanted to recapitulate a little bit of background on Flarf for you all. As was mentioned on the blog when Mohammad replied to our questions, he describes flarfy poems as ones that are “built on absurd or irrelevant juxtapositions of sometimes scurrilous found material.” It all began with poet Gary Sullivan sending in the worst, most offensive poem he could imagine to a poetry contest scam, Poetry.com, and having it accepted. Thus, Sullivan was inspired to rephrase the William Blake motto picked up in the beat generation “First thought, best thought,” to “Worst thought, best thought.” He also defines it as “wrong. UnPC, out of control and ‘not ok.’” But I think a lot of this is fairly self-denigrating stuff that masks the interesting juxtapositions that come out of the process. After all, there’s something wonderful about a poem in which Moby and Ms. Manners can appear in the same poem, as they do in “Morning in America.” Flarf started out when poets on a mailing list began to incorporate chat room dialogue and spam into their poems and later evolved into the technique Mohammad used for most of Deer Head Nation. And, of course, the eventual desire of some to name it a concept/movement rather than a useful compositional technique tends to take away some of its charm and has prompted KSM to write “There is no such thing as Flarf. Useless to declare that now!” His technique was to set Google’s advanced search option at 100 results per page and then searched for a combination of search terms with a goal of getting 20-100 results. He wanted to have enough to have some material to work with but little enough to keep an uncommonness in the combination of terms—also termed hyperjuxtapositionality. Twin towers + cupcake, for example. Then he cut and pasted the page into Word and deleted the color text, the URLs and any language he found to be uninteresting. The process involved a lot of polishing and obsessing, but he has said he doesn’t necessarily have a clear picture in mind before hand of what the finished product will look like. Among other things, this process results in a lot of interesting cultural and political juxtapositions as well as a lot of humor. In a review of Deer Head Nation Sullivan notes a goal of Flarf as “fus[ing] poetics with the semiotics of amateur-media drenched contemporary reality,” which I thought was a pretty succinct way of putting it. Whether or not you end up appreciating what comes out of this technique or not, I think you have to agree that the juxtapositions of the flarfist can bring to light some amazing social ironies that are pretty difficult to achieve when just sitting down with pen, paper, and your brain. Will the helpfulness of Google ever end? Don’t forget to think about the significance of the title in your blogs, should you feel so inspired (Thanks Bill!). Here’s a big hint—check out the poem “Deer Head.” You might also want to consider political implications of various poems.
Thanks,
Eve