Flarf

Works Discussed in This Essay

• The Anger Scale by Katie Degentesh
• "I Google Myself" by Mel Nichols
• "Mm-hmm" by Gary Sullivan
• "On Thoth's Tits" by K. Silem Mohammad
• PPL in a Depot by Gary Sullivan
• "The Swiss Just Do Whatever" by Sharon Mesmer
• "TO: All New York Office Employees" by Katie Degentesh

The origins of the flarf poetry movement, which began at the end of the 1990s and continued through the first decade of the 2000s, are rooted in the emergence of Internet search engines. This new technological development was fundamental to flarf, based as it is on the practice of searching for disparate topics and word combinations to create something of a nonsensical poem, or sometimes even plagiarizing lines from other people's work to create a new Frankenstein's monster of a poem.

During the period in which flarf came into public awareness, cultural and political upheaval was at an apex. The Internet was coming into its full form, with the specter of social media hazy on the horizon, and in the United States, the controversial 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was about to take place. By the time flarf had hit its highest level of popularity, the US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 was about to trigger a deep recession that would soon spread throughout the world. Much like earlier avant-garde movements such as Dadaism and postmodernism emerged in reaction to uncertain political times, flarf came into being during a fraught period in which artists were looking for new means of expressing themselves.

Gary Sullivan, one of the leading voices of the flarf movement, wrote about its beginnings in an article for the Academy of American Poets' website Poets.org. According to Sullivan, he was subscribed to a women's poetry mailing list on which poets began reporting having found their names attached to poems they had not written on the website Poetry.com. Sullivan recalled a conversation he had had with his dying grandfather about a year earlier, in which his grandfather told him that he had won a poetry contest and had ordered a leather-bound volume containing his published poem. Sullivan realized that the fraudulent poems were part of the same "contest," which he and others have described as a scam designed to convince aspiring poets to purchase vanity anthologies containing poems of dubious quality. In response, Sullivan wrote a nonsensical piece, which he described as "the most offensive poem I could manage," and submitted it, only to be told he had won himself. His winning poem, titled "Mm-hmm," included lines such as

my "huppa"-chimp™

gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god

wanna DOOT! DOOT!

Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey! (lines 4–7)

The letter he received announcing his victory read, in part, "'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" (qtd. in Sullivan). Sullivan posted about his winning entry on a subpoetics mailing list and encouraged others to contribute similarly horrible works to the site.

Around May 2001, Sullivan and a number of other poets started a new mailing list called the "flarflist." Early contributors included Kasey Mohammad (K. Silem Mohammad), Drew Gardner, Mitch Highfill, Jordan Davis, Carol Mirakove, Katie Degentesh, Maria Damon, Erik Belgum, and Nada Gordon. The first post submitted was a five-act play by Sullivan titled Angry at God, which he had "written doing a Google search on the words 'awww,' 'yeah,' and 'God'" (Sullivan). Other early poems include "Crucifixion Xing" by Kasey Mohammad and an untitled poem by Jordan Davis, which began "wim-o-weh wee-ooh wim-o-weh wee/PARIS SMUH 1967/05."

The nonsensical term "flarf" is not easily defined. Sullivan cited the meaning as "something akin to 'campy,' but with somewhat different resonances. More awkward, stumbling, 'wrong' than camp." The movement itself was defined by the unique voices brought into the works, the use of technology, and the alteration (and occasionally plagiarism) of each other's creations online. Many have described much of the material produced through flarf as offensive filth, spreading ill will among the poetry world. Sullivan noted that initially, mistakes were left unaltered in the works, and "certain 'cute' words," such as "fluffy" and "cuddle," became increasingly prominent.

During the early period of the flarf movement, conceptual writing also emerged as a popular way for poets and other writers interested in learning new ways of communicating in a digital environment to express themselves. However, there are significant differences between the movements, and those differences are useful in defining what each one is. In both movements, one's identity is fluid: a poet's name is not created on a foundation of like-minded works, but in how one conceives of the work to begin with, and plagiarism is popular and in fact encouraged. A fluidity and disposability of words comes into play; words are viewed as reusable materials that are not meant to survive indefinitely in a single form. The poem becomes a commodity of language. In a 2009 essay for Poetry magazine titled "Flarf Is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing Is Apollo," Kenneth Goldsmith wrote of the two,

Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

Goldsmith also noted the improvisational nature of the flarf poem, which he distinguished from conceptual writing's obsession with procedure.

Sullivan has said that the reason flarf became a movement was because work that at first seemed awful eventually became a worthwhile form of expression. The period following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, while the movement was still in its early days, is particularly significant and poignant, and marks a turning point of sorts. Prior to September 2001, the flarflist had been quiet for some time; afterward, people began posting again, this time with new works that directly addressed the aftermath of the attacks, "many of which were parodies of AP News items" (Sullivan). One poem by Degentesh, for example, was titled "We'll Rebuild the Twin Towers—on Your Pizza." Sullivan wrote what he described as "a 'sadness' series," basing poems on search results for terms such as "the horrible sadness," "the awful sadness," "the unending sadness," and so on, stories around the event using phrases like "the horrible sadness" and "the unending sadness," in response to what he saw as "a kind of stifling national(ist) mourning."

When flarf began as a movement, there was a tight group of early practitioners who are credited with turning those early mailing lists into what would become one of the most highly controversial forms of poetry to emerge in the twenty-first century so far. Sullivan, Gordon, Gardner, Degentesh, Mohammad, Highfill, Damon, and Davis are all credited with being forerunners of the movement. Other writers joined them over the years, including Sharon Mesmer, who has recalled being invited to join by Sullivan during a party at her apartment in 2003.

In a blog post for the Chicago School of Poetics, posted in 2013, Mesmer noted that the movement was not merely sparked by Sullivan's original "badly written" poem, but rather evolved into a reaction against the austerity of accepted poetic language and culture at the time. She quoted Gardner, who stated, "Part of what we were reacting against was that poetry at that time seemed to have been cut off from the realities (and therefore the poetry) of the social worlds we were actually, presently immersed in. Part of what flarf did was break open deadening and pointlessly limited conventional ideas of 'quality.'" Drawing from absurdist and avant-garde traditions, flarf was meant as a way of performing language, in a sense, so that one would pay attention to the spontaneity of the work rather than what was being said.

One of the hallmarks of flarf is the use of found materials to create something new, surprising, and sometimes controversial. Degentesh is a prime example of an artist who turned the information being fed to her by the world into works of art that she pushed back into it. Her poetry collection The Anger Scale (2006) is based on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a psychological test of 566 true-false questions that has long used to determine people's mental fitness. The test was developed in the 1930s and updated in 1989. Using the original version of the MMPI, Degentesh titled each of the thirty-five poems in the collection with a question from the test, then composed the poems themselves by typing phrases from the questions into a search engine and cobbling together the results. In a feature for the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets series, Degentesh described the process she used for one of these poems, "I Loved My Father," recalling, "For 'I LOVED MY FATHER' some results might come from a search for 'LOVED MY FATHER' +turtleneck, some from 'HATED MY FATHER', some from 'HATED MY FATHER' +pussy; etc. I might also then replace words or phrases in the results." The resulting poem begins with the following lines:

I loved my father and I loved Jesus.

What was I to do?

I felt like a canoe

that was being pulled apart by two strong men. (1–4)

As the poem progresses, it becomes more nonsensical, referencing how the speaker's father "dealt with the servants of the castle" (25) and stating, "I sucked my thumb until I was six years old" (29). The poem concludes with the lines, "I took what I wanted, and left him spoiled behind me. / I was reborn in Ireland in 1753" (38–39).

According to Sullivan, Degentesh also began to "flarf" interoffice memos she received at her job around 2001. In one, beginning with the line "TO: All New York Office Employees," the sender is listed as "Human Resources Loveroll" (2), and the subject is "Hot Hatred and Hot Business Coital Attire" (4). The original memo was clearly about the office's summer dress code; however, by replacing language and substituting found phrases, Degentesh turns it into something absurd that nevertheless still carries meaning.

Sullivan's book PPL in a Depot (2008) is a collection of ten plays that he wrote in an attempt to break away from literary clichés and to rewire the ways speech and interaction are used onstage or in real speech. In a review of the collection for Jacket magazine, writer Stan Apps evaluated the effectiveness of flarf when applied to the theater. One of the plays he discussed was The Separation of Church and State, in which, he wrote, "an angel takes Thomas Jefferson on a tour of the future." Apps quoted a scene in which people are arguing over punitive action for a variety of absurd actions taking place:

BONUS MILLER. I don't care what you appreciate! People who chew with their mouths open should be shot. People who lick the ends of their fingers should be forced to lick the ends of OTHER people's fingers, the very fingers used to squeeze—

COUNSELOR. Ma'am you are way over the line! You should be preparing to face problems on Earth, not in some fairyland called Your Opinion!

Apps noted that throughout the collection, Sullivan's method frequently shows that the freedoms people cling to usually result in people wanting the freedom to "be a moron." He asserted, "The best of these plays dramatize the uneasiness beneath our secular idealization of free speech, showing how the openness that is so valued in the abstract is often intolerable in the specific."

K. Silem Mohammad was one of the original group of flarf poets. His published collections include Deer Head Nation (2003), A Thousand Devils (2004), Breathalyzer (2008), The Front (2009), and Sonnagrams 1–20 (2010), the latter of which uses anagrams to transform William Shakespeare's sonnets into brand-new sonnets in iambic pentameter. Mohammad used an Internet anagram engine to generate fourteen lines of text, each one closely matched to Shakespeare's own works on the level of language. He then rearranged the text to create a new sonnet and used all leftover letters to create the title. An example from his poem "On Thoth's Tits," based on Shakespeare's Sonnet 75, reveals the mesmerizing, nearly hypnotic use of language that ultimately says little about any sort of subject:

A purple fist, a Federalist, a sunspot,

A bird that's got a big big butt to study,

A guy named Toots, ten dumb galoots, a gunshot,

Die Fledermaus by good ol' Strauss (my buddy), (5–8)

His work "Poems about Trees" is also considered to be a classic example of flarf poetry.

Poet Mel Nichols used Divinyls' song "I Touch Myself" (1990) to write her poem "I Google Myself," asking readers and listeners to consider the new piece of writing she conceived while inviting them to recall the sound of the original song. Perhaps one of the best examples of a flarf poet's use of preexisting content to produce something new, the piece blatantly copies the rhythms, verses, and word patterns of the original work. The first stanza is a near-replica of the song's first verse, with occasional substitutions referencing the tools used by flarf poets to conceive their works:

I Google myself

I want you to love me

When I feel down

I want you to Google me

I search myself

I want you to find me

I Google myself

I want you to remind me (1–8)

On the border of flarf and conceptual writing, "I Google Myself" is an interesting example of the recycling of preexisting material, asking what it means for something to be original. Is it enough for an old piece to address a new need? When the song was first released, the Internet was still in its infancy, so one could argue that Nichols has simply updated the material, replacing physical masturbation with the narcissistic need to be recognized—what some may consider a metaphorical equivalent of the original act.

Sharon Mesmer, long a creator of collage poetry and essays, came to the flarf movement a few years after its inception. Believing that flarf reveals the contemporary cultural and psychological conditions through the ways in which language finds its way to the writer via search engine—for example, the most popular search results on a certain topic reveal what a large swath of the population feels about that topic at that moment in time—Mesmer saw the movement as a way to revive an "old" and "tired" practice. She was also drawn to the ways flarf poetry "carried within their frames the indelible stamp of their Oulipo-Objectivist-Beat-New York School-LangPo (inter alia) origins" (Mesmer), and to how adeptly flarf poets flipped the script to create something new from an older, established tradition.

Mesmer's poem "The Swiss Just Do Whatever" is a tour de force of ridiculous language that hops from pop-culture icons to political figures to deeply raunchy action. A sample:

King Hussein and President Fabio,

always just about to touch each other

on their devolved sparkle-offs

and Neil Patrick Harris appreciation pages. (9–12)

In her blog post for the Chicago School of Poetics, Mesmer recounted the joy of the flarf movement, explaining how, at a time when protest poetry had been tried and done and exhausted, flarf became a way of escaping the seriousness of the world by protesting through nonsense. Recalling the last reading of what she called "the flarf collective," which took place at the We-Are-Familia Pop-Up Gallery and Event Space in New York City on July 22, 2010, she wrote, "We were approaching the fetishization of what made us interesting to ourselves and, yes, to some others, and I don't think we wanted that. In our case, change would not be good. It felt like a natural death."

Bibliography

Apps, Stan. "The Tragic and the Wacky." Review of PPL in a Depot, by Gary Sullivan. Jacket, no. 36, 2008, jacketmagazine.com/36/r-sullivan-rb-apps.shtml. Accessed 16 Dec. 2024.

Degentesh, Katie. "Katie Degentesh." New American Poets, Poetry Society of America, 2009, www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/new‗american‗poets/katie‗degentesh/. Accessed 16 Dec. 2024.

Fischer, Shell. "Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously?" Poets & Writers, 1 July 2009, www.pw.org/content/can‗flarf‗ever‗be‗taken‗seriously. Accessed 16 Dec. 2024.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. "Flarf Is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing Is Apollo." Poetry, 1 July 2009, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69328. Accessed 16 Dec. 2024.

Sterling, Bruce. "Flarf Poetry in Poetry Magazine." Wired, 7 July 2009, www.wired.com/2009/07/flarf-poetry-in-poetry-magazine/. Accessed 16 Dec. 2024.

Sullivan, Gary. "A Brief Guide to Flarf Poetry." Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 14 Feb. 2011, www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-flarf-poetry. Accessed 16 Dec. 2024.