Textual frameworks

My first flarf poem:

Good news

Based on wrong interpretation

You belong with me

On the same day

Theories That Tell Us How

Side to Side

fire breaks out

Attention

Wake me up when September ends

I'll Be Blunt

Can't Fly Without

In love with the shape of you

The making of

Live fast die young bad girls do it well

Concrete jungle where dreams are made

Don't wanna be an American idiot!

Morning brief

You belong with me

Firework

Good vibrations

Aren’t Stupid

the highs and lows of the night

Navigating a New Reality in the Sky

in a Hollywood-like film

in the Search for a

Did-that-just-happen moment

I took a pill in Ibiza

You belong with me

Negotiators to begin talks

Men Have to Contribute More

visit doubtful

Bogged down in misery

Did-that-just-happen

Sorry

Low life

Illusion of safety

Nothing to Hide

in favor of negotiated end

What a reply in

The dreamland.

For my first flarf poem, I wanted to play around with phrases from the top news articles which I did by doing a quick search on Google news and combining that with song lyrics chosen from an online song generator. I then used my poetic skills to create coherence.

Response:

Sharon Mesmer’s interview with Owen Perey was a good piece to understand the origins and meaning of flarf poetry. In the interview, Mesmer describes her way of writing a flarf poem- she starts with a phrase from someone else’s poem, Googles the phrases, and selects results of her choice, she then copy-pastes the selected results, and add some lines from her other projects, ideas, and even flarf email. She then puts together the lines that she has picked to create a flarf poem.

For Mesmer, flarf allows her to sound/speak like different people. Using snippets from search engines and combining it with phrases from other sources, allows Mesmer to play with the idea of juxtaposition. According to Mesmer, there is one way to describe flarf. Different flarf poets see their work differently.

I found Jim Behrle’s essay 24/7 Relentless Careerism on how to become the most important poet in America overnight, a bit difficult to follow. From what I understood, his piece is a satire and somewhat true (as satires are supposed to be). For Behrle, “Fame and poetry mix best through steady mediocrity, the creation of a “poetic voice” and a concrete underpinning of institutional power.” He further adds that the answer to becoming the most important poet overnight is by “suddenly, relentlessly, and brutally” spreading the word about your poetry. Being famous is not related to writing great poems. This can be true of flarf poems that Gary Sullivan likes to describe as “awful” poems.

Behrle is blunt about not creating fake writing movements which basically involves one famous person and hangers-on. He doesn’t like the idea of a shared spotlight achieved by getting famous through poetry movements. This, however, does not hold true when we look at the poets who became famous by contributing to poetry movements. Mesmer is also one such poet. She is known for her work in the flarf movement. Even though she writes all sorts of literary works, it was her flarf collection that got her famous.

My response to the textual framework would be incomplete if I didn’t talk about Gary Sullivan, the man who coined the term “flarf poems.” In his blog, Sullivan talks about how he submitted a poem that he calls “the most offensive” poem, to a contest. He was surprised when he learned that his poem was in fact selected for the contest. He encouraged his contacts from a sub-poetics list of a poetry club to submit similar poems to the contest. And that is how popular the flarf movement began. What started as a fun experiment for Sullivan, eventually became a movement. The idea of playing with words found through Google results and putting them together to create these funny and weird poems. The flarf movement is an example of how existing textual tools can inspire new textual frameworks in the literary world.