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poetic technologies : google
No discussion on how the Internet has affected poetry culture can be complete without a discussion of Flarf, a contemporary poetic genre that uses (used?) Google as a sort of aleatoric language generator.
K. Silem Mohammad summarizes its origins:
"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!
[...]
The initial aesthetics of Flarf ... 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 no principles as such, beyond some characteristic compositional techniques that developed along the way (collaging Google search-engine results, etc.)."
Sullivan sketches out the surrounding history:
"Drew [Gardner] began to do odd word-combo searches on Google for things like 'Rogaine bunny' and wrote poems using the results. ... 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.'"
Other relevant passages on this page include these from Mike Magee:
"'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."
and:
"[T]he 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."
Intriguing, entertaining. |
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
11:35 AM
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