kottke.org

...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.

Flarf

Flarf is a form of poetry made by combining together phrases from random web searches. Here's an early example:

"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!"

Flarf started off as a joke but then these joke poems that people were coming up with "evolved from 'bad' to 'sort of great'".

Edge Books publisher Rod Smith, a poet himself, says he feels the [Flarf] collective is prompting a bit of anarchy in the poetry world by widening the vocabulary of what is permissible. "Aesthetic judgments about what's bad in a very hierarchal society are usually serving upper-class people with a certain amount of privilege," he says. "So for a bunch of poets who are very well schooled in a variety of traditions of American poetry to take what's considered bad and throw that at people is a very interesting maneuver. It's not simply bad poetry; it's quote-unquote bad poetry written by people who know how to write poetry."

By Jason Kottke    Jul 29, 2009 at 09:13 am    flarf   poetry

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