http://artvoice.com/issues/v7n12/introducing_flarf
"The Flarf poets are coming to town. They are reading together on Good Friday.
"Never heard of Flarf? Try searching the Web, like the video performances that have been viewed umpteen thousand times on Youtube. (((Yeah, do that. Especially Sharon Mesmer.))) Or check out the media coverage, from the Village Voice to the BBC. But don’t try looking in poetry anthologies. The work isn’t found there, not yet.
"This poetry called Flarf—a name that several participants take exception to—began when a group of poets took to using search engines to locate pre-written text in the far flung corners of the Internet. Not just any old text would do. In most cases it had to be “bad” or wrong-headed. The poems tend to aggregate such content, often with no clear limit in sight. Words are fused and isolated, phrases are redacted and rearranged. The result is a poetic Frankenstein, part irreverence of Dada and part disjunction of Language poetry. The camp of gay performance art is in there, too. Nothing is (or claims to be) especially polished. Like the deep trenches of the Web, this poetry is filled with misspellings and snide remarks in anything but Standard English.
The source of the source language can be significant for individual projects. Katie Degentesh’s collection The Anger Scale (Combo, 2006) takes its cue from a psychological test long used to evaluate “mental pathologies.” Each poem is based on one test indicator, like “I sometimes tease animals” and “I very much like hunting.” Feeding these words into the search engine yields the raw material of Degentesh’s poems:
Cows are incredibly placid, sedentary animals when on the ice
but really they are gay nymphomaniacs
so big and bright that I will need to carve them
a juicy new watermelon.
They also dig pretend burrows
when a human doesn’t listen to what they are saying.
The fact remains that no cow has ever been proven to be a ghost or a spirit.
Things are good, good is sweet, and gnarly has
the musty reek that reminds me of the cow fetuses
I had to dissect a couple of months ago...
