Writing In Our Neighbor's Voice - Flarf poetry two decades later

Let’s think about Flarf poetry in the quick moving context of social technology. Flarf was, at its inception, a movement in poetry that took phrases generated by Google’s search algorithms and juxtaposed them in order to create a quasi-space, to give physicality to what would otherwise be an awkwardly phrased grouping of non-sequitors. It took the unpoetic language of the everyman and repurposed it into something that touched the depth and otherness of traditionally crafted poetry. Two decades ago, our neighbors were nearly unknowable in comparison to the information we can mine about them now from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and every exposed crack in the internet in between. We saw them use their above ground pools and barbecues. We would sometimes catch the flicker of their television screens against their blinds and wonder what movie they had rented. Maybe it was the same movie we had rented. They were constructs made from our own sense of self, made in the likeness of their creators. For a long time, our neighbors were just like us and the media that we consumed reflected that belief.

Early Flarf poetry (think turn of the 21st century) was illustrative of a changing social dynamic. Poems, and art in general, were no longer created outside of the influence of mainstream culture. The internet had woven a view of a much stranger world for most and a much more inclusive world for a few. We wondered then if maybe our neighbors weren’t just like us. Maybe they were freaks. Maybe while we were fingering a deeper understanding of the natural world and human relations as we matured, maybe our neighbors were just making collages of horses because they loved horses. Maybe with our different vocabularies we were still experiencing the same valid emotions. It was these sorts of ideas that served to carve the first notches into what would later be Flarf poetry. They were built from the bones of our neighbors, their real thoughts manipulated and skewed in a self serving satire. There was an anarchic quality to the Flarf poetry being produced in the movement’s infancy; the very first Flarf poem itself was a deliberately shitty piece of work titled “Mm-Hmm” submitted to borderline scam site Poetry.com by Gary Sullivan.

Mm-Hmm by Gary Sullivan

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!

Flarf was the distillation of the mainstream, the unalternative, into poems that were easy to laugh at and even easier to scoff at. It was a middle finger to the under educated masses, a reclamation of their ignorant utterances as something useful. But the poetry was still a product of the author, its ownership could not be denied. Although the phrasing was not theirs, words were often changed or rearranged in order to punctuate meaning more efficiently. The awkwardness was cosmetically altered and in doing so the poetry retained its affect in spite of its concept. There was, in early Flarf poetry, a glimmer of humanity that made the sometimes acerbic social commentary palatable.

In recent years, Flarf has undergone an evolution that has led many of its originators to claim its death. I’m inclined to agree with them. I think that the cause is that our toolset has been expanded with the advent of social media sites. With new social media sites like Facebook and Instagram that encourage constant sharing we can’t anonymously attribute various quirks to our neighbors anymore; we are privy to many of their innermost desires and fears, publicly broadcast in an attempt for validation.
There has been a practice in the alt-lit community of creating poems from the various groups and fanpages that you can tag in a post on Facebook.  On Facebook, if you begin a word with the @ symbol as you type out the word you are given a dropdown list that updates with each keystroke, an algorithm that constantly attempts to guess what page it was that you were tagging in your post.

This type of poem is the logical descendant of Flarf poetry but in changing the social and visual context and the subtle rules that governed the original Flarf poems something is lost in translation. I had played with this method of creating poetry as a way to jog my creative juices, never considering that the cheeky contradictions I had created were anything more than fun phrases. I was impressed with the uncanny images that I was able to conjure by happy accident but was never left feeling satisfied with the overall tone of the work and I think that is where the problem with this method of poetry creation lies (I’m still reminded of the image of myself hurdling the setting sun, an image I stumbled accidentally across during the creation of one of these poems). Facebook’s tagging algorithms are strict and clumsy. Sometimes an added space between words can bring about an entirely different drop down list of suggested pages. It is nearly impossible to add connecting words such as but, then, and, etc. without adding a disparate phrase as well. You’ll never find a page on Facebook simply titled “and” but you sure as hell will find “and i’M nEvEr TalkING TO YOU again!!”. When I’m talking about hurdling the setting sun, skidding across low tide, it’s only amusing for a second to wreck the tone completely with some inane, prototypically teenaged exclamation. The satire of it all loses emotional resonance when authorship is relegated to the assembly of phrases rather than the construction of full thoughts.

This isn’t to say, though, that our tagged page poems are without artistic merit. I’m just suggesting that maybe they are better left unowned. That it is better to not claim these as “poems” so much as curated collections of the public ideal. The hyperlinking of each phrase gives these works a vivid sense of place at the expense of full creative freedom. Working within the confines of this rule set can be inspiring. It gives us a sense of camaraderie with our neighbors that was absent in early Flarf poetry, allowing us to create content using the voices of others that is not necessarily immediately mocking but instead acts as an homage with a sidelong glance. It is so banal to hear but easy to agree with the sentiment “dont touch my hair, face, or phone.” though. It is a comfort for us to be reminded that our insecurities and inequities are the wireframes of our humanity, that the interpretation of these ideations is the defining skin stretched over our strikingly similar, and stupid, human experience.

Here, then, is a very short poem I had curated a year or two ago using Facebook’s tagged pages, hyperlinks surprisingly all still intact. It’s very stupid but it’s not my fault. I didn’t write any of the words.

Happy Birthday 7TH GRADE BOYS NEED TO STOP HITTING ON 8TH GRADE GIRLS ITS ANNOYING Way Too Teenish ღ