idiotmusic

II: Covert-Op Keywords

In the article “The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf: What Happens When Poets Spend Too Much Time Fucking Around on the Internet,” Day Hoy argues that the problem with writing flarf is that it becomes a “conduit of corporate ideology” because Google’s hierarchy of search results is centered around capitalism. I’ve been toying with the notion of the “Google hierarchy” for some time now without much direct explanation, so here goes: Google has to organize its search results in the most relevant and concise way possible, and the programmers do so by creating algorithms that determine how relevant a website is to a keyword by using three general factors: popularity, interconnectivity, and keyword density. Popularity is self-explanatory, interconnectivity refers to the amount of links to that website from other websites (some of you may be familiar with Ron Silliman’s blog which is often thought of as a central literary hub because of its rate of interconnectivity among other websites), and keyword density, which is a little harder to explain but also the most contingent on Hoy’s argument that flarf sucks because it inherently promotes capitalism. 

Keyword density refers to the potency of a certain keyword in relation to a website. Google has little bots (they’ve been referred to as “spiders” or “crawlers,” but I have no idea how they physically manifest or if they even can, and besides I find bots sexier than insects, and consider them in this case to be abstract enough to illustrate how little I’m able to conceptualize the process) that go out and determine how many times, for example, “poetry” appears on Silliman’s blog. The more times these bots come across “poetry,” the higher the potency, i.e. the higher up Silliman will be on the “poetry” hierarchy.  Keywords can appear pretty much anywhere on the actual website’s HTML (title, metatags, text), but the bots are unable to pick them up if they’re imbedded in an image, Flash, or Javascript. Some people abuse the bots by disguising keywords in clever HTML (covert-op keywords?), and many people find this, along with the embedded object deal, to be an unfair manipulation of the hierarchy.

The problem with this system of hierarchy, as Hoy sees it, is that the results are being homogenized and monopolized by companies that have a lot of money (they buy the nerds that are most equipped to make the keywords invisible), or by websites that sell products, unlike Silliman’s blog. Also, sponsored websites, ones that pay Google per click, show up at the top of the list, and Hoy states that “the Internet is evolving from a facilitator of information into a generator of money: search engines are selling keywords, and websites are structuring themselves accordingly.  This isn’t democratic—except in the most cynical, contemporary sense of the term, in which free elections are routinely won by the candidate with the biggest ‘war chest.’”  But who says the sense of democracy shouldn’t be cynical and contemporary?

Hoy criticizes flarfists for being unaware that their poetry promotes Google’s capitalist hierarchy, and that the results aren’t actually random because they are always governed by it. He also assumes that flarfists “promote a search engine without question” when “without question” seems to me a hard thing to quantify per poet (the same way it’s hard to quantify the awareness of flarfists to their Google-advertizing ways). Hoy uses too many generalizations in his argument, and its by-product is that any good poet who uses the flarf process will be subjected to its negative reputation without the same consideration of craft that a traditional poet would have. It’s hard for me to even be surprised that Google’s hierarchy is dictated by money, and its hard for me to think that any somewhat-educated flarfist wouldn’t be aware of it. The bottom line is that Google attracts people by the gaggle. Theoretically, flarf methodology should expand readership by making the language and imagery accessible to the collective people who determine relevant content, even if it’s consumer-based. Maybe Mohammad is a Google minion through implicit promotion, but Google becomes the poet’s tool to expand poetry’s niche. 

But it’s unfair to punish the process as a whole because a couple of people used it poorly. There are an infinite amount of methods used to generate poetry with a unique context, and many don’t exist yet.  The problem with any process or constraint is that if it overwhelms the content of the work, the poetry will fail. Darkling, a book of poetry by contemporary poet Anna Rabinowitz, is a good example of ruined acrostics, although no one on the internet is condemning acrostics after Rabinowitz defiled it—they merely give her poetry a bad review. Her process involved digging through a trunk of old photos and letters that belonged to her ancestors who died in the Holocaust, and writing poems about what she thinks they probably felt, etc (compared to flarf, the only thing different is the medium used to find interesting subjects). She then used the text of Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush” as the acrostic base, so if you read down the left margin the first capitalized letter of every line will spell out the poem. But because Rabinowitz was too lofty with her conception of the book, and because her constraint inhibited the ability for any of the stories to really take off (many poems do nothing more than statically describe a photograph), it fails. Take this example (which misrepresents the placement on the page):

 

Amok with what is unseen/ unsaid: love me,

Touch me, make use of me—

 

preludes

as in drawings

 

distances

 

as in prayers

 

Ensnared at the main gate—

and now—

 

and now—

oh god—

 

they’re dead.

Not only is the poetry melodramatic, but the use of italics is absolutely laughable. “love me” awkwardly got “Lovefool” by the Cardigans stuck in my head (you know, “Love me, love me, say that you love me, fool me, fool me, go on and fool me.” While we’re on the subject I might as well admit that not only did I have to Google the lyrics to find out who sang it, but afterwards I watched the entire video on YouTube. All this while I’m supposed to be writing an essay—maybe Hoy was right). Since typography obviously isn’t working out well for Rabinowitz, it doesn’t help that she cheats her constraint by using the page space to add lines that don’t adhere to the acrostic. Only the left-justified capitalized words are a part of the Thomas Hardy poem, and they spell out the ATE of GATE from the first line of the poem, “I stood upon a coppice gate.” That allows for a reasonable amount leeway with her constraint, and I don’t think giving oneself leeway with a form/constraint/process is bad, but it’s harder to forgive when the poetry is too: 

One’s life knowing, though it dribbles like

Farina down an infant’s chin,

    it can be—no! 

        it is truer than art.

But what is Life? And what is Art?

—such big questions!

Even though I don’t have to explain how bad Rabinowitz’ poetry is, this gives the opportunity to talk about how her process/constraint overshadows her work just like Mohammad’s does. Anyone in defense of Rabinowitz’ poetry can (and will) argue that if the poetry isn’t top-notch it’s because she chose so many formal elements to work with. They would also say that Darkling should be read in the context of its creation and not just for linguistic prowess. But if Rabinowitz is going to use all these formal elements to churn out super-sentimental melodramatic hypothetical Holocaust poetry, what is the point of using a constraint? A bad sonnet is a bad sonnet. Bad flarf is bad flarf. Why is there a double standard for some formal elements? Rabinowitz’ poetry fascinates her readers for the same reasons why Mohammad’s readers might be fascinated: because the generation of text is provocative in some way, even though the content is not. But if poetry had a hell, they’d both be doomed to the same place.