idiotmusic

What sets flarf apart from other formal elements used to create poems is that flarf is able to conjoin the individual with the collective, something that the sonnet, the acrostic form and the lipogram have yet to do. And because the internet (or collective) is such an expansive medium, it might broaden poetry’s readership and perhaps even crack at the foundations of the academia. The way flarf poetry does this is by appropriating the 13-year-old-girlish slang and bad syntax, a universal trend only because of the vast accessibility and relevance of the internet in our culture. Flarf shakes hands with absolute terribleness for an awkwardly long amount of time, capitalization is rampant and inconsistent, punctuation the same. I can feel the writhing of the academia without having to use Google to find a consensus of cynical and horrified academics turning their educated noses at flarf. 

But internet-derived poetry like flarf by necessity must attract a more diverse crowd because it involves and includes more people. First, the program developers have to be interested, otherwise the programs wouldn’t exist.  Second, the fact that language is limited by what is already high on the Google hierarchy forces the language to be accessible because commercial and personal websites alike want to attract as many readers as possible, so the language should, in theory, be geared towards as broad an audience as possible (as opposed to the semantics of lyric poetry or the syntax of L=A=N=G… poetry).  Might a throng of prepubescent swooning teenage girls be excited by the idea that poetry is “allowed” to contain their latest evolution in chatspeak, might they be able to see poetry in a “kewl” light.  So then why do most poet-academics consider flarf poetry a bastard child that inherited the features of its mother with virtually none of her personality or substance? Because technology does not trump craft.  And it is perhaps the very notion that the internet can “generate” mainstream(ish) poetry that makes flarfists reluctant to do extensive revision which includes authorial voice, even if it is disguised as flarf in terms of language.  

Flarf poets are also reluctant to conjugate internet mining with authorial voice because it undermines the beauty of letting the search engine formulate what is most relevant in relation to the keyword hierarchy. “Hey Boo Boo,” shows that a majority of internet-users talk about brittle nails and vomiting in relation to the United States of America, but is the poem good illustrating anything deeper? I’d say no. These flarfists need to let go of the principles which weaken concerns about syntax, diction, and overall cohesion. The generated words need a human filter, a process that adds complexity and depth where cutting and pasting can’t because its mere luck and chance with the generator.  Much like a Dadaist method of creating poetry (i.e.: if one were to cut words and phrases out of a newspaper, rearrange them randomly on the floor, and use the exact results as a poem), flarf without extensive revision is mere trick with no personality or substance, like the bastard child. The output is by nature more coherent and useful when there is some kind of imagistic cohesion beyond keyword relevance, and I would argue that it serves more purpose by better provoking abstract thought in the reader. The poet individual connects with the internet collective and a fusion occurs—the successful flarf, a cyborg poem.

Anne Boyer’s flarf poem, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” I think, illustrates the qualities of a successful cyborg poem because its images cohere and there is obviously an authorial voice:

I’m an ardent feminist and often get in arguments.
I am spreading antibacterial Purell all over my keyboard

and throwing the plant, a little piece of apple,
toenail clippers and everything at the drive-thru window.

Lilith, who was the world’s first feminist, thought
I am doing the best I can. 

That’s not a feminist primer. Try barefoot kids running goats
and sheep over rocky pastures invading your facial orifices.

A lot of people would probably not understand how a staunch feminist
could justify participants and many spectators dousing one another’s

glorious gaping anus baseballs with colored water in the mall
& a lot of people lacking only a clown with a flower and a bear on a tricycle

would not believe in a woman old enough to be retired
expressing milk out her eyelids.

But feminism is a righteous gift.

Being a student of écriture féminine
is much more specific than being the “Vagina Lady”

Women have the god-given ability to be as boy teen titans
or un-analyzable gilt casino ballooner haven treats.

The Great Cosmic Mother turns around.
Her hair looks like taco meat
and the truck stops

and everybody gets like a-when I get my mind is going
thats nmaybe vagina hunuhhh

I was thinking about it,
and then I remembered I was squirting glue on Jesus.

I blame the Matriarchy, mmm mmm mmmm.
Just lie to me and say it’s all right.

Whether the reader ascribes the “I” to Boyer or to a fictional persona is not as important as the fact that the first line gets straight to the point: we know the poem will be about feminism, and we know the voice/persona is abrasive. The text that is driven by internet mining manifests itself as fresh imagery, which helps to collectively define the individual experience of the persona. The images are bizarre and vibrant enough to be distinguished from Boyer’s embellishments if the reader can identify, or knows, that the poem is flarf. A lot of the poem loses, at first, its sense to rampant imagery. But upon close reading we can still connect those images to Boyer’s rather ironic look at feminism: the doused glorious gaping anus baseballs are a symbol for an act of exhibition that other uninvolved persons would question (say passersby at the mall who are neither dousing nor willing participants of the spectacle, but are so out of chance), and there is American symbolism in the baseball, as well the mall setting. 

The people lacking clowns with flowers and bears on tricycles while an old woman “expresses” milk out of her eyes can be unknotted as well. The clowns and bears are Boyer’s/Google’s euphemistic image for humor (i.e.: a lot of people are lacking a sense of humor about the act of exhibition), and the milk out of the woman’s eyes implies and is associated with motherhood (how else can a post-menopausal woman display her motherly urges but with emotion when her body has failed her?). The images that first seem nonsensically transplanted from Google actually function to enact the meaning of the poem through its freshness: I will remember the time Boyer’s poem-persona “squirts glue” on Jesus as she thinks about The Great Cosmic Mother over Mohammad’s infertile diction, hands down.

What is successful about Anne Boyer’s flarf poem in comparison to Mohammad’s “Hey Boo Boo” is that Boyer adheres to somewhat traditional notions of poetical form and houses her cyborg creation within it. “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” is mostly written in couplets, giving it a real-poem feel that “Hey Boo Boo” and “Mm-Hmm” lack. Boyer’s flarfing could in no way have dictated all aspects of form even if she used Get a Google Poem’s couplet feature, because at closer inspection, there is a smattering of one-line and three-line stanzas that she would have had to manipulate herself, further defining an authorial consciousness already noticeable in the poem. The only one-line stanza, “But feminism is a righteous gift,” is a pivotal point in the poem because Boyer directly affronts the reader with a sarcasm that is present in the poem.  We already catch a bit of her sarcasm in the irony of her title in juxtaposition with Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” but in this moment we can for sure say Boyer is jesting. Think back to Mohammad’s cultural “Boo-Boo.” Whereas he hides his tiny little witticisms and criticisms in layers of meaningless internetese, Boyer entertains and challenges her reader with references to pop-culture throughout the poem, so there is no mistaking it. Mohammad may have Yogi Bear, but Boyer really makes use of her “glorious gaping anus baseballs.”

Very rarely does Anne Boyer use sloppy punctuation or syntax in “The Vindication of the Rights of Women.” In fact, there is only one time where she does, and it’s when she’s recreating a thought-process in the brain. This occurs in the second half of the poem where elements of feminism are assigned negative characteristics: The Great Cosmic Mother has hair like “taco meat,” “Vagina Lady” implies that feminist women by nature are defined by their less-than-elegant qualities, and when the poem-persona’s mind gets “going” thinking about feminism, it goes: “thats nmaybe vagina hunuhhh.” The reader is more apt to consider her deviations from the norm artful or purposely done because there is no over-abundance which might read like a lack of revision or like too much dictation by the internet.  Poems like “Mm-hmm” and “Hey Boo Boo” rely too heavily on their internet parent to sustain meaning and forgive strange typographical and syntactical deviations from the norm, and if that parent is ever removed from the context of the reader, it becomes harder to stand on its own. 

The lines, though they vary in length, are tighter and better contained than “Hey Boo Boo.”  By contained I mean that each line has an image or ideology that can stand for the most part on its own as fertile and unique. What is a more enacting first line, “1. the United States of America,” or “I’m an ardent feminist and often get in arguments”? What is a more provocative seventh line, “addled, foolish, stupid” or “That’s not a feminist primer. Try barefoot kids running goats/ and sheep over rocky pastures”? Even if you are a male chauvinist with a total lack of concern for feminism, I think you would be hard-pressed to defend Mohammad’s linguistic choices if we consider its impact on the memory and its ability to render unique imagery even if we do cut Mohammad a break and try to read between the lines. After all, the internet is mammoth in breadth, he could have kept searching until he found language that was less of a dud.   

Boyer is a successful flarfist because she’s willing to concede or compromise with traditional notions of poetics. She might be giving up some of her basic freedom, but in the end Boyer is helping the greater good of flarf by showing nosebleed academics that the cyborg poem can be successful. And in order for flarf to exist, whether or not people continue to call it flarf, we need poets like Boyer. Moreso, I think the poets on the internet need to calm down and stop slurping up each others opinions just to regurgitate them onto their own blog (which is how I think flarf’s reputation came to be this way since it’s so internet-based). Its true flarf seems to attract poets of a lesser caliber than those who typically have their poems published in Poetry magazine, but I think that with a little compromise to tradition, flarf as process or constraint could be stripped of its amateurish reputation. But perhaps that involves stripping off the “flarf” label and redesigning it so it appeals to the more stuffy people who run this joint.