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. 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

Animals get the worst of it, like these hapless cows. In this work (not just Degentesh’s) the reader can find homilies to stork pâté, pizza-ravenous kitties, and geese forcefed on gravel. It’s funny for anyone with the right sense of humor. It might also have a serious message. These abject species are arguably a stand-in for people. Perhaps Degentesh photoshopped the word “cow” where the original text had the name of a person or group. Another poem ends, “I think that animals don’t have the right to suffer/but this one is noisy and jerky and gave me a traitorous kiss/The real point is that everyone opposes us.”

Denunciation of this poetry is pretty much a given. Some claim that others invented it first. Some claim the use of search engines is in bad faith because it depends on a corporate-controlled Internet—and is thus complicit with the outrages of global capital. Did I mention that this poetry often aims to be offensive? Some say it actually is offensive. Even a few poets who might be fellow travelers are uneasy with the appropriation of others’ voices.

But now, almost eight years in, poetry shelves are filling up with a series of collections that show “Flarf” is here to stay. Highlights include Rodney Koeneke’s Musee Mechanique (BlazeVox, 2006), Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson (Zasterle, 2006), Anne Boyer’s Romance of Happy Workers (Coffee House, 2008), Gary Sullivan’s PPL in a Depot (Roof, 2008), and Sharon Mesmer’s Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008). Some of the poets are already on a second round, like K. Silem Mohammad’s Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008).

Not all are happy with the group label. Anne Boyer is one poet also known for her digital paintings, Web installations, and flashing animations. In a poem called “Why I Am Not A Flarfist,” she responds to the categorizing impulse by channeling Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not A Painter”:

I am not a flarfist, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a flarfist, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Gary Sullivan

is starting to flarf. I log in.

“Sit down and be inappropriate” he

says. I am inappropriate; we are inappropriate. I click

to refresh. “You have *id test* in it.”

“Yes, it needed something awful there.”

“Holy shit, Gary.” I go and the days go by

and I log in again. The flarf

is going on, and I go, and the days

go by. I log in. The flarf is

still there. “Where’s *id test*?”

All that’s there now is *squid testes*.

“It wasn’t awful enough,” Gary says.

But me? One day I am trying to think

of offensive things: dolphin snatch. I write a line

about dolphin snatch. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of figurative language and elevated diction.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, of koala dick and ass vaginas, of

of how terrible awful cute weird late America is

and life. Days go by. I am even pious,

sentimental, and slightly boring,

I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven’t mentioned

dolphin snatch yet. It’s my life’s work. I call it

PRETTY SWERVE SPARROW OF AZURE CUNNING LIKE 1963.

And one day in literary history

I see Gary’s flarf, called POEMS.

The final line ends with an important point. Boyer balks at labeling not just her own work. She doesn’t want her fellow poets to be circumscribed either. Even Gary’s “flarf” ends up in the elsewhere of “POEMS.”

Nada Gordon is complicated in part because she has five books in the bank that pre-date Folly (Roof, 2007), her first collection of web derivations. Gordon’s book pays homage to Erasmus’s “In Praise of Folly,” which posits that folly (as opposed to wisdom) rules the world. Erasmus personifies folly as woman, and by sleight-of-hand, he ends up making the case that woman is thus in control of everything. This age-old satire is ripe for feminist détournement, and that’s where Gordon comes in. One of my favorite sections is the “Conversation” with James Sherry, the publisher of her book:

James: [to Nada] You have made my job very difficult by taking a tangential tactic across the problems of the prior MS. Not that I object to that, it’s just that it’s going to take me more time to understand the order and organization than if you had been willing to make the work about Folly more propositional and less gestural.

Folly: [cutting in—wagging her cigar] Have I got a proposition for you! How about we print this book on psychotropic paper? With guilt edges?

Nada: [gesturing wildly] But it is a proposition, James. The book’s three sections, like Erasmus’s. In his book he moves from 1) the folly of men and women to 2) the folly of social roles and institutions to 3) the folly of Christ. My book follows the structure roughly: “An Ape in Purple Clothing” affectionately addresses the follies of sex, gender, and decoration; “A Very Boring Society” the folly of the social—of church’n’state™; and “A Dissonant Gaiety” the folly (PBUH) of poetry. In my third section and in Erasumus’, the irony doubles back on itself to negate itself—transforming into genuine (if cynical) praise.

Note that none of this seems derived from search engines. Other sections do have material that shows clear signs of Internet sourcing, but Gordon also shows that content in itself is not the final word. She’s deeply familiar with the history of poetic forms, and in Folly she never repeats the same one twice. The book has a versatile array of lyric poems, anti-lyric poems, list poems, prose poems, projective verse poems, and all subgenres of dramatic poems (like above). Folly also contains more than a dozen epigraphs and scattered illustrations.

And now the precepts of this poetry are shifting, too. In Mel Nichols’s serial poem The Beginning of Beauty (Part I: hottest new ringtones, mnichol6) (Edge Books, 2007), the search engines of yesterday give way to the new media of today. For Nichols, culling all facets of electronic connectivity leads to a form of investigative poetry. She’s going undercover to explore how intimacy has changed in the global digitopia, where love letters are streamlined in text messages and pokes, and where lovers reach out to one another with the same email address used by the spambot. But Nichols, aka mnichol6, doesn’t let this project become a negative aesthetic. The transition from one kind of Flarf to another is evident in her poem “love for accordion lovers”:

If you really

want to hear

me speak on

behalf of my

employer

take a look at

the Hellraiser

movies

The opening lines evoke a horror film threat to the body, either from Pinhead or his real world equivalent, the speaker’s employer. Then the prospect of hooked chains switches direction about midway through:

This is not his

poem: It is

about lovers:

Hooking up in

a hooked up

World

With its

sweeping and

weeping strings and

accordion

Nichols’s gift is to see that being “hooked up” need not always mean the exact same thing or be controlled by any one party. She has a similar approach to the visual aspects of her project. Nichols is like the kid who never stopped seeing shapes in the clouds. Except now, busy with obligations of working life, the clouds have been replaced by objects that are half-seen while walking and commuting around her home in Washington, DC. A wad of chewing gum might be a pink heart, power lines might be a musical score, and a crumpled blue candy wrapper might be the view of Earth from space.

So come check out some of these poets when they take the stage on Friday, March 21 at the Big Orbit Gallery (30d Essex St.). The line-up will include Nada Gordon, Mel Nichols, Rod Smith, and Gary Sullivan.