Flarf was and is many things—a movement, a method, a friend group, an in-joke, an email list. But mostly Flarf was a product of a keenly-felt transitional moment, when the various institutions that glued American poetry together were soaked in the solvent fluids of emergent social media. Poetry, and discourse about it, was no longer beholden to the moderating temporality of the print journal, the gatekeeping of the university MFA program, or the fierce tribalism of the city-based avant-garde scene. I remember finding it remarkable that my new online friend of the time, Anne Boyer, could win so many readers, admirers, and friends merely by the strength of her blog. For someone like me, stuck in a remote town and fresh out of an MFA program determined to insulate me from everything interesting in the world of poetry, these blogs and email lists were an essential part of my education.
This was, in other words, a Golden Age of amateurism, before blogs and bloggers were gobbled up by Facebook and Twitter or domesticated by professional websites and institutions. Frequently composed from content found on the user-driven sites of the early internet, Flarf channels these amateur energies, but not in a simply celebratory way. The Flarf creation story that Gary Sullivan tells involves his bad feelings upon discovering that his grandfather had been hustled by the scam site Poetry.com, which awards prizes to everyone and anyone in order to sell them bound anthologies of prizewinners. In response Sullivan writes the worst and most offensive poem possible and submits it to the site, in order to test if there is any lower bound to their aesthetic judgment. (There isn’t; he’s also given a prize.) Flarf is born when Sullivan convinces others on the subpoetics email list to submit their terrible and offensive poems to the site. Far from a celebration of this new age of amateurism, Sullivan’s initial move seems to be an attempt to preserve aesthetic judgment, to ridicule and parody the sheer awfulness of the poems recognized by Poetry.com.
Sullivan’s oft-circulated account of how Flarf was born shouldn’t be the last word, since other Flarfists would display a different attitude to the masses whose language they reworked. But one of the few disappointing aspects of the anthology that Edge has released (Edge Books, 2017) is that it provides no context for understanding the work of the twenty-four poets included therein. I do not think Flarf is so self-evident and so well-understood a phenomenon that an anthology can dispense with a contextualizing introduction or some sort of prose supplement. Flarf was born out of that heady “blogosphere” and dozens if not hundreds of posts and mini-essays, both affirmative and critical, were written about it. While it will surprise no one if the editors dread a return to such debates, few contemporary readers are battle-scarred in this way, and they would benefit from some historical and political contextualization.
The age of amateurism was also a period when the US government was in the process of killing hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sullivan’s submission to Poetry.com occurred in 2001, right after the dot-com bust and right before the launch of the war on terror and the modern surveillance state. Fifteen years on, the power of these poems resides in their ability to capture the goofy enthusiasm of early Web 2.0 in such a way that you can hear the bombs in the background. This was also an age of relative political powerlessness, at least by comparison with what comes after the economic crisis of 2008. The anti-war movement was massive but also massively weak, and more or less evaporated after the invasion of Iraq. Liberalism dominated the terms of resistance and what liberalism meant, more or less, was a politics of irony, despite a brief epidemic of post-9/11 think pieces declaring a new age of sincerity. Encasing the blood and viscera of the bad news in a sausage skin of satire, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report captured the spirit of the times. The ironic politics of Flarf shares something with these contemporary expressions. Seminal Flarf poems like K. Silem Mohammad’s “Mars Need Terrorists” and Drew Gardner’s “Chicks Dig War,” for example, scour the internet for repulsive views that they might ridicule, intermixing them with the porny, spammy, chatty wordspew of the general online environment. The latter poem is composed in large part of language taken from Matthew Fitzgerald’s Sex-Ploytation: How Women Use Their Bodies to Exploit Money from Men, a predecessor to the pickup artist and men’s rights groups that led the charge of Gamergate and, later, formed the misogynist core of the alt-right. Gardner splices the language together expertly, exposing the bizarre dream logic at the core of the new misogyny, and does so in such a way that you’re never unclear what the point is.
Flarf satire can be used to powerful effect, but in other instances it goes astray. One of the problems is that Flarf often displays a simplistic red state vs. blue state conception of political division, animated by a fear that, in the language of another Gardner poem, “soon we’ll all be praying to John Denver / if we don’t allow right-wing poor people to feel happy ALL the time.” Sullivan is explicit about this connection in his Flarf origin story. As he notes, “the flarf ‘voice’ in my head was that of my father, a transplanted Southerner who likes to pontificate, and who has a lot of opinions that kind of horrify me.” This sort of “flarf voice” is fairly prevalent among the poems collected here. Without putting too fine of a point on it, many of the dramatic monologues from language found on the internet express, through ventriloquized irony, middle-class contempt for poor (or rural or uneducated) whites. Mixed in with that contempt is an unmistakable enjoyment in saying the unsayable, experimenting with language and viewpoints deemed off-limits by middle-class liberal standards. Sullivan is explicit about this as well. He found the norms of the listserv where he first experimented with Flarf too “P.C.” and “began using ‘flarf’…as a way of keeping [his] own tendencies toward repression” at bay. Eventually, Sullivan and others created the derepressive space of the Flarflist, where they could share their own experiments with socially toxic materials without fear of censure.
We have here, in miniature, an allegory of internet discourse. On the one hand, the politically correct discursive norms of a certain social media space; on the other hand, the troll who would violate them. This scene has played out in countless ways in the decade and a half since Flarf emerged. The troll will tell you that they have no avowed commitment to the content of their challenges. Their interventions are purely a question of form—the offensive content is therapeutic, or it’s there to prove a point about free speech, to attack the sanctimony and self-righteousness of the politically correct. In the Trump era, however, when the trolls show up with knives and guns, such claims have little ground to stand on.
Flarf is not merely a troll poetics. There are other tendencies, as a reading of the anthology will make clear. In some hands, Flarf seems a variant of documentary poetics, an attempt to sound the depths of nascent digital cultures, providing a cross-sectional study of worlds heretofore understood as separate. In the best Flarf, there is an infectious, lexicographic joy at the weird wondrousness of contemporary English. Jordan Davis captures it nicely: “‘What I love about chat rooms / Is that they’re already halfway to poetry.’” This is a sincere rather than condescending celebration of amateur culture. One cannot read K. Silem Mohammad’s poems without catching some of that joy. A poem like “‘The swans come hither in great numbers’” moves from Lucretius to chat room to spam to porn to literary criticism in the space of a few couplets. The poem seems likely to have been written via “Google Sculpting”—that is, collaged from search results generated by an improbable combination of terms. One of these terms is certainly “swan” and the poem serves as a rather remarkable survey of the fate of that bird as symbol, marking our distance from Mallarmé’s swan frozen in lake ice.
in our culture many people choose to use pairs of swans
to create an undetectable total mind-controlled slave
filled with a sinister creative brutality unleashed to sleep till bedtime
they began to vomit blood and rolled up their eyes
swan districts are an abomination! go the tigers
reflux superstructures whimper outserved intrepid gynarchy
unattended braintrust-plugging minuses won a Nutrisystem contract
stupid-brain rollercoaster mouths asserted “Africa podium hut”
dissonant biharmonic cream-puff underwear-freak bangers
mentally uncovered integral zebra-cellist-messiah dining halls
amazing feats of animal husbandry wherein I poked Mom in the ribs
For Mallarmé, the swan (le cygne) was a sign (le signe) that had become ossified by convention. But for Mohammad it’s less sign than signal, a vehicle for a deluge of associational content. The other search term is probably “vomit” and we might think of this poem as turning the swan inside out, emptying its insides, rather than freezing it in the clear lake of lyric.
Stronger, perhaps, than the documentary impulse though often intermixed with it is a tendency for the Flarf poem to become dramatic monologue. This is clear in Sullivan’s account of the Flarf voice, where he both desires to speak in and yet is horrified by the voice of the other. Not all Flarfologues are animated by the same urges, however, and in the hands of a writer such as Katie Degentesh, the dramatic monologue becomes a powerful tool for documentary exploration. Many of the poems included in the anthology derive from her excellent book The Anger Scale, which used the questions from a personality test (the MMPI) as search strings, and then created monologues from the results. The effect is compelling, and strikingly different from other Flarf poems, in part because Degentesh works hard to make these poems and their speakers internally coherent. The seams and fissures in the poems therefore stand out all the more clearly. We are able to see how the poems originate in contradictory social materials and processes. Degentesh’s poems say something significant about character and personality in the age of social media. Just as the questions of the MMPI call into being certain speakers and dramatic monologues, so too do the algorithms that drive the content we see online, personalized for us through crude though effective forms of typecasting not so different from the MMPI. Degentesh’s poems reveal the people formed by these processes, but also their attempt to speak through the cracks in them. One of the most welcome aspects of this anthology is that it includes newer work by Degentesh from two separate sequences—one concerned with the sex lives of adolescents, and another with the viral properties of the hashtag—that continue the method begun with The Anger Scale. The poem, “My Friends Were Having Sex and I Wanted to Fit In,” for example, is a brilliant exploration of the awkward and uncomfortable nature of adolescent sexuality:
I started wearing bras when my mom told me that I could have sex.
Recently she has asked me repeatedly not to wear a bra, telling me
I am going to watch my loved ones suffer when I die
Everything gets twisted, but in a way that makes a strange sort of sense:
Sometimes I get jealous when this young girl calls and asks Bobby
to be the guy that everyone barely remembered
when the mostly white community met at the mall for caroling.
Flarf is adolescent, then, in the worst and best ways. It can be annoyingly puerile and sarcastic, or touchingly pimply and embarrassed. But adolescents grow up and there are, today, a number of writers who owe a great deal to Flarf. Some of the best poets of the younger generation associated with so-called conceptual poetry—I’m thinking of Trisha Low, Steven Zultanski, and Diana Hamilton—write poems that resemble Degentesh’s to no small degree. These are all writers who use what I would call “post-internet collage” to explore questions of character and characterization, if not dramatic monologue, in the contemporary moment.
Flarf and its spirit lives on everywhere, and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in meme culture. In its moment Flarf captured perfectly the goofy charm of the meme, those in-jokes so inward one doesn’t need to understand them. Take, for example, a poem like Rodney Koeneke’s “Pizza Kitty”:
Kitty Goes Postal—
wants pizza.
Kitty has hat & cape and looks
like a magician…
Observe kitty eating a slice of pizza.
“Eat some free pizza, Kitty!” YUM
(pizza man impatient at the door)
BAD KITTY LIST, FOOD RELATED
______will not use my ninja kitty paw strike
______naked on sofa with rapidly-cooling pizza
______monster clowns with KITTY FACES!
Meme culture is a politically polarized space, and as much as memes can be innocuous diversions emptied of all content, they are also vehicles for the politics of irony that Flarf and kindred forms explore. Memes emerge from same digital spaces as the troll, from message boards like 4chan that offer up a smorgasbord of ironized racism and sexism. The left has its memes, just as the left has its trolls, but it’s arguable that the meme depends on a structure of feeling that, in this day and age, complements the manners and methods of the far right. With the rise of Trump, troll culture found a raison d’être and a new discipline and organization, taking the streets adorned with the visual and verbal jargon of right-wing imageboards. Flarf emerged in a moment when a person might reasonably believe that satire could expose the absurdity of the powerful and organize outrage. Poems such as “Chicks Dig War” and TV shows such as The Colbert Report could deliver the news and mobilize feeling about it, and though resistance never amounted to much, such things might reasonably have been expected to lead to action rather than paralysis. Trump effectively puts an end to that. His actions and language outstrip even the most imaginative parody. He neutralizes all outrage and scandal by purposely courting it in advance. He is his own satire, the king of the trolls, and effectively puts an end to a left troll politics, not to mention a troll poetics. Flarf’s future lies elsewhere.
February 2018
This review was published in Issue 61:2.