The Return of Flarf

For my second attempt at writing flarf, I thought I'd give the Google search engine method a try. I'd type a word or two at random, then browse the suggested search terms, composing a list of interesting phrases as I'd done with the spam title method earlier.

While I restricted myself to copying the phrases verbatim, I found this method offered more flexibility. Using spam titles, you must rely on spammers and spambots to provide interesting, inane, and insane content, but, using the search engine method, the possibilities seem endless. You're in control of the words you plug into Google. They can be as closely related or as dissimilar as you like.

This second effort yielded something more serious than the last—something I quite like. Something that reads and feels like . . . a "real" poem. I wasn't expecting that. But I like surprises. (When they're good ones!)

a threat (or a promise)

creation is groaning
making things out of trash
recycling facts

smashing atoms together
vainly in a sentence
violent and crazy

art is resistance
music is a weapon
poetry is a destructive force

make or break
play or pay
write or die

Flarf!

In the July/August 2009 issue of Poets & Writers, Shell Fischer asks "Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously?" (Just to let you know, I don't intend to offer an opinion either way, though you may certainly do so in a comment, if you like.) In case you're as unfamiliar with the term as I was, flarf is a kind of found poetry, a collage of words and phrases culled from a series of random Google searches or plucked from the vast, fetid bog of spam e-mail.

At its inception, flarf was really, really bad poetry. Intentionally bad. Some say it's evolved, some say it hasn't, but, again, that's not my concern here.

After reading Fischer's piece and doing a bit of Googling, my interest in flarf grew. It was a pragmatic interest at first: I wanted to know if writing flarf could be useful to my fiction writing process. (I write poetry from time to time, but my verses cower skittishly together in the darkness of my filing cabinet. And that's likely where they'll stay.)

I decided to try my hand at flarf, and I began collecting spam titles from my e-mail accounts over the course of a week or so, just copying out anything that struck me, without giving much thought to the reasons why those words or phrases caught my attention. I ended up with a list of about sixty-five items, and one morning, as I cut and pasted them—just playing around—a narrative seemed to suggest itself. A strange, silly, dark narrative, crafted from spam.

I set it aside when I grew bored and returned to it the next time I felt the urge to play around with words in a "non-serious" way. I finished my first piece of flarf and went on to compose several more. My experience with this new form of composition was similar to what I felt when I began writing micro-fiction:

"Pretty soon, I found that writing a micro piece geared me up to approach [my] short story drafts . . . . These mini-tales became, unintentionally, a kind of writing warm-up."

Regardless of whether or not the results should be taken "seriously" (a word that, when applied to art, means different things to different people), I found that writing flarf sparked my creativity. It was freeing—and fun! It made me want to tinker around with other strings of words I'd written, and that tinkering generated new strings of words.

Flarf may feel like an arrow through the heart of True Poetry, and for that I am sorry. I love True Poetry, I do. Truly. But from where I'm sitting, whatever gets a writer writing is a good thing—short of killing or maiming, that is.

Unless the person you're killing or maiming is a character, and the story you're telling requires that they be killed or maimed. Then all bets are off.
__________

So here it is, my first flarf, composed of spam titles. (The bracketed phrases are mine.) I repeated words/phrases where necessary and added punctuation for clarity. I'll post a couple more over the next several days. I encourage you to try it yourself!

100% Success with Chicks

Debbie said, “I always wondered why:
They sailed away in a sieve, they did,
they sailed away in a sieve.”
Then she slammed the door.

[His heart] was beating violently.

“I was thinking about us,” Debbie said.

[He backed away from
his] lover's mighty weapon.

Debbie said, “What are you so afraid of?”

The truth about her:
Librarian was a murderer!

CODE 9-1-1!

[Death, he thought,] is garish, like—
videos of vomiting stars.

CODE 9-1-1! CODE 9-1-1!

Sad news: Cell phone "glitch."

"Hi, lover," Debbie said,
wielding it with power.
John passed out.

Flashing stars,
vomiting stars.
100's of stars . . . .

Change of Season

She'd always hated this time of year. There was the rush of getting the kids back to school, getting Henry back into his teaching routine at the university. "You must be looking forward to some time to yourself," her sister Sharie said, calling from Arizona just the other day. Kim had laughed and lied.

The truth was she hated the quiet and the loneliness of the big, empty house, but more than that: She hated New Hampshire. In five years, she'd made no friends here. She didn't count the PTA moms or the professors' wives. Cordial, casual acquaintances, that's what they were.

This wasn't a life—not the life she wanted, anyway.

She'd left a note to Henry and the girls on the kitchen table. She needed to get away, to think things over a bit. And so, while the twins lined up in the cafeteria to buy cartons of chocolate milk, while Henry sat through another interminable meeting with the Dean, Kim stood beside her car, fiddling with her keys.

"It's not really leaving," she said aloud, to nobody. It's not leaving when you intend to come back someday.

She looked around her quickly, trying to burn the image of the house, the trees, the driveway into her memory. But she'd be back—sure she would. She'd be back.