Flarf poetry is an avant garde poetry movement of the early 21st century. The term Flarf was coined by the poet Gary Sullivan, who also wrote and published the earliest Flarf poems.^[1] Its first practitioners, working in loose collaboration on an email listserv, used an approach that rejected conventional standards of quality and explored subject matter and tonality not typically considered appropriate for poetry. One of their central methods, adapted from Drew Gardner, was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays, and other texts.^[2] Pioneers of the movement include Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Mitch Highfill, Sharon Mesmer, Mel Nichols, K. Silem Mohammad, Michael Magee, Rodney Koeneke, Rod Smith, Gary Sullivan and others.

Overview[link]

Joyelle McSweeney wrote in the Constant Critic:

Jangly, cut-up textures, speediness, and bizarre trajectories … I love a movement that’s willing to describe its texts as ‘a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness.’ This is utterly tonic in a poetry field crowded by would-be sincerists unwilling to own up to their poems’ self-aggrandizing, sentimental, bloviating, or sexist tendencies.^[3]

Dan Hoy wrote in Jacket Magazine:

The proliferation of flarf and its hybrids recycles an industrial era excitement over human ‘progress’ with no hesitance toward the embarrassing hubris of such a perspective. It’s retro-Futurist, and it’s indicative of their reliance on the virtual realm as a method of navigating reality... If there’s a difference between flarf and its progenitors it’s that Cage and Oulipo researched or created their generators of deterministic randomness, whether it be the I Ching, the weather, or mathematical formulas. They were aware of how each generator distinguished itself as a context and control variable, and their selection of each context and control variable was part of the content.^[4]

In 2007, Barrett Watten, a poet and cultural critic, long associated with the so-called Language poets observed that:

It is precisely, however, to the degree that Flarf does something new performatively and with its use of the detritus of popular cultural and the internet, treading the high/low distinction until it breaks under the weight, that it reinvents the avant-garde. In a larger aesthetic economy, it seems, "the truth will out." Flarf's recent productivity shows how the injunction against the sentence, paragraph, narrative, and even discourse from some sectors of the Language school intersects with actual conditions of language use. Any such thing as stylistic norms in the avant-garde must inevitably intersect with "life." ^[5]

Discussion about Flarf has been broadcast by the BBC and NPR and published in magazines such as The Atlantic, Bookforum, The Constant Critic, Jacket, The Nation, Rain Taxi, The Wall Street Journal and The Village Voice. Further discussion has taken place on dozens of blogs and listservs across the United States, and in Australia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Holland, Mexico, and elsewhere.

See also[link]

• Cut-up technique
• Spoetry
• Googlism
• Informationist poetry
• Spam Lit
• Word salad (computer science)

References[link]

External links[link]

Poems on-line[link]

• FLARF: MAINSTREAM Poetry for a MAINSTREAM World a weblog, active since January 2003, devoted to the poetics of flarf
• Flarf Feature at Jacket Magazine includes work from some of this movement's more recognizable practitioners including: Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Benjamin Friedlander, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Rodney Koeneke, Michael Magee, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, Rod Smith, & Gary Sullivan
• Poetry Magazine feature Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo. An introduction to the 21st Century's most controversial poetry movements.
• Google Poems Formal and informal work about, derived from, or inspired by the great search.

Audio & textual practice: essays and discussion[link]

• The Flarf Files @ the Electronic Poetry Center
• Flarf: From Glory Days to Glory Hole an article by Gary Sullivan at The Brooklyn Rail
• Google-Inspired Verse Gains Respect an article by Gautam Naik in the Wall Street Journal
• The Tragic and the Wacky a review of Gary Sullivan's PPL in a Depot in Jacket Magazine
• The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf an article by Dan Hoy at Jacket Magazine
• O, You Cosh-Boned Posers! this essay from the Village Voice is subtitled: "Awful poems sought and found: From spam to Google, flarf redefines random"
• "The New Pandemonium" essay on flarf by Rick Snyder
• "Googling Flarf" by Michael Gottlieb
• Ron Silliman on Michael Magee's My Angie Dickinson
• Studio 360: Schreiber, Flarf, Redman discussions, interviews, and readings of flarf poetry
• "Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously?" article in Poets and Writers
• Petroleum Hat The Constant Critic's Joyelle McSweeney reviews Drew Gardner's "Petroleum Hat"
• Flarf: Poetry Meme-Surfs With Kanye West and the LOLCats Article on Flarf in The Atlantic
• Flarf Poetry Flarf primer on Bookforum featuring reviews of "The Anger Scale" by Katie Degentesh, "Petroleum Hat" by Drew Gardner, "Folly" by Nada Gordon, "Musee Mechanique" by Rodney Koeneke, "My Angie Dickinson" by Michael Magee, "Annoying Diabetic Bitch" by Sharon Mesmer. "Deer Head Nation" by K. Silem Mohammad, & "PPL in a Depot" by Gary Sullivan
• "On Flarf" by Rachel Hyman

Flarf vs. Conceptualism controversy

• Why Conceptualism is Better than Flarf: Vanessa Place Poet and lawyer Vanessa Place's talk recorded on March 11, 2010 at AWP 2010: Denver, "Flarf & Conceptual Poetry Panel"
  • Why Flarf is better than Conceptualism by Drew Gardner K. Silem Mohammad has called this piece "Drew Gardner's answer to Vanessa Place"
• conceptual or literal? American poet-critic weighs in on the controversy

v t e Avant-garde movements Visual art Abstract expressionism Art Nouveau Conceptual art Cubism Cubo-Futurism De Stijl Ego-Futurism Fauvism Impressionism Post-Impressionism Color Field Incoherents Lyrical Abstraction Minimalism Mail art Neue Slowenische Kunst Nonconformism Pop art Rayonism Suprematism Vorticism Nouveau réalisme Music Ars subtilior Avant-garde jazz Avant-garde metal Free jazz Industrial music Krautrock Musique concrète No Wave Noise music Post-rock Progressive Rock Rock in Opposition Serialism Second Viennese School Drone music Literature and poetry Acmeist poetry Angry Penguins Asemic writing Cyberpunk Experimental literature Flarf poetry Imaginism Language poets Neoteric Oberiu Oulipo Visual poetry Nouveau roman Cinema and theatre Cinema pur Dogme 95 Drop Art Epic theatre Remodernist film Theatre of the Absurd Theatre of Cruelty General Bauhaus Dada Expressionism Fluxus Futurism Lettrism Modernism Minimalism Postminimalism Neo-minimalism Neo-Dada Neoism Postmodernism Primitivism Russian Futurism Russian symbolism Situationist International Social realism Socialist realism Surrealism Symbolism Book

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Sharon Mesmer is an American writer. Born in Chicago, she moved in 1988 to New York City and has since made the east coast her home. She is a two time New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry.^[1] She is considered a poet of the Flarf poetry movement.

Works[link]

Poetry
Crossing Second Avenue (ABJ Books, Japan, 1997)
Half Angel, Half Lunch (HArd PRess, 1998)
Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna Books, 2006)
Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008)
The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008)

Fiction
The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2000)
Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005)
Ma Vie a Yonago (Hachette Litteratures, France, 2005)

Sources[link]

1. ^ The Virgin Formica. Hanging Loose Press: Brooklyn, NY (2008).

This article about an American writer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Christian Bök (born August 10, 1966 in Toronto, Canada) is an experimental Canadian poet. He is the author of Eunoia, which won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, and which has been said to be "Canada's best-selling poetry book ever."^[1]

Life and work[link]

He was born "Christian Book", but changed his last name "to avoid unseemly confusion with the Bible."^[1]

He began writing seriously in his early twenties, while earning his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Carleton University in Ottawa. He returned to Toronto in the early 1990s to study for a Ph.D. in English literature at York University, where he encountered a burgeoning literary community that included Steve McCaffery, Christopher Dewdney, and Darren Wershler-Henry. As of 2005^[update] he teaches at the University of Calgary.^[2]

In 1994, Bök published Crystallography, " "a pataphysical encyclopaedia that misreads the language of poetics through the conceits of geology." The Village Voice said of it: "Bök's concise reflections on mirrors, fractals, stones, and ice diabolically change the way you think about language — his, yours — so that what begins as description suddenly seems indistinguishable from the thing itself."^[1] Crystallography was reissued in 2003,^[1] and was nominated for a Gerald Lampert Award.

Bök is a sound poet and has performed an extremely condensed version of the "Ursonate" by Kurt Schwitters. He has created conceptual art, making artist's books from Rubik's Cubes and Lego bricks. He has also worked in science-fiction television by constructing artistic languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.

Eunoia[link]

Bök is most famous for Eunoia (2001), a book which took him seven years to write.^[1] Eunoia consists of univocalics: The book uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters. In the book's main part, each chapter used just a single vowel, producing sentences such as this: “Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech.”^[3] Bök believes "his book proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language."^[4] In preparation for the project, Bök read the dictionary a total of five times, compiling an exhaustive list of vocabulary; Bök aimed to use almost all of these words during his work.

Edited by Darren Wershler-Henry and published by Coach House Books, in 2001, Eunoia won the 2002 Griffin and sold 20,000 copies.^[5] Canongate published "Eunoia" Britain in Oct. 2008.^[6] The book was also a bestseller there, reaching #8 on the Top 10 bestselling charts for the year.^[5]

The Xenotext experiment[link]

On April 4, 2011 Bök announced a significant break-through in his 9-year project to engineer "a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem".^[7][8] On the previous day (April 3) Bök said he

"received confirmation from the laboratory at the University of Calgary that my poetic cipher, gene X-P13, has in fact caused E. coli to fluoresce red in our test-runs—meaning that, when implanted in the genome of this bacterium, my poem (which begins “any style of life/ is prim…”) does in fact cause the bacterium to write, in response, its own poem (which begins “the faery is rosy/ of glow…”)."^[9]

Recognition[link]

Eunoia won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002.

Bök's poem "Vowels" was used in the lyrics of a song on the EP A Quick Fix of Melancholy (2003) by the Norwegian band Ulver.

In 2006, Christian Bök and his work were the subject of an episode of the television series Heart of a Poet, produced by Canadian filmmaker Maureen Judge.^[10]

On May 31, 2011, The BBC World Service broadcast Bök reading "The Xenotext." ^[11]

Bibliography[link]

• Crystallography (1994) ISBN 978-1-55245-119-9
• Eunoia. Coach House Books, 2001. ISBN 1-55245-092-9 - winner of the 2002 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize

• Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (2001) ISBN 978-0-8101-1876-8 - See ’Pataphysics

As editor

• Ground Works: Avante-Garde for Thee (2003) ISBN 978-0-88784-180-4

Included in

• Poetry Plastique (2001) ISBN 978-1-887123-51-8
• The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology : A Selection of the 2002 Shortlist (2002) ISBN 978-0-88784-676-2

See also[link]

	Poetry portal
	Biography portal

	Canada portal
	Ontario portal
	Toronto portal

• List of Canadian writers
• List of Canadian poets
• Concrete poetry
• Sound poetry

References[link]

External links[link]

• Christian Bök pages on UbuWeb, including recordings, poetry, and essays
• Christian Bök on Twitter
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography
• Griffin Poetry Prize reading, including video clip
• University of Calgary Faculty of English profile
• Eunoia online book
• Christian Bök interview and reading on CBC Radio program And Sometimes Y, episode 5, July 25, 2006
• Podcasts recorded at the Institut du Monde Anglophone, Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, on May 22, 2008
• Christian Bök at University of Toronto Libraries