What the Flarf?

Cleveland's a great town for poetry.  But, one thing that we don't seem to have is Flarf.

Of course, that may be a good thing.

Poets & Writers asks, can Flarf ever be taken seriously?

Flarf?  Serious?  You can't be serious.

The origins of flarf poetry are very similar to the origins of Wergle Flomp: deliberately bad poetry, written to prank the scam "contests" to see just how bad you can be, and still be praised.  But flarf evolved onward into something else, using google to generate word-associations for poetry, in a dada/burroughs sense.  The thing about flarf is, once you've started out with the idea that it's not an object of the poem for it to actually be good, you can write something that's, well-- if not good, interesting.

Heck, for a while it was hot that even Poetry Magazine was at it.  Of course, the flarfers seem to be a lot better at issuing semi-coherent manifestos than at actually doing poetry.  

It sounds interesting when they talk about it!  Kaplan P. Harris says (as quoted by Bruce Sterling ): "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."

Cleveland's mostly a flarf-free zone.  Maybe that's good.

So, out there-- do any of you flarf?  Do you want to?