Googlesearch Poetry?

It's like flarf, but different. "'Google Poems' are hauntingly beautiful," says Alexis Kleinman.  The technique is simple: type the beginning into google, and let "autocomplete" finish the poem.  Here's an example:

Everybody is...

Everybody is a genius

everybody is a star

everybody is looking for something

everybody is fine.

Want more? Top googlesearch poems.

How hard could it be?  OK, I'll try it:



How Difficult Could it Be?

How difficult could it be to invent a new life?
how difficult would it be for a person to leave a gang?
how difficult would it be to consume a vegan diet?
how difficult would it be to go on hajj?

If it were easy...
If it were easy, everyone would do it
If it were easy
If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon ...
If It Were Easy It'd Be Your Mother
If it were easy, everyone would be doing it
if it were easy it wouldn't be worth doing.

• and, John Lundburg says "Robot Wins Jeopardy, But Can It Write Poetry?"

Blind Review Friday

The author shall remain anonymous (unless they chose to divulge themselves in the comments.)

Those commenting are also welcome to remain anonymous if they wish.

Incendiary comments will be removed.

If you would like your piece thrown to the wolves send it to salinger@ameritech.net with "Workshop the hell out of this poem" as the subject line.

This week's offering is from a Clevelandpoetics the Blog contributor.

Perky Flarf

Before I begin I just wanted to take a moment and

make your butt as perky as you want.

In a society where baby-boomers seem to be the ones

engaged in noisy recreational activities for nearly 50 years

even learning how to flirt,

opponents twice a year,

goths, perky goths, cyber goths, mopey goths, traditional goths--

their goal remains to make a difference.

Jennie pointed you my way,

you get to breathe deeply a few times and then cough.

Studied, poked and prodded,

the market is not for the hard truth.

Desperate to see

this should be a fun week for me.

Moral panics rip through cultures,

and the "right-thinking" folks

find out what others are saying about you.

It just offends me

the canny folk

laughing at the paranoia.

Cover your mouth and nose.

Good-bye can be painful, but the pain is intensified.

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?