LolCatCrack
Flarf Flarf Flaaaaaaaaaaaaaarfullage fullo’flarf
Fluff like marshmellows
Flarflike substances emerge from lolcats on heroine
With a side of crack
Seeing better days
intelligence lacks what conscious banter flarf with inconsistancies
violence begets flarf which begets belligerent flarf
plagurized creativity fralf flarf may be new
plagurized creativity fralf flarf remains unique
sure
more crack and a little heroine for the kitty
flarf
meow?
Alright, so that is flarf. I can grasp the concept of flarf and I largely appreciate its origin but I do not understand its survival. Flarf should not exist. Misspellings, plagiarism, and shapelessness do not describe a style or form which ought to be considered in thought or pursued in practice. Before anyone argues that this “lack of style” ought to be considered a style all its own I’d like to state that such an argument cannot be construed as viable in any sense. Many have criticized philosophical pursuits as worthless and unprogressive but when compared to flarf, philosophy is presented as though it were the well-refined result of empirical observation and deductive reasoning with the backing of all of science. I relate the study of flarf to the criticisms logical positivists attempted to hold against philosophy as “cognitively meaningless” but must take this one step further as flarf does not consist of any “emotive meaning” either. Flarf communicates nothing. Conceptually it was created to prove a point and has somehow survived despite its lack of any kind of intelligible transference of thought. Even stream of consciousness exercises seem to yield more viable meaning and connections than flarf. I could proceed further with my disapproval and ultimate offense of flarf but as it has rendered me a headache I am finished for now. I may choose to edit and update this post later but no promises.
Flarf is simply taking the most ridiculous aspects of language poetry (and there are many) to their most absurd conclusions.
ReplyDeleteI'm posting my response to your post at my blog.
ReplyDeleteFlarf communicates quite a bit actually. In terms of communication Flarf is quite dense. It's as loaded as any poetic form I've ever seen. What's of particular interest about Flarf is the communication gap between its in-the-text meaning and its pragmatics. The reading of that gap ranges from "hey it's really damn funny parody" to "boy these flarfists really hate common folk." Either way its hardly communication-free.
ReplyDeleteI am not a Flarfist but I was certainly there at its creation, namely, in that I was sharing my search-engine-based poems with the Flarfists on a closed discussion list when many of them were pretty much confessional "I" poets. My motivation was parodic in part, but parodic not of common people. What I found in flawed voices on the web was a motherlode of poetic moments, serious and certainly undeserving of ridicule, whereas I found presumptions of cyberpoetics ridiculous and deserving of parody. While the semantic, pragmatic and conceptual dimensions of what I was doing with my Lester project as early as 1998 was vastly different from Flarf as it emerged in 2001 or so, the generative dimension is essentially the same. The internet is a treasure trove of poetic moments and retrieval tools provide the first and crucial component of accessing the vast panoply of those moments. The differences between the Lester project and Flarf rest in the choices made as to how to use the material. Oh, that, and the fact that a number of the flarfists (certainly not all of them by any means) are egotistical histrionic jerks who dumbed down a good idea while throwing friends under buses on the way to acquiring some scraps of a culturally elite rank.