Further History of Flarf

K. Silem Mohammad's got an unlikely-to-be-surpassed photographic history of Flarf up over at the new improved {lime tree}. If you're interested in the history of this revolutionary poetic movement, you should definitely check it out.

I've written about Flarf before (previous notes on Flarf here, and posts on related issues here and here), and do find it at least interesting. And while it's not an approach I'm likely to adopt, Google-sculpting is perhaps as good a way as any to get in touch with the Muse, the out there agent of the poem. It probably beats drinking lots of absinthe, the magical "Green Fairy", though I don't think Flarf has yet produced its Poe or Baudelaire. Time will, of course, tell.

Perhaps its method is most like the l'ecriture automatique of the Surrealists, though it shifts the presumed source of the materia or content of the poem from inside (the Unconscious) to out (the Internet via Google's search algorithns). The Internet is indeed a technology of many uses. Sing to me, oh Muse ... er, Google...

Whatever. It all, still, comes down to the poem so created.


Van Gogh's image of the glass of absinthe is from the History of Absinthe page linked above.