Flarf in Minnesota (tee hee)

Nearly ten years ago a few good people who were irritated at the hyper-seriousness and exclusivity of the American Poetry Scene began writing a kind of anti-poetry that came to be called Flarf. As University of Minnesota English professor Maria Damon has said, “If laugh were an F word, it would be Flarf, because it sounds like laugh, larf, fluffy, kind of overly cutesy weird, nonsense baby talk.” Wouldn’t you know it, Flarf tends to look to the Internet, rather than to Nature or “the real world,” as its Muse.

With roots in the Twin Cities, which spawned public radio’s version of a Flarfee, Garrison Keillor, the movement picked up speed in the aught decade. It surfaced nationally last year when “Poetry” magazine devoted a segment of its July issue to Flarf. According to the narrator of “Flarf in Minnesota (tee hee),” “there are only about 30 Flarfees in the country.” I doubt this. I’d estimate that in July 2010 there are between 300 and 3000 Flarfees surfing Google for inspiration.

I very much like KFAI reporter Diane Richard’s piece about Flarf. It’s an ear opener, a laff-in that stretches beyond humor. I wish there were more examples of Flarf poems—perhaps another PRX piece could be devoted to a selection of verse, drawn possibly from four Flarfees reading at the Walker Gallery a couple of years ago. Anyway, the better of the two examples in this piece is a fairly serious thingamajig written by Elizabeth Workman: “Visualize a forest, coppery violet, pulsating. Inside the forest is a looking egg. Peering into a little porthole at the end of the egg is a zealot. Inside the zealot is an antichrist. Inside the antichrist, poetry.”