We Want Media

While we toss about crazy terms such as "blog" and "blogosphere" and contemplate the future of podcasting and digital journalism, our friends in the poet's corner are coming up with new ways to explain the phenomenon of the Internet as well. Poet and NYU instructor Robert Fitterman calls the disorganized mess of the world wide web a "dumb conundrum" in his work. This isn't the kind of poetry you read in high school. It's not about courtly love, nor post-colonialism, nor anything pre-21st century. It's totally relevant to your life.

The form that this Internet-inspired poetry takes is what poets such as Fitterman and K. Silem Mohammad call "flarf." Fitterman defines flarf to be poems about web content, fake news stories, and funny noises. Mohammad explains how this poetry is created:

You punch a keyword or keywords or phrase into Google and work directly with the result text that gets thrown up. I paste the text into Word and just start stripping stuff away until what’s left is interesting to me, then I start meticulously chipping away at and fussing with that. It’s similar to normal writing, but like you have a head injury that only gives you access to certain words and structures.

He elaborates on the Google search method he utilizes in an interview on a poetry blog:

The advantage of the Google search text over the thoughts in my head is that I’m not limited to the small expanse of my own knowledge, cultural experience, vocabulary, moral values—I have access to things that would never come up in my own imagination.

While Mohammad meticulously chips away at his web content, Fitterman pastes the web content he finds directly on the page of his book to create the effect of an art gallery, as he describes it. I uploaded a page for all you kids to view. Now go to Google and search the title of the poem ("B9D"). Check out the first result. Cool, eh?

Fitterman's Metropolis XXX and Mohammad's Deer Head Nation are two examples of flarf. Rather than relying only on their own grey brain matter, members of the flarf group take advantage of poetic possibilities that float in the invisible world wide web. It is a medium of communication, after all, just as are our linguistics, and it's the poet's job to find some provocative method of utilizing our "words" to illustrate something beautiful, ugly, or awkward about the world in which we live.

Yet by most definitions, flarf isn't "real poetry," just as blogging isn't always considered "real journalism." Perhaps flarf--whether or not it is "good" poetry in one's opinion or not--is a reminder to us of the need to broaden our definitions of poetry, of journalism, of communications as a whole.