Has Flarf Gone Mainstream?

When a book from a founding member of an avant-garde poetry movement gets a starred review in Publisher's Weekly, is it still avant-garde? I'll leave that question for you, dear reader, to decide for yourself. The book in question is Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale.

By now, I'm sure you're all aware of the Flarfist Collective. No? Doesn't ring a bell? Here's how PW described it: "a loose gathering of Google-obsessed poets," most of whom incorporate texts found during web searches into their work. The idea has its roots in Dada (I wrote about the Museum of Modern Art's Dada-poem machine in a previous post) and the cut-up technique used by William Burroughs in some of his novels. The Beatles even used it for the background sounds on the song, "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite."

The titles of the poems in The Anger Scale are from questions in the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, and most of the text comes from Google searches using words from the titles. It's impossible to know now if the Flarfist movement is just a temporary eddy in the great river of poetry. In any case, it deserves a few collectors to accumulate and preserve the output of its poets.

There's a list of Flarfist poetry chapbooks - most by small or micro publishers - in Jacket, an online literary magazine (scroll to the bottom of the page)

For more about Katie Degentesh's new book, The Anger Scale, visit her blog.

To watch her read some poems, try YouTube.

For a picture, visit Flickr.