Daniel E. Pritchard on FLARF poetry, from his excellent blog, The Wooden Spoon
by Ernie on 08/10/08 at 9:56 am
“This gag [FLARF poetry] reminds me, fondly, of my childhood. Or rather, it reminds me of a person whom I was fairly fond of, as most boys my age were, in childhood: Melissa Joan Hart. In an episode of early the 90′s Nickelodeon television show ‘Clarissa Explains It All,’ Clarissa / Melissa uses her DOS-operating PC (the future is now!) to compose a poem for her English class without having to actually produce it herself. ‘Writing poems is hard!’ may have been a line of dialogue. I also despair. It means that years of ‘post-avant’ theorizing and poetical experimentation have finally caught us up to a 1993 episode of a middling show in which the primary motivation is laziness. These truly are great minds at work, folks.”
Read more here.
Note, he refers to the episode “Poetic Justice,” from the second season of Clarissa Explains it All, summarized below.
Poetic Justice: Clarissa regrets letting her computer do her poetry assignment when the resulting poem is pronounced the best in the class and put forward to a young poets award competition. The matter is only made worse by the discovery that she’s beaten her close friend Hillary to the prize, who had been working really hard on her own poetry. In the end Clarissa decides that she should get the computer to recite the poem instead of her at the award ceremony. Production Code: 129, US Airdate: 10th October 1992
And the better poet is . . . .
Nada Gordon
Oct 8th, 2008
Flarf is not “computer-generated.” This is a misconception. Please do your research.
[Reply]
Ernie
Oct 8th, 2008
Thanks for writing in.
I don’t know who informed you that someone thinks FLARF poetry is generated by computers, but surely you didn’t get that idea from Mr. Pritchard’s blog post (which I created an E-Verse Radio post about). I went back and placed his comments in quotations, to make it clear that I am quoting from his blog.
I think it’s pretty clear that Mr. Pritchard (I don’t personally know him) was joking. He knows what FLARF is. He obviously does not think that the process results in very interesting or worthwhile poetry. I happen to agree. Joshua Corey wrote: “I admire the subversive energy of the project, the daring of setting out to write deliberately bad poetry so as to put our received ideas of ‘the poetic’ into question.” I find this absurd and childish, and I really don’t believe that “bad poetry” is admirable or “edgy” on any level. If one wants anti-art and collage, it’s easy enough to return to the DADAists.
The joke put forward by Mr. Pritchard is that a 1990s computer can writer better poetry than a FLARF poet using the results of various searches and snippets of online material. I don’t see any claim that real-life computers are writing poems (though that’s been done since the 1960s by sci-fi guys).
Anyway, thanks for stopping by.
[Reply]
Daniel
Oct 8th, 2008
Hey there, my ears were burning – actually, this particular Flarf anthology [gag] was entirely computer generated: ‘I asked my friend Jim Carpenter to send me a batch of 5,000 poems composed by Erika T. Carter, his ludicrously advanced poetry generation software.’ The link to the creator’s explanation is below.
Flarf is a lot of things, one of them being poetry that is entirely computer generated as here. It is/was always based on the output of a computer algorithm though (spam, google searches, babelfish, etc).
I’m going to go listen to some Chumbawumba. Word to ya mutha.
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/10/anthology_spoiler.html
[Reply]
Paul Siegell
Oct 8th, 2008
greetings from robo-page 3471
[Reply]
Ernie
Oct 8th, 2008
Nada Gordon writes back about Pritchard’s comment: “Yeah but OK he’s wrong; it’s NOT a flarf anthology!”
Nada,
Perhaps Pritchard sees it as a growing, living movement, that can take many forms. Maybe it is too soon to lock our definitions into a rigid, fixed system of classification. I don’t know.Maybe he can clarify his comments.
Ernie
[Reply]
Ernie
Oct 9th, 2008
Nada Gordon responded: “I’m a founding flarfist, and I know what it is and is not. He can’t just call red blue!”
[Reply]
Ernie
Oct 15th, 2008
Daniel Pritchard replied to Nada Gordon:
Nada,
Ernie Hilbert emailed me this question you had regarding my ‘flarf’ comments. I hope you don’t mind my responding directly. I understand the origins of the word flarf in the google-based techniques used to generate texts is different than the way I, and others, employ it, but the term is evolving rapidly. The fake anthology, for example, was widely deemed flarf for its use of computer algorithms (similar to those of google) to generate the texts. Since the only difference between google and other such algorithmic programs is in the user-interface, it seems appropriate to extend the term to any text that has been generated by or filtered through computers. If your concern is that I will somehow co-opt the term for my own uses, have no fear, this particular process does not interest me in the least.
Thanks for following up,
Daniel
[Reply]