Amy Zoellers and I are back again with more poetry. This month we will interview each other, discuss new projects coming up and share our Flarf poetry challenge. Yes, Flarf—not a typo.
What is Flarf? According to Wiki, Flarf poetry was an avant-garde poetry movement of the early 21st century. The term Flarf was coined by the poet Gary Sullivan, who also wrote and published the earliest Flarf poems. Its first practitioners, working in loose collaboration on an email mailing list, used an approach that rejected conventional standards of quality and explored subject matter and tonality not typically considered appropriate for poetry. One of their central methods, invented by Drew Gardner, was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays and other texts.
Want to Flarf? Try it out and let me know what you think in the comments.
ChatGPT AI
I say we need a panel on this! And anything else wild & new — I’ve done the “open dictionary and whatever you see on the page, pick one word, write poem using word” thang, but this is a new ball game. I wrote one using “hirsute” and sold it. Also I didn’t know what the word meant until then! lol