Was it flarf?

If you don't know what flarf is, check out the Wiki and some of the sources it references. And don't feel bad: I've been roaming the poetry blogosphere for some 3-4 years, have run across the term frequently, and didn't bother to look it up until today.

So it occurs to me that under the broadest possible definition of flarf, which the Wiki gives as "a wide variety of research-software-based modes of composition", some of my poetry may qualify as flarf. For instance, "Your Karma Ran Over My Fox", which used a web-based random word generator to create the keywords. More generally, if Poefusion's Friday 5 and 3 Word Wednesday use RWGs, then I've unknowingly committed a whole lot of flarf over the last year or two. So has anyone who's written poems based on, for instance, Read Write Poem's or the old Poetry Thursday's RWG, or easystreet's RWG.

But probably this definition stretches the meaning of flarf completely out of the original intention. Certainly I don't share the goals of the flarfist collective, which Josh Corey summarized as

the daring of setting out to write deliberately bad poetry so as to put our received ideas of "the poetic" into question.

The original flarfists seem to have used Google- and otherwise internet-generated verbiage to demonstrate that esthetic and language standards at Poetry.com and similar venues were so low that they couldn't distinguish between "real poetry" and random words. It was almost a reverse Turing test-- "Which of these poems was written by a computer?"

Whereas I, and I think most of the people who share my interest in the prompt sites mentioned above, try to write the best poetry we can. For me, using RWGs serves two purposes: as a stretch of my poetic skills, like lifting weights, and as a source of ideas. Plus, occasionally I get a word I don't know and have to look up (like "cicisbeo"). But then, it's never been part of my mission to question our received ideas of the poetic.

As such, I find myself in closer agreement with what Henry Gould defines as AIEE! poetry. Although his explanation is, well, turgid, there are some things here that I strongly agree with:

Gould's poetry is founded on two very basic orientations or principles. Firstly, (1) he thinks of poetry as a distinct medium or mode or form of artistic expression, which by means of its roots in past & very ancient practice, maintains a kind of autonomous & healthy - one might say perennial - presence in the cultural-intellectual life of humanity. This distinct and autonomous mode operates as a kind of translating or transfiguring process : absorbing the events & discourses of real history & experience, & reconfiguring or transmuting them into its own distinct idiom. & here is the key corollary : this process of transfigurement is the radical activity of poetry per se, which brackets or supercedes both the ideological (political) and stylistic (aesthetic) dynamics of stylistic change.

Secondly,(2) - with (1) clearly in mind as a basis - Gould's poetry is rooted, along with all authentic poetry, in an inner telos or drive toward clarity, wholeness, and recapitulation (of experience). Poetry, in other words, aspires to simplicity-in-complexity : to the making of a clear & compelling mirror (the simple) of a differentiated and substantial reality (the complex). & this aspiration in turn is grounded in the sense of firm ontological ground itself : an Aristotelian-Aquinian-Maxi-musical notion of a holistic Cosmos consisting of Real, Integral Particulars (Individuals). Things are Real, and unmistakably Themselves (ie. they are not simply identifiable with, or reducible to, their various Descriptions or Labels). History is an Actual Record of the Real Process of the Change & Development of Things through Time. & Poetry is the Distinctive Expression of the Real Individual's Intellectual-Aesthetic Synthesis of the Real Actualities So Described. Personhood & Individuality are substantial and irreducible. So, also, are Intellectual Universals & the Process of History - the relation between the Individual & the Social-Historical (Common, Universal) Actuality.

Poetry, in other words, has a substantial intellectual grounding in Truth. But this grounding is not simply a given : it is the result of the Poet's own effort to discover & synthesize more General Truths. It is the grafting process of the unique & playful act of artistic making with its own wider contexts. Thus Great & True Poetry upholds this crown of artistic endeavor - this grafting process with the intellectual & experiential currents of the Real & Actual Larger World of Time, Space & History - as the real fruit - the ultimate aim & original source - of its own Traditions.

Gould's multifarious extended poetic Projects - all the long & short poems - can thus be viewed as forms of poetic Orientation toward a Larger World. Through the mode of art, poetry invests Experience with formulae of intellectual-emotional Meaning : the underlying structure or holistic arrangement of these discovered Meanings reveals a distinct Viewpoint, which simultaneously expresses Individual Personhood and World-Historical Reality. It becomes a "Henry" World, in other words : "Henry" cannot be exiled from his own verbal model of Truth.

(Note that the original contained a lot of italic emphases which didn't copy: I encourage you to follow the link and read the essay as written.)

No, I'm not going to begin identifying myself as an AIEE!ist. (For one thing, I can't be bothered to keep reaching over to the ! key.) All the poetic identification I need, or that you need to know about me, is over there in the sidebar. But it's fun, from time to time, to try to locate myself as a stickpin on the map of contemporary poetry. Sort of like looking up your house on GoogleEarth. But I do like a couple of things about HG's AIEE! definition.

"form of artistic expression, which by means of its roots in past & very ancient practice, maintains a kind of autonomous & healthy - one might say perennial - presence in the cultural-intellectual life of humanity"-- one of the things that disturbs me about contemporary poetic culture is how ignorant it is of its own history (and this is definitely a reflection of larger society and not a distinctive feature of poetic culture). The fact that poetry has been a nearly universal part of human culture for as far back as we can trace language, suggests that the need to generate and receive poetry is a fundamental aspect of humanity, deep-wired into the levels of the brain where biology and culture intertwine. Poetry is not going to go away, current anxieties about the future of publishing notwithstanding. Arts don't die, they just shed their skins and slither alongside us from one failing Eden to another.

"Gould's poetry is rooted, along with all authentic poetry, in an inner telos or drive toward clarity, wholeness, and recapitulation (of experience). Poetry, in other words, aspires to simplicity-in-complexity : to the making of a clear & compelling mirror (the simple) of a differentiated and substantial reality (the complex)." This too is a fundamental aspect of humanness: the ability, and need, to build abstract models to help us negotiate complex realities. In fact, the above could stand as a pretty good summary of the goals of science, except that science additionally requires that the "experience" (experimental evidence) be verifiable and repeatable. Poetry doesn't necessarily require this.

This gets back to one of my big gripes about modern poetry culture: the dogma that poetry is about and only about personal experience. Gould, I think, rejects this orientation in his last couple of paragraphs: "Poetry, in other words, has a substantial intellectual grounding in Truth. But this grounding is not simply a given : it is the result of the Poet's own effort to discover & synthesize more General Truths... Gould's multifarious extended poetic Projects - all the long & short poems - can thus be viewed as forms of poetic Orientation toward a Larger World."

The General Truth which I aspire to discover is Allah; the Larger World toward which I orient myself is the bosom of the Beloved. Whether Gould shares that particular orientation, I couldn't say: he refers to himself as having been a "Jesus freak", but doesn't specify (in my brief glancing through his blogs) anything about his current religious beliefs or any influence they may have on his poetics. But I think we share an outward-turning perspective that places us at odds with contemporary dogma.

So, was "Your Karma" flarf? Nah. It was fun to write, and I think a pretty good poem: touched on a lot of things I think are important, met some fairly demanding form criteria, and did it not too awkwardly. Might be publishable quality after revision. Is it better or worse for having used RWGenerated endwords? Irrelevant: without those endwords, it would never have been written. And that, ultimately, is how poetry works for me: God sends me words.

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