Flarf writers deliver laughs with Google poetry
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| Drew Gardner, 41, performs a Flarf poem at the We-Are-Familia Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. The blue blur in the background is a skateboarder crashing during the performance. (Photo by Eddie Vega) |
July 25, 2010
By Eddie Vega, ComedyBeat
It is difficult sometimes to ascertain the contours of professional comedy. It zigzags into and out of many disciplines that might otherwise seem inviolately self-contained. The onstage performances of the iconic Lenny Bruce were often as much acts of improvisational poetry and social criticism—witty, ironic and sometimes angry—as they were of humor. Bruce presented social and political truths with the cadences of free verse poetry. And contemporary comics like HBO's Paul Mecurio fuss over their joke writing with the same level of attention that the Augustan poets paid to rhyme, rhythm, and beat. It seems only fair then that serious poets should zigzag into comedy. Flarf poets are doing just that.
Recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal, Flarf poets are the latest wave of avant-garde writing. Their work often employs illogic and impossible juxtapositions, on stage and on the page, to make their audiences laugh. They do so by mining Google search results and other online sources for their wacky compositional material.
At a recent performance at the We-Are-Familia Pop Up Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, Flarf poet Drew Gardner, 41, had this to say about a coworker named Sarah Farkas, who was unhappy with her employer-assigned e-mail address:
They told her it didn't matter
that the department was wrong,
but that's going to be confusing
to people she emails.
She is also unthrilled
with her username—FarkasS.
As part of his performance, Gardner, who counts Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Monty Python as influences, used skateboarders and audience chants to create a background rhythm to accompany the text of his poems, a kind of contrapuntal poetry that combined independent layers of sound into one sonic unit. (The blue blur in the background of the headline photo is a skateboarder crashing during the performance.)
A fellow poet, Nada Gordon, incorporated dance—heavy on the hip action—into her reading. One audience member sniped at whisper level, “That is totally inappropriate.”
But in all other respects, Gordon offered a conventional reading. She read from the page and kept her clothes on.
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| Poet Nada Gordon makes peace sign (Photo by Eddie Vega) |
Readers of the Wall Street Journal article—which published illustrative poems by Sharon Mesmer and Gary Sullivan—added to the movement’s growing body of criticism in the comments section.
For example: Fluff + Barf = Flarf.
While the use of existing online material to create new work is of recent vintage, the concept is similar to the found art of Dadaist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), who used street refuse, such as bicycle wheels and stools, as the basic materials for his sculpture. The high critical regard that has placed Duchamp’s work in permanent museum exhibits has not drained it of its comedic power. His Fountain, a sculpture that was actually a simple urinal purchased from a bathroom supply manufacturer then flipped upside down, continues to draw laughs. And scorn.
In 2000, two Chinese performance artists, Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi, urinated on the glass casing of a replica that was on display at the Tate Modern in London. Fountain was not an object of art to be fawned over, they argued. It was just a urinal. And that was what urinals were for. Some got the joke. Others did not. Cai and Xi were banned from the museum.
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| Sharon Mesmer reads Flarf poem. (Photo by Eddie Vega) |
To be sure, Flarfists are serious about their writing. Gardner is author of Petroleum Hat (Roof Books 2005). And Mesmer, who holds an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, has several books to her credit including Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books 2008) and Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press 2008). Other founders of the Flarf movement, Shanna Compton, Katie Degentesh, and Gary Sullivan, who is credited with coining the term Flarf, are also widely published.
What is art? What is comedy? Whatever makes the audience think? Laugh? Duchamp and Bruce aimed consciously to do both in their art. The Flarf poets continue that tradition even as they cut new paths in U.S. and international literature. But as most beginning artistic movements go, Flarf faces a familiar struggle. At the conclusion of their program in Brooklyn, they divided the money from a tip jar, the only source of revenue from the show. It came to under $6 each.