>Flarf

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Flarf: a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness. This is a strain of avant garde poetry that began around 2001, in which Gary Sullivan, the coiner of the phrase, intentionally submitted bad poetry to Poetry.com to see if their standards held any ground. This is where poetry is headed in our digital age. Now I’m all for post postmodernism and the suggestiveness of Internet speak, but I don’t know where to put my finger on this one. I guess I’ll have to try.

If Yzerman and Kwame Kilpatrick
Don’t launch me to Google’s top spot,
Lindsey Lohan ankle bracelet is a searcher
that’s hot, and it might. Babelfish can help me translate this line of verse I wrote into… fuhgeddid.
Animals strike curious poses observed the heat between me and you.
Oh, but when they saw my penis strike a lampcatcher,
they wanted more. So I gave it to them, right up the Ace.
Hotels with coffee bars
make my jiggly wiggle, figglety figgle. Spigglety spiggle.
It was just for jizz and giggles that I did it. No I like girlz, as long as dey HOT. Hot, hot.
Lost series finale, n korea, safina, us soccer, ronald defeo jr, maybach 57s…

Not bad right? I kind of like this flarf movement.

By Daniel Ryan Adler

Daniel Adler writes fiction and nonfiction and is finishing his MFA at University of South Carolina.

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