I put my foot in it the other day when I listed Madeline Gleason as “the founder of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State.” Actually, if you do a little googling, you can find Gleason, Ruth Witt-Diamant, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan & Mark Linenthal all mentioned as founders. For example, Steven Clay & Rodney Phillips’ A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, jointly published by Granary Books and the New York Public Library, states flatly:

Madeline Gleason (assisted by Rexroth and Duncan) founded the San Francisco Poetry Center, housed at San Francisco State College and managed by Ruth Witt-Diamant.

You can also find claims that the very first reading at the Poetry Center in 1954 was W.H. Auden unless it was Theodore Roethke. There are also differing versions of the role Dylan Thomas played in causing the new institution to get going. What nobody disputes, tho, is that Ruth Witt-Diamant, who had taught at State since at least 1931, was the Poetry Center’s first director, and that the April 1947 “First Festival of Modern Poetry,” organized by Gleason at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery on Gough Street in San Francisco – 12 poets reading over a period of two days – was the first event of its kind, perhaps anywhere, and certainly an important antecedent not only to the Poetry Center, but to the Six Gallery reading in 1955 where Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl,” and beyond.

An essay in the emerging 29^th issue of Jacket by Dan Hoy on the subject of flarf – Hoy’s generally opposed – has set off far larger waves of dissent & discussion, especially on the Lucipo and HumPo listservs. Everyone - well, maybe not everyone - tends to think that Hoy – who defines flarf narrowly as poetry generated at least partly through Google list-searches, a process sometimes known as Google-sculpting – gets it wrong. But, and this is the interesting thing, nobody seems to quite agree as to what it would mean to get it right. Certainly flarf does make liberal use of search engine methodologies to gather in at least raw material, as is visible in this definition of flarf from Gary Sullivan:

Flarf: A quality of intentional or unintentional "flarfiness." A kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. "Not okay."

Flarf (2): The work of a community of poets dedicated to exploration of "flarfiness." Heavy usage of Google search results in the creation of poems, plays, etc., though not exclusively Google-based. Community in the sense that one example leads to another's reply-is, in some part, contingent upon community interaction of this sort. Poems created, revised, changed by others, incorporated, plagiarized, etc., in semi-public.

Flarf (3) (verb): To bring out the inherent awfulness, etc., of some pre-existing text.

Flarfy: To be wrong, awkward, stumbling, semi-coherent, fucked-up, un-P.C. To take unexpected turns; to be jarring. Doing what one is "not supposed to do."

On HumPo, there was even a discussion as to whether or not Linh Dinh’s work, at least in places, to be deliberately flarfy, although so far I know, none of it is derived from Google sculpting nor what Hoy characterizes as collage. Linh Dinh, for example, at times will use a version of English recognizable for its social origins in instant messaging, and often aims at discomfort.

Yet Hoy’s point, which seems reducible to the claim – which I don’t think anyone disputes – that search engines are not neutral, but carry within themselves a set of values that correspond to what their software designers were trying to find (page ranking, for example), doesn’t really address this larger side of flarf, which in turn raises all kinds of questions as to what it is, what it’s not, and maybe where one might go to find its roots.

For me, one of the question it raises is flarf’s relationship to what Kenny Goldsmith calls uncreative writing. Googling clearly has some relationship to the aesthetics of collecting (to employ Peter Balistrieri’s term), which places less emphasis on the arrangement of gathered materials & more, in fact, on the gathering process itself. It’s one thing for Mark Peters to Google the word “men” or the word “thongs” and construct works from this, yet Peters’ work, like Goldsmith’s, has a level of consistency to it that aestheticizes as it anesthetizes the reader. Goldsmith’s The Weather, which echoes the uses of reportage David Bromige first used in “One Spring” nearly a generation ago, is almost beautiful in a debased sort of way. Does that make it flarfy? What about the computer generated works of Brian Kim Stefans or Alan Sondheim? Or, lets go back further, Jackson Mac Low’s use of system – there’s that ancestor of Googling – and insurance texts – there’s that social appropriation of the deliberately awful in Stanzas for Iris Lezak. Which of these poems is flarf and who gets to determine this? What about works that are just dreadful but don’t realize it? Are Ted Kooser & Billy Collins & Stephen Dobyns’ flarfy? Aren’t they, in some sense, Ur-flarf, the way Jeff Koons’ puppy dog topiaries might be considered a visual arts analog.

Hoy’s complaint is that the randomizer employed by flarfonauts ain’t random – tho I don’t recall anybody claiming that randomness was what they were after, especially – which leads away, I think, from the more important question of Why this, why now? If we want to understand the answers – or at least possible answers – to those questions, it seems to me that we will have to confront the actual value of flarf and its related poetries:

·        One set of questions has to do with systematization, the use of computers, games, any sort of gimmickry in the construction of the poem

·        A second set of questions has to do with the anti-aesthetic, the deliberately awful, the troubling

·        A third set has to do with the appropriation of non-literary materials.

·        A fourth set has to do with the role of acquaintance & friendship in the creation of literary tendencies.

All of these have complex social histories that are quite distinct. Both flarf and uncreative writing intersect all four questions in different ways. That both are doing so at the same time is what I find fascinating. Why?