Can Flarf ever be taken seriously?

Shell Fischer reports in Poets & Writers:

Almost a decade after its creation, the experimental poetry movement Flarf—in which poets prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distill the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious—is showing signs of having cleared a spot among the ranks of legitimate art forms. Despite the group's penchant for shocking content and outrageous titles (Sharon Mesmer's "Annoying Diabetic Bitch," for example, or Gary Sullivan's "Grandmother's Explosive Diarrhea"), many in the literary world are taking the poems seriously.

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"To be honest with you," Sullivan says, "we started this list to do a hundred-page anthology of just garbage." To create such garbage, the group latched onto a technique poet Drew Gardner had been using to construct his own work: searching the Internet for random terms and crafting the results into poems. Soon, the poets started riffing off one another's lines and competing to create the most outrageous pieces. Sullivan used this technique to write a poem titled "Flarf Balonacy Swingle," and the collective quickly adopted Flarf as a verb, adjective, and noun to describe what they were doing. They were "flarfing" their "flarf" poems, which were, of course, "flarfy."

But then a funny thing happened: Their poems evolved from "bad" to "sort of great," Gardner says. "What we were really doing was throwing out rules that were constraining and ridiculous and weren't fitting anymore. Once we did that, we could do whatever we wanted—we weren't trying to ask: Is this magazine going to like this? Is this poet going to like this? Is my teacher going to like this? We just got rid of all of it and went nuts."

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