218 contemporary poetry
to be the embrace of the dizzying opportunities proffered to those
who are inclined to engage in chance-generated poetry, or artistic
composition, by the stunningly voracious, simply overwhelming
power of the Internet’s search engines’.^28 The texts can veer from
whimsy, with a focus on bizarre and humorous facts, to collabora-
tive enterprises. ‘Flarf’ was coined as a descriptive term by Gary
Sullivan, and has been described as ‘the fi rst recognizable move-
ment of the 21 st century, as an in-joke among an elite clique, as a
marketing strategy, and as offering a new way of reading creative
writing’.^29 A loose grouping emerged in 2001 under an email list
entitled ‘The Flarfl ist’. As Sullivan adds, ‘The Flarfl ist Collective
is hardly the fi rst e-mail based collaborative enterprise, but it has
been, despite the relatively occult nature of the project, one of the
most visible’.
A special edition of the online journal Jacket ( 2006 ) was dedi-
cated to Flarf poetry and focused upon the work of early key names
associated with the collective impetus. These included Benjamin
Friedlander, Anne Boyer, Drew Gardner, K. Silem Mohammad,
Rod Smith and Christina Strong. Turning to an example of col-
laborative web-based work gives a sense of how Internet informa-
tion and poetry collide with one another. In ‘Infi nity Revisited’,
the poets have collaged elements of information from animal
experimentation reports as a basis to their collaboration: ‘As I said
to my Spontaneously Obese Rat Friend, I said’.^30 We are told that
the aim of the poem is ‘to assess weather produced from rat feed,
grain, / and four doses.’ Using the language of scientifi c report, the
poem asserts:
The study used 480 male and female rats
and their little rat cell phones (under Simulated Microgravity)
which did not have cancer. One will study acupuncture.
The other will look at the old rats.Dan Hoy notes that using the Internet as a collage machine
presents ethical dilemmas to the poet. He asks: ‘The fl arfi sts may
be aware of the webpage from which they borrow material, but the
only reason they’re aware of that webpage is because Google (or
AskJeeves, or Yahoo!, or.. .) showed it to them – so the question