Contemporary Poetry

conclusion 217

work also shows an acute awareness of how electronic data do not
work in our interest. Joyce comments about the sinisterly entitled
‘Data Shadows’:

The ‘data shadow’ cast by an individual in a series of elec-

tronic transactions (via ATM, credit card or Internet usage

for example) can be assembled into a pattern which will allow

a profi le of that person to be developed, including personal

habits and buying power and preferences. Information col-

lected on one context is routinely re-used in entirely unan-

ticipated and even hostile ways without the knowledge or

consent of the individual involved. (p. 239 )

This poem combines data, technological and ecological language
with the presentation of an unnamed landscape of no defi nite
historical time. ‘Data Shadows’ makes us aware of ‘systems hunger’,
‘dear instruments’, ‘the clock’, ‘databases’ (p. 167 ), as well as ‘sys-
tematic breakdowns’ (p. 167 ) and ‘behaviour banks.’ The sequen-
tial repetition of key clauses in the poem affi rms a systematic
industry at work, a world of data retrieval ‘without managed rivers
or cultivated fi elds / only human bodies massed in their billions /
will fl ash before you here’ (p. 168 ). The unsettling decompositional
process outlined in the opening, with its ‘swarming vermin that /
disarticulate the fast frame’ (p. 163 ), is allied to a landscape of data

• ‘a vastness stretching towards all horizons’ (p. 168 ). Joyce’s ironic
  use of the childish phrase ‘losers keepers fi nders weepers’ (p. 165 )
  alerts us to the dystopic scene of managing information.

POET’S PLAYGROUND: ‘FLARF’ POETRY

The Internet has spawned a loosely defi ned movement of poets
(particularly in the USA) who use Internet search engines as a
tool for composition of what is sometimes known as ‘spam’ poetry,
‘Google sculpted’ poetry, but more often than not as ‘Flarf’ poetry.
Michael Gottlieb proposed that Flarf is a ‘self dubbed group’ of
young poets mainly associated with both east and west coasts.^27
He adds that: ‘A defi ning characteristic of their work can be said