Thursday, April 15, 2010

Found you!


Google your name (your character's, your pet's, that boy from elementary school's, a word, a phrase ...) Create a found poem by collecting and rearranging the odd, strange, surprising bits that pop up.


People have adopted the word flarf for this kind of poetry. The original flarf poem was an intentionally bad random poem submitted to a Poetry.com marketing contest/ploy. Since later flarfists often used Google and other internet devices to create their poems, flarf eventually got adopted for poetry created from internet finds. This hasn't been enthusiastically embraced by the Google poets since the tone of flarf is, in the words of Gary Sullivan who wrote the first flarf poem, "A kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. 'Not okay.'"

There is also spoetry created from spam. I used to get a lot of cool spam before the spam detectors got too good at filtering it out. I collected bits that caught my eye for several months and posted them at Spam-O-Rama. Like:
  • gingerbread some childhood objet
  • ceiling minerals
  • blimp artist
  • persevering ginks bent on making the best of a good chance
  • where are you? trollop buxton
  • launch the buttress
And lastly some spam wisdom on poetry:

The poet has not identified which place or event in the world has moved her to use the phrase ?ntial skill. -- Anonymous Spambot

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