Syllabi July 7, 2009

Since coming together on private Listserv exchanges in 2001, the writers of the Flarf Collective have attracted critical attention—oh, and readers—more rapidly than is deemed seemly for contemporary poets. The group’s recent reading at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (alongside a mock-rival cadre of “Conceptualists”) and supplementary inclusion in Poetry magazine have raised their already high profile, which may have resulted from the collective’s self-styled (and half-joking) status as a genuine avant-garde. Flarf, as it is usually practiced, takes as its raw material the results of Google searches on words or phrases chosen by the poet.