Flarf???

I was going to write this blog entry on the mundane topic of hip hop lit as the urban fairytale. I was. It was going to be a literate conversation about the elements of fairytale and make believe that characterize the literature of hip hop and why we should be paying attention. I was going to talk about girls and how fairytales inform their lives. It was going to be all pink frilly dresses and tea parties. Really. Now, I’ll have to get to that in my next entry because as I sat here eating my cereal this Wednesday before Memorial day (a completely irrelevant factoid) and perusing my husband’s Wall Street Journal something caught my eye. Mind you I hadn’t opened it yet, I was just flipping around the front page! There, right under the lead article about the U.S turning up the heat on BP (re: the oil spill in the gulf) and the ongoing saga of North and South Korea, was a little article about Flarf poetry. Yep, you heard me. On the front page of the Wall Street Journal was an article about Flarf poetry.

Some of you, no doubt, are wondering just what in all God’s green goodness is Flarf
poetry and even more importantly, what in the world does it have to do with Hip Hop Literature. First questions first. Flarf poetry is a kind of “found” poetry that gets its feet from the internet. According to the Wall Street Journal what happens is people use words from random search strings to create poetry… Okay. ..

If you say so.

As for the second question, the answer is simple: everything…and nothing.
It just made me angry that Stanford University professors could chime in on Flarf poetry which by definition is a kind “rubbish verse”, meaningless gibberish and the poetry can be featured at readings at the Whitney Museum and in credible literary magazines but if somebody brings up Hip Hop Literature we have to hear all about ignorance and illiteracy. Flarf poetry is about people looking for a new way to imagine poetry and language. The African American literary community could take a cue from this conversation.

I can already hear the arguments forming in the mouths of detractors. I know them all, save your breath. The point is, the academy decides what gets credibiity and what doesn’t. What this article confirmed for me is that Flarf poetry, poetry made up of random google-searched concepts that on their own mean nothing, can attain street cred because the peope who decide such things have decided that it deserves credibility. They want it to have credibiity because they need it to have credibility because they like it. Period.

As a writing teacher, if a student brought me Flarf poetry, I’d have to ask the hard questions. I wouldn’t argue that it’s not poetry. That would be counter productive to any conversation about creativity. I can even see its appeal (okay, that’s a bit of a stretch but whatever. The point is I’m open). And that’s my point. I can even see its value even though Flarf poetry as far as I’m concerned is merely a fun exercise in language, something you do when you’re trying to unravel the brain to get to the juicy stuff.

So why is everybody having such trouble with hip hop literature, which has a defined value and meaning in our literate society? I’ll tell you why. Because it’s not being produced by what we deem literate people and its focus is that part of ourselves and our society we don’t want to discuss. We don’t like what we think it says about the progress of black thought and black upward mobility in general.
What is even more distressing is that as a community we have the power to give hip hop lit the same kind of credibility as flarf poetry. Some guy is rewriting the Shakespeare sonnets flarf-style. No comment.

Flarf poetry. An idea that started as a joke and takes its name from a police blotter where a kid described marijuana as “flarfy”. ‘Nuf said.