Flarf in this way could be presented as a parody of Pound's great Modernist innovation where, in Hugh Kenner's words, his vortex is “not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water.⁴  Mohammad's poems and lines aren't the search words but are patterns made visible by the search words. Again in Kenner 's words: “[a] patterned integrity accessible to the mind; topologically stable; subject to variations of intensity; brought into the domain of the senses by a particular interaction of words.”⁵ A contrast can be made between Pound's method, which attempts to frame history and culture within a single totalizing poetics topologically stabilized by the poet's aesthetics and erudition (some have argued that this correlates with Pound's fascist leanings) and Mohammad's method, which surveys and presents recent culture and history as it is (or as it is created and altered on the Internet), creating a topologically unstable patterning out of a search engine, several words, and Mohammad's edits.

Mohammad's process and editorial eye collaborate to create unexpected images and phrase clusters; as an objective instrument, Google is unafraid of any image or register of language, and Mohammad applies its discoveries to great effect. “Peek-a-Boo's” language is relatively tame compared to perhaps more “hardcore” Flarf poems (see “Mars Needs Terrorists” later in this essay). From “Peek-a-Boo”:

what it's like to be an animal
transform the gunman into a bloody
truck, tractor or farm animal
eye swollen shut and
lips pulled away from his teeth
in flashback to his ancestor
“a mountain with a smile”
bloody, scary silence

The transformations that occur between lines are jarring; language that intends (or was intended) to go in one direction is re-routed into unanticipated territory. The line “transform the gunman into a bloody” comes from a hyper-violent short story called “Aaron Kaiser versus Raven Whitehorse.”⁶ The scene in the story describes a gunman clenched and squished by huge mechanical jaws. Mohammad's poem re-locates the language away from its video game-ish origins to a more pastoral setting, joining it with a line that arises from an apparently popular “You Might Be a High-Tech Redneck” bit circulating the Internet that reads: “You might be a high-tech redneck if . . . your screen saver is a bitmap image of your favorite truck, tractor, or farm animal.”

In discussing Mohammad's achievement , Marcel Duchamp's description of “R.Mutt's” submission of an urinal to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists is applicable: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”⁷ Similarly, freed of the burden of generating new language—the burden of Romantic originality—Mohammad is free to view pre-existing language from a new point of view, to create new thoughts for the language at hand (as well as new rhythms and images for this language). All of this would still be possible for a reader to appreciate even if Mohammad and other Flarf-ists kept their processes private; lines such as “he never brushes his teeth/his bloody techniques” and “he now has a very diabolical smile/for his little plan to get the dog/bloody hand prints emblazoned” have an immediacy that is not at all dependent upon a knowledge of the processes involved. In fact, some readers may be disappointed to discover that lines like those quoted above didn't spring from the poet's imagination but were found by him. Some may even argue that the lines are plagiarized. But I will argue that the re-imagining of source, and the reader's knowledge of the source of Mohammad's language, is perhaps the great realization of these poems.

 

 

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⁴ The Pound Era . 146

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ This story can be found on-line at http://www.hlrpg.com/Battle-Archives/2000/October2000-Archives/akai-vs-rwhi-17oct2000.html .

⁷ “The Richard Mutt Case” Art in Theory . ed. Harrison & Wood. 252

 

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