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Flarf

Movement
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A contemporary, avant-garde poetry movement characterized by the use of deliberately bad taste, found internet text, and aggressive banality

Detailed Definition
Flarf is an early 21st-century avant-garde poetry movement that uses internet search results, spam, and found digital text as raw material, often employing absurdity, irony, and deliberate “bad taste” to critique consumer culture, information overload, and the degradation of language online; poets like Sharon Mesmer or K. Silem Mohammad collage offensive or banal web content into satirical, provocative verse that questions authorship and aesthetic value.
Example
Example in poetry:
Flarf: "Google ‘love poem’ and vomit glitter"; "Kittens + bombs = sad internet"; "I ate your tweet and now I’m famous"; "Pizza rolls and existential dread—yum"
Additional Notes
Early 2000s poetry using Internet search results as source material. Deliberately "bad" or "incorrect" searches. Created by Gary Sullivan and others. Related: conceptual poetry, found poetry, digital poetics.
Also Known As
Anti-aesthetic verse Google poetry Digital absurdism Found language poetry
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