Facebook II Profile

I have love handles.
I am a horrible dancer. Look me up on youtube.
Everything I eat turns my stomach into a danger zone.
I have dry skin.
I am disgusting.
I like to eat onions.
I am obsessed with polar bears.
I like Saturday morning cartoons.
I whine a lot.
I have a horrible temper.
I watch Hannah Montana with Liz.
I am friends with Liz Weiderhold.
I don't dress up a lot. My daily wear is an old sweatshirt and jeans.
I am not attractive.
I like to watch the same movies over and over again.

Flarf Poem

Not appropriate for all

Gathering of Eagles or venereal disease has creditability.

Meet the jerk that can cause effects on the reproductive system.

Treatment guidelines contain graphic images,

From the potential threat of a MySpace account.

Inflammatory audiences can be prevented.

Health problems attack terrorists.

Oscar-winning counterprotesters sent the symptoms of animals.

Pay-Per-View transmission,

As we have experienced,

is no longer a scam.

Requires this situation to stop.

I Googled "bomb threats" and "sexually transmitted diseases".

Flarf

I really like the idea of flarf. I believe that this is due to the fact that I am unable to fully understand deep and meaningful poetry, therefore, I do not enjoy it. It is like with anything else in the world, when people do not understand it, they tend to have hostile feelings towards it. That is how I am with poetry. The reason I like flarf is because it takes all of those things about poetry that is, in its own way, humorous when it is taken seriously and makes it into a complete joke. All of the poetic licenses are made into an exaggeration and produced in order to be laughed at.

The history of the origin of flarf is quite interesting to me as well. Gary Sullivan first submitted his “bad” poetry to Poetry.com to see if there was an actual filter in what was being presented or if anything could be posted up with an extremely large fee. The spam poetry was being spammed. And, of course, Sullivan’s bad poem was “published” even though it technically did not have merit. When it was sent to Sullivan, the people from Poetry.com made it seem like his poem was mulled over and reviewed very critically before it was chosen to be displayed in some sort of book. I think the idea of spamming these people with poetry that is “unfit” to be considered real and they in turn accept it as something that is wonderful instead of the joke that it is shows that the people at Poetry.com are simply out there to get your money.

I love this aspect of flarf. I am a very silly and goofy person and I love the fact that flarf is basically a huge joke that is being played on the poetry world. I suppose I enjoy this so much because I cannot take “real” poetry seriously because I do not have the intellectual capacity to find it meaningful that I find the joke on poetry hilarious.

Since this class is about writing tools and how they affect what is being written, it is important to talk about that aspect, as well. The internet has a lot of impact on flarf because search engines are used to produce the words that will be used in the poems. The interest of flarf has also grown due to the internet which causes people’s works to become more accessible to the public. So, obviously the computer is a main writing tool of flarf. I was about to comment that flarf would be impossible without modern writing technologies, but I am sure that this could be done by taking random phrases from letters and newspapers if it were 100 years ago. Flarf can be achieved through many means. Even though flarf has come about quite recently, it could have been achieved many years ago. The only thing needed for flarf are words from another source that an author can string together to make something goofy.

Visual Text

I actually decided to change my visual text to something a little more meaningful to me. Instead of the silly poem that I wrote with different fonts and colors, I did a visual text that is in remembrance of the shootings at Virginia Tech. One of my best friends from high school was killed on April 16, 2007 and it really meant a lot to me to do this visual text about that. With the anniversary quickly approaching, I wanted to make sure that people have not forgotten what happened nearly one year ago.




I love and miss you Mary.

Article Experiment

In the West Bank, I joined the crew of a sailboat partway through a circumnavigation of the globe. Palestinian militants in Gaza all are dangerous. Overnight, the Israeli Air Force struck the most widespread human fingerprint. Below me, drunkorexics fired rockets into Israel. Israeli forces dived over the side, swimming in sewage. Damage from carbonic acid and stone-throwing have become glamorous. A troubling phenomenon is suffering therapists vanishing. Science is the first official medical term. Psychologists say buzzwords around the world seemed forceful. Sexual abuse, neglect and other sources of mental anguish are often driven by forest burning.

Class Blog - Visual Type Experiment

I had a lot of trouble with this assignment. I have yet to complete it because I had a lot of trouble trying to get the words to go where I wanted them to go. It was also hard to figure out exactly what was wanted. In the articles it said that visual text cannot be concretely defined. I am a very literal person and it was hard to be creative. What I had in my mind for visual text was making only text visually pleasing. I didn't realize, until I read the articles, that visual text could also include pictures and designs that weren't solely letters. I just remember in elementary school when we were going over our poetry unit we had to do a shape poem. This poem was in the shape of the subject of the poem that was being written. I suppose that is what I was trying to do with mine, but it's a little harder to try and do it on a word processor. I guess colors and fonts can add a lot to the text and I tried using that to make the words pop. This was not an easy assignment simply because of trying to figure out formatting on the computer. However, I did like it because it's fun to see text out of the double-spaced, black and white lines.

Class Post - The Iron Whim

When WH states his argument that typewritten texts often turn out to be riddled with errors, but people don't seem to care because there is a nostalgic feeling when a typewriter is thought of, I completely agree. So many writers often like to use typewriters because they feel as if they are going back to a more "real" form of writing. This slightly makes me laugh because it seems that typewriters are such a hassle to deal with than computers or even handwritten script.

Another writing technology that I think brings back a feeling of nostalgia is a quill.