Ara Shirinyan's
Your Country Is Great: Afghanistan–Guyana (Futurepoem, 2008) is great fun, even if it's not one of those books you want to devour in a sitting. Shirinyan feeds the phrase "[a country] is great" into Google (with quotation marks, so he gets precise appearances of, say, "Barbados is great"), then constructs poems out of the results. Great fun, and telling: for Afghanistan, you get lots of appearances of "the need for X in Afghanistan is great"; for other countries, it's more like "diving in the Bahamas is great," or just plain "France is great."
I'm terribly perplexed, tho: is this Flarf or is it Conceptual Poetry?
For a lark, inspired by Susan Schultz's Google results for "unfortunately, Susan," I entered "Mark Scroggins is great." Alas, zero results. Same for "Mark Scroggins is okay." At least "Mark Scroggins sucks" only got one result: "Mark Scroggins sucks! After 6 games, he is all the way down in 13th!" on the "allbowling.com" forum. I'm guessing that's my alter ego, MS the professional bowler.
2 comments:
Ara's book is great! And it's one of the many (well, several) books in recent years, Conceptual, Flarf, or other, that use Google as a compositional tool. As such, it points up the error of thinking of all Google-sculpted poetry as Flarf, or vice versa. Though I will concede that this particular book has a flarfy feel to it--more so, say, than Rob Fitterman's equally Conceptual and equally excellent This Window Makes Me Feel.
The procedure is also out there in the "lay" Internet, at Googlism.
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