Has someone thought to create a PDF chapbook of all the comment field and blog reaction to Issue 1?. Clearly that's where the poetry is in all this.

Perhaps I have a perverse sense of humor, but the spectacle of poets angrily claiming and defending the value of their intellectual property and brand name in a context where it has no value to the culture at large is funny to me. What does it mean that this concise, wrong-headed group writing might have more energy charge to it than much of the poetry of the comment writers?

The poems in the Issue 1 all do sound like they're from the same poem generating software. So it's really the work of a single author. I see some people are calling this Flarf. The event of Issue 1 is Flarfy in that it's provocative and identity-blurring. Identity-blurring always enrages poets for some reason.

The poetry itself isn't Flarfy, because Flarf poetry is very much a product of the individual poets who write it. You can tell which Flarf poet is the author within a few lines. Flarf poetry is expressive, or more precisely, it is a hybridization of expressiveness and procedure. The work coming out of the Flarf collective is poetry by any means necessary.