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Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Month: May 2022

Digital Poetry: More Predictions and the OuLiPo

May 31, 2022 / / 0 Comments

OulipoSo plugging along with The New Media Reader. The computer-prediction essays are getting a little bit tiresome but we have a few more to slog through. Some of these predictions of automation now seem a bit sad, especially reading from the tired, old future.

"Augmenting Human Intellect" by Douglas Engelbart" (1962) https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/

Englebart divides new media concepts into:

  1. Artifacts or objects.
  2. Language symbols/concepts
  3. Mythologies/strategies
  4. Training ("to be operationally effective")….geez, sounds so chilly when you say it that way.

Englebart came up with ideas of the computer mouse, application windows, the idea for the word processor and he helped establish the Internet and video conferencing. He is called "one of the great inventors of the 20th Century."

This paper is about rethinking how we organize information and he talks a lot about note cards, sorting links, concept packets and the serial progression of ideas not being how the human mind really works. Our brains are more of a scrambled, interconnected, linking tangle (aint that the truth). The human mind wanders down paths and crisscrosses itself. Engelbart takes us through how the mind diagrams a sentence or scans complex statements.

He also talks about how hard it is to get people to see how hard-wired they are in  doing things in a certain way. And that changes doesn't come as a big shift, but in lots of little shifts we make. You have to wait to see a big impressive change. He believes the computer can help us "add-up" to something impressive. 

"Sketchpad" by Ivan E. Sutherland (1963)
http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/sutherland%20(1963)%20sketchpad.%20a%20man-machine%20graphical%20communication%20system.pdf

This article basically predicts much of what became Photoshop. 

"The Construction of Change" by Roy Ascott (1964)
https://www.academia.edu/740569/The_construction_of_change

Acsott was first to use the word cybernetics and this is one of the first essays about new media art. Ascott goes back to the 1960s happenings which he says felt more like taking part in rituals and an interaction that was 1:1.  He sees the participation in new media art differently, as "loops of creative activity…fusion of art, science, personality." He differentiates between the act of making art and the end result and how happenings and new media are both about the act of making more than the end results. This was actually an interesting essay about the curriculum for the art students at the Ealing School of Art and how students were encouraged to experiment even with their self-identified personalities and how this led to thinking outside the self-box.

"A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Intermediate" by Ted Nelson (1965)

Nelson is credited for inventing the idea of hypertext and this essay deals with the changing nature of text, pieces of text in a state of flux, links to ever-changing text and separating the changeable elements out of larger texts so they will always be current. If you were ever an admin in a legal offrce or a paralegal, you might remember the stack of monthly update pages that endlessly needed to be swapped in and out of legal binders. In this way Nelson was predicting micro-content and the buzzworthy "headless CMS." 

The Internet as it exists apparently doesn't really do what Nelson envisioned, but is described in this essay as "a monumental public publishing space" which gained critical mass by employing a subset of hypertext concepts.

Nelson sees technology as an "adjunct to creativity…offering a data structure in a changing world."

The essay also informs us that a "small computer" would be a good corporate or educational investment for $37,000. (Yikes!) Nelson then goes into some interesting theories about writing is: outlines, editing, word processing and "handling information." 

After this essay, we get into some early experimental pieces, specifially around the French group OuLiPo (pictured above).  and this subsection begins with a great quote from Alan Turing: "Only a machine can appreciate a sonnet written by another machine" which states exactly what I mean by saying people seek out art to communicate with other people and the content of that communication is only interesting to most of us if it has originated from the mind of another human being who might be having the same human experience we are.

But in any case, new media likes to test this premise all the time and a French group of artists formed in 1960 around ideas for creating art with constraints and procedures. The "Brief History of the OuLliPo" by Jean Lescure differentiates between intentional literature and random literature. The OuLiPo were interested in mathematical constraints, failures of language, language games and paintings that involved "the dissimulation of the object of reference." 

The first OuLiPo piece we look at is "A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" by Ramond Queneam (translated from French by Stanely Chapman). The New Media Reader presents the poem as strips of a sonnet and invites you to cut up the pages to recreate physical horizontal page strips which are basically the separate variations of lines of a sonnet. You can swap out various lines in endless combinations to create an almost-infinite number of rhyming sonnets. This took planning to get the various lines to rhyme in French and English. 

Examples of swappable lines:

With breaking voice across the Alps they slog

Lobsters for sale must be our apologue

No need to cart such treasures from the fog

Bard I adore your endless monologue

French versions:

Barde que to me plais toujours tu soliloques

On regrette à la fin les agrestes bicoques

The strips would look like this:

    Stips

More about the making of the poem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Thousand_Billion_Poems

These experiments are curious and interesting but ultimately senseless and unmoving. No ideas but in structure.

The next piece is maybe the first Choose Your Own Adventure, a piece called "Yours for the Telling" by Raymond Queneau.

There are only 21 pieces of content to read but what was intersting to me were the word choices upon the presentation of the alternative narrative path, for example: if you don't want to follow this path, here is another:

  • if not
  • if it's neither here nor there to you
  • If it's all the same to you
  • if you don't care
  • If it's immaterial to you
  • If you wish
  • If you prefer
  • If you rather
  • If so
  • If you have no objection

The next essay in the section is "For a Potential Analysis of Combinatory Literature" by Claude Berge. He creates poetry graphs to describe narrative combinations. (The art of data). He groups combinatory literature in three buckets:

  1. Machine procedures that help you create art
  2. Machine procedures that transform existing content
  3. The transposition of concepts of mathematics into the realm of words.

He says the first combinatory art forms were musical dice games, some by Mozart. He lists the current players:

He uses terms like plastic arts, Fibonaccian poems and Exponential poetry.

The next essay is "Computer and Writer" by Paul Fournel. He talks about how the computer aids in combinatory/random literature (for example it makes the lose strips of 100 million poems easier to read).

He divides machine-aided literature into three buckets too:

  1. Machines that help build a pre-created narrative to be read by a reader (Author > Computer > Work)
  2. Machines that help read the reader read a pre-created narrative (Author > Computer > Work > Computer > Reader)
  3. Machines that work with the reader to build unique narrative (Author > Computer > Reader > Computer > Work)

The last essay is by Italo Cavino, "Prose and Anticombinatories"
http://www.creativepiecemeals.com/plotor7.html

Cavino provides an example of a crime story and like most of these experimental computer-based fictions, there's too much exposition at the expense of other important narrative elements (dialogue, character development, place building). 

These stories are heavily actions after actions, logistics of choice, subsets of options and random options. Not much thought is given to how motivations and plot are crafted to move a story forward, which makes these stories completely uninteresting. 

But that's a problem for another day.

The Essay Project: Ruthless Creativity (Roethke Teaching and Memorizing Poems)

May 11, 2022 / / 0 Comments

HugoTwo essays this time around to catch up a bit. The first is “Stray Thoughts on Roethke and Teaching” from Richard Hugo’s great book of essays on writing, The Triggering Town. This is an interesting comparison to Philip Levine’s essay on taking a class with John Berryman.

In his class Theodore Roethke focused on reading poets with “good ears” like “Yeats, Hopkins, Auden, Thomas, Kunitz, Brogan" [who interesting Roethke was once in a relationship with….so must have had something better than good…ok I’ll stop].

He talked about “falling in love with the sounds of words” and “the heart and soul of poetry” which sounds a big vague.

Hugo continues about the reputation of Roethke's classes: “One sad thing about university reputations is that they lag behind the fact. By the time you hear how good an English department is, it is usually too late to go there.” Hugo says that despite this rule, Roethke got better as a teacher as time went on. Roethke talked about taking risks, “a lot of poets don’t have the nerve to risk failure…you have to work, and you had better get used to facing disappointments and failures, a lifetime of them.”

RoethkeHugo talks about the crazy hard final exam Roethke would give to his students: a list of 10 nouns, 10 verbs and 10 adjectives and you had to use five words from each list, write four beats to a line, six lines to a stanza, three stanzas, two internal and one external slant rhyme per stanza, a max of two end stops per stanza and the poem must have clear and grammatically correct sentences that made sense….and finally the poem must be meaningless (that last one was Hugo’s own masochistic addition)!

The point of the exam: “Two many beginners have the idea that they know what they have to say—now if they can just find the words. Here, you give them the words, some of them anyway, and some technical problems to solve. Many of them will write their best poem of the term….the exercise is saying: give up what you think you have to say…”

“The second half of the Roethke final usually consisted of one question, a lulu like, ‘What should the modern poet do about his ancestors?’” 

Hugo talks about Roethke explicating a line from Yeats’ “Easter 1916” poem, the line “Stumbling upon the blood dark track once more” and how “blood dark track” according to Roethke “goes off like rifle shots.”

Hugo says this is

“simple stuff. Easily observed. But how few people notice it. The young poet is too often paying attention to the big things and can’t be bothered with little matters like that. But little matters like that are what make and break poems, and if a teacher can make a poet aware of it, he has given him a generous shove in the only direction. In poetry, the big things tend to take care of themselves.”

Later Hugo says,

“A good teacher can save a young poet years by simply telling him things he need not waste time on, like trying to will originality or trying to share an experience in language or trying to remain true to the facts (but that’s the way it really happened). Roethke used to mumble: ‘Jesus, you don’t want to say that.’ And you didn’t but you hadn’t yet become ruthless enough to create. You still felt some deep moral obligation to ‘reality’ and ‘truth,’ and of course it wasn’t moral obligation at all, but fear of yourself and your inner life….Despite Roethke’s love of verbal play, he could generate little enthusiasm for what passes as experimentation and should more properly be called fucking around.”

[Oy, I just said that.]

But Hugo says that the

“quest for self is fundamental to poetry. What passes for experimentation is often an elaborate method of avoiding one’s feelings at all cost. [Yes!] The process prohibits any chance the poet has to create surrogate feelings, a secondary kind of creativity but in most poems all the poet can settle for. The good poems say: ‘This is how I feel.’ With luck that’s true, but usually it’s not. More often the poem is the way the poet says he feels when he can’t find out what his real feelings are.”

Hugo then talks about people who struggle to appear interesting,

“There are those usual people who try desperately to appear unusual and there are unusual people who try to appear usual.” It doesn’t surprise me at all when the arrogant wild man in class turns in predictable, unimaginative poems and the straight one is doing nutting and promising work. If you are really strange you are always in enemy territory, and your constant concern is survival.”

Hugo says James Wright “was one of the few students who was writing well in Roethke’s classes.”

Then Hugo moves to talking about the future of American poetry, quoting Mark Strand who “remarked recently in Montana that American poetry could not help but get better and better, and I’m inclined to agree. I double that we’ll have the one big figure of the century the way other nations do, [William Butler] Yeats, [Paul] Valéry."

Hugo ends by giving us Roethke’s thoughts about the pressures of publication:

“’Don’t worry about publishing. That’s not important.’ He might have added, only the act of writing is. It’s flattering to be told you are better than someone else, but victories like that do not endure. What endures are your feelings about your work [Oy, Feelings again]. You wouldn’t trade your poems for anybody’s. To do that you will also have to trade your life for his, which means living a whole new complex of pain and joy. One of those per life is enough.”

Whew. I don’t know about you but I feel better right now.

The second essay is a short article from Poets & Writers in 1988 called “Poetry on the Run” by Arthur Roth who learned to memorize poems while he was out on long runs around the neighborhood.

As an aside, one of the interesting things about this 1988 issue of P&W is that there is only one ad for an MFA in all the pages of this article (Warson Wilson College in North Carolina). The rest are for two workshops, a prize-winning announcement and a writing conference. Times have changed.

Anyway, since running (and swimming after developing an arthritic hip), Roth has memorized about 76 poems. “Memorizing—like running—gets easier the more you practice.”

And he claims the practice often “halts him in his tracks” with the discovery of a new meaning in lines he previously thought he knew very well.”

I am terrible at memorizing even the basic life things so I don't see myself doing this….or running.

The Essay Project: Checklist for Poet Newbies

May 4, 2022 / / 0 Comments

WingThe next essay in the stack is actually the introduction of the book Sleeping on the Wing: An Anthology of Modern Poetry by Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell. I remember we were assigned this book in a high-school poetry class and the teacher went off on a weird tangent about writing detective screenplays (I think she was having a breakdown) and we never ended up reading it. Then the book was again assigned in a poetry class I took in college and we never read it then either. So I've had this book twice and never read even so much as the introduction of it. And every time I read the title I want to start singing "No Night So Long" with Dionne Warwick, although the lyric is "living on the wind" not "sleeping on the wing." That doesn't seem to matter in the situation.

The material in the intro is pretty basic for advanced poets, but it's probably useful for teachers running poetry intro classes. And then again, sometimes coming back to basic is a good opportunity for a beginner’s mind reset.

And oddly these precepts kind of track to life in general, too. The intro is divided into three sections as follows. My peanut-gallery comments in parenthesis. 

Reading Poetry

  • Don’t read poems like a newspaper article but like listening to a friend telling you a story, like the way you overhear a conversation among strangers, or like the way you listen to music, “that part of your intelligence that includes your feelings, imagination and experience."
  • Think about what words excite you?
  • Don’t get freaked out by:
    • a word or words you don’t know,
    • a person or place you are not familiar with,
    • a sentence that is long and hard to follow,
    • a sentence that is incomplete,
    • words ordered in an unusual way.
  • Read the poem slowly (I actually read a poem first fast and then slow the subsequent times).
  • Use what you do understand to help you with what you don’t understand (This is also helpful when reading stupidly-academic essays).
  • A poem may not have “a point” in a conventional sense. (Or, I would add, that point might seem smaller than you think is worthy of a poem).
  • Not all  meanings are hidden. (Some are though.) You might be disappointed trying to find the “deep meaning” when one isn’t really there. 
  • Keep focusing on how a poem is affecting you. (In this case it really might help to "make it all about you.")
  • Don’t worry about technique at first (unless that comes naturally to you). Sometimes the form and style can be distracting on the first read.
  • Read a few poems by the same poet to get a sense of their style and voice.
  • How to frame the adventure: “Think of the rather pleasant process of figuring out a part of town you’ve never been in or an interesting person you’ve just met.” Reading poetry is “something like traveling—seeing new places, hearing things talked about in new ways, getting ideas of other possibilities.”

I thought this was good, too: “Poets are not big, dark, heavy personages dwelling in clouds of mystery, but people like yourself who are doing what they like to do and do well. Writing poetry isn’t any more mysterious than what a dancer or a singer or a painter does.”

WorkshopTalking About Poetry with Others

  • It’s like talking about sports in that “you admire different qualities, you watch for and are excited about different things, you even use different terms when you look at soccer and when you look at baseball. And, of course, you only find out how to talk about all that by watching the games.”

    (This reminds me of learning to watch NFL football and how my comments have changed over the years from confused questioning and mocking of the gravitas of the TV announcers to actually seeing the plays as they happen and being able to express admiration for some feat of skill. You don’t have to be an expert in a week or a month. In fact, the malfeasance of innocence and ignorance isn’t such a bad thing at first. It can help you see outside the matrix and often advanced users cannot do this.)

  • You can express your own sense of things….your way of seeing or your own particular experience.
  • Concentrate on the poem (and what it might be trying to do not what you think it should do).
  • You may need to pay less attention to detail in a long rambling poem than is required for a 13-line poem.
  • Don’t worry about finding the one true thing of a poem. A poem could have many complimentary or competing truths. (In fact, a lot of poems can be reduced to “it’s complicated.”)
  • This is a good reading tip too: notice how you are feeling when reading a poem. Sometimes other life events can influence your interpretations. Were you preoccupied with some other thoughts?
  • Preface comments with “I think” and “It seems to me” (although that should go without saying, it bears repeating when debates start up).
  • Don’t try to say everything at one go. Sprinkle thoughts throughout the conversation, (which is what a workshop poetry discussion is, a casual conversation not a presentation of genius in front of a thesis board).
  • Don’t be afraid to be critical, “there’s nothing sacred about it.” (This is debatable. Some people take this shit very seriously).
  • Don’t be afraid to ask questions instead of asserting answers all the time.
  • If you do assert a theory however, “to be convincing, you need to refer to a particular part of the poem—to words and lines.”
  • If you're not sure what to say, talk about the kids of words in the poem, the title, the beginning and ending.
  • See every conversation as practice.

This was good too: “Sometimes because they find poetry difficult and complicated, people make the mistake of talking or writing about it in an abstract, general, overcomplicated way. They think that being abstract and general is more serious and is the way to talk about difficult and important things—that being simple means you’re 'shallow' or uncomplicated or unintelligent. In fact, abstraction is often a way of being evasive…”

Writing Your Own Poems

  • Don’t write about “things you think you ought to care about.” (Write about what you do care about.)
  • Don’t worry about trying to “transform” what you care about into something abstractly meaningful, (or Poetic with a capital P as Tom Lux used to say, which is another way of saying, write small).
  • Plan it all out in advance or don’t, let the poem take you somewhere it wants to go. Sometimes beautiful accidents happen this way and you are taken to a much more meaningful place, along with your reader. (Another way is to plan and then be willing to abandon the plan if some other magic starts to happen.)
  • Remember that nothing is set in stone. (You have the rest of your life to change and revise it all.)
  • Put the poem down for a few weeks after finishing it, even months and then look at it again with a fresh head.
  • Read a lot of poetry. (Like Billy Collins says in his delightful Masterclass, this is the only way to find your unique voice….by encountering other unique voices over and over again.)
  • Try stream of consciousness writing. Let go of sense. (But then shape the result into some sense; the world is packed-full with nonsense poems so push farther. Make the poem sweat a little.)
  •  Try rule-based and formal projects. Try your hand at translations.
  • Find friends who you can share poems you write with. Give each other encouragement and feedback.

 

NaPoWriMo 2022 Wrap-up

May 1, 2022 / / 0 Comments
Andrew-Wyeth-Wind-from-the-Sea

Andrew Wyeth (হ্যা তারা)

Whew. Ok. So that's another NaPoWriMo in the bag. One more year to go.

Meanwhile, I’ve been collecting some final stats on this year’s set of poems.

There were:

  • Nine pretentious literary references 
    1. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
    2. Edna St. Vincent Millay
    3. Proust
    4. (twice)
    5. Cyrano de Bergerac
    6. Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo
    7. Theodor Adorno
    8. Wordsworth’s lake
    9. Svengali from Trilby
  • Two probably-misapplied psychological traits
  • Quantum mechanics
  • Words in five languages
    1. English
    2. French
    3. Spanish
    4. Italian
    5. Some Latin stuck in there

Two late arrivals displaced two planned poems, which changed our demos somewhat:

      • Songs with men: 24
      • Songs with women: 11

I had to gather images for all the Twitter posts and after a while I just decided to add them to the NaPoWriMo page. In the process I found this interesting thing about painter Andrew Wyeth’s  windows. 

Although I love all the songs I picked, I did regret not being able to find a spot for a song of Sara Bareilles’ with her vast array of very helpful and inspiring love songs. And to that point, lots of fascinating and magical things happened during the making of these poems but one of them was this: as I was lamenting the lack of Bareilles in this set, my music app shuffled up a Bareilles song that fit very movingly into one of the new Electrical Dictionary poems, which is a sister set of a sort to this group.

I was also able to create linkages between a few of these poems and some of the poems in “33 Women” from NaPoWriMo 2018 and we could revisit some of the lovely women there. So that was nice.

In related news, the Poetry Society of America is doing a "Song Cycle" series right now where their investigating the relationship of poetry to music in the opposite way, music inspired by poems.

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