Poetry How-to Page

It occured to me that I neve ended up linking to the How-To page that I've created on this blog, so here's the link to it:

How To Create Poetry Using Various Technologies

It's a fairly brief description of some techniques but it has some ideas that mght be fun to try out. I tried to enhance a short fragment from one of my own poems using basic HTML code just to prove that it doesn't have to be a complicated process.

I'd love to see links to things that other have done, even if it's not inspired by the page.

Here is my HTML enhanced poem fragment in case you don't feel like going to a separate page:

love is but a nerve,

raw and stretched. I close

my eyes that are dark beetles

slowly wading through mud,

         hills space

and       of           undulate

before my eyes.

There is no luck to be

found here,

but a raw nerve

that quivers

within me

like wind gathering sand

along the horizon,

like a tightrope walker

forgetting the heavy shadows

that he casts on my dream.

Video Poetry Games

These have been created to take interactivity in poetry to a new level and I think that they are pretty fun (but somtimes confusing) to play.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-nelson/digital-poetry_b_824768.html#s242067&title=I_made_this

Has anyone tried playing these? Does it make poetry more engaging and fun for you?

I also saw some article about poetry and poetry related tasks featured in video games. It seems like an interesting idea to inspire a love of literature in kids who are busy playing games several hours a day. Do you think it would have worked for you if these existed when you were growing up?

Canadian Poet Expressed Through Spacing

Gwendolyn MacEwen was a Canadian poet who often used spacing in her poetry to create and control the rhythm of her poems. She is by far one of my favourite poets because although she utilized new technology in a way that enriched her writing, her poems were still full of colourful imagery, labyrinths of hidden meanings. She played with her audience, both in writing and reading her poems.

The Magician

finally then the hands must play mad parables
finally then, the fingers' genius
wave out what my poems have said;
finally then must the silks occur
                                                   plus rabbits
and the big umbrellas
be spun continually.

as you Lowe, in quiet irony
insire terrible skills of silks
                            or crash scarves vertically
as though miniature brains were held in fingertips
fantastic as of secrecy--

or my art being more a lie anyway
than the lie of these illusions
secreting realities in the twitching silks
or sacred sleeves
                           to twist or tamper them
to come out solid, in cubes or cups--
pull down then
                        silk avalanche of scarves
or play the cosmos on strings of human hair
                            as a wand cracks
and blinds belief and holds it knotted
         like an ugly necklace
         or a hopeless rope--

or you, Lowe, driving a spike through the head of a boy
as though magic were (and is)
a nail of steel to split the skull
                                                in either direction
to believe or not believe
is not the question.

finally then do all my poems become as crazy scarves
issuing from the fingers in a coloured mesh
and you, magician, stand as they fly around you
silent as Houdini who could escape from anything
except the prison of his own flesh.  

----------------------------------------------                  

She also wrote a prose-poem called 'Terror and Erebus', about an early expedition to the Northwest Passage. She wrote it for CBC radio in 1965. Here it is being rehearsed for an outdoor presentation. You can see how they take their cues from the writing, pausing where MacEwen broke her lines.Their rendition seems a bit comical and exagerated but the pauses originally allowed the mind to stay with the horrors experienced by the ship's crew:

Terror and Erebus

Meaning in poetry created with automatic generators

I decided that I'd play with one of the more sophisticated poetry generators that I've previously linked to on this blog. It's a kind of wild experiment that really made me feel like a deranged scientist measuring proportions of chemicals in the heat of the moment and never really knowing what the culminative effect of the chemicals will be.

I tried not to cheat and to choose words that are truly random and thematically unrelated to one another, but perhaps my attempts were futile because some part of my brain was already trying to predict how certain words would combine to form poems.

It's hard to say if this was truly a random poem generation experience. Even when I've done this with cut-out words and phrases from magazines, it didn't seem that random of a process. Here, i was hoping that the program would throw something random at me...and it gave me a taste of my own medicine...seeing as I chose many words that had to do with war, mythology and the spiritual planes.

This is what I got:

 



I can see meaning in this poem that has been generated without any conscious intention.

It is remarkable that a simple program has the capacity to write a thought provoking poem that can have emotional meaning to people and it can do so instantaneously. While a poem like this can take a human poet hours, days and even weeks to write and edit, the poetry generating programs can do so within the duration of a single human breath.

What's really extraordinary is that although the generators generate random sentences and cannot effectively determined the best sequences, a change in the arrangement of sentences in a generated poem can completely alter both meaning and mood of the poem, as illustrated by my example of a poem written by a program.

Although I was able to change words and choose from general moods and styles, I had no creative control over the poem that resulted from the experiment and yet, the result was still perfectly coherent, having both syntactic and poetic logic. This begs the question: can humans be taken out of the equation of poetry if a poem generated by machines can stir the emotions and provoke thought just as a human-made poem can?

Today, generators can utilize texts from news sites or randomly create texts from words chosen by a person. What is the future of poetry? Will having a varied and sophisticated vocabulary make someone sufficiently skilled to produce poetry that will be widely read? Is poetry going to be an industry in which craftspeople are replaced by machines and machine operators? Will we celebrate unusual insights offered by poems created by computer programs or recoil in horror from the inhuman creativity machines' cleverness?

The result is often something a lot like the cut-up techniques such as those employed by members of the Dada and Surrealism movements, appearing on the page through some unconscious process as if striving to mimic how meaning can be formed from accidental associations through proximity.

While scientists maintain that creativity cannot be produced in a linear way, the method appears to work well enough for poetry production. What are we to understand from this? Is English a language of nebulous meanings? Do our meaning -creating brains simply fill in the blanks between poetic generalizations? Or perhaps our emotions and thoughts are not as complex and unique as we'd like to believe they are?

Contemporary Video Poetry

I really struggled with finding oones that I actually like so I wanted to share the ones I thought were particularly good.

This is a surreal piece about how women fit into the urban landscape:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywkP5L3D24&feature=plcp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3D19D9Q2zE

Interesting idea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwjUfPhGvy0&feature=related

I think this could have been more dynamic and the conneection between written word and visuals could have been more interesting. Still, this is a lot better made than most of the video poems I've seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6BZDSRhkmQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKASmayhb7k

I feel like people are trying too hard to be clever with all this post modern pretense. I've yet to see a video poem that reallly communicates emotion effectivvely...any kind of emotion, even utter boredom and apathy. Nothing. In my opinion, the above at least come close to redemption of humanity.

I will not give up though, because I think there must be good digital poetry out there and it deserves to be heard and seen!

Random Poetry Generators

Is poetry only the domain of organic, meaning-making beings? Can only organic matter create original writing in response to input of information? Is it the same as poetry derived from human experiencce? Most of the time, the poetry that is created by generators is absurd and no more than an amusing curiousity, but some programmers developed more elegant and complex solutions over the past few years.

I found a few good generators online:

http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm

http://www.languageisavirus.com/automatic_poetry_generator.html

http://poetry.namegeneratorfun.com/

The following is a hilarious Gothic poetry generator:

http://www.deadlounge.com/poetry/created.html

You can change words and themes in this one. A lot to play with:

http://www.jelks.nu/poetry/dom/

and here's some information about a more ambitious project involving a program that can infer grammar and syntax rules based on internet texts. The program starts out as a blank slate, pulling words out of pieces of writing and using the rules that govern language to compose its own poetry:

http://www.alpha60.de/poetrymachine/poetrymachine.html

Enjoy! :D

Silliman's Blog

Ron Silliman is a contemporary experimental poet who writes eloquent and succinct comentary about poetry in his blog. He regularly posts links to interesting documentaries, projects, and poetic movements and theories. This is an invaluable resource to anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry, how it came to be what it is and what it might become.

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.ca/

For the sake of convenience, I am also posting this on the side in my links section.

I've had a chance to look through the film section and watch some of the films and the trailers and I thought that, for the most part, the section is well set up. There is a variety in the content and all the videos are embedded within the posts. In some cases, the videos are accompanied by a synopsis and sometimes he even offers his own thoughts on the execution and the story of the films he chooses.

Some of the spoilers irk me. I think that it is not necessary to have a complete rundown of everything that happens within a movie. With blog technology and sophisticated features, it isn't difficult to figure out how to post a basic synopsis and link to an extended posts that includes in-depth commentary for those who have seen the movie and are looking for opinions about it.

I also don't like that several of the links are dead although the posts are still on the same page. I think that if a post has a video as its main point of interest, it's a sign of respect to the viewer to ensure that everything works properly. Otherwise, it may be better to just offer commentary. Nevertheless, most of the videos work and offer thought provoking material. Silliman goes out of his way to discuss both merits and weak points of the movies he is discussing.

Ron Silliman keeps to the consistent theme of art and poetry related posts in his film section. He also remains true to his focus on contemporary poets. So much of what is posted in blogs on the internet -poetry related or not- is a tangle of random information that can be difficult to process because of its lack of structure and general purpose, but I think that Ron's readers have a good idea of what they'll find while clicking through the pages of his blog.

While the film page has a clear focus, it is full of little-known work and interviews that nobody would think of looking for online.

I probably enjoyed Chris Marker's atmospheric movie the most. Such early experiments in production fascinate me because based on what I've seen in the paast, I think that in the infancy of film making, people felt more free to experiment and there were less inflexible expectations from audiences and production studios. This movie only reaffirmed my initial impression. Although directors were more technologically limited, they found ways to be innovative in their sequencing, narration styles and soundtrack choices/creation.

Of course, now we look back and see the limitations: the jagged movement, the slow and awkward transitions, all of those things that would make us ask for a refund in a modern-day movie theatre. To me, this was the painful labour of film making, of an industry which has matured immensely. There is something poetic about how the images float and I wonder if the changes in transitional rhythms are intentional or just the result of technological limitations.

Although this blog is supposed to be about cutting edge, avant garde experimental poetry of today, it's always fun to climb backwards through the tunnel of time and witness the meagre beginnings of what later evolved in million-dollar film production. I only wished Silliman had shown us more experimental and low-budget, low key experimentation that is happening all around us right now thanks to broadcasting services such as Youtube and Vimeo.

The Xenotext Experiment - Encoding Poetry in DNA

Here is a video in which he explains his project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyCQfBZwRPA&feature=relmfu

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole process: Christian Bok's project involves encoding poetry in DNA of bacteria. The thought of it makes me feel a little queasy because mutations in organism may be unpredictable when a foreign genetic code is introduced. I'm sure that it's just paranoia on my part exacerbated by the fact that I'm reading Margaret Atwood's 'Oryx and Crake' at the moment. The scientists who are working on the project with Christian Bok surely know what they are doing and would destory any life forms that can infect other organisms with viruses.

The dangers are there of course, but I can understand why conducting such an experiment is incredibly tantilizing. For a long time, poetry has been largely the domain of mystics, romantics, sentimentalists. None of these are necessarily negative worldviews to express through poetry, but there is a negative byproduct that is also partially a result of how we conceptualize science as unemotional and dispassionate. The by-product is that our emotional world is tied up in myth and an almost obsessive involvement with the subjective self.

Most people don't think of science as having anything to do with poetry, and it's a shame. While reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, I was struck by how poetic some of the paragraphs appeared to me, especially ones pertaining to slow time. Science can be poetic, and poetry can be scientific. A poetry anthology discovered in the school library confirmed my sentiments - the volume contained a selection of poetry inspired by the scientific discoveries of the past years.

I appear to be contradicting myself now, but I am not -- most people, from my experience, do not even know that such things exist. To them, poetry is still largely associated with Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson. Again, this is not a bad thing to be unaware of new poetry. It does not reflect purely on a person's character because everyone has different interests, but it does unfortunately mean that this growing trend of seeing the poetry within scientific processes is largely left unnoticed and not many people experience the benefits of seeing the beauty and mystery contained in something that they probably wanted to forget about after passing grade 11 science.

Christian Bok takes this new poetic interest in science a step further by using incredibly profound and beautiful processes of DNA encoding to create a container for poems that may even outlive our civilizations. That is what he is hoping for and he also talks about extraterrestrial communication using this method of encoding linguistic messages.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about experiment is that his hope for mutation and spontaneous generation of poetry has been realized last year. His poem caused the bacterium to write its own poem in response to the original piece. This means that we can not only store poetry for indefinite periods of time (using this process) but also use it to generate new poetry.

I am, however, a little skeptical about that last part. Such poetry generation is coded to be constructed much like the poetry generated by computers, and the bulk of that turned out to be gramatically correct but meaningless, because meaning is more than the sum of obeying syntax and grammar rules. Sometimes meaning is more profound when these rules are disobeyed (as in concrete poetry), so it's not sufficient and not necessary for creating meaning.

It appears that the beauty of Bok's poetry is in the process itself; in the integration of something that is often overlooked as a subject of admiration lies the poetry of the possible implications.

I'd have to see more than a line or two from this project and I am going to remain open minded about the content of the poetry resulting from this experiment. It's refreshing to see people trying to bridge the gap between the world of science and the world of emotions. Christian Bok talks about his project as an attempt to extend poetry beyond the confines of a book and thus prolong its life and infect the universe with its explicit and implicit meanings.

If this possibility is not as poetic, I don't know what is.

Integration of Technology in Poetry - First Impressions

The integration of technology in poetry is a fairly new concept for me, especially as it is approached in the 21st century. Although I am awar of the integral role that new technology always played in liberating poetry from its past limitations of form and syntax, I was not aware that a huge body of such experimental poetry existed before the 70's, or that it has burgeoned and expanded in different directions as it has.

The other night, my search for experimental poetry yielded a myriad of different poems, among them interactive pieces and poems in which an attempt has been made to follow a basic structure of simple web coding. It was a little overwhelming to try and trace the origins while getting a general idea of how each is developing its own branches and establishing a place for itself in the minds (and maybe hearts?) of poetry readers.

It's a little intimidating to just begin writing about a topic when I know next to nothing about it. So far, my blogging endeavours focused on topics of familiarity but alll of a sudden, I have to blog about something new and very complex. It's kind of like coming upon a spiderweb and having to find its centre and where it begins. It's impossible. Maybe it's not even necessary. Maybe a more holistic and open ended exploration will leave me with a deeper appreciation of how artists have used technology to build and enhance their works of art.

After all, a majority of such experimental poetry is a deprarture from linear thought and conventional structure. It's meant to be taken in as little bits and pieces of thought and reassembled within the mind of the reader. It's an invitation for interpretation and dialogue. Sometimes its unnerving even - maybe an invitation to step back from what grade school teachers drilled into our minds regardng proper models of self-expression.

All in all, it's an invitation to play and engage the imagination. The format is different. The words often collide and create unexpected reactions. How can I expect to tackle this topic in the usual way? I suppose I could write reflection poems and essays and indulge in reading long theoretical papers that analyze the function of technology in poetry but I don't think any of these things alone would do the topic justice.

Besides, this is all very new to me and I don't feel that I have covered enough ground at this point to be able to expound on this topic in an engaging way.

I can only hope that you will join me in exploring the possibilities of integrating technology in poetry in meaningful ways.

My initial impression of poems that explore this relationship between poetry and technology is that there is a certain playfulness about these pieces that cannot be accomplished without the technology that is utilized but then the poems hold all meaning in playing with structures of language but onten the resulting texts don't offer meaning of their own in the traditional sense.

What is actually written on the page takes a back seat to how it is written and how individual readers react to the pieces. Many of the poems are not even written in the language that we customarily reserve for poetic expressions. It's hard to pin point what it is that is lacking from many of these poems but its an issue of lacking fluidity in establishing relation between the different parts. It's as if a child deconstructed something beautiful and forgot to reassemble it, as if mankind has grown tired with its ability and drive for creating meaning and conceptualizing beauty.

This is the case with most of the interactive poetry games that I've seen and a lot of concrete poems that I found over the last few days. Perhaps I have not yet cracked the codes of these poetic forms and that's why I can only see the surface play of reflections...I like to think that there might be a deeper meaning and I am still open to it, but I feel that the greatest meaning of poetry as always been the relationship between the lyrical qualities of a poem and its inner and outer layers of meaning.

This important interplay between the elements of a poem is not completely lost in video poems, which I will probably dedicate a whole post to! For now, I'd recommend taking a look at the video poems in the link on the side bar of my blog for an idea of how moving images can add new dimensions to poems. Not all of them are good by any means, and good is a subjectivve and vauge assessment, but the few included do offer something in terms of content and the seamless integration of technology within poetry.

I'd like to remind you that his is just an initial reflection, and is not meant to be a serious commentary on a subject that I am not qualified to write about in any serious way. This will probably end up being more of a database of experimental poetry and maybe a home to some of my own experiments at some point.

Happy Long Weekend!