Proverbs 2

(Source: Proverbs 1. Program: Charles O. Hartman’s DIASTEXT)

1
Tough, the spilled moon, blue black you sleep; discomfiture falls worlds.

2
Ache five wet whithers of orange, son, then blue dawn.

3
Counsel. Cry through three corona.

4
Lean magic: dogma distant from oak.

5
Hoarfrost, frost crisp as is hung your heart.

6
The seed, son: windshield of magic!

7
Moon perennials see our ache; you, son, ache from Jacob.

8
Disconsolation: the eye where stars die.

9
Windows from disconsolation? Open. Lean.

10
Distant hormones, distant beast.

11
Open orange before blue.

Filed under: DIASTEXT, digital poetry, poetry

The Poet’s Task and Authorship

I’m reading Charles O. Hartman’s Virtual Muse (originally recommended to me in this thread on readings in digital poetics by one Eric Scovel). And before I go any further, I have to say this: the clarity of the writing is simply stunning.

Now, more so I can (hopefully) remember these quotations later, here are a couple things I read today that struck a chord:

Quoting Howard Nemerov: “The poet’s task has generally been conceded to be hard, but it may be so described as to make it logically impossible: Make an object recognizable as an individual of the class p for poem, but make it in such a way that it resembles no other individual of that class.”

As a philosophy major and poet, I really laughed hard at that.

A touch of radical democracy, even of anarchy, is implicit in today’s ubiquitous desktop computers. True, the proliferation threatens new ways of regimenting workers, and so on. But potentially, the microcomputer revolution of the late seventies extended the social revolutions of the previous decade. [...] In this atmosphere we might expect the privelage and heirophany associated with Authorship and Authority to come under scrutiny.

And, somewhat more specific to my current general poetic state:

[S]econdary creation tends to make writers (and other “creative” people) nervous. Your self gets tied up in what you make. A computer that becomes too autonomous begins to feel like a usurper. Just who’s in charge here after all? For instance, [a simple "poetry composer"] program raised questions about authorship. Exactly who wrote [the poems]?Me? The computer? The program? Myself through the computer?

Filed under: digital poetry, poetry

Portions

Read Write Poem is my new favorite online community. Dana, the founder, and her staff are doing a great job running the place, and its members are proving a welcoming, talkative bunch. Interesting things are happening there all the time, so I highly encourage you to take a look.

Plug aside, I took part in RWP’s November mini-challenge: the build-a-poem.

What follows is less a single poem than five semi-related poems, all of which were composed in collaboration with the program Mchain (a text generator that utilizes Markov chains). The “base” source text for each poem was Thoreau’s Walden. Each poem also had a secondary source text. In order, the secondary source texts were Getting Acquainted with the Trees, The Man Whom the Trees Loved, Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground, Trees and Other Poems, and The Trees of Pride.

I am calling the poem/collection “Portions”.

1. Repastination

It can be obtained
at the matter
suggests,
beside that probably
harder still:
a field of water.

The best
is white
but only a plain tree
lover.
I have only
one of the blossoms.

Some trees maintain
such a continuous show
of their arts
to persuade me to go
at large again.

We have come to this
continual motion,
repastination.
Rhode Island Greening apple
is unpopular here.

There is the great workhouse
of the last years
that which was
soundest part,
though a good man to say:
when I began to live
was that I was.

Filed under: digital poetry, Mchain, poetry, Read Write Poem