After several attempts over two months, I finally got Gnoetry running on my comrade Chad Hardy’s Mac. He is now posting his work with Gnoetry alongside Eric Elshtain’s, Gregory Fraser’s and mine at Gnoetry Daily.
Check it out.
Major updates, revisions and extensions have been made to my Mchain blog, now entitled Markovian Parallax Generate. Some of the most important changes were made to better promote the distribution and use of two of the digital writing programs that I have been using for several years, Mchain and Gnoetry 0.2.
The goal of Markovian Parallax Generate is to spread the use of Mchain, Gnoetry and the digital writing process in poetry as widely as possible. On top of that, I plan to develop new programs and host them on the blog. Feedback is welcomed and encouraged, especially from new users. Drop a comment there to let me know how you react to writing with programs such as these. It opened my eyes to new possibilities in language and writing, and my wish is that it do the same for others too.
New and Updated Pages:
Less than a week left in St. Lucia now. It’s been a nice visit. I’ve suffered some from headaches and the usual mood swings, but you can’t take a vacation from everything, can you. I’ve been to the beach several more times now, and into and around Castries some more, too. I’m developing a decent tan.
Just last week I really started to settle into things on the island, but I am looking forward to returning to my own space and my own place in the U.S. I think I could live here just fine if things turn out that way. “White Bwoi” could get used to this place.
Now, the pics:
Kay's Parents, Patricia and George Goddard Jr., and I having breakfast.
Having a Piton beer at the Lime on the Bay at Rodney Bay.
The pile of puppies underneath the house. They were born just before we arrived.
Face, the proud mother, watching as the puppies are bathed.
Students assembled in the hot sun at Ave Marie Primary / Infant School where Avril teaches.
A great beach, the Ramp at Rodney Bay.
I lumber towards the sea.
A sand crab.
Posing in the shade by the beach.
Kay looking lovely in the shade.
UFO's are so common in St. Lucia, they have their own signs. Watch out!
Horses grazing near Pigeon Point. Tourists were riding them in the sea nearby. I don't get it.
The howto that I’ve been getting ready and testing for a month now is posted at my digital writing blog, recently redubbed Markovian Parallax Generate.
Howto: Installing Gnoetry 0.2 On Any Platform will guide any of you who are interested in doing just that: downloading and getting Gnoetry 0.2 working on a computer that runs on the Windows, Max OS X or Ubuntu Linux platforms.
I’d love to see as many people using Gnoetry as possible, which is why I’ve made this howto. Whether you think you’re a poet or not, it doesn’t matter. You can think of it as a game, if you like, and the way you play the game is to interact with and enjoy language on any and every possible level. It’s all about the word play – literally.
I’m beginning my Python self-education this week while on vacation, with the intention of creating new programs to augment the ones I’ve been using to write digital poetry for the last three years (e.g. Gnoetry and Mchain). I’m starting with How to Think Like a Computer Science and working my way out from there. For shits and giggles, I was doing a Google search for info on python text processing +poetry and found a course description of the course I’ve dreamed of taking/teaching for the last year or so.
Digital Writing with Python is being taught this Summer in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) by Adam Parrish (check out his website – cool stuff). The course description:
This course introduces the Python programming language as a tool for writing digital text. This course is specifically geared to serve as a general-purpose introduction to programming in Python, but will be of special interest to students interested in poetics, language, creative writing and text analysis. Weekly programming exercises work toward a midterm project and culminate in a final project. Python topics covered include: functions; object-oriented programming; functional programming (list comprehensions, recursion); getting data from the web; displaying data on the web; parsing data formats (e.g., markup languages); visualization and interactivity with Python. Poetics topics covered include: character encodings (and other technical issues); cut-up and re-mixed texts; the algorithmic nature of poetic form (proposing poetic forms, generating text that conforms to poetic forms); transcoding/transcription (from/to text); generative algorithms: n-gram analysis, context-free grammars; performing digital writing. Prerequisites: Introduction to Computational Media or equivalent programming experience.
Summer Session II begins on June 29, so if you’re in New York and interested in innovative writing techniques, check it out. If my plans work out well, I’ll be in New York in August or September trying to get a job and exploring a digital arts/poetry/jazz scenes. Otherwise I would be there. If I could afford it now after the M.F.A. Sounds like a fantastic course.
P.S. – I’ve been putting off finalizing the cross-platform Gnoetry installation howto, but I think I’ll put it up in the next week or so. Something to look forward to.
For my family and friends back in the States, here are some pics. I’m sure there will be some more to come.
Me on the laptop, writing or surfing the internet. Nothing new here.
The beach near the airport just north of Castries.
The view from the Morne overlooking Castries.
Sun on water.
Me, still chubby from the thesis year, after bathing in the sea.
Kay and Avril talking under an almond tree.
Kay smiling.
I’ll be back in St. Lucia again this year, this time for a month. We won’t be staying in Castries this time, but at Kay’s parent’s house in Monier, about 10 minutes outside of the city. There have been a few issues getting our flight confirmed, but if all goes now as planned, we’ll be in St. Lucia at 2:30 or so tomorrow afternoon.
I might post some while I’m there, but don’t count on it. I’m working on a howto for installing gnoetry on Windows and Mac systems using Wubi and/or VMWare with Ubuntu 9.04. I’ll definitely put that up after its tested successfully.
I’m becoming more and more curious about how digital poetry (or computer-assisted poetry, whatever you want to call it) might intersect with digital music and visual art. I was launched down this path in part by Vanessa Place and Robert
Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms, which talks about conceptual poetry in terms of appropriation and sampling–terms I had not ever associated with what I do with Gnoetry and Mchain, but which are clearly appropriate.
So, while digging out of this post-MFA slump I’m in, I’ve been acquiring some software to play around with. For laptop-music, I’m going to check out Fruity Loops (or FL Studio), Ableton and Propellerhead. I know almost nothing about these programs, but we’ll see what I can do. There are plenty of tutorials out there.
Also, I discovered this open-source data-visualization software called Processing via the art of C.E.B. Reas. I am always amazed to see how artists in other media have been working with programs and processes in similar ways to me. I do this stuff because it seems relevant and exciting, and I always find others who have had the same ideas.
So, summer projects to mess with while I take a few months off and see if I can find work in New York City.
I’ve been thinking about this paper I’m going to write about poetry writing teaching pedagogy. A call for papers (CFP) went out on the English grad listserve a few months ago for papers by graduate students on teaching creative writing. I’ve taught two semester of the English 205 course at Purdue now, and hey, perhaps I will teach some more workshops/lectures in the future. I also think my approach to teaching the poetry section of the course was very beneficial to my students learning to approach poetry in a more engaged and exciting way.
Basically, I structured the half-semester of poetry around Bernstein’s inspired compilation and update of Bernadette Meyer’s “Experiments” from the 1970’s. It was the spirit of these experiments that was most beneficially applied to the classroom, which is a spirit of open-minded interaction with the world, ideas and language, and in some ways a kind of responsiveness training [not sure what I mean by that yet]. The readings for the course were mostly chosen to correspond with certain exercises, usually as a sample of what kind of poem might come from the specific exercise(s) chosen for a particular class. An example of this was to choose Silliman’s “BART” (from Age of Huts (compleat)) and one of Mac Low’s Twenties poems as examples of an attention poem (Experiment #41). I also combined two exercises and had my students collaborate on an alphabet poem (#17 + #21), using the model of Lyn Hejinian and Jack Collom’s Abecedarian’s Dream collabs from Situations, Sings.
But the most interesting exercise, which was not included in the 90’s version of the “Experiments” list, was #71, the Google Poem or Google Sculpture. I wrote about the exercise I created on the blog earlier this year (”Teaching Google Sculpting at Purdue“), which used K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation as a model. (Bernstein’s exercise gives a few more options than mine did.) Some of them responded very well to the exercise, and came out with some very exciting poems. One of my students later reported that she has since done three more google sculptures “for fun,” which is a wonderful thing to hear.
I chose to teach using “Experiments” as my model in order to counteract the mainstream lyric workshop model that dominates even early poetry education. Most undergraduate students have no sense at all of contemporary poetry, and most are exposed by their professors/instructors to only a very narrow range of approaches. I employed along with “Experiments” a reading list of poems from nearly every contemporary aesthetic I could teach in 8 weeks. I did not seek to indoctrinate my students in the aesthetic of avant-garde poetry, but I equally chose to not indoctrinate them in the mainstream. The goal was to show them that poetry is an engagement with language, that words as sound and signifier are all around them, and that there are many, many ways to create a poem and many different voices to employ besides the self(poet)-conscious/self(poet)-obsessed subject inherited from Romanticism.
There. I just wrote some of my paper.
I wish I had been able at the time to use Gnoetry and mchain (statistical text analysis/genesis programs) in the classroom, too, but there were some software issues due to Microsoft’s institutional monopoly. Perhaps in the future.
Eric Elshtain sent me a notice a few weeks ago about this little bit of press that Beard of Bees and my recent chapbook publication received during National Poetry Month at Publish Chicago. It’s nice to get some notice.
In a similar vein, I recently received a pingback on my publication announcement on imperfect offering, one of Katherine Parrish’s blogs on digital writings and teaching poetry. The post “digital matters” links to some poetry generating PERL scripts and to a whole bunch of Interactive Fiction (IF) sites, a realm that I had yet to be exposed to. As I keep finding more blogs, articles and books discussing/using digital forms or programs, I become more and more convinced that there is a movement of young writers, academics and writer-academics who are intensely interested in how digitally- or computationally-assisted methods (or whatever term you prefer) can be and are being used in the composition of various literatures.
Personally, I think its about time that more poets and fiction writers start to pick up some of the more accessible programming languages like Python or PERL and start creating their own software. I plan to learn Python and start modifying existing scripts/programs myself as the next stage in my own writing. (You can see the program I had my brother write for me over at my other blog). The possibilities are vast, not only “generated” poetry (a term I do not apply to my own poetry and computer collaborations), but for compositional processes that incorporate the forms, formats, languages, and syntax of new media and text-generating tools into the writer’s engagement with language, the imagination, and the world in all the wealth of their diversity and depth.
Of course we cannot avoid the demands of relevance and insight in our art, but these tools are like any other: they open new possibilities for the artist to engage with the art, and I have found from my own writing experiences that the use of certain programs and processes have opened up my work to a more intense engagement with the political, spiritual and historical realms than the postmodern lyric ever allowed for me. I hope it may have the same result for others.
