Exploring the Digital Arts

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.

CFP: Teaching with Bernstein’s and Meyer’s Experiments and Google-Sculpture

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.

My Chapbook Gets Some Press and Pingbacks

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.

Book Review Accepted

My short review of Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet was recently accepted for inclusion in the next issue of Purdue’s literary journal, The Sycamore Review. It’s my second attempt at the book review, and I’m still trying to not be so positive all the time about the books I choose to review. But in this case, the praise was well deserved.

While writing the book review, I happened to read “What I See in the Silliman Project,” an essay from the mid-80’s by Stephen Rodefer reprinted in the most recent Chicago Review (54.3). It goes into much sharper detail and critique of the first three sections of The Alphabet. Much more incisive and comprehensive than I was able to get in 500-1000 words.