A friend of mine in the PhD program at Purdue kindly asked if I would come into her ENGL 407 class (Introduction to Poetry Writing) and give a lecture on something related to my own experimental work and/or anything relating to Flarf and conceptual writing. I of course accepted.

Read the handout of my Lecture notes here (PDF)

Something which prompted her asking me to do this was her decision to teach the July/August issue of Poetry Magazine to her class the following week. She hoped that I might provide some context for their reading of the Flarf and Conceptual Writing section of that issue, edited by Kenneth Goldsmith, which is online at the Poetry Foundation website.

My lecture was centered on Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” which none of them had yet encountered in their courses. After a brief discussion of the major division in contemporary English-language poetry between the Mainstream (official verse culture, School of Quietude) and the experimental (avant-garde, post-avant, flarf, conceptual, Oulipo, Language School, etc.) and some relevant vocabulary, we read and discussed excerpts from Barthes’ essay and two other poetics essays by Marjorie Perloff (“The Pleasures of Déjà Dit: Citation, Intertext and Ekphrasis in Recent Experimental Poetry”) and Craig Dworkin (his introduction to The UbuWeb :: Anthology of Conceptual Writing).

We used the ideas generated from this discussion to read several poems that eschew traditional ideas of authorship by various means of appropriation or constraint, all of which are available online:

1. Andrei Gheorghe – The Longest Poem in the World
2. Christian Bök – Eunoia
3. Jen Bervin – Nets
4. K. Silem Mohammad – Sonnagrams (and some more here)
5. Eric Elshtain, Gregory Fraser, Chad Hardy, Matthew Lafferty and Eric Scovel – Gnoetry Daily

The discussion went very well, and it seemed that many students in the class had interest in these types of poetry. We briefly discussed at the end the issue of appropriation and whether one is “really writing” when using such techniques. Using Barthes you can respond that even traditionally authored texts are still intertextual and respond to all kinds of cultural texts, even if this appropriation is implicit not explicit as in most of the texts we looked at. Also, using Mac Low’s argument that Pleasure is the purpose of making poetry (read an excerpt from his “Pleasure and Poetry”) or any kind of art, why would the means of textual production exclude it from judgement based upon whether the texts are relevant, meaningful and/or pleasurable to the writer and the audience?

The whole experience highlighted for me even more clearly my desire to teach issues of poetics and experimental poetry to students, and to ask them not simply to admire and replicate the poetry of the dominant Mainstream poetic figures of our times (what creative writing workshops do), but ask them to think about what poetry is, what texts are, what the role of the author is or might be, and how these ideas might factor into the way the write and live in the world. I think a curriculum that focused on the idea of writing first and the craft of writing later would better prepare writers to make timely and original works of art instead of lyrical reproductions of Romanticism superimposed upon our Techno-PoMo landscape.

Update your links and bookmarks. Gnoetry Daily has moved over to WordPress and been given a makeover. There’s plenty going on over there now: I’m writing several serial works, Chad’s pumping out the Zapatagraphy, and new posts by Eric Elshtain, Gregory Fraser and Matthew Lafferty go up often.

New members are always welcome! If you are interested e-mail me at escovel@gmail.com. The software is free, although some assembly is definitely required (see my howtos at Markovian Parallax Generate).

No, it isn’t Talk Like a Pirate Day (Wait, is it? Did I miss it again?). More like Read Like a Pirate Day, I suppose. If you’d like to read a lot more theory (literary, philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, etc.) and share some with others, go to AAAARG.org and register. It’s free. Amazing resource. Enuf sed.

Power to the PDF!

A friend of mine (and fiction writer) asked me to give some suggestions of contemporary poetry books to read, and I was a little surprised at how easily my first suggestion came. Hands down, it’s Christian Bök’s Eunoia. A bonus too: it’s online for free. Not only does it break the conventions of the publishing world by giving itself out free (and before it was in a print version, too, for that matter); but it can be heard performed in its entirety by the author, too [visit Christian Bök's page at PennSound].  If this is new to you, and you’re curious about new poetry, start here. Unfortunately, a lot of what is labeled as poetry and is available in bookstores will likely disappoint you after this, but hey, there’s always EPC and UbuWeb, and they’re free, too.

To be plain, this book is a masterpiece and gift to (and from) the English language. If you want to demonstrate how poetry can be delightful and not just dumpy, and how poetry can serve the language, the reader, and the listener and not just end up as a neo-Romantic lineated letter from a perception-perceptive, experience-experiencing, feeling-feeling author.

If only it was normal that poems create experience and not merely relate it!

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt.  This bankruptcy is not only financial.  It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making.  No one knows what the university is for anymore.  We feel this intuitively.  Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market.  These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Something truly amazing has started in California that may be a sign of a growing movement in the U.S. Even more interesting than their activities so far (see Occupy California for updates, and this IndyMedia page for photos of the first occupation on September 24th, and We Want Everything for the “critical theory and content from the nascent ucsc occupation movement”) is the manifesto behind it, which lays out the vacuousness and banality of the current system and of our lives trapped in it.

The words above open that manifesto, and they are just the beginning of an effort to disillusion University students (graduate students particularly) and jumpstart a real movement of protest and resistance that aims to spread outside of the University and throughout the nation. Behind their occupation is the growing awareness since the 2008 financial collapse that everything is bankrupt, “Everything is Broken,” as Bob Dylan put it, and that there is no hope in fixing anything without changing everything.

Reading their manifesto, Communiqué from an Absent Future, is exhilirating, especially for someone who has just struggled for more than a year to figure out how to say all that was wrong with graduate student life and work in this country so as to convince grad students to get out of their ivory tower fantasies and stand up for better conditions and wages, and maybe even for a better world in general. Although the GEO campaigns at Purdue did pressure to the University to marginally reduce the ridiculous fees they were charging graduate students, they did not contribute to any greater change or more than a marginal improvement in the financial shithole that they are placed in by the University. But all of the deeper issues and problems are all spelled out in this Communiqué, and at a pregnant time for change. Now almost everybody is being fucked over by or shut out of the system; everybody except the super-rich are feeling the pinch, are losing jobs or homes themselves, or watching people they know falling off the precipice that looms closer and closer.

There are too many potentially quotable sections in this essay, so just go read the whole thing if you feel it resonates with your situation. It is openly Marxist/communist in its language and sentiment, mostly in the anti-Capitalist sense, though the calls for a “free society” echo the Declaration of Independence more than the Communist Manifesto. Below is the opening of the third section:

We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.
Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms.  We demand not a free university but a free society.  A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.

I hope something comes of this, and I hope it doesn’t just degenerate into calls for reform than end up changing nothing. I hope more students, workers, professionals and unemployed come to see the mutual grimness of their situations, shed their feelings of hopelessness and/or delusions about “making it” and work together for some common good–something sorely missing is our politics and our society.

“Off The Shelf: Finding the pieces that turn writing into poetry,” by Matthew Zapruder.

Thanks to Ron Silliman for linking this on his blog. This seems like it would be a great resource for instructors teaching introduction to poetry courses, or anybody else new to poetry. It does a good job filling in crucial history of the formal shift in English language poetry from the old days of rhyme and meter to our more contemporary (in)formal tendencies. I know I had a few students who seemed determined to write like Alexander Pope, Edgar Allen Poe or Emily Dickenson who might benefit from this. Zapruder also connects poets to visual artists–a connection which I think is good to encourage in young writers’ minds–and introduces some helpful ways of thinking about the discursive element of poetry, the level of statement and idea, instead of focusing only on the formal aspects of writing.

Some quotable moments:

For about a year, I carried around a rhyming dictionary, writing terrible sonnets, lousy sestinas, atrocious villanelles, abysmal pantoums. I felt like I was working, which was good, but it was also painful and embarrassing to write so much bad poetry.

I didn’t realize then that I was doing my own clumsy version of what art students do when they learn to paint. Now every time I go to the museum I see at least one of them with a sketchbook, copying the great paintings, and it makes sense to me. I’m glad I did it, even though nothing I wrote was any good.

One thing I do notice about my poems is that, though they might not have overt formal elements, there is always a rhythm that develops, subtly, in the voice of the speaker. Maybe something more like a cadence. Most poetry is “formal” in that way.

And I think, secretly, that my poems actually do rhyme. It’s just that the rhyme is what I would call “conceptual,” that is, not made of sounds, but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn’t have expected, and to make the reader or listener, even if just for a moment, feel the complexity and disorder of life, and at the same time what Wallace Stevens called the “obscurity of an order, a whole.”

I would only suggest that conceptual rhythm be added to the idea of conceptual rhyme. The most interesting poetry these days, for me at least, must be engaging on this level–of patterns of thought, the play (or disruption, or explosion) of signs, of making words mean elsewise, of making statements or impressions that are  surprising to both reader and author–and only after that do I admire its formal, linguistic or aural ingenuity. Alternately, I would also say that I have used formal, linguistic and aural constraints to give my writing a framework within which these “conceptual” elements might better flourish. In either case, the conceptual level of works end up taking precedence over the other (still essential) elements; i.e. I would not consider the work to be good without perfection on that level, though I might tolerate a lack or have more flexibility with the rest.

The education in literature Americans receive through high school is overall totally inadequate at giving young people the necessary foundation to make it an important part of their mental lives (if they are allowed these). Poetry suffers especially, and I have seen it in undergraduates that know nothing of poetry after 1900. Maybe this article will help to make up for this gap in understanding, or at least point them in a more relevant and timely direction. And just maybe, after reading this article, jumps to more experimental “forms” of poetry and works of conceptual poetry might not be so difficult for students to make.

So yeah, I’m tweeting away these days. Tweets of exactly 140 characters (including spaces and line breaks). They’re on the side of the page and on my Twitter page. I’m not sure if these are poems or just stupidity, but I’m bored and I need some other outlet for my energy.

Let me know if you enjoy them or hate them. I’ll let you know if you’re awesome or a dumb dumb head.

I first became aware of Scantily Clad Press in March when Chad directed me to Stan Apps’ chapbook Grover Fuel. I didn’t take much notice of the press, as the chapbook was up on Issuu and I wasn’t too curious at the time to look any further.

The chapbooks in their catalog, though, testify to a fairly radical/edgy editorial aesthetic, far more interesting than most of the poetry you can get in journals these days. If you’re looking for poets-with-names (in post-avant/flarf/whatever circles at least), you can read some new work by Nada Gordon or, if you haven’t yet, Stan Apps. But there’s plenty of work from poets you haven’t heard of for you to discover, too.

I’m sending them a manuscript today, so maybe there’ll be another unheard-of there to read soon.

Cross yer fingers.

Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII (1966)

You can read my current poetic project, The Same, currently being published serially at Gnoetry Daily. I might be pulling five or six of them soon so I can send them out for publication in print journals, but for now they’re all available to read, even the ones I’m not going to include in the final edit.

The poems are all written using the Gnoetry 0.2 program. There is currently a pool of 19 source texts, of which I more or less arbitrarily select three for each poem. The source texts are mostly from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century, and focus on islands, continental philosophy, religion and scientific discovery. The form I have chosen is three eight-line stanzas in blank verse. As a further constraint, I have barred all personal and personal possessive pronouns to the best of my ability. The titles are taken from each poem’s first two words, which are “the ______.”

As each poem develops, stanza by stanza, several themes arise from the beginning object (“the ______”) and are explored semantically and/or aurally and brought into relationship with each other. Syntax is broken or twisted to suit the building of these relationships, with the hope to creating an impression or understanding that rises above – while dwelling within – the words and ideas.

Currently the project is being influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil, whose themes and perceptions seem to be eerily in line with my own. What is meant by “the same” in this project is meant to be multiple, but I think it is something that is wrong, perhaps the “profound indifference” of contemporary consumer culture; and possibly a solution, already present, ubiquitous, secret. Are these poems definitions? The opposite? What is the opposite of a definition, and would the imposition of anti-definitions be a meaningful act? These are the questions I’m working through right now.

In any case, enjoy the poems!

Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn

Tomorrow I’ll be flying to New York City for a 10 day visit. Besides going to see a saxophone orchestra, the Greg Osby 6tet, and possibly the Colbert Report (cross your fingers) the Vandermark 5, I’ll be visiting Adam Parrish’s Digital Writing with Python course on its final day. Afterwards, there will be a final performance of their digital works, Strip, split, join, print. Love the title.

Check back for some pics and updates.

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:

• The Programs – Info and Screenshots [NEW]
• Gnoetry 0.2 – Download and Install Howto [NEW]
• Mchain 0.2 Script – Download and Usage [UPDATED]
• Mchain 0.3 – Source Code (C++) Installation and Usage [NEW]

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.