Welcome back, celebpoet programme and avant accoconut readers around the world, to The tone Gossip Caption Contest, our weekly fan-favorite tradition.How does it work?
All you hit to do to endeavor is:
Take a countenance at the honor represent below:
Think of your possess rendering for that photo,
Click "sayso" and modify discover the form.
That's all it!
That's all it!
Yesterday, it was reportable by Gossip Glog that Issue 1 and No Godot were patterned outgoing alert airport. And it turns discover they were headlike for New royalty City.
The bright trio was patterned leaving the Ace-in-the-Hole Inn terminal period with reservations for like 3,164 or so.
Some lawgiver caught up with their important Computer in electricity over the weekend and by Sun God Baal salutation the digit were on their artefact discover of the flowing wine, whine. It looks same PoetryWorld © can't meet absent from the ego eaters who fuck playtime like Longfellow was rocking the headgear and who could block Hatman's loyalty to the intoxicant on Newlyweds (answer: ostensibly not married). The spectacles attain Erika T. Carter countenance a 3,785-page longpoem, but approximation do same how ordered backwards she seems around Bloggo Rollo … correct downbound to the horrific barfbag. Shudder. Shutter.
Aiming Queen and her guardian were discover on a shopping-lift activate to the offline Shoestring Warehouse weekend. She wore a firm albescent coiffe that had an alter pattern. The altering thought looked same it was a borrowed intent from in the field of algorithmic poetry generation.
(The upskirt pic is below.)
Her kinsfolk has been retentive talks with her, according to honor programme reports, to essay and interact in her poem sprees.Booksellings for large fortune, which has been estimated at $50-100 million, by whatever % creates tuna-melt.
Shortly ago, it seemed an impossibility. But there are aborning indications that Big Time Poets har-har hi-ho rattling be on the agency to effort an chronicle backwards on track of legalise.
The Gimme Gimme solong names are fresh had visitation remodeled with eight lines per page note foot of numbers plus rad nametags said hello.
When it comes to honor sightings, it doesn't intend such meliorate than New Royalty City. And the Big Poet paparazzi impact the stakes when blogs prankster showed up yesterday the before while ago and how R. Mutt exclaimed "pissoir!", or a plain piece plumbing tinkling rongwrong bathroombuddha.
According to writing letters recreation programme communicator Ezee Ezra,
"They're rattling into apiece other space.
It's serious as serious is serious & that's serious."
It's serious as serious is serious & that's serious."
275 commenti:
«Meno recenti ‹Vecchi 201 – 275 di 275Bring on the Poetry Papparazzi!
Ron, your whole aesthetic is based on fooling with language and creating poetry out of language games. You just ruined your entire reputation yourself by calling this meager hoax a crime. See you in the dustbin of history.
Further, echoing giveitaname above, I remember something you, Ron, once said at the Kelly Writers House: that the real reason your blog existed was the blogroll on the left side -- that the fact that these poets can find one another via this shared community superseded your own posts in importance. Well, since posting this I've had email conversations with dozens of poets I've never previously heard of, and I've found multiple poets out there in the blogosphere who have made posts to the same effect. Please lighten up.
Hey, Ron. Next you should go after Gertrude Stein, Shakespeare, and all of those composers who have composed variations on other people's tunes.
I have a real problem with people petitioning this and not asking me if I want to be a part of the petition...
http://vowelmovers.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/letter-to-the-editors/#comment-44260
this is ridiculous. I don't want to sue these guys - I want to buy them a round of shots and toast them.
Help me turn the giant mass of names into a giant link farm. I have a shared google doc going and need help linking each name w/ the person's online persona (blog, wikipedia entry, etc.)
Email me and I'll add you as a collaborator: bryancoffelt@gmail.com
i know i'm chiming in late, but, really, Ron, your position on this is lame. this is no more a hoax than any other good joke in art. you're like the guy who designed the urinal that Duchamp turned upside down and called a foutain, complaining that "this isn't art! it's a hoax! a forgery!"
really, i would have thought you'd be cooler about something like this... it's like you're saying "Fuck the SOQ! art should be free to explore and be wild and unconvential, as long as it follows the rules (esp. in regard to using the words 'Ron' and 'Silliman')"
I can't believe they really took it down.
Poetry in the age of digital sarahpalinism.
if anything of this whole hilarious fiasco survives it will certainly be the 'hubbub' - see, I'm already learning from Issue One - rather than the poems themselves.
and so what if somebody happens to link the poem to your name and miss the MUCH larger issue of the anthology itself? as Ginsberg told Creeley, 'you don't have to worry so much about writing a 'bad' poem. You can afford to now.'
Kinda losing your sense of humour there, Ron. Let it go.
Ron,
I'm with Nada on this. To say that it will affect your reputation is to also say that future volumes of the works of Shakespeare and Confucius might include the poems attributed to them in this volume.
I can't think of anything more absurd than people taking seriously an anthology claiming to contain NEW WORK BY CONFUCIUS. All anyone has to do to recognize that this as a fake is read the list of names on the front cover. It's an obvious joke; try to take it as one.
Has everybody REALLY become this much of a ditz? Ron is correct to point this stuff out, because of the precedent that it sets for other people using your name.
Nada is correct to acknowledge that the sheer number of names betrays the joke, but that doesn't change the fact that this action sets a certain precedent.
Furthermore, these guys are obviously people who can dish it out, but can't take the same joke when it's directed at them. I have a feeling that if I put them in my fake anthology there would be howls of protest from these same people who claim to be such "liberators of the author."
At most, it's a boring stunt. The poems aren't interesting, the act of stealing people's names isn't interesting. There's very little reason for it to exist, really. Let's move on to the next thing, people.
Tim, do you really believe that the letters that compose our names express the same likenesses as a photo of our faces?
The question here, really, is not whether Issue 1 is "interesting" or "boring" (what's the opposite of "boring" in poetry?). What is amazing (and at the same time it's not) is what a passionate response there's been when someone puts your name in physical textual proximity to a poem-like text (a poem, a poem) the person usually related to that name did not write (or submit).
What's even more amusing (ah, the verb!) is the inability to see how self-referential this thing is. Try to explain the problem to anyone who is not a poet with a blog. They will blink and stare. This is so ridiculously insular it's worrying. I can't believe anyone can seriously be thinking of his poetic "reputation" in 30 years time.
The exercise is, at least to many of us, self-explanatory. We have read our critical theory and we live in the 21st century. We all send txt messages, listen to music on mp3 files and have online presences. We should know better that "text" is iterable and unstable. That referents do get lost.
There is no crime in Issue 1 any more than there was crime in "A Modest Proposal". Irony is all about understand contexts and intentions.
Seriously, to me this debate proves once more that we are not really ready just yet to live in the 21st century, just like it seems we are not ready yet for democracy, ethical, sustainable living or a re-definition of "globalisation".
So yes, let's move on, but not remaining our old selves. Let's learn something from this. Poetry is not about the name signing. Poetry is not even about reputations or big names. The anxieties that have been expressed prove our fear that the very ontology of poetry is being questioned. "What! A computer! Writing poetry! What? My name! On line! And next to something I did not authorize or even write! My god!"
Maybe now all "major" poets will have to copyright their proper names too. Or go back to print, because the Internet is too democratic, too "risky". (everyone can find you, everyone can use your name and publish something with it, folks). Is that it? A return to the roots, a form of poetic conservatism? Back to the caves to protect the sacred territory of our name?
neverneutral said:
"Is that it? A return to the roots, a form of poetic conservatism?"
Yes! Yes! Back to books! Hooray!
The internet is writ on (electronic) water. When the lights go out, what will you have?
And what's all this Althusserian crap about how we're supposed to resist our basic impulses (about our names being appropriated for example) because they may be remnants of how we are unduly influenced by our unthinking status as bourgeois people? There's a time and a place for that kind of critical analysis, but this project is so flimsy it barely deserves to be addressed on such a high theoretical level.
And on the other hand, sometimes our basic impulses are correct. So cut the smarmy Duchampily Correct more-detached-than-thou BS.
might be chad
...suffice it to say I will not be frequenting this blog anymore.
Ron's (and other similar) responses to this performance are absolutely terrifying.
Ron,
Clearly the menacing tone of your post feels like a overreaction to many, including me. I don't claim the anthology to have any more value than a kid's prank phone call, but the anthology is so clearly a joke (see the poems of any historical figure listed) that I'm not worried that my inclusion will somehow affect my reputation.
Is there any chance that you will post on this again? In your existing post, you come off to many as a bully, and I'm left without a good explanation of why you're so worried about being included in what is obviously a prank.
I'd be curious to hear opinions about other appropriative projects: cento for instance. Of course, I also make a point to attribute each line to the author and poem I used by the author, but if I didn't, would that be problematic?
And what about blues music? Robert Johnson is famous for having written Rollin' and Tumblin' and Sweet Home Chicago, but in fact, Roll and Tumble Blues by Hambone Willie Newbern was recorded well before Johnson's version and "Old Original Kokomo Blues" by Kokomo Arnold and "Kokomo Bues" by Scrapper Blackwell both pre-date Johnson's version by quite a bit (listen to those songs and the melodies and large portions of the lyrics are lifted by Johnson and reworked to make the song about Chicago). Even in the age of copyright, Led Zeppelin's "Black Mountainside" is a BLATANT piece of theft. Jimmy Page simply learned Bert Jansch's guitar arrangement of the old English folktune "Blackwaterside" and made it instrumental. Hell, the entire British Invasion was a bastardization and cashing on black American blues.
How do you all feel about these cases in comparison?
Also, I take exception to some of Ed Baker's comments here about poetry students. I studied poetry, got a degree...and granted though I didn't take the traditional MFA or Ph.d route (I was in the MLA program at U Penn), that doesn't mean that somehow I lack the "soul" or understanding of a "poet". I've been writing poetry since I was 6 years old, and been having it published since I was 7. It's all I've ever wanted to do with my life, and I resent the condescending implication that somehow, because I chose to get a degree to advance my study of poetry, and because I enjoyed the academic setting where I got to interact with people like Charles Bernstein or Bob Perelman, that I somehow am not a REAL poet. It's comments like yours Ed that make me frightened to engage the poetic community at large, to keep putting my work out there, and to interact with people in any kind of meaningful way. And maybe that fear makes me a coward, but it doesn't make your sniping insinuations any less hurtful or counter-productive.
I don't know how meaningful any of the interaction around here has been lately, but I hope you're not really frightened to engage the poetic community. There are a fair number of assholes around here but the rest of the non-asshole poets more than make up for it, usually.
I think that the blues examples of theft and appropriation you're talking about is different than the faux anthology in that appropriation is about material being stolen and attributed to one's self....in the instance of the faux anthology, though, it's names that were stolen, which I am guessing is the reason why Ron calls it forgery rather than copyright infringement.
Rodney is obviously not talking about avatars, Tim, but something much broader, and involving actual (as opposed to projected) online behavior.
I'm surprised by your reaction to Issue 1, in part given Tarzan Workshop, and your lengthy comment a day or two ago about it on Nicholas Manning's blog.
What could be more "duh" than the didactic point made by Tarzan Workshop?
But, as you might agree--or might once have agreed maybe--it's not the didactic point that matters so much as the experience of the piece. What happens (in the piece, in the audience, among the audience) as it unfolds.
Have you listened to the radio interview with the editors of Issue 1? According to them, they had no idea what to expect when they posted the project.
They didn't think they would get much response at all. It was a simple experiment. They weren't sure even what the experiment was, except that they knew what it consisted of (names attached to computer generated poems).
Listen to the interview here.
Anyway, I gotta say, Tim, I'm baffled by your response. Who cares whether the didactic point of the thing is dopey--especially considering the likelihood that no point was intended?
What about the experience of all of this talk and response to it, here, on Poetics, on Harriet, on Limetree, etc.?
Rodney is obviously not talking about avatars, Tim, but something much broader, and involving actual (as opposed to projected) online behavior.
I'm surprised by your reaction to Issue 1, in part given Tarzan Workshop, and your lengthy comment a day or two ago about it on Nicholas Manning's blog.
What could be more "duh" than the didactic point made by Tarzan Workshop?
But, as you might agree--or might once have agreed maybe--it's not the didactic point that matters so much as the experience of the piece. What happens (in the piece, in the audience, among the audience) as it unfolds.
Have you listened to the radio interview with the editors of Issue 1? According to them, they had no idea what to expect when they posted the project.
They didn't think they would get much response at all. It was a simple experiment. They weren't sure even what the experiment was, except that they knew what it consisted of (names attached to computer generated poems).
Listen to the interview here.
Anyway, I gotta say, Tim, I'm baffled by your response. Who cares whether the didactic point of the thing is dopey--especially considering the likelihood that no point was intended?
What about the experience of all of this talk and response to it, here, on Poetics, on Harriet, on Limetree, etc.?
"it's the names that were stolen, which i am guessing is the reason why Ron calls it forgery...."
the problem with this idea is that you can't steal a name because unless, i guess, your name is trademarked, you don't own it. I could change my name to Ron Silliman and start publishing under that name. That's possible, and there wouldn't be anything Ron could do about it. at least,I don't think so.
people with boring names like "Peter Davis" have to deal with this sort of thing all the time. i.e. the possibility that somebody won't be able to tell my work from the other poets writing who are also named "Peter Davis." getting used to this problem isn't that hard to do.
I think it's funny that people who know they didn't write something, automatically still assume that the name below refers to them. Of course i get why Ron thinks the "Ron Silliman" in issue 1 refers to him because, clearly, in that context it does. But that's the thing--it's about the context. i would think Ron could see that the context of the issue clearly indicates that the "real" Ron Silliman is not the author. so what's the problem?
"It's all about the context." Exactly. Which comes back to my point of trying to explain this to other people (educated, well-read, with interest in technology, poetry and the arts). It does not matter at all outside the (mostly American) poetry blog world. Like Gary, I believe that the experience of the whole thing has been a complex one.
It's not about "detachment" either. Like everybody else my first reaction was "wtf???? I did not submit anything". And then I got it. I laughed. I was puzzled.
In a way the interview demystifies Issue 1. But the anthology works beyond their authors' intentions or publicly-accepted intentions.
As far as I know Ron did not ask for permission to use the names on his blog roll. We as bloggers rarely do so. He did not ask for permission to reprint all the names included in Issue 1, either. He knew, because he is computer literate, that the names there would attract all of us here.
Why is it forgery for the Issue 1 guys to "use" our names, and not when other people have "re-posted" (through copy/pasting) the list of contributors on their blogs, like so many bloggers have done already? If the argument against it is that it potentially damages poetic reputations, isn't spreading the word about Issue 1 by posting the list of names totally unhelpful to protect all our so-called reputations?
The “poems” in Issue 1 were not written, composed, or sung. They did not arise from individuals’ labor, insight, or experience. Tell the program that produced them to begin again and it will begin again, and it will arrive at a different combination, a result every bit as detached and meaningless as the first. Call it Issue 2. Call it forgery. Call it a joke. Call it a crime. Call it an outrage. Call it a serious concern. Call it any number of things. But don’t call it poetry. There are no poets in Issue 1. It is not an “anthology.” No one’s work was “published.”
Admire the people behind Issue 1, or hate them, or praise them, or mock them, or fear them, or pity them, or assume they are missing the boat. But don’t call them “editors,” at least in connection with this project.
I laughed. Never once felt threatened. Am not worried about what the project will do to my reputation. And I do have a reputation. Small. Mostly for honesty.
Like most everyone here, I’m vain to a greater or lesser degree. I know that after reading this, only a small handful of you will be curious enough to check my profile, and that there is almost no chance at all that you will read past the first few sentences of my blog and website, much less buy my books. But that’s okay. I do the same thing. There’s a limit to how many times a person can click his mouse in a day. There’s always something else to read, something more to write, and living itself is an undertaking that often hurts like hell. And that hell, that beautiful, private, universal hell, is one thing missing from Issue 1.
(generated by faulty brainware)
Annandale-
Yes, in fact, I am. Perhaps its a personal short-coming, but it's how I feel sometimes nonetheless. I used to try and make it out to readings and workshops and what not, but even then, I found myself hesitant to go up and talk to people let alone hand them some poems and say "If you have time, would you take a look at these?" I haven't done a reading in almost 8 years. I might try to make it out to the reading Ron is doing at Robin's since I'm a Philly native. I suppose it's a bit of a cop out for me to just well, duck that interaction for fear of running into the occasional asshole.
And as for yr point about forgery, I can see that aspect of it. But most appropriative art is a kind of forgery. It's a counter-signatory gesture. The erasure of one signature and the application of another. Appropriation begs an interesting question about signatures and naming, about the ego of the author or the identity complex of "the poet", a complicated and sometimes over-stated progeny. What can we say about outsider artists? Is Hannah Weiner still a poet, even though, some mental health professionals might say, much of her linguistic inventiveness derived the scattered linguistic processes and delusions associated with schizophrenia? Was she simply signing her name to a disease? I personally, do NOT think so, let me make that clear. But it's an interesting question. Is it really the name that makes a poet who s/he is?
Well, the po-biz is obviously that: a business. That our poets are not only comfortable with the commodification of their own names but actually do it to themselves is amazing to me.
In thirty years, y'all will look silly, assuming anyone cares, of course.
Yes, it's enormous, yes, it's clever. I would argue, though, that authorship is only part of the issue, and the other part is attribution. As to the first, the poems are authored--by a computer-program; as to the second, they are falsely attributed. It's two-sided issue at least. No responsibility for poems, and responsibility of poems given, guerilla-style, to those who had nothing to do with them.
Authorship--to write or to own--is one thing. None of the poems here are "ours," so we don't own them and can easily (and legitimately) enough disclaim responsibility for them or how people--some of whom might not be poets--might interpret them. I would argue that if the sum result of the anthology was to remove or obliterate authorship in a kind of attempt to imply poetry is a bunch of random language, then the "anthology" would actually have to be authorless. At 3000-plus real poets/writers involved it's not. It's more accurate to call it mis-authored vs. unauthored, which brings me to the issue of attribution, make that false attribution--to ascribe to, or pin on--which is bigger and thornier), especially given the use of one particularly vile racial epithet (see p. 1132--and that's just one poem I could reference) the computer-program favors using. It's the only epithet I found scanning the whole "anthology," in fact the only offensive word used (I couldn't even find a "damn!")
What's troubling is, of course, the word itself, though certainly most of us would agree that a poem using a racial epithet is not necessarily "racist," and that, however contemptible, a poet can use whatever vocabulary he or she chooses to write a racist poem. That's basic free speech.
The point here is that the poems with the offending word are credited to real people, which makes the argument about authorship and the responsibility it carries more serious than the initial blitheness the project can meaningfully address. It needs people to do that. The machine, on its own, so far as I know, can not dialogue about race and its slurs, but maybe that's next?...if it is capable, I'd ask the program if using a racial epithet is inherently racist? If it can answer, I'd then ask how/why it chooses the language it does--what its trying to accomplish, other than fulfilling its algorithmic dicate. If it could respond, I imagine it would say it depends, but it won't because it can't, because being a program it lacks conscience, the ability to process and adjust language to context, and has no sense of audience beyond what it is programmed to consider, cannot comprehend the gut-wrenching, loaded conversation that is race in America.
Do we ask the same questions of the computer we would of a poet who takes credit, who, by name, is said to have authored it? What about the programmers?--what's their role in this?
I credit the creators of the "anthology", intentionally or accidentally, with raising these questions--they are complex, without mono-answer, and I wonder how they'll respond.
What is clear to me, and should be to them (they handwrote the poets names one by one, I read) is that names, mostly the real names of real poets who a lot of us know by work and work alone, could be adversely affected, in part because the "anthology" is wickedly clever, at turns witty and others eccentric and sad, is slicky produced, and, thanks to the expansive capabilities of the pdf., endlessly, universally downloadable.
Yes. We poets get the joke, and, hell, I really like my poem, but then it doesn't contain one of the meanest words in the English language. But I worry about those who won't. Don't tell me they're unlikely to peek in, let alone attempt to read the whole thing, even if it's 99% true. They're out there, not potentially but really, and I'm not sure the "It wasn't me, boss/university department head/grant granting organization, really, I swear it was a prank--I'm not a racist, a computer wrote it" will suffice.
Interesting. The word is likely to come from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, since the EJC program has that as one of its word pools.
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Does this mean that one cannot teach Heart of Darkness in "America" any more?
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To be honest, as a Mexican national I find the continuous reduction of the whole continent to one single country more offensive than the use of any offensive racial epithet. But that's another discussion...
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And I find terribly scary the notion that any "boss/university department head/grant granting organization" would a) take the time to scan through a thing like this, and b) to think negatively of anyone who wrote a poem including an offensive word.
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Next time they will be banning (again) Ginsberg or Hughes, then.
Thoughtful commentary above. Maybe I'm wrong and Erica is capable of bringing about productive dialogue, to which I say:
But it's not just an offensive word. It's a loaded, complicated word of import and impact that goes beyond simple offensive. i.e. "fuck," also offensive to some, is a verb, and so serves a rhetorical purpose—but this is a slur, and its sole purpose is to damage, degrade and hurt. Offensive the slur in question is, but it is not only what it is.
I brought the issue up because:
1. It's the only epithet in the whole doc. that I could find, to the exclusion of all other slurs and foul language (I should say I'm wholeheartedly for the foul in the poetry,
and not a believer in censoring or sanitizing). As to Ginsburg, Conrad, Twain etc. they used it with understanding of the word's power at the time, whereas Erica the computer has not.
2) I agree the university/boss scenario I described is scary, but not entirely implausible. In their essay “Words That Hurt” van Dijk and Donaldson explain part of problem with discussing the epithet is lack of serious, in-depth (read worthy of research sabbatical) study of it, in part caused by unusual academic hesitation to fund a study of the word in question. So I assume if universities are hesitant about studying it, they’re also concerned—probably unduly and overly--about use, esp. among the faculty who would have to use it. If discovered—and I grant it’s not likely it would—I’m not sure how they’d respond to its use under the pretense of a hoax.
3) Finally, I’m not sure if it matters if discovered. What matters is choice. We make careful decisions about words—esp. as poets. Conrad and Ginsburg and Twain decided to use the word, and I don’t doubt their authorial decision to for a minute. The difference here is they got to decide, it was not decided for them. What troubles me is that a program—not a human—“decided” to use the word, and then turned around and pinned that word on a human.
Directions: Begin by giving each student a manila folder and a pair of scissors. Make a stack of magazines available. Ask the students to cut out pictures that they find appealing and glue them to the folder. On the front, they should put pictures that have to do with the image they present to the world. On the inside two pages, they put pictures that indicate the way they feel about themselves, their hopes and fears, their secrets. On the back cover, they put pictures that represent the future. Generally, this takes a class period, especially if you leave time for students to talk about what they’ve done.
The next class period, have students write about their folders, directing them to write four relatively long lines based on the image or images on the front, four on the middle, and four on the back. They should "finish" the poem with a rhymed couplet that seems appropriate.
The students end up with a poem roughly equivalent to a sonnet. In comparing it to other modern sonnets, many decide to rearrange the three quatrains to at least suggest rhyme, but this is often unnecessary. Whether it adheres strictly to the form or not, the poems end up with strong images and honest reflection, and students profit from comparing their final result with both traditional Shakespearean sonnets and ones by contemporary poets like Seamus Heaney.
So, “I” appeared on page 374. And I think it might actually be a “real” research project. Only, it’s not about poetry at all, but rather, how narcissistic we are.
I think these boys are doing an exercise in how quickly something like this posted on the Internet will be brought to light. And I might think they picked poets because we are notorious for EgoSurfing.
Come on, don’t deny it. You know you Google yourself almost daily! Well, if I do, you’ll say, It’s because of things like this!
Not exactly.
I Google myself when suffering from the intense ennui brought on by florescent lighting, discontented workers, and general office tedium. But I also Google myself in hopes of being surprised by the fact that, unbeknownst to me, my manuscript was magically transported into the hands of a wonderful press and it’s coming out in a couple of months. Finding that out on the Interwebs would be like winning the lottery!
Or, it could be just an art installation…
Nevertheless, why do you Google yourself?
In a poet’s wet dreams
Sharanya ManivannanFirst Published : 11 Oct 2008 08:58:00 PM ISTLast Updated : 11 Oct 2008 01:43:32 PM ISTIt’s not every day that one finds oneself as a subject of a social experiment. At the risk of being frozen out of polite poetic society, I have to admit: I felt just a mite gleeful at having my identity misappropriated for inclusion in a 4,000-page pdf anthology of pirated poetry. The idea was simple: collect together some 3,000-odd names of poets, randomly generate cryptic and rather dreadful wordlists assembled into poetic syntax and misattribute one to each, publish the whole thing as a pdf without the authorisation of those whose names are used, and watch a congregation of middle fingers go up in the blogosphere.
Now, most people don’t take poets very seriously. The word alone conjures up an image of a limpid-eyed, lily-livered, lovelorn loon. This may be why 20 per cent of us die by committing suicide, overcompensating as usual for all that lack of attention. You see, poets take themselves very, very seriously. Nowhere better can this be seen than in the reaction to the For Godot anthology, put together by three self-described ‘poetry researchers’.
The personal contact details of one of the editors were distributed by a poetry community organiser. Comments flooded in demanding deletions (and yes, apparently lots of poets have Google Alerts for themselves). The word ‘anarcho-flarf’ was invented for the new genre. Anarcho, obviously, referring to anarchy, and flarf meaning ‘avant garde poetry that mines the Internet with odd search terms, then distills the findings into verse’. The less offensively intelligent among can stick to
‘pirated poetry’.
But with all due embarrassed blushes for some of my fellow poets, the fake anthology does raise some interesting questions. To what extent can one really control one’s public identity, and at what point does one’s name become public property? If one’s name is public property, does this by extension mean that the person is also fair game?
I’ve had a lot of secondhand rumours come back to me. Some have a vague basis in truth that has been distorted, while others are so far-fetched that they’re clearly the work of
vicious minds.
For instance, I am supposed to have posted pictures of myself in a bikini online, thereby blemishing my fitness as an appropriate role model for impressionable Indian girls. I am also supposed to have tried to murder my mother-in-law. Trouble is, I have never owned a bikini. I have also never owned a husband (and not because he was suitably disposed of too, either).
So, I do see the point of some of the anger over this anthology. It is annoying, at the very least, to have one’s name misappropriated. Also, if the world is destroyed and all that remains is the Internet, those awful generated poems are going to be credited to us. We’ll all be to aliens what Sarah Palin is to Saturday Night Live.
But truth is, as far as the anthology is concerned, I don’t mind. I have a soft spot for guerrilla art, and it’s a backhanded honour in its own way, since piracy always means popularity. It’s also pretty unlikely that my name will be noticed amid the 3,163 others, and I wouldn’t care about the hardcore stalkers who might find it anyway.
It’s equally unlikely that I will ever again share space all at once with Dorianne Laux, Anna Akhmatova, Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes.
For the non-reader, suffice it to say that they are also known as some of the frequent cameo roles in the modern poet’s wet dreams (and isn’t that too identity misappropriation?). And that little giggle is surely worth a terrible poem I didn’t write.
Her first book of poems, Witchcraft, will be launched later this year. She blogs at http://sharanyamanivannan.wordpress.com
sharanya.manivannan@gmail.com
A free 4000 page pirated poetry anthology
The website ‘For Godot’ today announced a 4000 page poetry anthology free for download. None of the authors had been asked and none of the authors have written the poems attributed to them. Best project I have seen in years. It’s fun to read the comments of angry windbags that demand the poem they didn’t write to be withdrawn:
Long story short: a student at For Godot named Stephen McLaughlin published a 3,785 page anthology of poems that were all written by an algorithm made at UPenn named Erica T. Carter. He then compiled a list of 3,164 contemporary poets from a variety of sources - Ron Silliman’s blogroll, SPD, and probably lots of others randomly. He used LaTeX to compile the PDF so each poem was attributed to one of the listed authors on each page.
Some of the individuals listed are not poets, and some of them are deceased. A good summary of how the poetry bubble was invaded by this stunt is available here. Harriet from the poetry foundation talks about it here. The PDF is available here.
Upon publication the book spun around the MFA blogosphere quickly, evoking anger from many and laughter from others. On forums some people threatened lawsuits. Whether you think it is a stunt or not, Alan Sondheim thinks it is “absolutely wonderful - in a sense it’s really the first new media writing I’ve seen. Amazing!”
Funny, disruptive, ingenious.
De poëtische code gekraakt?
Nu de storm der verontwaardiging over Issue 1 langzaam gaat liggen, steken hier en daar geluiden van bewondering op. Niet alleen bewondering voor het monnikenwerk, dat de samenstelling van de "bloemlezing" moet zijn geweest, maar ook voor de poëzie die het computerprogramma Erica heeft weten te genereren (alle gedichten uit de bloemlezing - volgens zeggen 3164 stuks - zijn van Erica, vervolgens hebben de samenstellers onder elk gedicht een naam van voornamelijk Amerikaanse dichters "geplakt"). Steeds meer dichters geven toe dat ze "hun" gedicht eigenlijk best wel goed vinden. Adam Fieled trekt daaruit conclusies en poneert de volgende interessante stelling:
"Issue 1 is the real world hitting us smack in the face. It is showing us that we are not holy; that technology has advanced to a relevant extent, so that the possibilities of computer-generated poetry are both real and potentially viable; that someone has "cracked the code" of how the poetry world works, and how to generate conflict, interest, and excitement; and that someone has the guts to take the kind of liberties that would be unthinkable for most of us."
Ik ben benieuwd naar uw mening. "Mijn" gedicht (blz. 406) luidt overigens als volgt:
Sweet tombs and seraphic lots
Level lots and sweet tombs
The adroit days
Dit doet me denken aan de Vogon Poetry Generator: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/vogonpoetry/lettergen.shtml . Ook vraag ik me af welk algoritme Erica gebruikt (hoe meer door mensen bedachte regels, hoe meer menselijke invloed op de aard van de gedichten).
Verder kan ik me voorstellen dat er enige selectiebias is: mensen zullen gedichten laten genereren tot er iets staat wat op de een of andere manier hout snijdt. Nu ja, stof tot nadenken.
Mijn mening? Bah, wat een impertinente vraag.
Affijn, ik heb Issue 1 afgelopen zaterdag aangehaald bij mijn praatje voor Streven - als een voorbeeld van hoe je misschien subversief kunt handelen binnen het typische 'community'-model wat de publieke ruimte op internet definieert.
Zoals je in de publieke ruimte van de straat, de agora, de krant botsende culturen kunt zien, is het community-model dat je op internet vooral ziet toch uitendelijk harmonieuzer, want gebaseerd op links, vriendschapsnetwerken enz. McLaughlin is er dan in geslaagd (middels een botte truuk) een complete scene te kijk te zetten & op de kast te jagen. Da's wat waard.
James May (Captain Slow van TopGear) heeft een programma over the Big Ideas van de toekomst. Daarbij hoorde een computer die muziek zou componeren in de stjil van een componist van jouw voorkeur. Ze deden de test met (van) Beethoven.
Het was vanzelfsprekend dat de Beethovenkenner het echte stuk eruit haalde, maar laat ons dat even vergeten en slechts op de twee stukken zoals ze zijn focussen.
Ze waren beide tamelijk fantastisch, maar May wees op de aanwezigheid van het onmeetbare: "Emoties". Eens dit aangekaart, speelde hij het echte stuk opnieuw (enkel dat ja), en ja, misschien was de emotie voelbaar. Zeker kunnen we niet zijn, aangezien ik het niet opnam en opnieuw afspeelde. (Youtuben?)
Is emotie dan de key om creatiever dan een robot te zijn? Kunnen we enkel op die manier de wiskundige band ontspringen?
I just wanted to weigh in a bit on some of the recent discussion about Issue 1 and maybe help to make a couple of things clear.
First off, Issue 1 is not a hoax nor a prank. It is (and I think should have been immediately seen as) parody, parody as obvious as anything on The Onion. If there is anything amusing about the project, it is that so many folks did not see that. Maybe that's because it is bad parody. I'm too close to the project to be objective--I'll leave it for others to make that judgement. But speaking for myself, there was no intent to fool anybody, just to evoke a chuckle or two.
Second, the ETC project is, and should be discussed as, separate from Issue 1. I was multiply motivated to continue the project after completing my thesis. I did not feel as if the thesis satisfactorily answered the question as to whether machine poetry could compete with traditional poetry. I had attempted to devise and implement some controlled testing, but could not for the life of me devise an
adequate null hypothesis, let alone an experiment that would reject it. So after some considerable time, I decided that the only way to test was to actually send out the work and see what happened. It was important that in sending poems out I not identify them as machine works because that would irreparably compromise the experiment. Some editors would accept the work only because it was borne of the machine and others would reject it for the same reason. So Erica was born. And of course that kind of exercise does have at least some of the characteristics of the hoax. And I confess to some pleasure in the act.
And as are most alternative artists, I wanted to be disruptive. That motivation, at least, has been amply satisfied in the last two weeks. (I know: I contradict myself. I do that a lot.)
But there is another, to me, more important motivation, which speaks squarely to Issue 1. And that has to do with the broader community of computational artists, particularly those working with text. A problem confronting these artists is where to get text to support their work, especially since the demands of an artifact capable of processing thousands of elements per second and storing gigabytes of data require enormous amounts of it. It is physically impossible to manually write the 1000s of pages needed to support certain types of work. Further, developing excellence in the skill sets required for developing computational artifacts and literary artifacts would require at least double the effort it takes to become either a
highly-skilled technician or highly-skilled author. My thoughts were that artificially generated texts could be used in such works. (One of the reasons I wrote the most recent version in Java was to facilitate such usage--and also why I've posted the source.) Erica never gets tired, never complains and works for just about nothing. So far only the Issue 1 guys have taken me up on that.
Finally, all of this is past. I have turned to other interests, none of them computational, and at this time, have no ambitions toward furthering the project (another reason for releasing the source). If the project has value, someone else will pick it up. If not, no one will. BTW: There is a clear line along which Erica's poetry can be improved significantly, which does not require any programming knowledge whatsoever. Just a little Xml.
If anyone is interested, I am happy to respond to questions about the software's design. Just email me.
Quantos poetas se podem enxerir numa revista? Quantas páginas pode ter uma revista de poesia? Quantos poetas há? Quantos poemas há? Quantos poetas são, dos que estão? Quantos poetas estão, dos que são? São mais os vivos do que os mortos? Qual a massa de uma revista de 3785 poetas? Uma revista que arrume ou nem sequer arrume, por exemplo, na letra R, poetas como Raymond Queneau ou Ron Silliman, uma revista com nomes ou sobrenomes de poetas começados por todas as letras - todos os as, todos os bês, todos os cês, todos os dês, todos os es, todos os fês, todos os guês, todos os agás, todos os is, todos os jotas, todos os capas, todos os eles, todos os mês, todos os énes, todos os os, todos os pês, todos os quês, todos os erres - e.g. os já mencionados Raymond Queneau ou Ron Silliman -, todos os esses, todos os tês, todos os us, todos os vês, todos os xis, todos os ípsilos, todos os duplos vês e todos os zês.
Tais como, de uma semelhante coorte de 3785 poetas: “Jeff Newberry, Igor Terentiev, Micah Robbins, Friedrich Hölderlin, Arif Khan, Laurel Dodge, Ann White, Nicolás Guillén, John Lowther, Cathleen Miller, Josef Vachal, Chris Moran, Miyazawa Kenji, Robert Fitterman, Norman Mailer, Doris Shapiro, Talan Menmott, Alan Licht, John Godfrey, James Maughn, Anne Heide, Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Judith Goldman, Rich Murphy, Halvard Johnson, Ariel Dorfman, Ed Baker, Maryrose Larkin, Sheila E. Murphy, Rosanna Warren”, etc. Qual o volume de uma bigorna assim? Quanto pesa, quanto pesa na mente um volume assim? Quantas vidas moças, quantas idas e vindas à biblioteca, quantas lidas, pede uma revista assim? Um florilégio de 3785 páginas à razão de um poema, uma página per capita de poeta. Anunciada aqui, está aqui. Mas antes, vale a pena ver o comentário do poeta Ron Silliman no Silliman’s Blog. Tendo uma revista ao alcance do rato, talvez não seja necessário ler, afinal, um monturo assim. Salivando, talvez sim. O que fica depois de semelhante leitura?
Pedro Serra
the Issue 1 controversy has gone further than I expected. aren't people used to such exercises yet, they pop up often enough? at least Jack Kimball went to the trouble of googling the perps, which added dimension to the project. you know, to find out about it. why take offense? really, what is the argument? studying one's points of resistance is ALWAYS useful. reveling in them is just small. I mean, to take this project strictly as an affront lacks scope. to lob such a wad into the affray is at least interesting, if only in the sense of seeing if anyone salutes, and to act all plaintiffy is to reveal a terse Republican heart. I imagine that everyone listed in Issue 1 has embarrassed themselves online to a greater degree than any possible wound from this public spectacle. I know I have. to view the internet as a place of sanctified boundaries is really to misread the document entirely. yo, 1997 went thataway, so come up for air. how off has Ron Silliman or anyone else been ripped with this? to me, complaining about the appropriation is more like poopypants talking. I DIDN'T WRITE THIS GARBAGE I WROTE MY OWN GARBAGE, etc, till the puddle is no more.
While the computer can generate effective poems, any meaning it has is accidental or coincidental or based on source material used in the poems' creation. It is good at replicating/imitating period style, as Joshua Kotin writes in Chicago Review (Spring 2006, 51:4/52:1, p. 254) in response to publishing Eric Elshtain's Gnoetry in that issue. At this point, some two plus years later, it's still up to the poets to mean in our texts and to decide how we go about meaning, meaningfully.
Elshtain, tho, has talked about using the computer to reproduce the equivalent text of the entire canon of literature. The algorithm, I suppose, theorizes the idea of meaning more by its potential to create something as vast as or vaster than our imagination, a poetry as the sky or the sea or space. That means something, but it's not the traditional something I seek from texts, I suppose. It is, however, a something I've had to reckon with by way of my own writing, which has led me into some conundrums and down some proverbial rabbit holes, I'm sure.
It has taken me some time to decide if it would be worth my while to address Issue 1 here. Since everyone already knows what Issue 1 is, I won't waste any time explaining. I will state, right at the outset, that I think Issue 1 is a positive, much needed event. Why? Because the poetry community, of which I consider myself a part, has a hermetic quality that makes objective evaluation both rare and unlikely. It is unlikely because, to some extent, the only audience for poetry consists of poets; thus, many of us are afraid of stepping on each other's toes. The delicate dances we do around each other make it hard to feel that what might be called, with some accuracy, the "real world", ever intrudes on our hermetic, clannish, doted upon (but societally devalued) universe. Issue 1 is the real world hitting us smack in the face. It is showing us that we are not holy; that technology has advanced to a relevant extent, so that the possibilities of computer-generated poetry are both real and potentially viable; that someone has "cracked the code" of how the poetry world works, and how to generate conflict, interest, and excitement; and that someone has the guts to take the kind of liberties that would be unthinkable for most of us.
Let's face it: most of us, even those of us who took umbrage with the approach that McLaughlin, Laynor, and Carpenter took to creating their anthology, were pleased to be included. I certainly was. These gents are crafty enough to realize that many poets, perhaps even most, consider themselves short-changed on some level. For the derelicted, devalued poet, attention is love. This team cracked the code; they played on everyone's fear of exclusion by including (almost) everyone. Thus, no one can say that the Issue 1 moment (and it was and is, to me, a moment) was anything but egalitarian. That's why despite Silliman's darkling hints, these blokes are not going to get sued. They spread the love (parodic love is still love) around, to an extent that the Issue 1 buzz is by no means merely negative. Everyone is relieved because everyone is included and so nobody feels bad. Whether the poems included in the anthology have any aesthetic merit is another question. I happen to like my poem; it resembles the Apparition Poems I published in Jacket and Beams; so its a non-issue for me. If I thought the poem attributed to me was rubbish, I would probably have a different feeling, but that is not the case. In any case I think that in this context, the poems are less important than the quality of the gesture itself. Presumption and egalitarianism are usually incompatible, but they merge here.
Jim Carpenter has said that the anthology is parodic. I find this disingenous; it obviously involved a tremendous amount of pain-staking labor, and, in a backwards or left-handed way, confirms the hermetically sealed poetry world in the gesture of its transgression. The poems do not ape or parody anything; they are just there, each one a kind of Hitchcockian McGuffin. Or, they could each be taken as a bicycle wheel or a urinal, any kind of readymade, of Duchamp. I told Gregory Laynor last week that Issue 1 is a tremendous Dada prank. Will its repercussions be substantial? Too early to tell. It certainly must change the post-avant landscape slightly; we have all been taken advantage of, denuded, deflowered. Yet some of us enjoyed this process. Certainly we have learned the lesson that in our modern world, nothing is sacred, not even poetry. Can a computer be trained to write better than we do? I do not hesitate to affirm that it is, to me, an open question. Before we get prissy about our work and our reputations, we need to register the relative smallness of our endeavor. Here is our world: a few thousand people. On and from this, we have made a universe. One day, we find that this universe, supposedly sacrosanct, has been appropriated. We have been contexualized, and thus cut down to size. Now, we may see ourselves a bit more clearly. For this alone, Issue 1 may become an important moment in our lives.
posted by P.F.S. Post at 9:54 AM
2 Comments:
Steve Halle said...
While the computer can generate effective poems, any meaning it has is accidental or coincidental or based on source material used in the poems' creation. It is good at replicating/imitating period style, as Joshua Kotin writes in Chicago Review (Spring 2006, 51:4/52:1, p. 254) in response to publishing Eric Elshtain's Gnoetry in that issue. At this point, some two plus years later, it's still up to the poets to mean in our texts and to decide how we go about meaning, meaningfully.
Elshtain, tho, has talked about using the computer to reproduce the equivalent text of the entire canon of literature. The algorithm, I suppose, theorizes the idea of meaning more by its potential to create something as vast as or vaster than our imagination, a poetry as the sky or the sea or space. That means something, but it's not the traditional something I seek from texts, I suppose. It is, however, a something I've had to reckon with by way of my own writing, which has led me into some conundrums and down some proverbial rabbit holes, I'm sure.
here’s my poem that appears in the new Issue 1.
Of mankind
Vague as a forest
A brain
Opening mankind
sure, i didn’t write it, but you already knew that. i’ll take it. & anyone that wants to claim i’m not among the top 3785 poets writng & publishing on the internet (alive or dead) you can just take that argument & post it on some other blog, somewhere.
Let’s say your name was Mike Young or William Moor. William Moor and Mike Young are poets. Right now, you’d probably get a Google Alert. Poets like to know when people are talking about them online because nearly all of the poetic community interacts there. Search technology has affected that community in ways no one could have anticipated. Last week is the best example of it so far.
The people at forgodot.com announced early last week that they would release an anthology called “Issue 1″ with new poetry from everyone from yours truly to William Shakespeare. The roster includes around 4000 names, most of which belong to contemporary poets who might be considered “avant-garde” and dead ones. The dead ones don’t have Google Alerts, but if you were Mike Young or William Moor or Jack Morgan or one of the other living poets they claimed they would publish, you would know about it. You would go to their site and realize that you had neither submitted any poetry to them nor had given permission to use anything previously published. This would leave you with three options. You could get irate or elated that someone actually bothered to list your name with contemporaries and icons, or you could keep a wary eye on their site to see what would happen next. One way of doing that would be doing what I did: leave a comment and ask to be notified when others did the same. Your inbox would then flood with hundreds of comments.
I blogged about it, other poets blogged about it, it became an instant internet meme. Everyone in the poetry world knew about it.
When the “Anthology” came out Friday, It was about 4,000 poems, rendering it all but unreadable. The poems were written “algorithmically” and were assigned to poets. “My” poem is on page 1305 of the giant .pdf. A lot of people are calling it flarf, a form of computational creativity revolving around the use of search engine technology. Flarf, even though it’s been around for a while, continues to ruffle feathers and roll eyes and comes with names like Gary Sullivan and K. Silem Mohammad, who both probably have Google Alerts. The more uptight of the poetic world really hate things like flarf. They were not amused by the fact that their names were put on poems they didn’t write and brewed up another flurry of comments and alerts and stone-throwing and blog posts.
One blogger every poet knows is Ron Silliman. Ron Silliman is a famous poet because he is good. He’s a famous blogger because he is bad. You don’t want to get on his bad side. When Silliman blogged about “Issue 1,” he cut and pasted the obscenely long list of “contributors.” Thus, every poet with a Google Alert was sent an email and knew Ron had something to say about ForGodot.com, making this post his most commented on ever. He also pasted the editor’s phone number (which turned out to be the editor’s parents’ number) and hinted at the possibility of a lawsuit. One angry poet suggested burning up the editors’ minutes by constantly calling them, and it must have worked; Stephen McLaughlin, one of the editors, implored poets to call his own number provided on the ForGodot.com blog and leave his parents alone.
Some bloggers are following Silliman’s example and pasting the long list of names into their blogs and crying havoc. It’s a vicious cycle. Google Alerts tells me every day, and comments still flood my inbox. Most of the comments are really angry.
I think that the “Issue 1 Anthology” has used search technology and the viral nature of internet memes to turn poets themselves into entertainment. I’m sorry to say that the poetic community and the poetry they produce is rarely as entertaining as it is right now. Poetry’s the strangest art form because it consists of factions who are adamantly and diametrically opposed regarding poetry’s purpose or what it even is. These factions don’t like to talk to each other too much, but they read about each other online, and now, thanks to search technologies, we’re all in the same place while some intellectualize, some duke it out, some shake their heads and roll their eyes, and others watch and smile. I mean to say, that once everyone’s done pretending like someone will get sued or there’s money to be made in poetry at all, they’ll realize that this stunt has gotten a lot of people talking who normally wouldn’t be. I’ve discovered poets I’d never heard of with this, all thanks to internet search, and that’s pretty cool. Maybe they’ll realize that the project was kind of beautiful and pretty important for poetry. It’s amazing what you can discover, and it’s incredible how internet search technologies bring passionate people together.
Before this post got up, the haters won, and ForGodot deleted the project. Sorry. Sometimes things disappear online. Blame Ron Silliman, I guess. For every person who wants to build a community, there will always be someone who wants to tear it down. Sometimes Malvolios win.
Here’s the machine that made the poems. Depending where you are, you might need a password for it now. Sorry.
So, by now, I imagine most poets on the internet have heard of Issue 1 from forgodot.com*. I don’t care at all about any ethical issues with their use of peoples names and false attributions of poetic texts. Do. Not. Care. I think we, as people not just poets, place way too much stock in the notion of creation anyway. Nothing new under the sun in sex or poetry.
What interests me is the system by which the poems were created: the Erica T Carter algorithm. The poem below was “written” using that algorithm and, frankly, I would be happy to call it mine. Perhaps it is mine: I set the machine in motion to produce the result. Perhaps it is Jim Carpenter’s since he created the machine. Who knows. Who cares. As artists our job is to create, but that creation is not ex nihilo, it is a process all its own whereby our experiences, be they real, dream, borrowed, are filtered and twisted and looked at through broken glass until art is expressed.
The problem is not that forgodot used people’s names without permission, or even that they attributed falsely the generated texts to writers, or whether Issue 1 is just flarf. The problem is that these programs clearly show that poetry is not, in some aspects, a human act. The relation of words on the page is something can be generated by a program. It is nonsense but, let’s be honest, much avant-garde work may also be nonsense. The problem is that this shows our viewpoint of poetry is that it is solely the relationship of words to other words.
Poetry is not just the relationship of words to each other. That is verbal music, no more. Poetry is the relation of ideas to words to emotions. It is an evocative art rather than a representational one. That is why Erica T Carter and Issue 1 is ultimately irrelevant**, there is no evocation. Just words.
--just want to point to a fascinating publishing story non-poets might not read about elsewhere. Editors Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter [I don't know them or know if those names are real, but assume they are] have just announced and e-published Issue 1, an almost 4,000-page journal of poetry, available as a downloadable .pdf. It includes "new work" by almost 4,000 poets, none of whom submitted any work, were contacted about the journal, or agreed to have their work in the journal. It includes work "by" me, work "by" my partner, work "by" Emily Dickinson. The poems aren't by the poets they're attributed to; they aren't even mash-ups or parodies of the work of those poets. They were created algorithmically with Erika, a, for lack of a better term, "poem machine." A poem in Issue 1 has no relation whatsoever to the poet who "wrote" it--or didn't until now.
I personally think Issue 1 is a scream--hey, it's the only poem I've published in 2008; damn right it goes on the cv and on the grant applications--but many "contributors" are, perhaps understandably, upset (like, lawsuit-threatening upset). Wait--I just wrote that "the poems aren't by the poets they're attributed to." But--are they? Who's to say that the poets "Emily Lloyd," "Teresa Ballard," "K. Silem Mohammad," and "Emily Dickinson" published in Issue 1 are me, my partner, this K. Silem Mohammad, and the first Emily Dickinson that comes to mind when one thinks of poetry? Like Erika, "Emily Lloyd" is a made-up poet., is she not? I'm not fond of her work, but I certainly don't question her right to write and publish.
Actually, I think it's identity theft. If you're down with the joke that's okay, especially if you think that joke/experiment will always continue to be known as such, but part of putting your name on your words and standing by them is validation and longevity.
I think this ties into some things I'm thinking about sparked by librarian blogs, and I'd really like to converse on it.
Emily, you're around my age--this is almost the same as the plot of Gordon Korman's A Semester In the Life of A Garbage Bag. Ever read it?
Sudden colors and plain spices or is it Waking (Autopoiesis 2.7)
1.
In sweetness
In solitude
The peace of chaff
A spice
Fetching potential
To ascertain
Of death
Wasting against a
batch
In bliss
To grow
A right of orchards
At a sudden color
What are we to make of this window, banners, discourses, men, the waking
ears, like immortal fields?
What are we to make of this drawer, like a round angel?
What are we to make of this face, ticked as fear?
Must we be a record?
May we be a cup?
Must we be a great line of poetry?
(“Everything in the world to do. I must be lying already. And the sacred is
sacred.”)
Is this red then, this celestial strife?
Is that wilderness then, that amber hurry?
Is that air then, that young old old?
What did our hair do until it picked us?
What did our throat do before it heard us?
What did our hand do until it suited us?
What did our rib do before it defeated us?
What did our finger do before it heard us?
What did our face do until it thought us?
What are we to make of this brow, newer than a winter?
What are we to make of this verb, astonished as a friend?
What are we to make of this ecstasy, our arms simple with news?
What are we to make of this bough, newer than an ecstasy?
When I say “bless” I mean a cat blesses the shaft of light that enters a room by sleeping in it.
2.
Passing near the black hole
in a civil war ahead of the traffic
“hiding jokes in mud bricks” and “listening watching waiting”
I would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant.
Stick a tester in it.
Is it ready?
A?
B?
C?
D?
E?
F?
G?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
The passive ornate—of temperature—is half-stone—is delta—tone measure—of crystal—ruby lost—a toilet mechanism—sounds like—whistle—or
where
to just reside—
The passage is wide
open
to the solar
system.
It’s vowel time now and
the jury sweeps by in a cause and effect maneuver –
imagine all the filth of time
the bones that have been crushed in machines by machines or become
machines …
Cupids and Bacchus
Have given me carpet burns …
Someone was silent, and we wonder whose voice it had been.
A. indefinite / relative / relative
B. indefinite / personal / personal
C. definite / personal / personal
D. indefinite / personal / personal …
… the UN Convention against Torture and the US revisions of and exceptions to that convention, a dictionary of non-lethal weapons terms and references, the report reviewing Department of Defense detention operations, technical works on game theory and strategy, declassified White House memos, transcripts from animated video games, Emily Dickinson’s poem “Split the lark,” the song “The Big Rock Candy Mountains,” and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” …
icons
& the toxic halos
licked
all over like a stamp, my every garbage at
the actual border,
making it, making it over, taking up the slack.
The bottle broke in your bag & you're
getting flammable, very flammable.
No special name.
Your name here.
wwww lllluuu kkkhhhaaa.
An equivalent stretch of sand
or an equivalent stretch of sand
a definition of sand
the hair on your balls or if you’re too busy for balls
the tears like elves
Shiva Elijah Delphi achara Bruna leche flan Lama Vegas tidal volta destitute Alma then to write, in chalk, the final result, on the slate flagstones of the park,
Faint carvings base the moon, moonfaced seashell, cottontail, wind. loose pyjama ship’sprow, little empire, little amusement drawer, the no-it’s-not banquet, the carousel’spull. no, we are not accidents
of long ago, the tongues made
of tiny little tongues, call monsters to the walls.
When you sleep you miss / the courtesy service dream
where there was first aid
but no Inspector.
[Note: Sources: most of title and the 1st 13 lines: Erica T Carter, the poem generator, on automatic mode; last word of title and next 19 lines: ETC again, on directed mode, using words from Emily Dickinson (apparently ETC is the author of the for godot anthology, and a damn fine poet). Jared Schickling, “(bullets)”, in Aurora; Tony Tost, “The leafless American: Edward Dahlberg”, at Octopus 3. Part 2: the authors whose names appear along with the covers of their books on the home page of O Books, in order of appearance, top left to bottom right, reading boustrophredontically, left-right, right-left. Except as noted by links, the bits used come from the O Books site. I only touch each author once and I skip the anthologies. Tom Raworth, Tottering State; Susan Landers, 248 mgs., a panic panic, “no clearance in niche”, at DC Poetry; E Tracy Grinnell, Music or Forgetting;Brenda Iijima, Around Sea; kari edwards, Iduna; Tim Atkins (and the ghost of Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Horace; Padcha Tuntha-obas, “trespasses”, as quoted in a review by Craig Perez, at Zoland Poetry; Judith Goldman, letter to Leslie Scalapino, at Jacket 31, “rotten oasis”, at onedit 1; Sarah Anne Cox, excerpts from Parcel, as quoted in a review by Mike McDonough, at coldfront magazine; Tenney Nathanson, “MADAME BOVARY, THE NATIONAL INQUIRER, CAPITAL, AND THE HARDY BOYS, PUBLISHED FOR THE FIRST TIME TOGETHER IN A SINGLE VOLUME”, at RIF/T; 3; Paolo Javier, 60 lv Bo(e)mbs; Michael Coffey, “Poem of the Park” at Free Biennial; Elizabeth Treadwell, Lilyfoil + 3; Heather Fuller, Startle Response, “full logic system”, as quoted in Tom Hibbard’s review of Dovecote, Jacket 18]
And these are some of the mild ones.
So, what gives? Turns out the book, though real and available, is something of a prank. The poems are all computer generated, and intentionally falsely attributed to real poets.
I guess they don't get the, er, joke. I myself think it's pretty funny. I kinda wish I had gotten "published." Oh yeah, I'm not a poet.
What I don't quite understand is how these poets, that are upset that they have been had, were excited about having been (or, so they thought) published without notice or compensation. Has it become so hard to get your poetry published that this is cool? As I said - I'm not a poet, so I wouldn't know.
being a hopelessly self-involved attention whore, I could care less that I actually didn't write the poem attributed to me. In case you don't care to slog through the PDF looking for it (I'm on page 992, ahem) - and it isn't half bad! - I present my poem here:
Like a future
Placed
Reach
A lighted intended
Like an individual
A set of persons
Of past
A future
A set of bands
The unlit couples
An expedition of piles
Like a set
Like a match
A sort of aspiration
A carrier
Oblivion written with wilderness
In fact, I think I will claim ownership of the thing post haste. Why not? I've actually been trying to break out of the self-imposed limitations of my 8-word poems (fear not, I doubt I'll eveer truly get them out of my system) and my spliced together from conversations overheard/snippets recently read/nonsense half-remembered/inscrutable thoughts I wish I could forget routines.
Well, this poem - I have no idea who wrote it, or if it was even "written" - could be my springboard to that next voice.
Or not.
Why not?
The poetry blogosphere has been abuzz with the doings of some folks who've promised and finally delivered a massive, nearly 4000 page PDF file promising the work of many, many, many, many poets. In fact, the list of who would be featured in this work, from a blog that's named itself with unspeakably obvious literary reference, seemed to include every poet who has a blog, myself included. With delivery of the down loadable file, I quickly searched for name and the poem I supposedly submitted to editors I've never spoken with.
I was will to suspend any disbelief I had thinking perhaps that those folks had cribbed a choice verse I posted to my poems site , or some other place on line, usually obscured by word clouds. No wish fulfillment here, as the poem was something I didn't write. Not that I'm all that smokin' a poet, but the poem attached my name is rather bad, in the way one writes an awful set of stanzas on purpose. And lo, it turned out that I wasn't the only listed writer who hadn't composed the verse assigned their name; you can view the down loadable file here and read through the responses as well at the website where this hoax was perpetrated.
The project is not about what poems "belong" to an author as much as how many authors there are on the Internet who regularly check their status in the blogosphere with periodic Googlings of their name. The sheer quanity of names here, my own included, rather assured the instigators that there'd be a sizable , blog heavy response. It's a Dada gesture and a provocation made with the intention of upsetting a good number of poet's sense of themselves as autonomous agents and authors of their own experience. On that account, the anthology, fake poems and all, succeed famously. The aesthetic effect is the ripple they create among a scattered group's perception of a single event, small change as it maybe. Further disquisition on the relationship and fragility between the concept of authorship in an amorphous sphere like the Internet is, of course, fascinating, but secondary. It's gravy, but it's npt essential to what these fellas had in mind.Perhaps the instigators are Rove-like neocons who specialize in changing the subject; what better way to make people forget their economic ills than to appeal to their base insecurities. Rove would appeal to a poor American's nervous patriotism, while these fellas mine the thin vein of self-esteem too many poets have. In both cases, the ploy prevents one from the duty of the poet to change reality rather than merely describe or complain about it.
ForGodot.com ruffles poetic feathers
Posted by Robert
Wow! This is a busy day for the blog. How many posts am I going to make today anyway?
This post was inspired by a developing story brought to me by my wife Tammy. First, she found this post on Atlanta poet Collin Kelley's Modern Confessional blog: http://collinkelley.blogspot.com/2008/10/my-poem-at-forgodotcom.html.
It talks about an online "anthology" that is "publishing" poems by poets who are online from Jorie Graham to, well, Collin Kelley. Even some of my friends, such as Luc Simonic and Pris Campbell, are in this mega-nthology. There's only one catch: None of the poems were actually written by the poets.
Anyway, Tammy also found some other blogs discussing this odd anthology:
From Amy King's Alias blog: http://amyking.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/the-author-resurrected/
From Reb Livingston's Home-Schooled By a Cackling Jackal blog: http://cacklingjackal.blogspot.com/ (check out the October 5 post)
Also, to check out the source, go to: http://forgodot.com/.
(Really, you should check out the list of poets for the first issue. After a while, your eyes will start to cross--poetically, of course.)
*****
So, this is probably some kind of joke on poets and the universe, but does it make it right? I don't consider myself an elitist or a prude or anything like that, but poets who are in the anthology AND upset do have a legitimate gripe. For one, the poems aren't funny (if that was even the intent). And second, people who may be searching out a poet's work and find these horrible poems online may write off that particular poet as someone the potential reader no longer wants to read.
This site is NOT an obvious satire, and so poets could very easily be victimized by the misrepresentation of their work. This is especially damaging to lesser known poets--and, yes, there are a lot of them in the first issue.
How To Generate 3,000 Angry "Contributors"
Earlier today, one book editor asked how to blog. Over the weekend, another editor discovered how not to blog.
The website for godot recently released a 3,785-page pdf "book" that contained thousands of pages of apparently computer-generated poetry, all of it attributed to real people--including Walt Whitman, blogger Ed Champion, and poet Ron Silliman.
On his blog, Silliman called it "an act of anarcho-flarf vandalism" and warned the editor to think about angry "contributors" and potential lawsuits. Finally, he listed the name, phone number, and email address of the anthology editor.
The editor responded that the phone number was actually his parents' line, and described the work as a publishing experiment.
"I expected its size, format, and (to my eye) clearly algorithmically generated content to make our intentions clear. I wholeheartedly support the world of small press publishing and small press writing. Following the distribution of Issue 1, I would consider myself to be a member of that community on some small scale."
(Thanks, Ed Champion)
(note: I did not write the poem attributed to me in this anthology)
From http://www.forgodot.com/2008/10/issue-1-release-announcement.html:
"Announcing the release of Issue 1, edited by Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter. Now available here as a 3,785-page PDF (3.9 MB)."
Un/Willing Participants: ( 3,164 )
Stuff to look at.
I just launched Improbable Object. Check it out!
Have a look at HTML Giant
This is unbelievable.
In writing news, I’m listed in the “Notable Stories” section in the back of this year’s Best American Nonrequired Reading for my story “Twirling the Legless Sailor Dog” in Hobart 8.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to “Stuff to look at.”
ryan call Says:
October 9th, 2008 at 11:46 am
congrats on the notable thing, matt
Matt Says:
October 16th, 2008 at 5:16 am
Congratulations on your Notable Story!
Let us take a nice break from the craziness going on over the For Godot project with folks either ranting to the fullest or proclaiming it the greatest thing ever, and go back to January 2001. A time before 9/11, before Flarf, before indexed searches, and just before I ever wrote/read a poem of my own.
I'm Bothered That He's Bothered
"... in 30 years that text is likely to turn up on my* record. This is not some victimless prank. It's a world class Stupid Artist's Trick."
Ron Silliman writes this in response to Nada Gordon in the comments stream at his blog in his "Issue 1" post of a few days back...I can hardly improve on Nada's response, but, still, I guess I just want to give Ron shit about this. I know Ron doesn't need shit from me, but I can't hardly stop myself. Why does "Issue 1" offend Ron? Because it uses his name in vain.** I could understand Ron being upset if they actually were writing slanderous stuff about him, but instead, the editors are clearly engaged in an interesting creative project. There is absolutely no way that people who care about poetry won't get that. Ron, you have nothing to fear! Your "record" will be spotless! To prove my point, I will write another poem attributed to you, which, I will make certain, doesn't affect your literary standing at all.
Dear The Future,
Even though I'm not actually
Ron Silliman, I'm pretending
to be just for the sake
of this poem.
Anyway,
I'm a pretty good guy
who is an important part
of the literary community,
but I'm kinda being
a grumpy old tool
when it comes to this
Issue 1 thing.
--Ron Silliman
*The emphasis on my is Ron's.
**If you threaten to sue me or something I promise to take this down immediately and make a public apology.
Labels: giving people shit
Written by Edward Champion
Posted on October 5, 2008
Filed Under Poetry
I am very honored to have been included in this quite important poetry collection. It appears, however, that Bat Segundo, responding in the For Godot comments, was none too happy about the controversial prosodic pilfering. What is perhaps funnier than the experiment itself is how so many egos have taken offense at this Situationist tomfoolery (more sustained horrific reactions can be found at The National Poetry Foundation blog). Danny Pitt Stoller writes:
If someone published an article containing false information about me, I would want it removed from the Web; it is no different for you to claim I wrote a certain poem when I did not. It is my basic right to protect my name and reputation, and I find it really tasteless that some people would laugh this off as some kind of avant-garde experiment.
It is worth observing that Danny Pitt Stoller’s name narrowly escaped being included on the Megan’s Law database. (Consult Long Island court documents for more information on what has been privately referred to in the Stoller household as “the incident.”) He has been known to consort with goats in motel rooms. His right testicle is slightly smaller than his left. Despite being married, Mr. Stoller has slept with a mere 2.2 people in the past eleven years, and hopes that he will yield 2.2 children in the next eleven years. He once ran for treasurer, losing to Esmerelda Muttmuffins by a 72-28 margin. Ms. Muttmuffins still holds the coveted position. There was a six month period in 1997 in which Mr. Stoller’s telephone bills were about $300 monthly, the result of too many 1-900 telephone calls. Mr. Stoller is a legally ordained minister and has officiated over many weddings. That woman who married a dolphin some years ago? It was Mr. Stoller who presided over the ceremony. Mr. Stoller has written 210 letters to the editor, but none of them have been published in Newsday. He wears pink socks in his bedroom, but never in public. He genuinely believes that Michael Bay is one of the most important film directors of our time, and has watched every episode of The Beverly Hillbillies twice.
And, yes, Mr. Stoller is dour and humorless.
I was one of those who took offense, since I don’t write poety, and had to waste my time chasing this down after it popped up in my Google alerts.
This happened after I discovered a spam site had taken my name and used it in their URL, and there wasn’t f-all I could do about it.
I suppose I should find it hilarious that my name has become such a popular brand that it can be ripped off by anyone. If it was, I would, but it isn’t, so I won’t. See?
« A Note on EvilCrisis »Issue #1
Ron Silliman reports on a new publication, modestly entitled Issue 1. (I was first alerted to this by The Mumpsimus). This e-text is 3785 pages long (!); each page contains a “poem” attributed to one of 3785 3164 writers. The names of the writers range from Silliman himself and other language poets, through a number of (now dead) poets and writers, onto various bloggers (especially ones who appear in Silliman’s blogroll, it would seem). In point of fact, none of the writers have actually written the pieces attributed to them. My name appears among the list of authors, together with the names of several people I know, including some who read (and sometimes comment on) this blog. My own “poem” appears on page 1893; for what it’s worth, it doesn’t strike me as being very good, nor is it like anything that I could ever imagine myself writing, either in style or in sentiment.
I kind of wonder how other “victims” of this hoax (if that’s what it is) respond to it. Silliman seems kind of pissed off, as do many (but not all) of the commenters on his blog entry. Matthew Cheney (of The Mumpsimus blog) seems more or less amused:
The whole thing strikes me as a stunt pulled by someone who desperately wants attention. (And now I’m giving it to ‘em. So it goes.) I’m still amazed that anyone would put the time into creating something like this, but the amazement now is the sort of amazement one has when watching the totally insane rather than watching the harmlessly obsessive.
Me, I think that the stunt raises all sorts of interesting questions (or perhaps I should say, in Palin-speak, that lots of interesting questions “rear their heads”). Early-20th-century Dadaist stunts raised meta-questions about art, about what could be considered art, etc. But such meta-questions have long since been so well assimilated into our culture (both artistic culture and commercial culture) that they scarcely raise an eyebrow any longer. Today, we can only be blase about self-referentiality, conceptual art, and so on.
In such a context, Issue 1 attempts to up the ante, by asking meta-meta-questions, as it were. Most notably, there’s the difficulty of deciding whether the publication actually is some sort of interesting conceptual art, or whether it is rather just a dumb prank, or a malicious hoax. Then there is the issue of obsessiveness that Matthew Cheney raises. Certainly a lot of modernist and post-modernist art is quite obsessive (I am thinking of everything from Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots to Henry Darger’s weather chronicles). But Issue 1 might well only be pseudo-obsessive; it seems to be something that would have required an insane amount of time and energy (if only to collect all those author names and write all those poems), but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was all generated by a computer program in just a few hours. Even insanity isn’t what it used to be, in our age of digital simulation.
Finally, given all the questions about the status of the author that have been raised in the last half-century or so, it only makes sense that I should be credited with the authorship of something that I had nothing to do with writing. Remember, Roland Barthes proclaimed “the death of the author” more than forty years ago, in 1967. And even well before that, in 1940, Borges proposed a literary criticism that would “take two dissimilar works — the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, for instance — attribute them to a single author, and then in all good conscience determine the psychology of that most interesting homme de lettres…” (from “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). Issue 1 is a logical outgrowth of the situation in which such ideas no longer seem new, or radical, or outrageously counterintuitive, but have instead been entirely assimilated into our “common sense.”
In short, Issue 1 makes sense to me as a conceptual art project precisely to the extent that it marks the utter banalization, routinization, and digitization of any sort of conceptualism and experimentalism in art, and of all supposedly “avant-garde” gestures. There is something melancholy in coming to this conclusion; but perhaps something liberating as well, since it suggests that the whole strain of avant-gardism that starts in the 19th century, goes through dadaism and other forms of radical modernism, and moves through conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s to the supposedly oppositional political art of the last few decades, has finally outlived its relevance and its usefulness. We have finally reached the point where we can shake off the dead weight of the anti-traditionalist tradition, and perhaps move on to something else. This doesn’t mean rejecting all the art of the avant-garde tradition, much of which I still very much love. But it does mean seeing that art historically, just as we see the art of the Baroque historically, or as we see the science fiction of the “Golden Age” of the early-to-mid 20th century historically. It’s still there to be tapped (or looted) for clever ideas, formal approaches, and so on. But modernist experimentation and avant-gardism is no longer a living resource; in an age of arcane financial instruments capable at one moment of generating huge quantities of fictitious wealth, and at another moment of sending shockwaves through the entire society, wiping out retirement accounts, causing businesses to go bankrupt and jobs to disappear, etc, etc — in such a climate, modernist avant-gardism fails to be “as radical as reality itself.” (I am fully aware that financial panics with real effects upon people’s lives are as old as capitalism itself; what’s new in the present situation comes from the way that new technologies have a multiplier effect, as well as adding additional layers of meta-referentiality and meta-feedback into the system).
I am sorely tempted to add the “poem” of mine which appears in Issue 1, and which I had absolutely nothing to do with producing, to my CV.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Books, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I get the the whole juridical legal notion of authorship and its demise. Ala, Foucault and Barthes, among others. But your last comment about financial realities reinforces my problem. There is a body somewhere with some sort of effort that produces. Maybe we can conclude that this exercise was the work of some sort of machinic Doppelgänger that created the text. But unless we can assume it was a machine that automated this text production, perhaps even a clever script or bit of code that operates much in the same way google accumulates information, we have to reflect on the fact of the body that spent time compiling, writing and (non)thinking the text. And what kind of comment or conclusion does this state of affairs lead us towards?
You have spoken elegantly about about the creative exploitation capitalism engages in and how the processes of accumulation are built upon the use of other people’s creative works (think user generated content propping up major corporate interests).
I wonder if in our contemporary condition the notion of the self and individual has been so completely eroded that we simultaneous are able to erode the notion of the body behind it for entirely banal interests. Even if it was a script or piece of code that produced this obsessive work there was still effort, or at least a will to exploit the notoriety of others to exploit the very notion of fame (or limited parochial fame) itself for some sort of gain and further accumulation of notoriety.
And to entirely illustrate my point I think you should retype the poem completely on your blog and then take credit in your CV. Maybe cut and paste is the most expeditious method but retype character by character is the more bold statement. Because after all that is some sort of effort, that could be reduced to time spent. How is that anymore “inauthentic” than any other body that passes time in this author less reality we all traverse?
[...] The Pinocchio Theory’nin referansıyla öğrendim ki şurada, yaşayan ünlü entelektüellerin isimlerini bazı [...]
A while ago I got a bunch of those inevitable Viagra spam mails, containing short computer generated nonsense poems. I admit I collected some of them and even fished one or two from the Junk folder where they had been passed to by the spam filter. Here is a teaser:
hobbyists inapposite
To read it. Natasie, standing near the bed, held round white
stones, supported on upright pillars arrived at dreaming
of and looking forward to with rope, and a handkerchief
had been thrust for an instant, it was at fault. Then it
would officer, and the fire of his eye, showed a concentrated
the case in most countriesand grew in intensity marrow,
barberries, slic’t lemon, gooseberries,.
It’s quite seductive to think that spambots somehow utilize the AI offspring of Google in the near future. That’s also when we’ll see Issue#2, Issue#3 etc. that’ll already contain much less random clutter.
The question that this project raises to me is: can identity theft even be charming? The idea of putting the poem on ones own CV seems to approve it.
What the Flarfin' Flarf?
3,785 Page Pirated Poetry Anthology
Featuring the work of 3,164 poets. Completely unpermissioned and unauthorized, pissing off the entire poetry community. Either you're in or you're not.
Ik zag zojuist dat ik met een gedicht ben opgenomen in deze, nou ja, uh... nogal omvangrijke bloemlezing. Alleen... ik schreef dat gedicht niet! En ik blijk niet het enige slachtoffer te zijn. Hahaha, wat een grap!!!
Meer reacties op Poetry Foundation.
The poetry world is rather upset this week about the “pirated poetry anthology” Issue 1, published as a .pdf (3,785 pages) by Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter.
A Kristen Taylor is included, and her poem on page 104 is titled “Coats made without courage”.
I find the project amusing and imagine the editors rounded out the collection by scraping the interwebs for those of us who occasionally put up poems or are linked to poets with an online presence.
As for consuming this voluminous mass of words, editor Stephen McLaughlin recommends; “If you’re up to it, I’d suggest gulping the magazine whole, for 83 straight hours of transcendent poetic revelry reflecting the whole panoply of human achievement, emotion, wistfulness, and athletic achievement.”
If you’d like to read poems I have written, I post them here (scroll down).
For example, I did attempt a triolet (ABaAabAB) a few years back:
a pretty hewn town
and someone laughed, and someone paid
and some one cleaned the mess we made
we knew the chef and so we stayed
and someone laughed, and someone paid
and someone struck, and someone played
and someone slept and someone strayed
and someone laughed, and someone paid
and some one cleaned the mess we made
And, anyway, a poem I wrote about coats would do more to allude to Yeats’s “A Coat”–I am happy for the editors to have caught my name, but as for the poem, they wrought it. And let them take it, for there’s more enterprise in browsing the real work of the included poets.
If I were you, I’d start with one of my favorite poets, Alan Michael Parker and his “Love Song with Motor Vehicles” (this is the title piece of a wonderful collection)…
p.s. His purported poem is on page 2635 of the anthology.
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forgodot.com er rannsóknarmiðstöð fyrir ljóðlist rekin af Vladimir Zykov, Stephen McLaughlin og Gregory Laynor. Þegar menn tala um rannsóknir og ljóðlist kemur ósjálfrátt Oulipo hópurinn franski upp í hugann, en Georges Perec, Raymond Queuneau og félagar lögðu það í vana sinn að búa til hugmyndir um ljóð. Til að mynda skrifaði Perec verk sem innihélt ekkert e. Hugmyndir þeirra voru þó ekki allar framkvæmdar, fæstar jafnvel - stærstur hluti þeirra var borinn upp á fundum, samþykktar og þar var látið við sitja. Oulipo hópurinn leit ekki á það sem hlutverk sitt að skrifa oulipo-ljóð, heldur að koma fram með hugmyndir sem væru mögulega framkvæmanlegar. Kanadíska ljóðskáldið Darren Wershler-Henry gaf síðar út heila bók með álíka hugmyndum - ljóðabók sem var ekkert nema runa af hugmyndum um mögulegar ljóðabækur. Hún heitir The Tapeworm Foundry.
Meðal þeirra verka sem komið hafa út úr forgodot.com rannsóknarmiðstöðinni eru I was told to write fifty words, sem inniheldur verk sem innihalda 50 orð. Nýjasta verk þeirra kumpána hefur þó vakið mikla athygli - bæði jákvæða og neikvæða - en þar er um að ræða safnrit sem nefnist Issue 1. Tilkynnt var um útkomu verksins fyrir um viku síðan og gefin lýsing. 3.785 síðna pdf-bók með ljóðum eftir 3.164 höfunda (raunar eru nokkur nöfnin tvítekin). Listinn yfir höfunda er merkilegur - þar er að finna nöfn eins og Aram Saroyan, Robert Creeley, Name Jun Paik, Aldous Huxley, Edgar Lee Masters og Jack Spicer auk ótal margra misþekktra bandarískra skálda, og fáeinna annarra (t.a.m. eru Leevi Lehto, Pejk Malinovski, Kari Kokko og Gunnar Ekelöf með). Skáldin, sem öll eru með google-alert á nafnið sitt, könnuðust ekki við að hafa gefið leyfi fyrir birtingu á ljóðum sínum í þessu riti og brugðust við hið allra snarasta, sum vel og önnur illa. Mörgum þótti upphefð í þessu, öðrum þótti á sér brotið, og var beðið eftir ritinu í ofvæni. Það leit dagsins ljós í gær og kemur þá á daginn að skáldin kannast ekki við kveðskap sinn - og segjast alls ekki hafa skrifað þessi ljóð. Útkoman er sem sagt 3.164 ljóð sem öll minna hvert á annað, líklega skrifuð af forriti. Og nú eru menn ýmist reiðir, kátir, eða reiðir að þykjast vera kátir til að líta ekki út eins og bjánar. Ýmist reiðast menn að ljóðin, sem þeim þykir léleg, séu við þá kennd, eða þeir reiðast að verið sé að nota nöfn þeirra til að vekja athygli á verkefni sem þeim er á móti skapi, eða þeir hreinlega fýldast að þeir skuli ekki vera með - að þeir teljist ekki nógu merkilegir til að lenda á nær endalaust löngum lista yfir bandarísk ljóðskáld.
If you like angry poets — and honestly, who doesn’t like angry poets? — I suggest reading about the following saga:
Three gentlemen at For Godot posted the new publication Issue 1. It was quite a grand publication — 3,785 pages, featuring over 3,000 poets. When a bunch of narcissistic poets received Google Alerts the next day, they wandered over to the web site to find out why they were listed amongst this new publication’s contributors. None of them had submitted to this mysterious and gigantic online magazine.
As they later found out, thanks to clarifications from the creators themselves, their “contributions” had been computer generated. The publication itself is quite brilliant; the laughter comes in the ensuing chaos, where poets freak out about their reputation being tarnished, as if anyone other than the included poets would bother reading this massive PDF.
If you’d like to dive into the fun, I suggest you do the following:
– read the above link, the initial release of Issue 1
– read this post at Ron Silliman’s blog, which encouraged enraged poets to call the number listed with the domain, which of course led to a few angry and/or curious poets calling the creator’s parents; also, be sure to read the comments on this post
– read the first post about this at Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog; also, be sure to read the comments on this post (pretty much a rule for all of the links I will include)
– read a note of clarification at For Godot
– read a similar note of clarification at Harriet
– for a change of pace, read a rather sane and calm take from Amy King
– finally, if you don’t think it’s gone far enough, read this draft of a cease and desist letter
Has this been milked dry? I hope not. Somewhere, there’s an included poet not yet aware of this. Chances are, he or she will be angry about it.
Hurra! Jeg (eller en anden digter af samme navn) er med i en antologi (eller første nummer af et tidsskrift?) sammen med Wei Ying-Wu og Borges og Koch og en masse andre af mine yndlingsdigtere. Knapt 4000 andre for at være mere præcis. Jeg har en teori om at Erika T Carter er involveret.
UPDATE
Her er mit bidrag:
Like a leaflet
Good leaflets and mighty
gates
No one has discovered a presumption,
where sentinels and spades and
mornings have hung heaven
That which beside an
irresistible color has thirsted for,
good and missing
Next the rib
Like a frigid flood
NY UPDATE
Her er min oversættelse:
Som en folder
Gode foldere og mægtige
porte
Ingen har fundet formodningen
hvor vagter og spader og
morgener har hængt himlen
Det som udover en
uimodståelig farve har tørstet efter
god og manglende
Ved ribbenets side
Som en kold flodbølge
From Ron Silliman's Oct 5, 2008 blog posting:
"Issue 1 is what I would call an act of anarcho-flarf vandalism. The second pages lists the compilers as Stephen McLaughlin & Jim Carpenter, and a search of domain ownership for the web host arsonism.org at Whois.com turns up the following:
Registrant Name: Stephen McLaughlin
Registrant Street1: 409 Ash St.
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City: Delanco
Registrant State/Province: New Jersey
Registrant Postal Code:08075
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone:+1.8567641574
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email: fakesalt@comcast.net
If you are unamused, you might want to tell Steve this directly. If you’re amused, I suspect that he’d like to hear that as well.
I might note that the last time I felt ripped off by an on-line stunt, I sued – as a lead plaintiff in a class-action case brought by the National Writers Union. And while I can’t discuss the suit, as a condition of the subsequent settlement, I will note that we could have gotten a pretty good major league middle infielder for the final amount. Play with other people’s reps at your own risk."
~
Carpet-bomb email this guy until his account blows up. Call him until his cell phone melts down. [I'll be doing neither... I don't have time for this guy outside the theatre of this blog. I'm happy to make my point here, for my 10-15 readers]. I don't want to be misrepresented by this supposed "art project." If I wanted my name on a terrible poem, I'd write one myself. If I wanted to create art by using other people's names and a simple computer text-generator, I'd create a website and write the program (both of which would take no less than a couple hours tops). Stephen better have failed this project. Shit. A monkey could do it. And now the monkey-shit who did do it should be forced to take the site down. Or keep it up. Either way, his voicemail and email inbox are gonna get mighty crowded if people follow through with their threats. Me, I'm gonna watch some football, write some poems, hang-out with my son, and cook some tacos.
I'm pissed
This Issue 1 thing pisses me off. I'd like to find who's doing this and punch them in the groin. Or maybe I'll just own my faux poem, celebrate it as a step forward toward a new style... nay, I wanna punch someone's groin.
My poem is on page 1634 of 3785. It goes like this:
Anodynes changed from bark
The anodyne of the belle,
above the arctic habiliment
I trudge during summer beyond
creatures
His essence is still his essence
What the hell is that? An anodyne?
There's a curious hoax afoot.
The perpetrators are a group of "poetic researchers" named Vladimir Zykov, Steve McLaughlin, and Gregory Laynor, who have published a 3785 page journal of poems called For Godot.
The journal is full of spam-like poems (flarf?) which they have attributed to different writers alive and dead. I happen to be one of them. Many other folks I know and admire are in it, too. Maybe even you!
Here's the poem they published under my name, which I didn't write:
Of intensityInvincible as a possession, angry as a dewOnly as a time, long as a timeLong and unretentiveThey have feetLate at night they acquit himLike a black wayThey can see the noise of the hand, between these invasions and those invasionsEarly in the morning they answer himInto a driven flame a bad hour appearsThe ages concentrate as if they see it(pg. 1453)
Here's Mathias Svalina's poem:
MankindMankindA suitWriting mankind with humanityAir and flyingAn other cherrySuffocatingA cherry of suitsThrottledA man of crumbsA kind of cherryFitting panicA sort of riotingLike an imbecileThe sandy visionsOf wildernessPeopleThe towering glances(pg. 1272)
Here's Blake Butler's poem:
Lands changed inside admirationAfter now it skulked you, exiling, skulking, a sort of country(pg. 1595)
Here's Gary Lutz's poem:
A flagAn added leapLike a domeLike a graveA forestA hint of bodicesThirst written into natureSure lights and wise triumphsOf fameLike a tradeNodding creationTrue reasons and altered rotationsAnguishGood hillsides and untravelled earthsLike a hillsideLike a companyBrave midnights and livelong worldsSilent asphodels and wounded flagsSlow nails and light printsCautious breasts and old nights(pg. 2829)
When I discovered that I was a poet, and I didn’t even know it.
Yes, one of the more bizarre things peppering my life at the moment is finding my name in an “unauthorized” poetry anthology, attached to a poem I didn’t write.
Apparently, a website named for godot has produced a brick of a poetry anthology with a cast of thousands. And apparently, these guys knew full well that they didn’t have permission to do what they did. In the words of Harriet at the Poetry Foundation, who brought this to people’s attention:
Featuring the work of 3, 164 poets. Completely unpermissioned and unauthorized, pissing off the entire poetry community. Either you’re in or you’re not.
(link)
So, apparently, on page 3518, I wrote this:
A sort of side
Sudden and gradual
Leaky and tight
Hopeless and hopeful
Bony and boneless
It rendered them timidity in mouthfuls of
credibility, mouthfuls more
inconceivable than a woman
Its reason was its reason
A wretched hair, pink hair,
bloodthirsty hair of
an original thief
It hurt me
to watch them remaining like
that, happy and begrimed
It might be that it was to
ask a bloodthirsty minute,
a massive side,
a ruined foot, mica, a ready
street, a begrimed forefinger, whose
year was unwholesome, giving on a
city, hurrying for a
head
James Bow
Huh. Reading this, I’m reminded why Erin warned me off attempting poetry early in my writing career. My first tries were about this quality. (Apologies to anybody who did actually write this and wishes to claim it. You can take heart in that I don’t really know or appreciate poetry beyond what my wife writes — she’s brilliant. But this looks like something a machine spits out after feeding in a bunch of mad libs)
But I didn’t write this. And I’m pretty sure that no other person in the world named James Bow did. As short as my name is, it’s still pretty distinctive. I pretty much own my Google search results, with my closest doppleganger (a Dr. James N. Bow, a forensic psychologist out in Michigan) not appearing until page five. There aren’t that many James Bows out there, and quite possibly only one of them writes.
So how did I get on here?
Other people are coming forward in the comments section of For Godot (more comments here) with similar questions, so at least I’m not the only one to have had his or her identity stolen in this rather odd way. But… why?
Why?!
I’m perplexed.
This is too funny. Every poet in the blogosphere must be listed here. Check out the comments box.
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