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-   -   Conceptual literature redux (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=17576)

Janice D. Soderling 04-21-2012 02:31 PM

Conceptual literature redux
 
For your reading pleasure.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...+The+Blog%2 9

Nicholas F. 04-21-2012 04:08 PM

I'd rather read tea leaves.

Jesse Anger 04-21-2012 04:15 PM

As a Canadian writer I am quite familiar with Christian, he's buddies with most of my profs, and that awful book Annoya, or whatever it's called, is everywhere. Although I think Bok is an excellent lecturer and essayist I find his poetry, sorry, retarded. I could give a shit about a damn machine that writes nonsense sentences, it's dumb. Now writers that create palindromes and do other linguistic tricks such as mirrored constructions upset a set up have a place in my heart, I've always enjoyed premutating letters and such -- but that's not poetry, it's word wizardry. He said once in a lecture that I was at that one need not ever write another sonnet because there was a computer program creating sonnets by the minute -- it sure was( maybe still is) creating 14 IP lines, but that's it -- that ain't no sonnet.

Anyway, as you may be able to tell this guy has a way of getting under my skin, and while I think him a wonderful man I find his aesthetics repulsive.

Janice, this is a good topic link for a discussion

J

Janice D. Soderling 04-21-2012 04:36 PM

Right to both you. We have had some knockdown and dragout threads on this already. That's why I thought it might be of interest.

Chris Childers 04-21-2012 04:40 PM

I think pentametron is funny. You can only read so many of these things, but any single line could provoke a poem. It would be a good exercise.

Edit: This one almost makes sense:

4/20 ain't a fucking holiday
This female really fucking trying me
We talking swisher sweets and warren G
I love expensive jeans & crispy shoes
I want tattoos, tattoos & more tattoos.
I neva gave a fuck about a hoe!!!!
i am a really lazy person tho
jus saw a pussy wagon mini van
We even get an elevator man
I never really trusted NOBODY!
Remember love! Remember you and me! ♥
I hope chicago kicks miami's ass
I'm gonna kill Monique retarded ass
We're number one. :) Hello Hello Hello...

R. Nemo Hill 04-21-2012 06:02 PM

I see no harm in ego-less surrealism.
A poem is often about what a reader brings to it anyway.

And cries of horror or outrage or tsk-tsk-ing at this sort of thing are so predictable. Now that surrealism has been co-opted by advertising or by dull poets who needs to brighten up dull patches in their verse--it's salubrious to remember that it provoked the same sort of reaction: automatic writing (albeit without a machine), scandalous! What will become of literature?!

I'd certainly rather see twitter used this way than for the usual inane shallow conversation.

Nemo

Jesse Anger 04-21-2012 09:14 PM

I agree with you Nemo on most of what you've written. Although, I feel that there is something other than blind randomness at work in the act of automatic writing, something that a machine cannot tap into, something which requires will, intelligence and consciousness, or the intersection of these.

To deny the ego is still an egocentric act, a thing in reverse, still the thing.

I am down with the surrealists, for sure, and to a lesser extent the Dadaists -- I need to study the latter further. This is different; something about the synthetic generation of poetry irks me, to me, and this may be totally romanticized, the act of writing poems is a magical act, it's more than simply throwing together random words -- it's as if by unfocusing the mind, the mind is becomes clearer, it becomes a conduit. My best poems are almost always automatic.

Tangent much?

J

Vernon Sims 04-21-2012 09:30 PM

It is a long-held idea in critical thought that the ego must suspend judgement in order for the creative process to function, however, and this is the key point, it must step back in and exercise judgement to finish the process. A chimpanzee may eventually write great literature if allowed to use a keyboard, but an ego must eventually make sense of it all. The surrealists/dadaists may belittle the ego but it is the ego that recognizes their usefulness..

R. Nemo Hill 04-21-2012 10:15 PM

Still and all, it is an interesting experiment to place the ego only on the receiving end, only as the audience. No one is saying this replaces any other kind of work--it's just another angle of investigation.

Nemo

W.F. Lantry 04-21-2012 10:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by R. Nemo Hill (Post 242133)
scandalous! What will become of literature?!

Ha! Exactly, Nemo.

So in 1950, seriously, 1950, Vonnegut wrote a story called Epicac. You can read all about it here. In the early 70's, people were using LISP to generate text strings. There's nothing new about any of this, the arguments all happened years ago, there's no point in getting worked up about it now.

It was relatively easy to write a program for playing chess. The game seems complicated, but it's mathematically reducible. Now even a dumb program, one you can run on your PC, can outplay the best human in the world.

In the 90's, people were using Linux to make self-learning bots who could teach themselves to play checkers. They got better and better as they played. They could run a thousand games a day. Does anyone really think they won't catch up? Yes, language is far more complex than chess. But Moore's law still holds.

There's an amusing joke here. We were always taught that a good metaphor takes two disparate concepts and links them, finds their previously unimagined connections. It was the very measure of a great poet. That one goes all the way back to Aristotle. And that was exactly the same technique the bots used to overcome the spam filters. Over a decade ago.

Somewhere out there some english major who knows how to code is staring at a screen right now. Her idea of poetry doesn't begin and end with Jabberwocky, a coder favorite. And she doesn't care about the silly pop culture stuff this Bok guy is writing about. She's hard coding for hard lit. And when we see what she's doing, she's going to blow us away with what she can achieve...

Best,

Bill


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