Conceptual literature redux
 

For your reading pleasure.

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

I'd rather read tea leaves.

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

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.

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...

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

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

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..

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

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

I don't care really about all that 20th century whinge, because my attitude is live and let live. People can write all the Dada/Surrealist/whatever crap they like. It's ain't the end of literature or anything because I'm still writing what *I* like, and others are as well.

However, as to your claim above. I call BS. I am a pretty damned good programmer, though I do say so myself. LISP? Sure. I've done AI work in LISP, Smalltalk, Scheme, Prolog, Haskell and more. I've also done a lot of more general-purpose programming in Assembler, C, Objective C, C++, Java, Python, etc. You mention checkers-learning programs. Funny thing. I wrote a program in college to learn how to play checkers using a bit of my own hybrid between genetic algorithms and simulated annealing. You mention what I presume are trigrams and higher nth-order text generators? Yep, I've coded more than my fair share of those as well, and had fun feeding them with text corpora from Prodigy, Usenet, Project Gutenberg, etc. It looks to me as if you've pretty much ticked off the standard list of things that any undergrad with an AI interest has dabbled in. I'd just add Eliza and perhaps a frame-based expert system in a field of the student's interest.

Here's the thing, though: Those are all toys. Computers are nowhere near the slightest glimmer of a prospect of replacing the humanities. Not. Even. Close. Mind you, MacCarthy, Turing, and even taking a step back to von Neumann, all these esteemed and brilliant individuals thought that it was just a matter of a few more MIPS and a bit more core storage here and there before computers would be taking over human creative tasks. They lived to admit just how wrong they were. There is a fundamental quiddity we are missing entirely before such a breakthrough would be possible. I'm not saying it will never happen. We're just cell assembly, and even the most sophisticated assembly can eventually be reverse-engineered. Hey maybe Skynet is indeed on the way. The point, however, is that we're not even close yet, and there is almost certainly no English major with coding skills or Computer scientist with humanities chops sitting at a screen somewhere out there now on the verge of replacing *decent* poets.

Sky ain't falling, so folks should feel free to hate anti-humanistic "writing" as much as they please without being accused of ludditism.

But, hey, why stop there, Bill? With the ability to accomplish what you describe, it would be a cinch to develop related software, aimed at taking over and maximizing the submission and publication process. Set up a data base of all known literary journals and their acceptance tendencies, establish an initial screening system to aim at, say, the easier-to-sell second tier for starters - new Bosnian publications, that kind of thing - possibly even introduce a feedback loop so that editor requests for modifications are automatically satisfied, establish your targeting parameters properly so that the right poems are submitted to the right journals, and you're set! Poems can be automatically generated and submitted, leaving poets free to do the fun stuff, like jabbing at each other on internet Forums. If they wish to. (This note, for example was produced by my new WiseAss Mark IV Geezertronic program. The data base and algorithms are so sophisticated that all I had to do was type in your name and a link to the thread.)

I agree, however.

; The end result is one of two things

conceptual literature or flattery.

Uche,

I respect your position. Who can forget the euphoria, and subsequent disappointment, over advances in AI? In spite of those setbacks, I still have an optimistic view. I guess we'll find out. By the way, did you catch the Tupac concert the other night?

Michael, thanks for your kind words. Interesting sidenote: I recently discovered some new categories one can add to one's google news page. There's even one which will give you lots of news concerning poets and poetry. There's also a literature news section, art, contemporary art, too many to list. Let me know if you need some assistance tweaking your settings. That's a nice webpage you put up for your book, by the way... ;)

Best,

Bill

I like the guy. Hey, look at this tweet of his, in which he links to a little sonnet I wrote. I posted on the Sphere some time ago, but many here thought it sounded cranky. I'm glad Christian saw the humor in it. It's an homage!

Pedro.

That is a real sonnet, Pedro. How can one not like it?

I thought "ego-less surrealism" juxtaposed with Bok was awfully funny.

Uche,

Thanks for your perspective. Perhaps it's just confirmation bias but I enjoy hearing someone else who doesn't think that magic people bots are on the horizon. I don't even think they're in the gravity well.

Bok, et al exist because they've tapped into the money well of poetry--that is, teaching and speaking engagements. They get them because they're good looking, well-dressed, and well-spoken--not because they're great writers. But this is (to an extent) what happens when a group of poets becomes insulated but still retains patronage--introverted, impossible verse.

I wonder have many here have actually read Eunoia. It's a fantastic work and definitely formalist -- more constraints than a sonnet, certainly. I've met Bok and he's very nice and told me I had great style, so I suppose I'm biased. Here's an excerpt from Eunoia's A chapter:

Hassan can watch can-can gals cha-cha-cha, as brass bands blat jazz razzmatazz (what a class act). Rapt fans at a bandstand can watch jazzbands that scat a waltz and a samba. Fans clap as a fat-cat jazzman and a bad-ass bassman blab gangsta rap -- a gangland fad that attacks what Brahms and Franck call art: a Balkan czardas, a Tartar tandava (sarabands that can charm a saltant chap at a danza). Bach can craft a Catalan sardana that attracts l'Afghan chantant a l'amant dansant. A sax drawls tantaras (all A-flats and an A-sharp): fa-la-la-la-la.

You'd have to be deaf to not hear all the internal rhymes and shifting rhythms word play. And it's far too ridiculous and funny ("that attacks what Brahms and Franck call art" takes jabs at all the people dismissing Bok's work) to be "introverted, impossible verse" to quote a critic below.

No one has to write a sonnet ever again. Those who do it do it because they like it. No one has to read a sonnet ever again. Those who do it do it because they like it. Some enjoy reading conceptual constructs and some enjoy reading sonnets. I don't foresee that changing in the future, but probably the ones who like sonnets are less likely to enjoy conceptual poetry and vice versa. Trying to persuade one side to like its opposite is just counterproductive. I don't rule out that there may be some who can get equal pleasure from both. I just think they are rare.

Susan

And Bok called me a troll in print, so I suppose there's bias there, too.

At any rate,

Hassan can watch can-can gals cha-cha-cha, as brass bands blat jazz razzmatazz (what a class act). Rapt fans at a bandstand can watch jazzbands that scat a waltz and a samba. Fans clap as a fat-cat jazzman and a bad-ass bassman blab gangsta rap -- a gangland fad that attacks what Brahms and Franck call art: a Balkan czardas, a Tartar tandava (sarabands that can charm a saltant chap at a danza). Bach can craft a Catalan sardana that attracts l'Afghan chantant a l'amant dansant. A sax drawls tantaras (all A-flats and an A-sharp): fa-la-la-la-la.

Is nothing not done by Joyce or Stein. The problem with the avant-garde (unlike, say, a sonnet) is that once it's been done then it's instantly boring; everything is derivative. A sonnet you can come back to and make it your own--you can make it new.

I haven't read Eunoia yet, but it seems like the stand-out example of that sort of formalism. What I have little time for is the Goldsmith shtick (Day, for example). I can't blame Bok for writing constraint-based poetry (as most of us here do).

Nick

Annoya is brilliant, but no less annoying for it. The constraints he places on his writing are rigid, but to what end, the form does not support the content, it doesn't do anything, except make it a schtick. We all have our own stances and biases, to me, Bok does not write poems, these are exercises, word games, linguistic tricks and sometimes senseless prattling.

He is a wonderful public speaker though, beware.

Ha! Confirmation bias. Nice one! Remember "Don't flip the bozo bit?" Hard to believe that was almost twenty years ago. Although I suppose the concept is even older than that: coders are fond of pointing out that Lao Tzu said something very similar... ;)

On a completely separate subject, participants in this thread should be aware that sometimes the subject of the thread drops in, reads, and comments, as I've learned to my red-faced embarrassment in the past... ;)

Best,

Bill

It might just be a robot pretending to be him if he were to drop by!

But neither Stein nor Joyce wrote lipograms. Anyway, Eunoia is much more comprehensible than Finnegans Wake and Stein's skittering syntactical experiments. I'm not even sure why you're lumping them together.

There are plenty of undiscovered, novel ways to use lipograms. Compare Perec's A Void to Eunoia -- totally different in tone, style, and scope. Telling me that it can't be done just shows your lack of imagination.

Oh, a lipogram--is that what it was supposed to be an example of? Pardon me for not picking up on a formal constraint that doesn't actually add to meaning.

I just thought it was bullshit boring writing. Jazz-writing under the best possible doubt-shadow. I lumped it in with Joyce and Stein because it appears to be the same sort of wordplay. Indeed, I'm not seeing evidence to the contrary.

I actually read through Eunoia several years ago for my MFA--and apparently promptly forgot about it until google today brought me here. And then I remembered.

So I should also lump it in with Gadsby, I suppose. Boring and tired. I suppose it's "Canada's bestselling poetry book ever" though that may just be due to the famed Canadian politeness.

Dear Uche Ogbuji,

There is still hope --- humans can dumb themselves down to the level of contemporary to them computers. I see it all around.

Dmitri.

Why is the argument being cast constantly in terms of replacing one with the other. The two can't exist at the same time?

Nemo

Well played with the Tupac bit, Bill. Well played.

The vehemence of my argument is largely that I've spent so much time keeping my left and right hemispheres honest when contemplating such matters that it overloads my corpus callossum to see them too lightly conjoined. We'll see one day the extent to which mechanics subverts our system of aesthetic judgments, but for now I think we can treat such judgments entirely on their traditional merits.

Nemo,

If pobiz weren't a patronage game there wouldn't even be a discussion.

Unfortunately, it is. I suppose you ought to ask the question of Silliman, too, what with his positing most of what goes on here as "the school of quietude."

I, for one, generally feel icky after getting into these discussions--mostly because I really wish I could feel "oh well, what they do doesn't affect me or poetry in general" and leave it at that. I would like to believe that.