"Hero-worship is a dangerous vice, and one of the minor merits of a democracy is that it does not encourage it, or produce that unmanageable type of citizen known as the Great Man. It produces different kinds of small men - a much finer achievement. But people who cannot get interested in the variety of life, and cannot make up their own minds, get discontented over this, and they long for a hero to bow down before and to follow blindly. It is significant that a hero is an integral part of the authoritarian stock-in-trade today. An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable. One hero at the top and a smaller one each side of him is a favourite arrangement and the timid and the bored are comforted by the trinity and, bowing down, feel exalted and strengthened."
Saturday 26 November 2016
Friday 25 November 2016
The East Anglian Sublime
Thursday 24 November 2016
Wednesday 23 November 2016
Code Poetry: The Conversation pt2 (5/6)
[02/08/16
and again 16-18/08/16] TC:
I
write a lot and throw out the significant majority of the stuff I
write. I used to think that code is a good way of giving me a chance
to rethink how language works outside Greek, English, French or any
other language I have some knowledge of. I still think
that,
but I also think that code language allows for something else: it
allows me to rethink how language can often function (perhaps more
often that we’d like to admit) as a strategy of acknowledgment,
negotiation and reconciliation. Yes, the question of
defamiliarisation and alienation of self and subjectivity has been a
long running theme in a lot of the stuff I have been doing but there
is also an implied negotiation folded in there [note: I wrote
“neogotiation” instead of “negotiation”, which I love:
negotiating with what is new? negotiating everything from the top?].
I think this is also why I am endlessly fascinated by musical remixes
or variations on a musical theme: sometimes, the intent is to
playfully appropriate while other times, the intent is to
intentionally subvert the original track/theme. I was gobsmacked with
DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing
when I discovered it in the summer of 1998 (perhaps it was late
summer?) and the idea of a flowing subjectivity working across
different rhythms, times, series, strata and discourses. It helped
that I spent most of 1997 reading Douglas Rushkoff’s books (Cyberia
and
Media
Virus,
in particular) and discovering in the summer of 1998 Kodwo Eshun’s
mind boggling More
Brilliant Than The Sun
which exposed me to so many novel concepts and theories. More than
anything, all this stuff showed me that one must in some way
acknowledge their own, personal responsibility within the culture one
finds oneself. And while all of this began from my being intrigued by
people creating works of art borrowing, appropriating and modulating
on existing artworks, this also eventually also dovetailed back to a
discussion I had with a childhood friend who was moved back to Greece
in the mid-1980s from Italy and brought along with him a huge PC and
this book that taught you the BASIC programming language. That was
quite the future shock. More defamiliarisation emanating from late
childhood.
Code
tends to equally frustrate and surprise me still: my fantasy of code
- before I really got into it - used to involve the lightcycles from
Tron
(geek!) but I was rather disappointed when I realised that code
turned out to be less exciting than motorbikes appearing out of thin
air. The disappointment gave way to excitement when I realised code
was a language which meant another
grammar
and another
syntax one uses to make new
stuff
(geek!). So, even when defamiliarisation and alienation are present
in these code poems, I view code also as an alleviation, or rather a
rebuttal to nostalgia. To extend your line of thinking further, MIS
needs to be dismantled every day bit by bit: as Deleuze and Guattari
say, there is no such thing as a clean break but I think we need to
conceive of strategies and mechanisms towards an investigation of
aesthetically arid and socially irresponsible uses of language. So,
to reiterate: your point about Making It New is very astute and the
distinction you are making between MIS and MIN is necessary to
acknowledge and express. But in using I think there is more to this:
the ubiquitousness of code needs to addressed. My response to your
message is made possible through the mediation of computers, and by
extension code. As N. Katherine Hayles notes in, what I think will
become a key text, ‘Traumas of Code’, “Derrida’s famous
aphorism, ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ [there is nothing
outside the text] has been replaced by its computational equivalent
Il
n’y a pas de hors-code
[there is no outside to the code]”.[1]
This inability to exist outside code in the supermediated world we
live is bound to have some repercussions. We need to have some
understanding how this supermediated world is constructed and how we
live in it. One needs to acknowledge the existence of the code
running in the background and what it does to us and our
understanding of ourselves and the world. The internet of things and
all that. I was discussing something along these lines with Sophie
Mayer over coffee at some point and Sophie pointed out that the
Singularity has already happened and we need to realise that the
machines are actually training us in how they work rather than the
other way round (hope I am not paraphrasing too much! Sophie can
correct me if I am misquoting her).
And,
as mentioned before, it is this ubiquitousness of code that I am
trying to negotiate with in these poems. Expertise follows after
acknowledgment turns into familiarity: a feedback loop. I am also
attaching a poem in Greek written &
published in 2010 [2]
which attempts to consider what inspiration is all about/where it
stems from and how code might figure in the creative process. The
poem is an attempt to talk about many things: the actual language is
inspired by the work of Mez Breeze, an Australian-based internet
artist who has invented her own hybrid language mezangelle but it
also attempts to ask many questions about machine language and its
effect on inspiration using various oulipian techniques. The
background of the poem itself is a graphic representation of the
moves made by my hands while using the keyboard. So, the poem in
itself is both a manifesto which playfully explains as much as it
obscures.
So:
how do you communicate in this language that is human in origin but
also machinic in a very real way? What is the impact of this machine
language on human language? How can register and tone be documented
in code? Writing across and between languages makes one reconsider
how one thinks in whichever language one is writing. I know I have
written poems that have begun in one language that were finished in
another (English to Greek and vice-versa); but I have also written
poems in, say, python which have given me answers about impasses
reached in half-finished or abandoned poems written in English or
Greek. It is a rather peculiar process: sometimes, it feels like
solving a puzzle but mostly it feels like negotiating with some sort
of unresolved issue between languages and between different modes of
perception, action and reaction. Hayles puts it succinctly,
“Experienced consciously, but remembered nonlinguistically, trauma
has structural affinities with code” (ibid). And while one can
certainly disagree with Hayles’ point re. affinities of code with
trauma, somewhat unconsciously I think that poetic languages, itself
an excess/surplus of language, as a unique means of navigating trauma
and its specific linguistic/semantic codes, code and its attendant
traumas. I am too weary to begin such a discussion here because I am
still thinking through these issues myself; I fear I will end up
sounding callous or insensitive or insulting (probably all three
simultaneously) so I will try and tread carefully. Surplus of meaning
(or the exhaustion thereof as a result of the trauma of meaning
surplus) can alienate: an excess of production often implies an
inability to effectively process said surplus. But
surplus/rarefaction of meaning might also require new reading
capacities and code can be a way to think about this but also about
new modes of meaning production and reception.
Code
poetry offers that rare opportunity to simultaneously recontextualise
without ‘breaking’ as you say the meaning of words, hence its
inherent ‘strangeness’. Το repeat a claim made many times
before, poetry is of the body and when it works, it amplifies the
affective capacity of the body. Code poetry on the other hand can
work both in paper but also when it runs, though the effect can be
starkly different depending on the reader/viewer. This is where the
familiarity comes in and to be honest, this is what I am least
interested in. I am more interested in how code poetry makes me
rethink about the friction between different languages, potential
impasses, dispersals and breakdowns of communication and meaning
production; in other words, code poetry offers the chance to think
about how the machine as language and language as machine works and
how and when they might break down. Code poetry makes even more
apparent not only the constraints of language and their effect on the
actual body but also the generation of new sources of meaning and the
new affective challenges they pose.
Once
more, we return to this: how do we read in this age of
hypermediation? What is it that we do with what we read? How do we
navigate the paradigm of too much communication, too much
information? Poetry and code poetry might offer some sort of solution
but there is a lot of work we have to do for (and on) ourselves if we
want to keep up. The question is not what the AI overlords will do
when they emerge gleaming from their perfect pods but how we are
going to keep up with the evolution of poetry and language in a
context when machine mediation will be seamless for a certain part of
the population. What are the new cultural and social inequalities
that will be created there and how must we tackle them?
I
have meandered enough and have again offered more questions than
answers.
===
[1] N. Katherine Hayles, “Traumas of Code”, Critical Inquiry vol. 33, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 136-157. Available online.
[2] The poem was
written in the context of a literary festival when asked by a
newspaper that perennial question “What is inspiration?”
Tuesday 22 November 2016
Code Poetry: The Conversation pt1 (4/6)
[21/10/15]
GT:
[...]
As
to your own piece, the first thought (sorry) was that we could do an
anthology of this stuff! Poetry, or poetry and poetics essays, making
use of computer software language? But let's leave that thought aside
for now.
This
is only a starting point for a discussion. I'm not an expert, I've
only dabbled in coding many years ago and I have only basic html. If
anything, my interest is in my inability to make computer code
functional: I fill it with mistakes and fall into recursive traps,
lose track of my variables and collapse the sense of what I'm doing.
That in itself fascinates me, and that's why I turn to it repeatedly.
The
part that struck me recently, when I was thinking about your poem
(I've been thinking about it on and off for a couple of months since
we met and you showed me the print outs of your work) is that
computer languages often separate out functional language from
'commentary' or 'notes to programmer'. So there's a separation of
language which needs to be interpreted by machine, and language
intended for the human robot working on the code.
That
suggests hierarchies and the ability in semiotic terms to construct
simultaneously a language that 'does work' and a language that
reflects on the work done. Some of the early drafts of 'Static Exile'
were written in that kind of format, as 'dismissable' sections of
code which were designed not to be read by the 'authorities' lurking
in the poem.
Your
piece has that in abundance - a hierarchy and ancestry of precision
and lists, but also a disruption of reading approaches, as if a
machine might make sense of the code where a human can't, but
accesses the narrative, or the emotion, or, more likely, the
structural politics. Who talks about the structural politics of
computer code? (That reminds me of a story I heard about Cold War
coders, about how Russian programmers had so little storage space,
they had to work harder to execute the same calculations as US
programmers using fewer lines of code.)
The
question of reader/processor is a strange structural problem in
reading such texts: the layout in your piece forced me to read with
two heads, a machine-head and a poetry-head. I found myself delighted
by certain lines in your work, but they weren't 'yours' or anyone's
so to speak, even where they were credited. They belonged to some
kind of process; and the idea of the 'code' poem being decodable was
fascinating, that there was only process in front of me, no sense of
meaning. And that became meaning, forced attention to how structure
carried meaning.
The
'resistance' Perloff takes from Adorno and discusses in one or
another of her books (I think reflecting on conceptualism in
Unoriginal
Genius)
lies in a resistance at the level of process: language, at the level
of the word, the line, or units and stanzas, has actually begun to
recede as the alienness of process (against the partial familiarity
of syntax) takes over. Which sounds a lot like conceptual poetry, but
done without the need to devolve responsibility for the 'curation' of
texts so far from real world issues.
Am
I making sense? I think my point is, I was hit by the context and
concept. When you showed me some of these a couple years ago, I was
puzzled and found the difficulty overrode my sense of enjoyment of
the lines, but couldn't explain why. Now, with a bit more
understanding from certain 'linguistically innovative' poetries (god,
how I hate having to write that phrase for job applications), and the
context of my own slightly more McSweeneyish response to a similar
conundrum, I 'get it' at the level of process better. I can see a
degree of human motivation behind it, even where I haven't decoded
the specifics of your content, the arguments you've assimilated
(although I take signifiers and signposts to the direction they point
in).
[I
would love to chat more about the process of these poems. It matches
up with some experiments Andrew Bailey tested out on me once, and
still occasionally uses, though you've a much more developed
architecture in these and you did explain some of the simultaneity
and serialisation at work. Rather than go into the coding influences,
where you found things, I'm fascinated by the effects on language at
this stage. I'd love to attempt a dialogue in writing, if you have
time, maybe we can use these emails to think about a conversational
essay for Gists
& Piths,
which, incidentally, I've been full of plans to restart now the
thesis is over.]
[28/10/15]
TC:
[…]
Many
thanks for reading and thinking so thoroughly about 'Codeswitching'.
There is so much I want to expand on what you have written but I
think you have really zeroed in on what I was trying to do with this
observation: "That suggests hierarchies and the ability in
semiotic terms to construct simultaneously a language that 'does
work' and a language that reflects on the work done."
This
piece was written on a January morning 2004 almost in one go. I am
definitely trying to work my way out of some of my own frustrations
re. machine and human language, but I think more importantly I am
trying to think what it means to write as a writing subject whose
sense of agency is gradually slipping away.
So,
yes I did try to write in different styles and different discourses
(hence, my attempt at using the Dewey Decimal System and transcribing
as accurately as possible a Scottish accent); in the end, it did not
matter: I wanted to put down a feeling of alienation and alienness to
the whole idea of writing. I am always thinking that writing is the
most natural thing to do but if you ask me how certain lines have
come about, I have no idea. I know this sounds like I am veering
dangerously close to fairy-land stories about the "transcendental
nature of writing" but in fact, what this piece is trying to do
is to figure out how the process of writing (and language) actually
has a very material consequence.
I
remember being taught Ancient Greek and one of the better teachers
explaining to us the concept of the infinitive as an ice cube and we
must think of the declension of verbs as the melted water that comes
from the ice cube. Does that make sense to you? So, yes as you say I
am hugely interested in process if only because process gives a
glimpse into how we come to think about the world. I am afraid this
all sounds very airy-fairy but I am maintaining this is all very hard
line materialist and we need to question the process of how we come
to say what we say, constantly.
This
is where some of the poets N. Katherine Hayles has been championing
fail: it is fashionable to diss Goldsmith for his politics but the
interesting thing is that for all his talk of appropriation and
process, his work and work ethic seem to be completely unburdened by
the practical ramifications of his own practice. Hope this all makes
sense.
[I
would be very interested in taking this further and yes, I would love
to do this for a revamped Gists
& Piths.
This is a lot to think about. Apologies if I am not making perfect
sense (which, as you know, it would not be the first time).]
[18/1/16]
GT:
[…]
I
wanted to carry on with this discussion about computer code and
poetic language. I completely understand the idea of language as
having a material process. Sociological studies hold that the 'frame'
through which we experience the world is often stronger than the
material evidence, or even the material language we see in front of
us.[*] So, yes, poetry needs to tackle that head on.
Lately
I've been reading studies about climate deniers and the language of
the Anthropocene. I wouldn't say I've yet the grounds for a solid
foundation for the argument, but the idea that language is itself a
filter to our experience of the material world meets up (perhaps a
skewed joint) to what you say.
[I'm
thinking about Kamau Brathwaite's argument that the iambic pentameter
can't capture the experience of people in Commonwealth countries,
like in the West Indies, where snow never falls, even though they
were been bombarded with such poems under colonial rule. What does it
do to your sense of reality when the language you have to respond to
and experience the world is almost exclusively from a culture
thousands of miles away?]
The
ice cube/melted water problem: what happens when you restrict your
vocabulary, as the Dadaists (or was it the Futurists?) attempted, to
just nouns and verbs? What sense of the world do we learn? And so
too, a static, past-tense vocabulary: the close, third person past
tense of a generic literary novel?
The
question of 'doing work' with code had me thinking along related (OK,
possibly tangential) lines. I have a sense of a functional language
in code (accompanied by a reflective //commentary which the computer
is told not to read). Which makes me wonder how 'new' comes about in
coding. If you are given only a finite set of 'functional' words to
work with then 'originality' comes about only through
contextualisation. You can't re-purpose the meaning of words, the
code would 'break'. At least, that's my limited sense of it and I
defer to your better understanding.
Against
this, I started thinking about the 'function of poetry'. Which is a
dangerous path, but hear me out. For myself, I guess I'm still
thinking about the whole 'make it new' (MIN) dictat. And I
acknowledge there's a separate approach which I'll describe as 'make
it safe' (MIS).
The
MIN approach suggests a constant re-purposing, re-contextualising,
restructuring, of language and its architecture: the word, the
sentence, the line, the stanza, the paragraph, the book. MIN is a
moral condition which suggests the world is not right; there's always
a need to open up the structures of discourse so that power can be
reassigned, questioned, challenged; but also a need to think our ways
through external challenges. Both are a form of adaptation.
MIS
then is using language to preserve, conserve, those factors which
supposedly are already OK. You could say, from this reading, that MIS
is written by people who think the world doesn't need changing. The
complacent/bourgeois/already powerful/blind. They're quite insulted
in literary history, even by people who'd fit that category.
I'd
say you need a balance of both (but I would say that (but still)).
And I lean toward MIN. Only, I understand it as a practice of making
poetry wherein the language is simultaneously unfamiliar and
understandable.
I
don't want to start setting up more binaries than I have already, so
I'll put this on pause. But with all the ways that you can
defamiliarise, alienate, make new, with poetry, and the limits to
code languages by comparison, I wonder why or how, you turn to code
language to alienate yourself? Doesn't the code require a degree of
expertise, thereby, familiarity, already? Is it yourself or your
reader you want to alienate?
More
questions than offerings, given how late, how late.
===
[*]
I was thinking of George Lakoff, an article in Alternet full of typos
I read around that time, but his book, Metaphors
We Live By,
might be more relevant now.
Monday 21 November 2016
Code Poetry: IMM LHO by George Ttoouli (3/6)
I am in that long drag
of democracy between
betrayal and the next election.
What should I do?
The city
{
has fractures in its tarmac;
is like earthquakes;
turns me into a fault line;
aggregates
{
empty
{
packets;
wrappers;
shells;
}
refusals;
}
turns our stomachs;
leaves our mouths
{
plugged with denials;
stitched shut with a pencil; // if no one speaks of terror then
// perhaps we will not know it when
// it comes so tell me lies if lies are
// what you have inside your heart
// don’t follow us and find yourself
// in pieces where we fell apart
marked X; // with no men left to pick the fruit
// or sow the fields or dig the
// trenches and so we all turn into
// farmers bury our hearts in the soil
// and go to work
}
}
is a non-neutral it;
is an unexploded bomb.
}
What should I do?
I’ll shuttle from this city
{
like cathodes emit heat;
escape from this un-exploded bomb with
{
a radar blip;
a rocket;
a grey cross on my flag;
}
}
my nation ruptured by that long drag
{
through police files;
electoral registers;
of pencils in the boxes
{
top left to bottom right;
top right to bottom left;
}
through the pieces of me they have gathered;
}
all ruptured;
and I will kill the Prime Minister I will slip in behind the wooden panels of democracy and kill him with the heavy gavel of democracy and I will kill him and I will cut WAR CRIMINAL into his chest and hang him in a gallery and I will call it WAR CRIMINAL and they will ask for my signature and I will deny everything.
===
Some brief context: this was written around the time of the illegal invasion of Iraq, when I was writing poems with titles designed to test whether one could be arrested in the West for writing poetry. This title was probably the most benign/coded (I've also removed the dedication), but I soon realised people were actually being arrested for this stuff and I was just being immature. And this comes with a big disclaimer, that it didn't and still doesn't condone violence toward any individuals. The poem filtered into a portion of ‘Static Exile’ and the ‘DVD Extras’ in Static Exile. (Yeah, I know, shameless plug, but it is back in print and I am completely broke.)
of democracy between
betrayal and the next election.
What should I do?
The city
{
has fractures in its tarmac;
is like earthquakes;
turns me into a fault line;
aggregates
{
empty
{
packets;
wrappers;
shells;
}
refusals;
}
turns our stomachs;
leaves our mouths
{
plugged with denials;
stitched shut with a pencil; // if no one speaks of terror then
// perhaps we will not know it when
// it comes so tell me lies if lies are
// what you have inside your heart
// don’t follow us and find yourself
// in pieces where we fell apart
marked X; // with no men left to pick the fruit
// or sow the fields or dig the
// trenches and so we all turn into
// farmers bury our hearts in the soil
// and go to work
}
}
is a non-neutral it;
is an unexploded bomb.
}
What should I do?
I’ll shuttle from this city
{
like cathodes emit heat;
escape from this un-exploded bomb with
{
a radar blip;
a rocket;
a grey cross on my flag;
}
}
my nation ruptured by that long drag
{
through police files;
electoral registers;
of pencils in the boxes
{
top left to bottom right;
top right to bottom left;
}
through the pieces of me they have gathered;
}
all ruptured;
and I will kill the Prime Minister I will slip in behind the wooden panels of democracy and kill him with the heavy gavel of democracy and I will kill him and I will cut WAR CRIMINAL into his chest and hang him in a gallery and I will call it WAR CRIMINAL and they will ask for my signature and I will deny everything.
===
Some brief context: this was written around the time of the illegal invasion of Iraq, when I was writing poems with titles designed to test whether one could be arrested in the West for writing poetry. This title was probably the most benign/coded (I've also removed the dedication), but I soon realised people were actually being arrested for this stuff and I was just being immature. And this comes with a big disclaimer, that it didn't and still doesn't condone violence toward any individuals. The poem filtered into a portion of ‘Static Exile’ and the ‘DVD Extras’ in Static Exile. (Yeah, I know, shameless plug, but it is back in print and I am completely broke.)
Labels:
Code Poetry,
codepoems,
codepoetry,
Conversations,
Poems,
the internet is a beautiful thing,
Theo Chiotis
Code Poetry: Lolwhut? (1/6)
George
Ttoouli and Theodoros
Chiotis have been having a (very long and very slow) conversation
about Code Poetry. This began before the relaunch of G&P in its
new incarnation as a bastion of sweeping cultural misjudgements and
ad hominem salvos at the human world’s failure to stimulate our
overweaned attention spans away from the stupor of growing global
isolationism and ignorance-entrenchment.*
The
conversation has been about code and poetry, poetry which uses code,
the poetics of computer language. Let’s be honest here: Code Poetry
is not a thing yet. But let’s raise those capital letters; let’s
make a thing where no thing was, to see if that brief act of
objectification can achieve some kind of good. To that end, GT has
taken a crude series of amateur snapshots of that conversation,
beginning with this introduction, and to include some examples of
work by each of us – mostly by Theo – to illustrate the exchange.
The
concept of Code Poetry arose for me when I swapped some poems with
Theo Chiotis, many years ago. While we were back and forthing, Theo
edited and published an anthology of work from Greece and the Greek
diaspora (including a piece by me): Futures:Poetry of the Greek Crisis.
We discussed the anthology back in August 2016 at the Poetry Library
and, if you listen to Tom Chiver’s intro, you’ll hear mention of
Code Poetry, but – horror of horrors! – the panel never
discusses Code Poetry!
To
prevent the spread of this logical black hole, herein: the gap
plugger. This article carries the pretence of offering you everything
you need to know about Code Poetry, but were afraid to ask,
sufficiently thrown about the digi-room like two dogs playing squash
with a kitten until you’re too frightened to ask more questions, in
case it goes all grid-shaped right through the racket.
To
begin, the codepoem (look! it’s become a compound noun!) by Theo
which triggered the discussion. Then a piece by me, referenced in my
first email. Then the discussion in two parts. Then, to close, a
final codepoem by Theo (in Greek, no translation) with procedurally
generated spheres.
What
is CodePoetry? Answers on a postcard, to the unusual address. Or keep reading.
===
*
Feel free to take scissors, cut out this last, clunky, overstretched
sentence from your screen and replace it with whatever phrase you
prefer to use to describe late capitalism’s self-immolation. G&P
accepts no responsibility for your attempt to cut out a piece of your
computer screen whatsoever, but will be grateful, should your attempt
succeed and you not be horribly electrocuted by the process, for the
loss of your readership.
Thursday 17 November 2016
Tuesday 15 November 2016
PlatformSeven™: Message to all Users
DEAR PLAYSUMER™,
Congratulations on
being one of PlatformSeven™’s treasured 8.2bn valued community
users! Even as you are reading this message, every single one of our
Playsumers™ has received and is reading a similar message, tailored
perfectly to their unique Playsumer™ profile and filtered through
our unique MutationAlgorithm™.[1]
This is one of our very
rare Service Announcements.[2] You may have noticed in the past few days
a bright red box appearing in the top right corner of your field of
view. We apologise for the generic aesthetic look of the box, but our
rapid response team have decided to emphasise visibility now and
allow full customisation (excluding deletion) later down the line.
WHY THE BOX?
As you know,
PlatformSeven™ is a multi-user generated creative outlet using the
latest webex visuaural technologies to generate endless content
experiences that satisfy in The Best Way—Your Way, without
resulting in reader fatigue.
User experience is as
much the experience of other users as it is the experience of a
responsive AI mechanism tailored to meet your own needs based on past
actions, fully responsive customisation controls and a comprehensive
data collection taken from our unique AI-controlled data-miners
(trademark pending). Each and every one of our readers can experience
the best-generated content possible, in a unique and exciting format,
completely individualised to meet their exact profiles as determined
by our hyper-sophisticated software design, LifeAlgorithm™.[3]
PlatformSeven™ can
tell how many full rhymes per twenty lines of verse each of its
community members likes in its poetry (you prefer seven rhymes out of
twenty with two pairs and a triplet). It can tell how many users
can’t stand adjectives, who loves purple prose, what balance of
narrative to strike against philosophical reflection and your exact
preference along a spectrum of climax and anti-climax. How hot do
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Monday 14 November 2016
"That year's version of hello"
'"I can't believe it," people said, almost with passion. It was that year's version of hello. "I can't believe it," people said, on the beach, on the slopes, in hotel lobbies, in cells, at parties. Apparently incredulous, astounded, people met. Sometimes the rejoinder was "For God's sake," as in "Harry! Maude! I can't believe it." "Marilyn! Well, for God's sake." Sometimes people changed it slightly. When we had just come back to the office, a middle-aged couple, he with the heartiness of another era, she with a certain trembly superstition, met in the elevator only yesterday. "Well, as I live and breathe," he shouted. "Touch wood," she replied."
Renata Adler, Speedboat [1976] (New York: NYRB Classics, 2013): 111
Saturday 12 November 2016
Friday 11 November 2016
Flo's Friday Doodles #6: Silverscape (totem)
Wednesday 9 November 2016
Simon Turner - Numerology: On Matthew Welton
His
new collection, The Number Poems, has
been gestating for quite a while now, but it’s been well worth the wait, as it’s an
unmitigated delight.
Let
me rephrase that: The Number Poems,
like Welton’s previous collections, has taken some considerable time to
produce. But, like its predecessors, it’s
an unmeliorated pleasure.
What
is it, you might ask, I enjoy most about Welton’s poetry? First and foremost, I admire Welton’s
adventurous approach to form. As the
title of his latest collection, his third, will attest, much of that formal
adventurousness derives from a near-mathematical approach to the sonic and
iterative potentialities of language.
That
sentence is, I feel, a trifle dense, and may need some unpacking, so let me
rephrase myself. Welton’s a poet who’s
interested, chiefly, in the sonic iterations of language, as expressed through
demi-mathematical formulae and structures.
Which is to say, and as expounded in an interview Welton gave recently to
Prac Crit, that words for Welton are
not primarily welded to their meanings, to the concepts and objects which they
nominally denote, but rather to the sonic and architectural possibilities opened up when
language is divorced radically from semantics as it’s been traditionally
conceived. Welton: “I’m not really interested in subject matter, I’m interested in form and the question of what we call poetry.” Although we’d do well not to take any poet,
living or dead, at their word on any subject – they’re notoriously slippery
creatures who’ll say anything if it’s likely to engender a long-running
twitterspat or a decent pull-quote in a glossy Sunday supplement article about the next
generation of dead-eyed, floppy haired neophyte poets – Welton’s refusal to allow for meaning to be
considered the primary fount of his writing is as good a place as any to begin a
discussion of his work, at least in part because it feels like such a ground-breaking proposition in the current literary climate.
Let
me, by way of explanation, provide an illustration of precisely what I
mean. Over the years, I have written
poetry reviews for a number of publications, both in print and online: small
magazines all. “Big whoop!” I imagine
the literary commentariat muttering into their over-priced skinny lattes, blowing
little fountains of incandescent rage-froth across their IKEA countertops, and
no doubt they’re right to scoff, as it’s not a particularly noteworthy
achievement, by any measurable standards. But what is noteworthy is that, for one of the
publications for which I’ve previously written reviews, editorial policy explicitly favoured
‘content’ over ‘form’ as a point of discussion for the poetry collections under
consideration. I’ve not named the
publication in question, partly because I don’t want to single them out – I’m
not interested in finger-pointing or snark – but also because I don’t think
their editorial stance is all that idiosyncratic: all that differentiated them
was that they were honest and open in their editorial preferences. We’re invited, across the board, to read
poetry primarily in terms of content, and the critical reception of poetry, it’s
worth remembering, doesn’t differ all that much to the reception of other art forms
in this respect: movies, for example, can all too readily be reduced to ‘plot’,
novels to ‘story’, the whole unruly field of non-fiction to raw information,
untroubled by questions of style and structure.
This is in spite of the fact that it’s precisely poetry’s attention to
the formal properties inhering in language (sound, rhythm, repetition, symmetry,
structure) which, broadly speaking, differentiates it from prose, its more
functional, flat-footed, plain Jane cousin. How else
to explain the inclusion of poetry collections in Robert McCrum’s ongoing Guardian series on the best books of non-fiction,
an editorial decision which can surely only favour those poets whose work might
‘unproblematically’ be read either in terms of autobiographical veracity,
political engagement, or identity-based authenticity?
But
I fear I may have lost my grip somewhat on the topic at hand, as though it were
a slippery bar of soap that had toppled into a sink full of murky grey water. Then again, Welton’s work is rather slippery
and unstable and protean in character: that’s partly its function, and indicative
of the readerly joy it provides. For all
of the high falutin’ language I’ve deployed in trying to describe Welton’s
procedures and processes hitherto, the simple fact of the matter is that this work
is fun, which is not a word one
normally associates with the experimental tradition in contemporary poetry. For those who are interested – and I accept
that, numerically speaking, we’re staring down the barrel of cosmic insignificance
here – I have written about Welton’s work a few times before, at greatest
length in a Tiggerishly overenthusiastic essay on Anglophone Oulipians in the
Penned in the Margins critical anthology Stress Fractures, which appeared in the comparative halcyon days of 2010. In this essay, I made some pretty wild (and
subsequently unsubstantiated) claims about the inexorable rise of post-Oulipian
poetic formalism on the British and American ‘scenes’ – this was, remember,
well prior to the conceptualist explosion and attendant backlash, so I can at
least fall back on ignorance as an explanation, if not an exculpation, of my
folly – but in the midst of the grandiose vatic pronouncements I insisted on
making about the Future of Poetry, I did manage to make one or two salient
points that I think I can still stand by. Firstly,
I argued that the critical and aesthetic valorisation, in the wake of Modernism,
of a radically individuated style – the Poundian, the Eliotic, the
Hemingwayesque – as one of the primary markers of poetic value, had a
concomitantly detrimental impact upon the currency of classical (read: ‘conservative’)
conceptions of form. Secondly, and of
more pertinence here, I made a case for Oulipian-inspired poets – Welton amongst
them – as aesthetic bridge-builders, ameliorative ambassadors, if you will,
between the continually opposed camps of ‘mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’
poetics. Welton’s visible influences are
indicative of this tendency, drawing as he does with equal enthusiasm from the
twin wells of, on the one hand, experimental poetics and composition; and, on
the other, a more popular strain of nonsense verse and children’s rhymes. The
Book of Matthew, Welton’s debut, included a number of poems which had a lot
of fun with the arbitrary narrative possibilities opened up by rhyme (‘The
funderment of wonderment’ and ‘He wore a lot of corduroy and he talked a lot of
crap’ – best title ever, by the way – are probably the most perfect examples of
this strain in Welton’s writing); whilst ‘We
needed coffee but…’,[1]
his second, contains a number of poems that might be read with equal value either
through the lens of the experimental tradition, or that of pre-literary sonic
play, such as ‘Four-letter words’, ‘If I had a yammer’ and ‘I must say that at
first it was difficult work’. Harry
Mathews: “The projects I then undertook were ferociously hard: a three-part
composition based on anagrams of our two names [Mathews and Oskar Pastior]
distributed according to 3 x 24 permutations; a sestina consisting entirely of
anagrams of its six end-words. [...] During those long hours, I have no doubt
that, to an unobtrusive observer, my face would have manifested the oblivious
intentness of a six-year-old girl playing hopscotch.”[2] No
poet currently writing, I think, sounds
as good as Welton – his ear for rhythm and sonic texture’s so good because, in
some regards, the poems begin and end with these points of composition, with
meaning relegated to a decidedly secondary role – but, given the nature of his
procedures, no poet’s simultaneously so quotable and unquotable: quotable
because every sentence is a tightly constructed minuet of dancing fricatives
and plosives and labials in perfect arrangement (“A yellow yaffle snaffles up /
a pile of apple waffles and, I’d like to think, / takes comfort from my distant
uninsistent thoughts”); unquotable because these individual gems are entirely
dependent for their resonance upon their position within the wider,
cathedral-like structures that Welton employs.
Which is perhaps simply a very roundabout way of saying I insist you
invest in a copy of The Number Poems
all of your very own, as it’s best to ingest his work en masse, avoiding interruptions from unwarranted guests, perhaps
hiding the volume later in an antique travelling chest, the lonesome physical revenant
of your maiden aunt’s bequest.
[1] Full title, for those people for
whom, these things matter: We needed coffee
but we’d got ourselves convinced that the later we left it the better it would
taste, and, as the country grew flatter and the roads became quiet and dusk began
to colour the sky, you could guess from the way we retuned the radio and
unfolded the map or commented on the view that the tang of determination had
overtaken our thoughts, and when, fidgety and untalkative but almost home, we
drew up outside the all-night restaurant, it felt like we might just stay in
the car, listening to the engine and the gentle sound of the wind.
Actually,
scratch my previous assertion: this is the best title ever.
[2] from ‘In Quest of
the Oulipo’, in The Case of the Perservering
Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive, 2003): 89
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