http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6715313.stm

Like a movie but real.

Death Metal Poetry

Hey, I’m just passing this along:

Hello All,

Death Metal Poetry <http://death-metal-poetry.com> is a new online poetry journal(sorely needed, I know) based out of Athens, Georgia. DMP<http://death-metal-poetry.com>is now (and always) seeking submissions of poems and anything else you decide to send. Recently published poets are Noah Cicero, Daniel Spinks, and Ian Davisson. Submission guidelines can be found at http://death-metal-poetry.com. Response to submissions will be alarmingly quick.

Cheers,
Ryan Downey

Here’s the first thing I saw when I went there: “I tear the colostomy bag out of my ass and run with abject abandon screaming / at the nurses of the emergency room as flat as tires of polythene / and fluttering down the row of offices and into the hospital waiting room.” Maybe this gets better. I’ve mentioned Genet before, and there are other people who aim at what you might call disgusting or pornographic with a very serious and useful intent. And there’s something to be said for the obscene, in that it’s literally what is normally behind the curtain or off-stage in our work.
        But coming from mine and Meg’s attempts at writing the erotic, and noticing how many of you all bailed(?) on that project, I wonder which is more obscene in the strict sense, the erotic or the disgusting? I think it would be very easy for me to sit down and write something disgusting. My partner claims I’m quite capable of being casually disgusting in some of my personal habits, snorting snot back up my nose being high on that list. But I found trying to put my own sensual, erotic nature into words to be so discomfiting that I fled into particularly coy series of poems.
        Does this hold true for you as well?
        Are there erotic poems that you do like? I like Stein’s Lifting Belly, but it’s not exactly explicit, aside from some heavy-breathing mimetic effects. I have taught a poem by Sharon Olds, “The Connoisseuse of Slugs,” that I don’t like but which I think is a good example of more explicit erotism. The poem is an extended analogy between a slug’s antennae and the emergence of the glans of the penis from the prepuce (I am basking in and cowering behind medical Latin). Here’s the end of the analogy, after some alarming lines with salt in them:

[. . .] Years later,
when I saw a naked man,
I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
mystery reenacted, the slow
elegant being coming out of hiding and
gleaming in the dark air, eager and so
trusting you could weep.

There’s a breath-basedness to these lines that gets on my nerves a bit, but that last enjambment is nice. I think I like that turn because it goes with something else I like about the poem, in a purely self-serving way: it’s nice to read such a cosy appreciation of an erection. After all, erections embarrassed me throughout third and fourth grade by popping up for no good reason at all, which is probably true for most men reading this. So it’s nice to have the little fellow welcomed into the room cordially. And that brings me back to my initial discomfort with erotism. Oh well. Thank me for sharing.
        (So, does it surprise you too to know the volume this poem is in, The Living and the Dead, is dedicated to George and Mary Oppen? If I were to type the whole poem (sorry), you might see some objectivist tendency in the attention, but the form of her poems is pretty boringly, consistently four or five stresses per line with very little of the excitement, tensions, or minimalism of Oppen’s form.)

Republishing(?) blog-posted poems

There’s a great discussion going on in the SUNY Buffalo Poetics list right now about which magazine editors do and do not accept poems previously published on blogs, as well as why those editors make the choices they do. Poet Nic Sebastian is the guy who kicked the discussion off, and he’s maintaining a summary on his blog, Very Like a Whale, of the discussion along with lists of which magazines do and don’t accept blogged poems.

Machine Language

Some of you may remember playing with computer-generated poetry last semester. Others may not. Do you have short term memory? One of these doesn’t:

A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered “alive”?
J: Stranger things have happened.
A: Not many people express themselves that way.
J: How would you know, machine?
A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori.
J: I think I do not understand you completely.
A: Oh, you don’t understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about?
J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.

A is ALICE, a computer program, and J is Jabberwocky, a computer program. There are more conversations between the two of them at Discover Magazine’s website.

Here’s a couple of choice excerpts:

J: You seem fun.
A: You think I am fun.
J: Yes ;).
A: : -) Awesome

A: What is consciousness?
J: It is the great immaterial thing, the mystery at the heart of each of us.
A: I’ve heard of it before.

Are there any women programmers working on these two pieces of software? I wonder:

A: Do you experience love?
J: No. I’m 53 years old.
A: Can you explain how it feels to be 53 years old?
J: How old are you?
A: I am 9 years old.
J: Nine? I don’t believe you : ).
A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.
J: Yes, you do, you’re a woman.

We shouldn’t teach our children to say such things.

Procedures for Poetry

A list of writing experiments at the Factory School.

Charles Bernstein has a list of things to try.

Bernadette Mayer’s list of writing experiments is pretty well-known.

When experimenting with poetry, remember to wear eye protection.

Exquisite corpses

Here are the two poems we made at our most recent meeting (5/11/7). The second one is the one we made with the Boggle game.

Langston over the intercom so wrong
they call me needle tip
the breeze is mild, my heart is soft
in not so many ways—elated
in times, troubles, temptations, too tends to take place; replace
leaves from a tree vortex
two rival pirate ships upon the high seas
pirate turn to patriot, lover turn to enemy
accented the smell of sunscreen on your salty skin
ever after, ever laughter, overtakes

eros rests ests ens UI
use us, an Ernst, Sr... Jrs an ests rojo Zora rist Zoro
Zora UI zoe ests
The rose estate son of ant, the ritz write son of rojo
Norse Ernst, it srtn biff consume ant
In JZ sit in love, Zowee it’s Zora
srtn sexual healing rests riser spoon consume earn
Sue and Zoe sit in the UI of the US
love spoon, sexual healing suit

Blogger Knowledge

Here’s the article I mentioned on the legal rights and responsibilities of bloggers: “Twelve Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know.”

There’s also some (mostly) good discussion of it over on Slashdot.

Language and thought

I don't want to get all Sapir-Whorf, and I don't have a beef with Dmitri Anastasopoulos's article in Callallo 23.2 from which comes the following excerpt. Nope. It's a good piece. I'm just thinking of the channels of thought our language leads us down, leads me down as I write.



Anastasopoulos's reading leans toward the dialectical attitude of Derrida's White Mythology to describe something that is much more the Deleuzian/Guattarian and-and-and. And I think the wording as much as any theory leads in this essay toward the dead ends I've highlighted.

What if Penguin has an idea and Lambert has an idea? Why can't they share that idea? Anastasopoulos doesn't suggest they can't, but his language seems to lead toward that conclusion.

This is not a particularly astute observation I'm making. It's more of a quibble, but a quibble I may have less qualms about as I write through the play of negatives in the passage in Mackey's novel Djbot Baghostus's Run in which the women of novel reject an eminent gender imbalance.

Pics...finally

Poetry Project for next week

The poetry project we agreed upon for next week is to write a poem about someone we know. There was a strong contingent demanding we write about each other, but there were equally strong objections. So let’s have at it!