Category Archives: Poetry

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Memories, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

The Unreliable Narrator–You

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Samhain                                                           Thanksgiving Moon

Beginning to play with the post-modern idea of the unreliable narrator, a staple of certain literary fictions and now understandable to me.  The most unreliable narrator of all may be our Self, or, rather, the work done by our mind to create a self.  As we attempt to weave a coherent notion of our story–how this, what, let’s use Heidegger’s idea of dasein–this dasein came to be here now, we impose on our memories a logic, a sequence, a string of cause and effects that explain, as best the dasein can, how it came to be in this moment.

There are many problems here, but the one I want to focus on is the fungibility of our memory and what Kant called the a prioris of thinking:  space and time.  Our memory changes as we access it, as we put it into new contexts, as our understanding grows and that changes happens to a quanta that was shaped by the context in which we first had the experience, the understandings we had then and by the fog created by our senses, which, by design and necessity, edit our lived experience so we can utilize it.

On top of this string of memory altering inevitables are the a priori categories of space and time, mental constructs which our reason uses to make what William James called “the blooming, buzzing confusion” worthwhile to us.  We see objects in four dimensions, in a space time matrix that changes as we perceive an object, event, feeling, moment, idea.

(Henry and William James)

What this means to us is that our Self has the demanding and ultimately futile task of seeing the plot in our life, its why and its meaning.  Why futile?  Because we change as we touch it, not Heisenberg, no, more than that we change more than the spin or the location of memory when we touch it, we change its content and thereby change our narrative, which, as a result changes our Self.  This is always happening, every moment of every day of our lives.   Modernist literature like Ulysses and Remembrance of Times Past was an attempt to give to us in written form this mutability at the heart of the internal project that is us.

As I said a few posts back, this is descriptive, not proscriptive and certainly not prescriptive, and it does contain one kernel of great importance. Since we actively construct our own narrative from the experiences we can recall, we can enter into that stream and actively construct our future.  In fact, unless we enter that stream with purpose, Heraclitus’s famous river, it will carry us along without our intention.

So, buckle up, strap on that orange life-preserver and take your seat in the raft that is your Self navigating the flood of your life.  It’s a thrilling ride no matter where it takes you.

 

 

Dogs, Latin, MOOCS, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Thank God It’s Frida

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Samhain                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Latin with Greg this morning.  I felt like I’d made good progress with my work, but in doing the translating with him, I hit a snag.  There was a long sentence, six verses in length, with a complicated structure, hinging on a definition of a verb that was, Greg said, esoteric.  Getting that one out of whack made the entire six verses difficult, entangled. Just when I began to feel incompetent (not a feeling I enjoy), Greg pushed us further into the translation.

Once we got out of that briar patch my work improved.  “Perfect.  You’ve got it!”  “It was just that complex sentence and ferunt (the verb in question) that messed you up.  You kept at it.  That’s the key.”

“Oh, tenacity I have.  I’ve got too much time in this to give up now.”

Kate’s away at a continuing medical education event on pain.  After Greg and I finished I fed the dogs, made lunch and took a nap.  Gertie, who rehurt her leg, came in and snuggled up next to me.  This afternoon she’s moving much better.  Good to see since she’s been down for a few days.

Finished up ModPo with assessments of four other student’s essays and watched a beginning video on Dramatica Pro, the new writing software I purchased.  I plan to use it to build Loki’s Children, but before that I have to learn how to use it.

With Latin on a steady course and ModPo finished, I’ve just got Missing and Ovid to occupy my days.  And they’re plenty.  With, of course, learning how to use Dramatica.

 

 

Friends, Latin, MOOCS, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Education for Everyone

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Samhain                                                              Thanksgiving Moon

Back from sheepshead.  The goddess let up and gave me some good cards tonight, one very good hand in particular.  A roll of the dice for Fortuna.

Finished the last ModPo poet today, the last video of Al Filreis and the gang doing close readings.  I still have my assignments to write, but I’ll finish those tomorrow.  I chose not to get a certificate in the Modern/Post Modern class, but I’ve earned one in ModPo.  There are 35,000 people in the class.  35,000.  That would be a crowded lecture hall.

The revolutionary impulse of the MOOCs is just beginning to be felt.  The university will have to have a rethink in not too many years with this technology working on the disaggregation of education in the same way the net has disaggregated so many things before it.  This will work to the benefit of many constituencies:  the poor, the geographically isolated, the third phasers, adult learners of all ages, even the traditional college student for whom the cost of four years has become a leaden albatross hung around their neck at graduation, a weight rather than a celebration.

Missing’s fifth revision has begun to open up very exciting possibilities, ones I didn’t see before.  I’ve reentered the story with the same enthusiasm I had when I first wrote it.

Four more verses of Ovid done.  Greg and I talk tomorrow, the first session where I’ll be using the new technique of staying “in” the Latin.  I’m looking forward to gaining more facility with it.

GeekWorld, Latin, MOOCS, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Still Plugging Along

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Samhain                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

Working through the revisions in Missing, having fun, surprising myself.  About a third of the way into the manuscript, though the later chapters have more work than what I’ve done so far.  Ways of knitting themes and character development with the narrative come more easily at this stage.

Got a new piece of software today, Dramatica Pro.  I’m hoping it will help me deepen my work while making it more exciting.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  It’s supposed to take a long time to learn.

Five more verses of Ovid.  These verses had a textual problem that had me digging around in the Oxford Classical Text’s version.  It’s supposed to be the best manuscript available now.  The Metamorphoses presents certain problems since it’s oldest manuscript dates from the 9th century, seven to eight hundred years after it was written.  The Aeneid, for example, has some fourth century manuscripts, still within the time of the Roman Empire.

And finished up the next to last poet of ModPo. I’ll finish tomorrow and start on my assessments on Friday.  Yeah.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Humanities, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Photography, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Missing, In the Dark Wood, Lycaon

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Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Involved with what is, I believe, technically the fifth revision of Missing.  20,000 words went out today, a whole story line about a goddess and her giantess assistance.  It included, too, a favorite part of the book for me, the Wyrm and the Weregild, a group of expert giant dragon hunters.  But this storyline does not intersect directly with the primary story in Missing and it’s now in the pile for Loki’s Children, which now has over 50,000 plus words available from the drafts and revisions up to now of Missing.

Some key names got changed, transitions made more clear.  I got about half way through a quick review.  Probably will finish with that tomorrow.  Then I’ll go back in and start adding some more description, some character development and I may, probably will, change the ending to give it more punch.  Thanks to Stefan for the idea.

Translated another four verses in the story of Lycaon today, too.  These were hard, either the Latin was thick or I was.  Maybe both.  Still.  Done.  That’s my goal per day.

Also worked on ModPo’s final week.  Two very interesting poets today.  Erica Baum is a conceptual poet who combines photography and found language to create intriguing works.  Here are two images we reviewed in class:

 

The first is from a work called Card Catalogues where Baum photographed certain portions of the New York University Library’s old card catalog.  Each photograph is a poem of juxtaposition created by the strange constraint of alphabetically organizing knowledge.  The second is one of several pieces from a work, Dog Ear.  These are all large photographs, Card Catalog is too, and she hangs them in galleries together, though each photograph stands alone.  This is part of the conceptualist idea that ambient language contains all we need as far as poetry.  We only have to work to find it.  But that work can be difficult.

The next poet is Caroline Bergvall, a French-Norwegian who works in English.  Her work is a ten-minute recitation of 47 different translations of the famous opening lines of Dante’s Inferno:

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.  from the Mandelbaum translation

This is a strangely evocative, haunting experience.  You can hear her read it here.

(Frame from a 1911 Italian film version of the Divine Comedy. The director’s name was Giuseppe De Liguoro. from this website.)

MOOCS, Poetry

Conceptual Poetry

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Samhain                                                                         Thanksgiving Moon

if every word spoken in new york city daily
were somehow to materialize as a snowflake,
each day there would be a blizzard.

Kenneth Goldsmith, Soliloquy.  Postscript

 

The last week of ModPo.  The conceptual poets.  The book from which the quote above comes, Soliloquy, is every word the poet, Kenneth Goldsmith, spoke in a whole week.  He wore a microphone, recorded his speech, then sat down and transcribed it.  A lot of work.  Not as much work, however, as another work of his, Day, in which he transcribed every word in one day’s New York Times.  A 1,000 page book.

Christian Bok, a Canadian poet, took seven years to complete his project, Euonia.  In Euonia he writes 5 chapters, each of which had to have a banquet, an orgy, a feast, a voyage, refer to the act of writing and, most improbably, use only words containing only one vowel, the same vowel, 98% of those words available.  There is a bit more to Euonia, which means beautiful thinking and is the shortest word in the English language that uses all the vowels.

These are highwire acts of virtuosity and the real creative act is in the concept, especially in Goldsmith.  The concept–what would every word in one edition of the New York Times look like transcribed into a linear text and bound in a book look like?–was the creative moment.  The act of fulfillment, the days and weeks of transcription, is either non creative or uncreative.

Interesting stuff.  I’m more with this than I was with the Chance poets of last week.

Latin, MOOCS, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses

The Weight of the Inert

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Samhain                                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

I finished the fourth and last writing assignment for ModPo.  I’m attaching it because it was fun, a riff on the Chance poetics of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Bernadette Mayer (pic).

Next week we finish up and my 3 months excursion into the modern and the post modern through Coursera will be at an end.  The gardening season has come to an end.  And Holiseason is just beginning.

Over the next weeks and months I plan to consolidate my learning both in poetry and the post modern.  As I’ve said before, I want to include these concepts in reimagining my faith.

BTW:  Some of you have expressed interest in the MOOCs.  Here are the two I’ve worked with and can recommend:  Coursera and EdX.

 

The Weight of the Inert

Version I

“5 Before the sea and the sky that hangs over all the lands and

was one of the faces of the whole of nature in the world,

I have spoken of the chaos, the amount of raw indigestaque

and nothing but an inert and heaped up in the weight of the same

not well joined the seeds of discord of things.

10, supplying light to the world, no one has as yet the Titan,

not renew the waxing moon horns,

or hanging in surrounding air

balanced by its own weight, or long arms

edge of the lands stretching out her arms;

15 and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”

 

Version 2

5 and and which covers

One look in the whole world,

the said, the amount of raw

and only if the weight of the inert

things do not go well.

10 Nothing in the world,

neither growing Phoebe

or in the surrounding region

their own weights, and not long

15 and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.

 

Since I’m currently engaged in translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I performed the following operation. First, I copied a Latin section of Book I: 5-15 from Perseus, a classics aides website. I took that section and put it into google translate. I then went through the Latin and eliminated all words with the letter a and ran it again through google translator. The result is version 2.

I retained the first version here so you could see that the translation was far from smooth and contained some chance operations on its own. In that sense version 2 is more than 1 step away from the Latin version of number 1 since it introduces the still clunky results of the google translation algorithm into the altered text.

Version 2 surprised me. It makes almost as much sense, if not a bit more, than Version 1, not in the Latin, of course, but in the English machine translation.

I hear a surprised boy saying, “And, and which covers one look in the whole world.” Another voice, perhaps a chorus replies, “The said, the amount of raw and only if the weight of the inert.” Another, deeper voice, an adult male weary with experience says, “Things do not go well.”

The boy again, chastened now, “Nothing in the world, neither growing Phoebe or in the surrounding region…”

And finally a resonant female voice, mature and wise, “Their own weights, and not long and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”

All this on a stage bare except for the actors, a broken Greek column and a small tripod holding a basin in which a bright fire burns.

A fluxus moment, perhaps performed on an off-Broadway sidewalk, the stage improvised with concrete blocks and plywood.   The air is cold, midnight of the Winter Solstice, and a flier announcing the performance reads, “Saturnalian Words. The voice of Sol Invictus.”

This has a Harry Haller, magic theater resonance for me. The whole thing could be a performance in one of the side stages, feeding the Steppenwolf in all of us.

OK, I know I’ve gone pretty far afield with this, taking it from chance to dialogue and from dialogue to theater and then positioning the theater in Hesse’s imagined dramatic space. But that very journey speaks of seed text and deterministic method, that somehow flensing an ancient text, then using a very contemporary technology to alter it, can create haunting, yes, I’ll say it, meaning. Meaning created in that most artistic of ways, with the caesura as important as the content.

What did that one look over the whole world see? And why does a rejoinder to it reference the raw and the inert? The next line seems very apt in a Kafkaesque, Hesseian way: “Things do not go well.” How could they?

Finally the last two spoken lines speak of loss and seem to refer back to that one look over the whole world which saw what? “The air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”

Health, Poetry

Ritual and Chance

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Samhain                                                                 Thanksgiving Moon

Ritual purification proceeding according to the rules set down in the book of codes, an ancient text hidden deep beneath the skyscraper headquarters of Insurance Company. The plan is working.

We’re into the next to last week of ModPo now, the poets of chance.  These poets push further away from authorial authority, even from the Steinian modernism and the Beat emphasis on automatic writing.  John Cage, familiar to many through his musical compositions, plays an important role in contemporary poetry, too.  He and Jackson Mac Low are the two poets of this bent I’ve studied so far.

(John Cage)

The key move among these poets is a deterministic method of creating poetry that removes the creative act from writing, putting it instead in the creation of various methods for choosing words, texts, lines.  An example is a third poet whom I studied in another section, Bernadette Mayer.  She has rules for creating new poetry out of old.  Pick a poem, any poem, and, say, take out all the prepositions.  Or, all the words beginning with a.  Perhaps removing every third letter or every third line.  Then, there is a new piece, based on what Cage called a seed text, or an oracle text, one that served as the material from which the method would create a new work.

The term oracle text comes from Cage’s fascination with the methodology of the I Ching, the Chinese taoist Book of Changes.  By casting straws the user of the I Ching can determine which of 64 hexagrams apply to a particular situation.  Cage adapted the notion of a method like casting straws to his creation of poetry in a manner resembling Mayers.

Here is a portion of Mac Low’s “Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair” created by applying a rigorous method to Gertrude Stein’s famous “Tender Buttons.”  Below it is the method he used.  Still not sure about this myself.

Pedestrianism showed itself triumphant and disagreeable.
That which was hidden worried them.
They asked that her speech be repeated.
Summer light bears a likeness to justice.
Then the light is supposing attention.
That section has a resemblance to light.
Is it a likeness of the justice chair?

 

Author’s Note:
Eight strophes initially drawing upon the whole text of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.
I sent the entire text through DIASTEX5 (Charles O. Hartman’s 1994 update of DIASTEXT [1989],
his automation of one of my diastic text-selection procedures [1963], using as a seed text
the fifty-third paragraph of the book (exclusive of titles, etc), which begins, “A fact
is that when any direction is just like that, . . .” I selected the paragraph by random-digit
chance operations using the RAND Corporation’s table A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal
Deviates. (The Free Press, 1955).

My source and seed texts came from the first edition of Tender Buttons, issued by Donald Evan’s
publishing house Claire Marie (1914), as posted online in The Bartleby Archive (1995) and The New
Bartleby Library (1999), both edited by Steven van Leeuwen, with editorial contributions by Gordon
Dahlquist. However, I incorporated in my file of Tender Buttons fourteen corrections written
in ink in Stein’s hand, which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland’s copy of this edition,
now owned by the Special Collections of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

I “mined” the program’s output for words which I included in 117 sentences (several elliptical
and each one a verse line) by changes and/or additions of suffixes, pronouns, structure
words, forms of “to be,” etc. and changes of word order. Initially, in making these sentences,
I placed lexical words’ root morphemes near others that were near them in the raw output–in fact
I included many phrases, and even whole verse lines, of unedited, though punctuated, ouput,
mostly in early strophes–but I was able to do this less and less in the course of writing the poem.

While composing the 117 verse-line sentences, I divided them into eight strophes that
successively comprise numbers of sentences corresponding to the prime-number sequence
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19.

New York: 20 September 1999

 

 

Latin, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses

Keeping On

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Fall                                                                       Samhain Moon

After a lackluster come back to Latin on the 17th of October, my confidence wavered. Kept at it though and today I finished my 60th verse since then.  That was my goal for the two week period.  Unless I’m way off, I’ve found my trireme legs again.  Far from easy, but very far, too, from being opaque, as Latin was to me for the first 63 years of my life.

In fact, with the time I’ve got left over this next three days I’m going to start on Lucrectius’ De Rerum Natura.  Some variety is helpful Greg says but Vergil and Caesar didn’t work for me.  Couldn’t hold my interest.  Lucretius will.

Started the last third of ModPo today with the Language poets.  I’ve only read one piece so far, Albany, by Ron Perleman.  It’s a 100 line autobiography in what he calls new sentences, each sentence personal and political.  And, not in sequence.

It sounds strange but I found reading it a pleasure.  A gestalt forms from the scraps of

More later on these contemporary poets working in an unusual way with poetry, memory, and story-telling.

Garden, Latin, MOOCS, Our Land and Home, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Changes Are Coming

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Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

With Modern/Post Modern in its last week and Modpo with only three weeks to go, I feel like the end of the quarter or semester is in sight.  Since it will roughly co-ordinate with Samhain, this means a distinct change in my daily life.  The garden is almost put to bed and will be by the end of this week as well.  The bees, too, will get their cardboard outer sleeve, the moisture absorbing top board and corks in the lower two entrances, plus the entrance reducer.

This year part of that outdoor energy will get focused in the garage which can use a major cleaning, rearranging.  It’s gotten cluttered and we could use it for more if we eliminate a few things like the five stall dog crate and feeding platform.

Writing Loki’s Children and keeping up with the Latin will occupy the bulk of the time.  I’ll huddle downstairs with the green gas stove burning, my Zojirushi kicking out tea temperature water and visions of old Rome and Ragnarok.