Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Month: April 2025

Discovering Brian Eno and Oblique Strategies

April 17, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Like I said on Cher Scholar, I am now publishing blog alerts and new content on Substack due to recent political and news events. So discovering a three-hour Brian Eno documentary (“The Man Who Fell to Earth”) last week feels like a good moment of refreshment for Big Bang Poetry. Some fresh projects, a fresh bulletin board.

Not only was the documentary long, but it only covered 1971-to 1977!!  Monsieur Big Bang is a Brian Eno fan and picked it out to watch. Whenever we talk about Roxy Music, he will say “Roxy Music was better with Brian Eno in it.” And now I understand why he feels this way (although I still like the later-day Roxy Music).

This post could almost cross-pollinate with Cher Scholar in the ongoing arguments over the use of voice-manipulation-technology in “Believe” (and also Eno often planning an up-tempo record side and a downbeat side which Cher tried with Closer to the Truth and I hated it), which has a tiny but direct lifeline back to the ethos of Brian Eno, a self-described non-musician who has managed to spend his whole career working with technology in music as an art form in a very commercial space.

The avant-garde’s attraction to technology is one of the main controversies of our time. Like the defenders of “Believe,” the documentary’s talking head pointed to the emotional connections of Brian Eno’s music, one commentator pointing out the way Eno can explore work with machines to produce “great humanity and warmth.”

The documentary also discussed ideological tensions around the idea of virtuosity and yet Eno works with practiced musicians. So it’s complicated. You can feel the threat of AI coming now while watching; and the contempt of craft that comes around every few decades. But there is also something interesting about the idea of play. As was said of Eno and an instrument or machine, he “plays with it versus plays it.” It reminds me of the kind of digital “poetry” that uses vocabulary as a material but words separated from grammatical meanings, making it more a visual art using words like a material object. The same thing could be working here for Brian Eno (he uses sound for art’s sake versus music’s sake) except that I think his work appeals to musicians more than digital poetry appeals to other poets.

The documentary explores early technology experiments with Pink Floyd and Kraftwork and Eno’s work with Roxy Music, Robert Fripp, Cluster, David Bowie and the Talking Heads.

The doc also draws a line from Erik Sartie (and his “sound furniture”) to the chance operations of John Cage (who crosses over to LANGUAGE poetics and mesostics) to Brian Eno’s ambient music. I made a list of albums to listen to and have only yet finished No Pussyfooting (with Fripp).

But there were a few things that really appeal to me about Eno. One was his stance against rebellion for rebellion’s sake. Having grown up romanticizing rebellion (heroizing it even), I’m ready to look at another way.

The other thing was the Oblique Strategies cards, which are all about generating new inputs if you are stuck. He made them with painter Peter Schmidt from their separate notebooks of ideas they used when they were stuck on something.

The randomness of cards, the tactileness of cards has always attracted me. Growing up in a poker-playing house, I was only interested in the cards at a tactile level, the way the sounded on the shuffle, the feel of the slide, the many ways to paint them.)

Anyway, I went looking for these cards on eBay and they are very, very expensive, prior editions going for hundreds of dollars, the original edition for over a thousand. Brian Eno is selling new decks from his website for only $50.

But I decided to dig out some unused business cards in my office closet (who needs them after VistaPrint?) and hand-write my own set. This would also give me a chance to do another archaic thing I love to do: laminate shit.

Considering Eno is a technology artist, the cards are a very beautifully physical tool to use. I love that about the context of the whole endeavor. It reminds me of my own need to play around with browser poems and then hand-write haikus.

Version 1.0.0

The set of 115 cards were written to be recording studio aids for when artists get stuck, when things just are not working. But I think they would be just as useful as writing aids, like the Creative Whack Pack or Stones for the Muse.

Reading them over, I came up with the following example categories and my thoughts about some of the cards:

Shake the creative jar:

  • Change instrument roles (that sounds interesting)
  • Abandon normal instruments
  • Reverse
  • Use fewer notes (Is that the Emperor talking to Mozart in Amadeus?)
  • Look at the order in which you do things
  • Faced with a choice, do both
  • Convert a melodic element into a rhymical element

Do some abstract thinking:

  • A line has two sides.
  • Repetition is a form of change
  • Always give yourself credit for having more than personality
  • Do we need holes?

Beginner’s Mind:

  • Ask people to work against their own better judgement
  • Use unqualified people
  • Don’t be afraid of things because they are easy to do
  • Idiot glee
  • Question the heroic approach

Some of the Beginner’s Mind ideas do work against our narcissistic tendencies but I’m now questioning some of these impulses, which have been popular for some years now. The problem is that this kind of chaos-creating has got us where we are now socially and politically because it has led us into to a fear of expertise or maybe a distrust of expertise. (This is the essential tug and pull of an artist like Brian Eno).

In truth, we need to beware of our fear of expertise as much as our glorification of it. Because it’s almost like someone is trying to run a country this way and it can cause a massive-scale of suffering. The beginner’s mind is a way to break out of the spell of a creative block, not a system-entire operating strategy (or at least it shouldn’t be). We’ve come this far as humans by figuring things out. I don’t need to understand quantum physics but someone should. And I should respect their understanding that is beyond mine.

Where are the cards for tapping into all that we know and allowing others to contribute their expertise to our enterprise? Not that these cards are the antithesis to that. They’re not.

Jump starting the brain by adjusting the body and other sensory adjustments:

  • Breathe more deeply
  • Water
  • Ask your body
  • Put in earplugs (a personal favorite)
  • Shut the door and listen from the outside
  • Remember the quiet evenings
  • Twist your spine
  • Get your neck massaged
  • Do the washing

Stop stopping (or guarding) yourself (this is a big one):

  • Don’t be frightened by cliches (I have a poem in a new collection that says the same thing)
  • Allow an easement (I think this might make more sense to a songwriter)
  • Honor thy error as a hidden intention (the power of failure)
  • What would your closest friend do?
  • What wouldn’t you do?
  • Discard an axiom
  • What mistakes did you make last time?
  • Emphasize the flaws
  • Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them (one of the laws of mining for comedy)
  • Go to an uncomfortable extreme and then move back to a comfortable place
  • Be less critical more often
  • Accept advice
  • What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate. (honesty, truth)
  • Trust the you of now
  • Courage? (perhaps the most valuable card in the deck)

What Is Poetry: To Reveal the Self or Disclose the World?

April 9, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This is our last blog post covering questions about what poetry may be. We ran out of Elisa New questions (from the Harvard Emily Dickinson MOOC) in the last post. This question is a bonus question I cobbled together somewhere between reading about Gary Snyder and Jack Spicer last year, a question poised somewhere between the Confessional/Beat poets (who make appeals from the self) and the LANGUAGE poets (who try to reveal a reality which does not include ego-driven ideas of the self).

I find this a very interesting, advanced question: what is the purpose of poetry, to reveal the personality or to disclose the world as authentically as we can (in all its scary nebulousness), to explore our many personas or to abandon the idea of individuality altogether?

Poetry camps each feel very strongly about this. And, as you can predict, I hate to take sides in these poetry matters. Again, how can you choose? Like all these attempts to define what poetry is and what poetry does, there are easy cases to be made outside of any staid definition.

If we’re honest, most humans can’t really function outside of a sense of self, despite the precariousness of the self in any biological sense. Psychologists can show how and why we construct our ideas of ourselves so we can mentally move through the world. And we need the idea of other selves to help us come to terms with the mysteries of human behavior in others.

But some (very Zen) humans can also operate with a more fluid sense of self, of being part of a collective self (without feeling threatened by losing the assurance of an ego). Other people need a strong sense of self, a bolster that helps them understand where they begin and end in the world. And then some people just want to think of themselves as the center of the universe.

So this determines the kind of poetry each type of person needs to write.

It’s probably a healthy practice to try both kinds of consciousnesses and write poems that explore each point of view (or pointlessness of view).

After all, without personalities to communicate from and to why bother? On the other hand, with an intransigent sense of self, you are going to get stuck in the pointlessness of that as well. Without being willing to a kind of fluidity and openness to changing your mind, why try to communicate with others? Because if your goal is just to force your perspective on everybody else, you are doomed to fail and feel alienated as a result.

What Is Poetry? One Moment or an Eternity

April 3, 2025 / / 0 Comments

We are to the last of our Elisa New questions from the Emily Dickinson MOOC. We have one more bonus question later but this is the last in New’s string of musings to her students about what poetry is or how we can define it.

This last question is long: “does a poem live more fully in one distinct moment of performance, like a theatrical performance, like a dance performance? Or does a poem live across time, such that any one performance is inadequate to what the poem actually is?”

Unlike how poems were originally transferred from person to person before the printing press was invented, and unlike how music, theatrical and dance performances operate as one-of-a-kind, communal experiences, poetry can also be transmitted by the technology of books, its own machine of mediation.

So “performance” takes a different meaning if you consider the “performance” on the page. How does a poem perform across and down the white space of paper and across pages? A private reading is also a kind of performance in your own head, in your own imagination. You are the eternal performer in all your readings.

Live events are communal events. Who hasn’t felt the energy of being part of an enthusiastic audience? Any piece of work that has been preserved and then experienced in another time and place through a mediated device is a different experience. Just as experiencing the plays of Shakespeare are unique to their time as opposed to their very first performances. The cultural context has changed. Time changes culture which changes the context of reading any art.

The media also affects the experience, changes in books, new technologies. Watching a video on MTV in the 1980s is a different experience than watching it on YouTube. Hearing AI read a poem aloud is quite different than hearing a monk read it centuries ago. A paperback book is different than a computer printout which is different than a book that was handwritten. These are both intellectual and emotional differences. They land differently in our heads and hearts.

Are all these pieces of art different if differently experienced? They may use the same words from context to context and medium to medium. Does even the reader change what is read? I recently read a allegory for fandom that described two people riding a roller coaster. Their bodies experience the same ride in the same objective way but one loves the ride and one hates it. Their interpretations are based on their personalities and expectations of pleasure.

So one set of words could have infinite performances across time and media, and infinite performances even in one moment across the array of an audience.

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