Category: Poetry Technology (Page 1 of 8)

What is Poetry: Should Poetry Be Heard or Read

August 21, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re making our way through Elisa New’s queries on what poetry is, questions she posed in the Harvard’s Emily Dickinson MOOC. Here’s the next question in the list: is poetry language other human beings necessarily hear or read?

It’s interesting that New specifies “human beings” because obviously animals overhear poetry spoken by humans, like a racoon stuck in an attic overhearing a poetry reading downstairs. It must sound like pure music for them, like listening to any unfamiliar language. But it’s humans who need to experience their language as poetry or want to. And there are humans who are satisfied to experience poetry simply as nonverbal music. Fans of Gertrude Stein, for example.

New also specifies the word “necessarily” as if this is the way we have to experience poetry, as a necessity, and the other way is possibly superfluous.

It’s probably not necessary to overthink New’s casual questions here but the fact is the hoomans have never been able to agree on an answer.

Some of us believe poetry is best experienced as spoken word. Poetry is primarily aural in this case. Some of us believe the page is where the poem is set in stone and formalized. And the page itself, the white space, the visual is crucial to its meaning.

And they both have a point here. Much depends upon what properties of a poem the author was working with, sound or visual tricks. It’s hard to bring visual chicanery to life in a spoken performance. On the other hand, you can get a slight idea of the sound effects when reading a poem silently, but you get a better understanding of them when you read a poem out loud.

Poetry predates printing and so spoken word and memorization is at the heart of its history. Musical elements made it easier to perform and pass along poems. Often, it’s the musical elements that set poetry apart from prose.

But then the printing press happened. Poems could come alive in the minds of readers and not just in the ears of listeners. Now we have even newer publishing platforms like web browsers and interactive applications.

In one MOOC I attended on Electronic Literature, the teacher talked about “affordances” which were like beneficial properties of any one platform. For example, you can take a book to the beach, get it wet and it won’t conk out on you. It’s still a very usable media platform even when damp.

On the other hand, a book in an e-reader might short-circuit when wet, but is weightless and doesn’t take up room in your house if you decide to keep it. You can also search it for content very effortlessly and quickly.

Likewise, our mouth is a platform with some very beneficial affordances.

Everyone has a greater need toward one or another affordance. I personally like the look of books in my rooms. I like the feel of books and paper.

Interestingly, I was going to search images for this post, one for “poetry reading” (as in the live event) and “reading poetry” (as in the book). But the search engine, of course, didn’t know the difference. So putting the words “poetry” and “reading” in the search field brought back everything and that is kind of metaphorically nice.

These are pretty stereotypical images of both options. The dark room with a spotlight and a dramatic performer gesturing with their hands. Contrast this with the manicured reader, enjoying nature no less with a latte with some artfully applied whipped cream.

So every one will have their own personal answer to this question; and how could it be otherwise? We all have different aesthetic needs.

For me, music itself satisfies my need for music. And the music of poetry often overwhelms me during poetry reading performances. The rhythms send me drifting off into my imagination and I come back a minute or two later having missed whole sections of the poems. There’s also the poetry reading grunt that I find pretty grating.

But then again I love to attend public discussions of poetry and literature, like the sessions of The Los Angeles Festival of Books and I like Ted Talks and stand-up comedy. So I do like the physical human presence of communication. It’s a fine line between that and other forms of spoken word.

I’m much more interested in poetry as a visual artifact. So for me, the page trumps the performance. Whereas for the live performance of a conversation, lectures or the performance of music itself, this is not the case.

Music has such a strong nonverbal element, regardless of its lyrics, a strong energy of spirit (in all its variation). Poetry, albeit with its own kind of spiritual effect less powerful, is more verbal and idea-based, despite experiments exploring the boundaries of that with either nonsensical or mostly musical writing.

For me, music does music so well. And reading platforms give poetry more opportunities to do what it does so well.

Learning New Things

June 15, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I am still making my way through a year’s subscription of New Yorker from 2021 but I only have a few issues left. I came across a good article last week called “Starting Fresh” by Margaret Talbot and it’s about learning new things as an older person and how this is good for preventing cognitive decline. This article interested me for a few reasons:

One, the women in my family have always been keen on preventing cognitive declines. My grandmother Ladd did this by religiously doing crossword puzzles and keeping track of storyline plots of soap operas. My mother does it with online games like Words With Friends, and cooking when she is able to still do that.

Secondly, I had a brain explosion many, many years ago when I took a ceramics class and got over the daunting idea that I would never be good at it. (See raspberry mask above.) We live in a society that instills in us a terror of attempting anything we might fail. So most of us like to stay in our comfort zones.

But as a writer working my way through my later years, I feel the need to keep exploring, as best I can anyway. This article talks about the benefits of learning new things later in life beyond the spiritual resetting of embracing a beginner’s mind. And also of the dangers of perfectionism earlier in your life.

“Maybe it could be an antidote to the self-reported perfectionism that has grown steadily more prevalent among college students in the past three decades. Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill, the authors of a 2019 study on perfectionism among American, British, and Canadian college students, have written that “increasingly, young people hold irrational ideals for themselves, ideals that manifest in unrealistic expectations for academic and professional achievement, how they should look, and what they should own,” and are worried that others will judge them harshly for their perceived failings. This is not, the researchers point out, good for mental health. In the U.S., we’ll be living, for the foreseeable future, in a competitive, individualistic, allegedly meritocratic society, where we can inspect and troll and post humiliating videos of one another all the live-long day. Being willing to involve yourself in something you’re mediocre at but intrinsically enjoy, to give yourself over to the imperfect pursuit of something you’d like to know how to do for no particular reason, seems like a small form of resistance.”

Yes it does.

Talbot talks about what kinds of cognitive abilities decline with age and which ones improve with age. There’s no perfect age, as it turns out, for the best cognitive ability in all areas. “Fluid indigence, which encompasses the capacity to suss out novel challenges and think on one’s feet, favors the young. But crystallized intelligence–the ability to draw on one’s accumulated store of knowledge, expertise and Fingerspitzengefühl—is often enriched by advancing age. And there’s more to it than that: particular cognitive skills rise and fall at different rates across the life span…”

The article states that your overall cognitive function will also improve if you try to learn a few new things at once. You don’t even have to be good at it. Just the attempt to do it. And researchers think this is because the act of learning multiple things at once replicates how children learn.

I’m fascinated watching how children learn things cognitively and socially. Following early child development educator Dan Wuori on Twitter is just as interesting as watching people try to solve mysteries or design things on TV. It’s watching the wheels spin. You can see it on countless reels of little kids. The first Dan Wuori video that hooked me was a little kid learning how to sort bags of different kinds of snack chips and it was compelling. The face of someone thinking is a wonderous thing.

Which is all to say I’ve started learning how to type on a braille typewriter I bought a few years ago. Back then I invited a friend over who works at a local school in Albuquerque where kids have some disabilities. So she has to take a braille test every year. It was a daunting lesson. First we had to figure out why the machine wasn’t working. Then she had to show me how hard it was to use!

I did a series of typewriter poems a few years ago and it took me like 60 pieces of paper to type out 6 poems. But I’m a comparatively good typist so that was easy compared to working with braille. There’s the same high expectation that there be no errors, (no white out sheets for my typewriter poems!), but you have to learn to type very slowly with multiple fingers engaged for every single word.

It took me quite a while to write a poem I thought worthy of the thing. Years. Then I used an online text to braille translator to map out the poem this week. Now it’s just days and weeks ahead of making many mistakes.

Wheeee!

Board Game for Poets

January 31, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This amazing world, huh?

In August my friend Ann told me about a poetry board game called Dead Poets Rise, a game that was not yet for sale. I sat across from Ann practically losing my shit. A board game for poets? I’m a poet! I love board games!

I tried and failed to get in on the funding by sending a message to the game Facebook page. Possibly I was too late, but I did get added to the mailing list. The game went on sale last fall for $100. This seems like a steep price when you consider games going for $20-40 on Amazon and Target. But I’ve noticed really popular and well-designed games are going for $100 on eBay, games like The Gallerist (about planning art exhibitions at your gallery and rumored to be the hardest strategy game out there, a factoid told to me by one of the clerks at my local board game hangout) and Shakespeare (where similarly you plan out a theatrical show).

This is a very nice game and I can see why it’s listed at that price point. I got a copy as a Christmas gift. Thanks Mom!

The Stuff

It’s a beautiful game in an awesome hexagonal-shaped box. The only flaw is that the box doesn’t close properly and needs a paper strap that’s hard to get on and off to keep it closed so that the contents don’t all spill out when you try to stash it in your closet. The paper is already tearing and will give up the ghost before long and I’ll have to be careful with storage. Right now the game is not being stored with my other board games but with my conspicuous poetry consumption objects.

The cover also acts as a hexagonal board with quotes printed along the edges. There are also juicy elements like a die, three decks of cards, tons of marbles! And a board that looks like Chinese checkers. Also included are mechanical pencils (with little eraser hats and a box of replacement graphite), pads of paper and a sticky notepad for all your writing prompts.

You also need a phone to look up texts and videos as part of the writing prompts.

The instructions

The instructions attempt to explain in words how to set up the board but we had no idea what we should end up with. The instructions need a picture of the board at the start of play. The main issue was that there were too many marbles for the available marble holes and we needed to have a combination of black and green marbles. But how many black marbles did we need? The instructions didn’t say. And should there be more black marbles in games with more players? There were black and green marbles and big shooting marbles (to represent the players). Shooting marbles went into easily marked holes around the edges of the board. We just had to guess.

Instructions should be specific about how many black marbles to “roll out” per number of players and then instruct the players to fill in the rest of the holes with green marbles. Why were there so many bags of marbles in the first place? There was a nice tan bag full of big beautiful shooter marbles, a beautiful black bag with the game logo full of green marbles. Then there was an extra plastic bag of 12 black marbles and another extra plastic bag containing 4 green and 2 black marbles. We never did figure out what all the different bags meant.

The black and green marbles were referred to as common and uncommon marbles which seemed unnecessary. In fact the game had too much new terminology that was maybe intended to create ambience in the game but it ended up just being confusing.

Instead of getting a specially made single die with low numbers, the instructions had a die translator. This annoyed me more than it did Monsieur Big Bang who was playing the game with me.

A word about Monsieur Big Bang, he hates board games. He grew up with bar games like pool and foosball, not that he’s crazy about those games now either (maybe with the exception of pinball). During Covid I got into board games somewhat excitedly. I focused on finding 1) games I felt deprived of as a child like Mystery Date or Go To the Head of the Class, two games my girlfriends had, 2) detective games with map boards and 3) games with pictures of famous art or art-related games (which is a crossover of #1 and the fact that my eldest brother had the game Masterpiece and refused to play it with me for mysterious reasons so I’ve been obsessing about that game ever since.

A word about me: I am notoriously bad at board games. I just like the doo-dads, setting them up, sorting it all out, losing the game and then putting everything back in the box. Just typing all that out makes me want to do it right now. My eldest brother did play games with me from time to time, but only war games like Risk or Battleship, during which he famously won by lying for the whole game and I guessed every single space until it was impossible not to have hit one of his ships by then. I lost by gullibility but then he was 7 years older than me so…I don’t feel too bad about that.

Getting Monsieur Big Bang to play board games is always a struggle, especially these days because he is very busy. And my local friends have their own games they want to play, so I’m collecting quite a stack of unplayed board games. I even bought one called Plunder with a pirate raiding theme (and little tiny ships with attachable masts and cannons) thinking it would entice Monsieur Big Bang (who also used to like Risk) but that was a no go. One of the last games I made him play was the aforementioned Mystery Date. I had a few friends who had this game but they never wanted to play it (also mysteriously). It has such an awesome opening door feature and I was always wanting to play it.

It turns out my girlfriends didn’t want to play this game because it is mind-bogglingly boring and takes too much time around the board before you can ever get a chance to actually open the technological marvel of that door to reveal your date for the night. I recently snared a copy and talked Monsieur Big Bang into playing it and (can you believe it?) I kept losing this game too! He kept getting the ball-room prince and the ski hunk and I kept getting the ‘dud,’ by which the game just means disheveled guy.

Oh yeah, so another annoying thing about Mystery Date is that is was created in the late 1950s and has seriously outdated ideas as to what makes an attractive date for the typical 1970s little girl. Twenty years later and that ‘dud’ looks pretty much like the most attractive guy in the deck and the others look like the duds.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not very good at board game strategy. And this game would prove no exception, professional-poet expertise aside.

Dead Poets Rise has two stacks of Creation and Chaos cards. You use them to write a poem while your working to collect marbles on the board.

Creation cards give you prompts for lines of your poem. Chaos cards sabotage the directions you were headed with those lines.

Examples of Creation cards: use the words always, never, sometimes in your next line, use alliteration with pr, pl, gr, gl sounds, search Google with provided prompts for words, write about a smell in the room, write about two disparate objects in the room, fill in this sentence when I hear ambulances I want to ….

Monsieur Big Bang said at this point the game felt like a Mad Lib.

Examples of sabotage cards: change one of your words to the opposite, change your verb tense, change the past to the future.

Unfortunately, there were quite a few duplicate cards and some triplicate cards. Coming from a family of poker players who can do fancy acrobatic playing-card shuffling, I can tell you I also suck at card shuffling. So I have to shuffle like ten times and still we couldn’t get them shuffled enough to reduce the duplicates We also caught a typo in the word ‘corresponds’ in one of the cards.

Hopefully these things will get rectified. All the prompts should be original.

We played the short game for two people. The object is to roll the die and move across the board collecting a certain amount of black and green marbles. Once you have all your marbles you can move into the center area of play called The Sphynx Challenge.

Each turn also draws Creation and Chaos cards that help each player create a poem in the style of one of the “dead poets,” obscure poets that comprise another, most interesting deck.

You actually start things off with this dead poet deck, which includes separate little packs containing a handful of cards each for one obscure poet. At the beginning of the game, you all agree on the poet and everyone pulls a poet card with some biography and samples of poems. The players also choose a random theme from a list in the instructions. You use the theme and the poetry samples to write “in the style” of the poet you are attempting to “resurrect.”

It sounds more complicated than it is.

The back of the dead poet packs have biographical information and each player gets one of cards with snippets of their poems on it. These are the cards we drew:

By the time of The Sphynx Challenge at the end, you have pretty much a completed poem and the challenge is to read one line of your “fake” poem lines and two lines of the real poet’s poem and others have to guess which line is yours.

We each guessed each other’s fake lines.

In fact, Monsieur Big Bang won on the technicality that he was the first to make it to the Sphynx area with is big marble. And our decision to have him guess my fake line was just courtesy play.

The punishment for losing the Sphynx challenge seemed too much for the short version of the game (three green marbles) but then again your marbles don’t win you the game so who cares.

The Sphynx challenge introduced the elements of points which seemed sudden and out of place and the game provided no material to track these sudden points (grab a piece of paper). It felt like an after-thought, an additional confusion. And yet those points would determine the winner as people won or lost the challenge. Then again, it was also possible we weren’t playing it right. The whole points layer was confusing.

At the end of the game, we felt like the game was missing something and I couldn’t articulate it. The box had all the do-dads, after all.

Monsieur Big Bang had some ideas though. He said you could almost dispense with the board play and use the card prompts for writing exercises, like for students, friends or just playing alone. He said it was lacking a sense of a game’s highs and lows. There was no real feel of competition. And so we discussed board games that lacked this competition element and yet were still fun, like the Encanto movie board game. In that game you work together against a clock to save the house. It’s still fun but not cut-throat.

My friend Julie recently gave me a very Dungeon and Dragons like haunted house game, Betrayal at House on the Hill, (which I haven’t found anyone to play with yet), and the first half of that game is cooperative to set up the board pieces and the second half of the game, once the monsters get tripped off, is competing against a common monster and against each other.

Dead Poets Rise did feel like a writing exercise more than a game. I also didn’t understand the rationale for collecting the marbles except to extend our writing time with the prompt cards. The game does seem to needs more conflict, if not against each other than with some external element.

Monsieur Big Bang also felt the game didn’t have enough person-to-person contact. And you didn’t feel invested because there wasn’t enough drama, which prompted a retelling of the the joke I learned at Sarah Lawrence, “why are poets (and thus poetry board games) so cut throat? Because the stakes are so low.”

The stakes felt very low for this game. And maybe that’s where game drama lives.

The final imposter challenge did seem most satisfying at the end and maybe that could be worked into regular game play. Considering it was one of the most fun aspects of the game, it was disappointing that the first person to enter the final Sphynx challenge area quickly won the game before anybody else could experience the fun of being an impostor.

I also really liked discovering, if not feeling like I fully “resurrected,” the dead poet. Our poet was Celia Dropkin and our theme was “the war within.” I had never heard of this Russian-born Yiddish poet who immigrated to New York City at the turn of the century (and passed away in the 1950s) so that was great fun for me (more so than for the non-poet-player).

Although there are some fixes needed, I do want to emphasize it’s a fun box of beautiful things and I will be playing it again and showing it to other poets.

My resulting poem turned out like this:

Untitled (the task of adding a title could be added to the play somehow)

Maybe my mother’s yearning
is never in me like conception (Not a bad start)
and the silence of the Gods gone quiet
like all the fires of the world going out,
grounded, groused and groveling for air. (What a mess of a run-on!)
And to survive I strive to organize. (True, dat)
When I hear ambulance I want to
melt into the water like ground (Good prompt to switch those words)
where the italicized roots of Latin are buried. (I had to change roots to monks. Boo.)
And the world revolves on the sight of glass
and dollars and dead poets. (I like the end)

And So the Summer Departs

September 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

To-do List Courtesy of Reddit

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here…well since our Essay Project came to a close in July. When I finish a big project I always feel suddenly a little untethered.

Alarmingly, this year has gone by faster than any year before (it would seem). Cruel summer and turned into cruel fall. Soon it will be Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The Halloween stores are already open and just a moment ago it was spring and I was finishing up migrating websites. The whole year was on the horizon and my day job was really feeling great. (They gave us ice cream!)

The year of 2023 has brought me….well, things. For one, the day job has turned into the gaslit labors of Sisyphus. And the somewhat dreadful news about Artificial Intelligence has taken a lot of wind from the sails of my proliferating digital poems.

I spent a few minutes yesterday with no small bit of ennui considering if I’ve actually accomplished anything this year.

But I have.

I’ve finished two multi-year online blogging projects on Cher Scholar and we’ve wrapped up the Essay Project here. I did create a few new browser-based poems and the The Electrical Dictionary of Melancholy Absolutes hit 100 definitions quite unbelievably this week.

And the in-progress stuff continues to march along. Although it’s been a slow slog, I’ve been working on a big course-like survey about the poems of American history. I stared about two years ago and I’m just now seeing the finish line. Monsieur Big Bang’s new Intro to Anthro podcast has me thinking about what format that survey course will take. Should it be a podcast or an online class? Should I use an educational platform for a fee or just host it myself for free (like a podcast)? I still don’t know. Podcasts have higher visibility but that format leaves out the possibility of fun PowerPoints and videos of petroglyph from my neighborhood. In any case, that’s a decision probably a year or two away.

The Katharine Hepburn poem is underway and slowing forming into itself. I’ve also started a new browser-based poem about my paternal grandfather based on some work my brother Randy finished a few years ago researching the history of our grandparents in Jicarilla, San Carlos, Hopi, Tohono Oʼodham, at the Indian School at Stewart, Nevada, and their final years in Roy, New Mexico.

I also need to dust off the Braille machine I purchased a few years ago and figure out how to write poems on that thing.

I have a little stack of experimental poetry books to review going back to last fall of 2022.

There are some fun trips ahead, too. Our group formerly known as the Sarah Lawrence writing group, now known as the Difficult Book Club, held a reunion dinner recently in New York City. It was so much fun, we’ve made plans to meet again in Winslow early next year.

And I have poems forthcoming in a spring 2024 anthology of Albuquerque poets coming out from University of New Mexico Press.

It’s a lot of work. I’ve made a big change in my day job hours that will go into effect at the first of the new year and hopefully that will give me more time finish all of this stuff. There’s that novel too.

So I guess that’s good, right? I feel like I’ve hit a plateau somehow. Oy. These are times for baby steps.

Anyway, in other news my friend Christopher gave me this book for my birthday, a coloring book created by Jane Heyes, peppered with Shakespearean, Romantic and 20th Century British poetry (except for one Walt Whitman poem floating in there, “A Glimpse“).

Maybe I should spend a few months just coloring around poems like I’m William Blake

AI Aiyee!

June 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’ve been telling people this week about what a dumpster fire my life is at the moment what with various things going awry, (job things, neighborhood things, sick friends, old dogs, and many, many more).

For example, I wanted long hair when I was young and my mother would not allow it, mostly based on her own aggravating childhood experiences of her mother brushing her long hair while she practiced piano but also because she said she knew me very well and I would never brush it. And if I didn’t brush it, spiders would nest in it. That’s what she said.

I thought, hmmm…not a deal breaker.

So what happens this morning? Ok, she was right. I don’t brush my hair very often, but seriously? I suppose you could say this is a dumpster fire of my own making but that’s not the point. The point is, that spider could have picked any other week to go for my long, unbrushed hair.

So anywho, I’ll be using a few dumpster fire pics to describe the new normal for poets and other writers in the shadow of Artificial Intelligence, another dumpster, another fire.

Everyone everywhere is talking about Artificial Intelligence, or AI, and the astounding (and creatively off-putting) gains it has made in the last few months with the release of ChatGPT.

When I was last in LA in April, my friends and I went to the Marina del Rey restaurant Dear Jane’s and our friendly waiter there, (who had just moved to LA from Atlanta), told us he was using ChatGPT to write a script for a sitcom about a restaurant where he was once employed. He said he just plugged in all the characters and some scenarios and bada-bing-bada-boom! The script was done.

Forget for a moment the cliché that every waiter in LA is writing a Hollywood script. We have more pressing problems.

I also have a friend from Sarah Lawrence who now works as an editor at a very prominent magazine in New York City. She told us the writers there are being told they have to use ChatGPT for first drafts (save us all time, you know). The writers there are very unhappy about it. Even the young digital natives are upset. Everyone can see the writing on the wall here.

For years, we’ve been letting AI learn from us everywhere from Grammerly to auto-correct to auto-suggest. And we’re so cheap and frugal. We’ll happily be lab rats as long as the App is free. As they once said in the documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” if you didn’t pay for the product, the product is you.

So here we are. Flood under the bridge.

I’ve been saying for years writers shouldn’t feel so threatened by AI since nobody wants to hear what machines have to say. We’re human beings wanting to connect with other human beings about the human being experience. I was even reminded of this while attending my niece’s graduation from Perdue in Indiana last month. We talked about AI there too. At dinner when someone suggested the commencement speeches might someday be written by AI, everyone noticeably cringed.

The table was full of engineers who had plenty to say about AI. First the engineers informed us it was really machine learning we’re talking about, not AI. (I still don’t know the difference.) My brother Andrew, his ex-wife Maureen and her best friend are all computer engineers and they had a mini-debate at the table about whether or not we could use tools to detect things created by AI.

That debate started because I lamented AI would probably affect all future literary submissions to magazines. Now this is one thing I hadn’t thought about before when I insisted people don’t want to hear poems, music and stories created by machines. We still don’t want to but what we want only matters if nobody ever lies.

And as we know, people love to lie.

So, for example, how will a literary magazine be able to tell, post ChatGPT, whether a submission has been written by a human being or a machine? We’re on the honor system now. And the problem is letting machines write your poems is easier than doing it yourself. And we all know people who care more about getting published than they do about authorship in the first place. Why wouldn’t they let a machine try to create something that would get their name in print and then just lie.

I didn’t think about the lies.

How do we even prove we’ve created something? I’m imagining a scenario like Melanie Griffith in the movie Working Girl where she’s explaining to Harrison Ford the long and winding way she came up with her business idea to prove her boss, the lying Sigourney Weaver, did not.

And what’s to stop a literary magazine from one day deciding to let a machine write the whole thing? It’s a lot easier than dealing with those pesky, needy writers. And who would even know? Who would even be able to tell? Do we even have the time to even try to figure it out?

My brother thinks we’ll soon have machine tools to be able to suss out tell-tale markers of creative AI content. My other brother Randy then said “But won’t AI then just get smarter to outsmart the tools?” To which Andrew replied that the tool will just get smarter then too.

Oy. Sounds like a lot of work.

And then having worked in the Internet business for a while myself, I can see how even AI might not be able to slog through the onslaught of information burying us these days, (AI could process it but could it find what’s meaningful for us?) or even more distressing, I can see how one bug in the program could cause a lot of damage. Happens every day. We’re not smart enough to make perfect AI. (Although some day AI could be conceivably smart enough.)

Some people are even worried AI could cause not only the loss of all our professions, but the demise of humanity itself! Some alarming scenarios are proposed in an article in this week’s The Week. I’ve been talking about some of these apocalyptic scenarios with my Dad (a former computer hardware mechanic and software programmer) for years. But he sides with the machines! “Good-bye to bad rubbish,” I think he said. No help or sympathy there.

I spoke to my cousin Mark about it last Saturday. He says what I hear most of my writer friends say, “I’m just glad I’m at the end of my career and/or life.” But if you believe at all in reincarnation, you’ll probably just get reborn decades down the line, right back into this flaming dumpster fire so that’s not a real hope of escape. Besides, I’ve got maybe 40 years left if my family genes hold up. I’m not planning on retiring from creating.

My cousin Mark also said he’s heard about people forming communities around the idea of only consuming creative material made before 2023. And honestly, if each of us just tried to consume the mountains of creative material at our disposal made before 2023, we’d never run out of music, poems, fiction, movies, or TV shows. We’ve surely got enough stuff.

But that’s still not very comforting.

Creators might have to live with creating on a much smaller scale, with just a small circle of readers. Because the joy of making art isn’t just in consuming it. Humans love to make it. Making it, in fact, might be the most pleasurable part. And at the very least, we know whether we made it or not.

It feels like a big dumpster fire in the making. Let’s just all stop brushing our hair in protest.

So That Happened

May 7, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So as of late last week, all my websites have been moved. I was delayed one week off the master plan by a nasty bronchitis infection and a last-minute trip to LA to meet with ICANN and visit the LA Times Book Festival. More to come on the book festival. And I know I also owe this site a review of the Joan Didion exhibit from the LA trip before that (it’s half done).

Cher Scholar is back up and pontificating and finishing up the four-year review of all Cher’s television shows from the 70s and 80s. And this site, Big Bang Poetry, is slowly waking up as well with a few new essays and reviews of essays. I have a big stack of poetry books to review. The last site to move, marymccray.com, was the most complicated lift (with all its axillary pieces), but I’m back to adding and continuing its digital explorations. The popular pages have been updated as well, like the Difficult Book page.

Buy oy vey! It’s been a trial. Maybe this is why I’ve been sick four times since Thanksgiving.

There’s still plenty of work left to do, like find and fix each site’s broken parts and figure out what to do about site measurement.

But the ordeal is officially over. I think we can all agree to pretend the last six months just didn’t happen. Boo. I’ll be working on some offline projects, too, including a long epic I’m working on, a history poetry project and I have to get some health stuff taken care of due to the aforementioned four take-downs, possibly some ICANN news coming up, a lot going on.

Thanks for hanging in there or returning to see the dust settle.

Finding Poems by Themes

March 31, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Months ago I finished The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present edited by David Lehman. I’m not going to review the book. I’m just going to post a photo of my dog-eared copy.

But this anthology did drive home to me the idea for me that anthologies are often good for surprising reasons. For example, the Seriously Funny anthology of humorous poems was full of some very unfunny poems. But there it had some of the best music poems I’d ever read in there, poems not found in the Everyman’s Library Music’s Spell anthology.

And likewise there were some surprisingly stellar love poems in the Erotic anthology. Not the same thing and I don’t know why this is that anthologies may have a kind of subconscious ordering principle.

My only complaint about Lehman’s Erotic anthology were his claims to not be able to include all the poems he wanted and then devote a third of the book to contributors’ sometimes very long comments regarding their favorite erotic texts. Although these comments led me to some interesting things, it made me question the point of even having author bios in anthologies anyway. Because like…the Internet. Save the room for more poems and if readers want to look up author bios, provide them on a link or let users do their own Google search.

Speaking of the Internet, Twitter has gone through many instabilities since I’ve been using it but I still maintain it’s the best spot to mingle with strangers. That isn’t always a pleasant adventure and there’s been a lot of melodrama on Twitter in all the usual places, but once in a while something quite amazing and miraculous happens there. Like good people sharing good poems.

Joseph Fasano has an account where he posts a thematic poem daily and people crowd-source response poems on the same theme. It can be quite moving, like today’s thread on Soulmates. Themes can be on topics like coping (a day or so ago) or joy or alienation or whatever. And it’s a brilliant way to start compiling lists of poems around topics of interest.

Many, many people post their favorite poems of the day on Twitter and once you start following a few readers, poems will start falling into your lap in the most amazing way. One thing I’ve noticed is that most of the poems people are gravitating to, collecting and sharing tend to be significantly emotional. And this makes me think that as a collective of humans who read poems, we’re ready for that again after the long trek we just made with “modernism” and “post-modernism” and the experiments of “contemporary” poems and I hope we start naming our eras with less dated word choices please.

Digital Literature: The Medium

August 12, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

What is a Digital Poem

I want to start this digital catch-up by saying I’ve been thinking a lot about what separates digital poetry from digital art which happens to be using words as material. I think this is the main point of contention for paper poets around pieces labeled digital poetry, especially when few if any of the aims of poetry-as-meaning are involved. Many digital artists use words as material and since there’s no narrative element to the thing, they want to put it in the digital poetry bucket (as if poetry is just that nebulous thing that is not narrative or sensical, which is a pretty small view of what poetry is).

So I’ve been trying to come up with some parameters in my own head just to understand it myself. And here’s what I’ve come up with:

If the piece uses words (language) that are un-readable, or not even meant to be read in the traditional sense (to come to a meaning as a phrase or sentence would): this is digital art,
If the piece uses words and their meaning is the primary driver of the piece, meaning the piece is meant to be read in a traditional sense: this is digital literature, digital poetry or digital story,
If the piece can be read in a traditional sense but that’s not entirely the point of the piece or a secondary benefit of it (maybe there is a balance of meaning from both visuals and from words): this is a digital hybrid of art and literature.

The New Media Reader

We’re almost done with the conceptual essays about computers and it looks like we’ll be going into actual essays about art and hopefully examples of interesting things. These two are by Marshall McLuhan and you know we’d have to pass through McLuhan because he’s the one who famously said, “the medium is the message” which has digital art all over it.

The introduction to two of his essays talks about what the “medium is the message” means, that the delivery medium of any content influences our understanding of it in profound ways we do not often realize. (You can see this clearly with social media arguments on the internet; the internet medium had transformed the way we argue and the ways we tolerate ((or don’t)) opinions that differ from our own).

But McLuhan’s statement was made for television not the internet and his examples go back to the first printing press and how mass-produced books changed the way people thought about…well everything. The introduction also quotes Neil Postman (who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death) who said, “the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.”

Oh boy.

The first essay is “The Galaxy Reconfigured or the Plight of the Mass Man in an Individualist Society” (1962) where McLuhan talks about “sense rations” and changing patters of human perception, using William Blake’s “Jerusalem” and how our imaginations acclimate to new technologies, how they change how we think, how technology actually facilitated changes from gothic to renaissance to realism in literature. The printing press (or the idea of a popular press) brought to us the idea of a mass consciousness, a group vision, the lack of one single vision, and that all endeavors became “a mosaic of the postures of collective consciousness” and then we started to question, ‘what is truth?’ and then the sheer volume of voices gave us “mental anguish.”

The task of the individual artist became to “tap into the collective consciousness” even if the forms were individualistic and private. He says this occurs both with music and writing technologies. We “behold the new thing” and are “compelled to become it.”

And then he goes into capitalism and market economics and self-regulation of markets and feudal societies confronted with technology. But then he comes back around to how technology can isolate the senses and hypnotize society. How we become what we behold as we are swept away by the novelty. He says, “the most deeply immersed are the least aware.”

We are often lured by the idea of an improved future. And in some cases the new technology does provide improved future (think of the washing machine, for example). Another example is the printing press which brought us the novel itself and the sustained tone of a long story which produced in readers a “feeling of living in the world.” Not too shabby.

The invention of the novel lead us to study the new reader which led to Edgar Allan Poe writing "The Philosophy of Composition" and inventing the detective story (all good there), then symbolist poetry, the reader as co-author, and the nineteenth century mass surrender of unique selfhood, the assembly line, the unconscious, the non-logical.

So that happened.

His second and famous essay is “The Medium is the Message” (1964)

“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividng all things, as a means of control, personal and social consequences of any medium technology is an extension of ourselves.” He says machines usually fragment and decentralize.

Interestingly, he talks a lot about the invention of the electric light, pure information without a message. And he uses this to launch into talking about how the content of the medium is just another medium when you pull back the layers. Writing is really a medium for speech, which is just a medium for our thoughts, which is then a medium for our nonverbal impulses.

Technology changes the scale, pace, and pattern of human affairs. The railroad accelerated time and enlarged the scale of previous human functions. New kinds of cities came to be, new kinds of work and leisure that evolved to be independent of location. Then the plane came and dissolved the railway city.

There are independent consequences in the use of any technology. Again his example of the electric light: what it’s used for is irrelevant; it dramatically changed our lives and our behavior. "Content tends to blind us to the character of the medium." Content is a distraction.

He quotes something my father used to always quote as well because he worked for IBM for many years, probably the original 'thinking outside the box' idea: "IBM is not in the business of making machines, but in information processing."

And McLuhan insists light is a communication medium and it's no coincidence they called light companies “light and power." Electric light eliminates time and space just like the radio, the telegraph, the phone, the TV (and now the internet).

He criticizes technology apologists for being disingenuous when they say technology is the scapegoat for the sins of the world. It's like saying “apple pie is neither good or bad. It is the way that it is used" (and "guns don't kill people…")

There are consequences of innovation. These apologists speak "in the true narcissistic style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form."

But it's more complicated (as it always is) than good or bad. The printing press gave us trashy novesl and nationalism, but he says, it has also gave us the Bible (and Choose Your Own Adventure books). Movies brought a world of illusions and dreams, point of view, then cubism happened, the idea of perspective, the interplay of planes, contradictions, instant sensory awareness of the whole…

Like all cultural things, it's not always easy to unravel: “Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.”

That's a lot of omelet to chew right there.

Poetry Maps

August 11, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Soo…I was doing something I definitely shouldn’t be doing…and I came across this very cool website called Poetry Atlas. You can look up poems connected to or referencing cities and towns around the world. You just type in the city and you're off to the races: http://www.poetryatlas.com/

This week, I used it to look up poems about the city of my birth.

(An aside, I was the one-hundredth baby born at a white skyscraper hospital in downtown Albuquerque called St. Josephs, which is now a brown medical building called Lovelace. My parents got a steak dinner. My brothers were born across the highway at Presbyterian and there were no steak dinners for them.)

Anyway, two really lovely poems about Albuquerque are on the site. And I think they resonated with me for a few reasons. One is that New Mexico in general and Albuquerque specifically can be a very harsh place to live. Even today. It’s a tough city and it can be a rough place.

A lot of people are drawn to New Mexico for the natural formations and the spirit of the place but it's not for the light of heart. The weather can be harsh. Half of us are allergic to the Chamisa and the juniper pollen. The spring winds can drive you mad (or if you're like my grandmother you can become addicted to them and forever need the sound of a draining wind to fall asleep). Medical care here is absurd. The public schools aren't very good. I guess there are some building codes. And mañana is the motto of the land which you will either learn to love or not.

And I am made of this place. These are my people. And the word love doesn’t quite express my connection to the rocks and trees and mesas and people here. It's really, really foundational for me. But sometimes I wonder if humans were meant to habitate this place.

My big family loves to say wherever they live is "God's country" and my little nuclear family loves to laugh about that. My grandparents and parents and brothers have always believed New Mexico is God's Country. Living far away in St. Louis, that is what we always said to each other. And when I found myself back here about 12 years ago, it dawned on me what that really meant was: 'good lord' and 'for the love of God' and 'for Christ’s sake!"

Sometimes you need poems to remind you what you love about the flawed city and country and world you are from.

And I must say, in reference to the first poem below, Albuquerque's airport is one of its lovliest things here, as airports go.

"Gate A4"
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
"If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately."

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. "Help,"
said the flight agent. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this."

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
"Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?" The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, "No, we're fine, you'll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let's call him."

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

"Passing Through Albuquerque"
by John Balaban

At dusk, by the irrigation ditch
gurgling past backyards near the highway,
locusts raise a maze of calls in cottonwoods.

A Spanish girl in a white party dress
strolls the levee by the muddy water
where her small sister plunks in stones.

Beyond a low adobe wall and a wrecked car
men are pitching horseshoes in a dusty lot.
Someone shouts as he clangs in a ringer.

Big winds buffet in ahead of a storm,
rocking the immense trees and whipping up
clouds of dust, wild leaves, and cottonwool.

In the moment when the locusts pause and the girl
presses her up-fluttering dress to her bony knees
you can hear a banjo, guitar, and fiddle

playing "The Mississippi Sawyer" inside a shack.
Moments like that, you can love this country.

Conspicuous Poetry Consumption: Poetry Scrolls

June 1, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We have a few locations here in Albuquerque and Santa Fe (Range Cafe, The Standard Diner, Meow Wolf) that have Art-O-Mat machines, converted cigarette dispensers made into cigarette-pack-sized art dispensers.

For $5 you can buy art objects and I have an office shelf half full of them because I can't pass them up. In fact, I will panhandle five bucks if I find myself near one of these machines without cash.

About six months ago at the Range Cafe near the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center I came across a poet in the Art-o-Mat selling poetry scrolls in his cigarette box.

This poet calls himself Reverend Stray Toast (a.k.a. Max Toast) and his creative packaging includes nutritional information (Total Fascism 0%) and the warning that "poetry has been scientifically proven to have the ability to, under certain circumstances, Change Your Life."

The box contained three scrolls.

"Show Love" (click to enlarge) is about getting back what you put out with lines like "I will stay until I become the depiction of I love I miss in the world" and "being alive is harder than being intelligent."

This is mostly a poem of fragments and ramblings about abandonment, competition, self-hate and inauthenticity.

He stays in the realm of abstractions a bit too much but he's putting it out there on little scrolls…so enjoy it I say.

"Sequentialism" is a complete free association poem where one word in one line rolls into the next: "history story teller/teller at the bank/Banksy at Gaza/gauzed wrapped strip nude" and some lines even repeat a word like "miss your face face your fears/fears of commitment meant it/the other way."

The final scroll contains three poems: "Class," "Resonate" and "Go Figure" which tells us to "Figure something out/with your hands./Now fix it."