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Mid-Century Predictions and the Love Letter Generator

March 9, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Hearts and Machines

To return back to digital art essays from the New Media Reader, I'll be talking about two predictive pieces next: Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think" from 1945 and "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" by Alan Turing from 1950.

Bush's piece is a list of predictions, both hits and misses, but some impressive hits like ideas around wearable informational devices, wireless data connections, machine voice interactions, information storage working like brain cells and e-books. Forefront in his mind was the predicted coming information explosion. His ideas inspired the invention of the computer mouse, the word processer and hypertext.

He wanted to solve the time-consuming lookup problem and make man's "record of ideas" highly searchable. As he said, significant attainments have been lost in a mass of inconsequential, the glut of publications being crippling to researchers. But he probably didn't foresee the glut being so big and growing exponentially bigger as storage systems themselves grew, not only with information but misinformation.

Technologists predictably never predict meanness.

Although Bush didn't predict digital storage systems; he instead imagined storage on film. He also couldn't see beyond a room full of girls keyboard-punching data onto cards. But, most specifically for our purposes, he did predict possibilities for machines beyond numerical calculations. He saw machines manipulating language. And he envisioned an efficient text search much like the Internet parses IP addresses, although he envisioned a clunky "memex" machine instead of the Internet itself. He also dreamed of machines that would work beyond logical files and paths but would operate as the mind operates, by an almost random association via a web of trails (which is pretty much the Internet).

In "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Alan Turing explains the imitation game (and if you've seen the movie of the same name, you're familiar with Turing's tragic story) and his hopes to test computers with the imitation game in order to answer the question can machines think, which would become known as The Turing Test. He rephrased the question to can computers fool us into thinking they can think, or can they think at a rudimentary level?

Like Bush, Turing also saw language possibilities. His work also led to early programming languages like FORTRAN and COBAL, email, word processing, voice recognition, chat bots and that OK button you've spent half your life clicking.

The article follows a very rational path, explaining the imitation game and why it would be good to find out the capabilities of the machine as a way to ask, "what are the physical and intellectual capabilities of man?" He then systematically goes through all the objections, from contemplations of the soul and God, superiority complexes, mathematical limitations, human frailty, infinity and even ESP. In an early question of identity, Turing even wonders if the human mind is like an onion, full of layers but ultimately no core there.

Turing created a random-number generator on the Mark I machine and, in the summer of 1952, Christopher Strachey used that to write the love-letter-generator program in what is now considered the first piece of digital art.

From https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/4701/:

“One of Alan Turing’s final projects was a computer-based, automated love-letter generator, which some have identified as the first known work of new media art. It was programmed by Christopher Strachey in 1952 for the Manchester Mark I computer. Turing maintained this machine, which was fondly known as M.U.C, as a professor at the University of Manchester, and the love letter generator was but one among its many applications. It operated with a template similar to the game of Mad Libs, into which the computer would insert nouns and adjectives of endearment randomly selected from its database."

DEAREST JEWEL,

MY RAPTURE ADORES YOUR FERVOUR. YOU ARE MY PRECIOUS BURNING. MY COVETOUS EAGERNESS TENDERLY LIKES YOUR EAGER SYMPATHY. MY LOVESICK FONDNESS WOOS YOUR SYMPATHY. MY FONDNESS PINES FOR YOUR FELLOW FEELING.

YOURS PASSIONATELY, M.U.C.

Darling Sweetheart

You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking.

Yours beautifully

M.U.C.

M.U.C. stands for Manchester University Computer. What a sweet talker, that machine!

"As Noah Wardrip-Fruin has suggested, it is interesting that Turing and Strachey were both gay men, and that their first literary collaboration for the computer imagined it as the author of a one-sided epistolary romance. The tangled mash-up of sentimentality bespeaks a twinge of longing beyond the one that already accompanies the genre: one can almost sense M.U.C.’s thirst, as if the computer were struggling to speak from the heart but discovered that its vocabulary had been arbitrarily limited to the language of clichés. Like the wooden puppet in search of the Blue Fairy, the computer longs to be human; like Snow White fleeing into the forest, it longs to be admitted into the company of those who are capable of care and affection.”

According to Stobhan Roberts in The New Yorker, basically 70 base words here could create three hundred billion different letters.

"In choosing to write a program that expressed adoration rather than humor or literary talent, Strachey was perhaps playing the cynic, exposing the mechanical nature of romance. The German artist and theorist David Link, in his book Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, observes …'ultimately the software is based on a reductionist position vis-à-vis love and its expression,” Link writes. “Love is regarded as a recombinatory procedure with recurring elements.'”

And I need to stop at this point and say Alan Turing has been an important inspiration to me since I first encountered this co-created random love letter generator in the Electronic Literature MOOC from Davidson College. It's not insignificant to me that these two men were closeted gay men (although not in a relationship) and that one of Turing's final projects was contributing to something we can call digital love art. So basically emotion, drama, concealment, longing was baked into the very first digital art. And the idea that machines can aid humans in unpredictable ways.

The algorithm broken down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strachey_love_letter_algorithm

Take a spin on a recreated generator: https://www.gingerbeardman.com/loveletter/

Christopher Strachey had a literary pedigree: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/9/queer-history-computing-part-three/

The Essay Project: Dylan Thomas Talks Inspiration and Craft

March 2, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The next piece in the essay class was "Notes on the Art of Poetry" by Dylan Thomas, which confusingly is also a poem. The essay is most likely from the book Modern Poetics: Essays on Poetry edited by James Scully (1965).

Although the essay in the version from the book is not available online, quotes from the essay are found here and there: https://quotesondesign.com/dylan-thomas/ and this version is not the same as my version, but it's close.

The subtitle says the essay was “written in the summer of 1951, at Laugharne, in reply to questions posed by a student” – a fact that seemed somewhat indulgent at first; but I think this a very understandable impulse, the desire to elaborate on something you previously only considered while thinking on your feet.

Anyway, Thomas starts by saying how poetry first came to him with sound and nursery rhymes (which I can relate to as the first two books my parents gave me were my father's copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses and Hallmark's A Child's Rhymes which was illustrated). Dylan says, “let me say that the things that first made me love language and want to work in it and for it were nursery rhymes and folk talks, the Scottish Ballads, a few lines of hymns…”

He maintains “I am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly…they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable. Out of them came the gusts and grunts and hiccups and heehaws of the common fun of the earth”

…

“What I do like to do is to treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mould, coil, polish and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, figures of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly-realised truth I might try to reach and realise."

…

“My first, and greatest, liberty was that of being able to read everything and anything I cared to. I read indiscriminately, and with my eyes hanging out.”

He goes on to define the charge that he has been influenced by James Joyce; he also talks about “the great rhythms” of the Bible and Sigmund Freud.

Then he moves over into talking about craft:

"I may apply my technical paraphernalia. I use everything and anything to make my poems work and move in the direction I want them to: old tricks, new tricks, puns, portmanteau-words, paradox, allusion, paronomasia, paragram, catachresis, slang, assonantal rhymes, vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm. Every device there is in language is there to be used if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twisting and convolutions of words, and inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.”

He also lists as influences the Surrealists (and the subconscious mind…without the aid of logic of reason…illogically and unreasonably in paint and words”) but he breaks with them in insisting that afterwards composition “must go through all the rational processes of the intellect. The Surrealists, on the other hand, put their words down together on paper exactly as they emerge from chaos; they do not shape these words or put them in order; to them chaos is the shape and order. This seems to me to be exceedingly presumptuous; the Surrealists imagine that whatever the dredge from their subconscious selves and put down in paint and words must, essentially, be of some interest or value. I deny this. One of the arts of the poet is to make comprehensible and articulate what might emerge from the subconscious sources; one of the great main uses of the intellect is to select, from the amorphous mass of subconscious images, those that will best further his imaginative purpose, which is to write the best poem he can.”

I agree with this. Neglecting to edit through selection, deletion, reconfiguring has always seemes presumptuous and lazy to me. Five little more minutes could turn something mediocre or solipsistic into something amazing and meaningful to someone besides yourself.

Thomas finishes attempting to avoid defining poetry.

“What does it matter what poetry is, after all….All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it, however tragic it may be. All that matters is the eternal movement behind it, the vast undercurrent of human grief, folly, pretension, exaltation, or ignorance, however unlofty the intention of the poem.”

…

“You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick…But you’re back again where you began. You’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.”

And that's pretty much all you have to say about that.

NaPoWriMo 2022 Demographics

February 24, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Updated (March 16, 2022):

Ok so the mix of songs has, for the most part, been nailed down. Some happy things; some unhappy things. I think a good balance. Despite the completely nailed-down title ("A Field of Music: 30 Love Songs Incorrectly Explained"), not all of the songs are popular, nor will they necessarily be incorrectly explained (although tangents might ensue). Oh and there's a three-song interlude plus one poem with two songs so there are actually 33 of them. So there's that.

I ran some demographics on my choices just to see how I did. I completely disregarded genre because I didn't care about that nebulousness. But here is some other information:

Songs by men: 20
Songs by women: 12
Songs by white people: 27
Songs by people of color: 5 (that's not so great)
Songs from the 1950s: 2
Songs from the 1960s: 6
Songs from the 1970s: 6
Songs from the 1980s: 10
Songs from decades after the 1980s: 9
(because everything after I graduated high school is contemporary to me).

NaPoWriMo 2022 is Coming

February 11, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

It's almost time for NaPoWriMo again. I have two more years to finish before I hit my goal of 300 NaPoWriMo poems to assemble into a book.

So…I couldn't figure out what to do this year and had decided maybe I would just follow the official NaPoWriMo prompts; but then it occurred to me I had already planned to follow the NaPoWriMo prompts in the final year (which would be next year) in a set of interactive poems I'm already working on a list for.

I've been enjoying writing from pop-songs recently, so I decided to do a set called Field of Music: 30 Popular Love Songs Incorrectly Explained. Look for that starting April 1.

If you're interested in joining this year's challenge, find more information here: https://www.napowrimo.net/.

New Media: The Story That Started Forking Path Stories

February 2, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Next in our journey through the New Media Reader textbook is a short story by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges who wrote a very influential short piece of fiction called "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941).

Here's the translation from my book, also the original translation by Donald A. Yates.

Here's another translation I found online that isn't as good by Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd.

The difference can be seen clearly in the final words between:

"infinite penitence and sickness of the heart" (Temple/Todd)
and

– "innumerable contrition and weariness" (Yates).

Maybe I'm just partial to the words I read first. But the language in the first story was evocative enough that not only did I read the story twice, but created a cut-out poem from it.

Anyway, the heart of the story is a conversation about narrative direction (or directions) and possible alternate, simultaneous narratives, like Quantum Mechanics talks about.

The story is about an Asian soldier in the British Army during World War I. He is a spy for the Germans and is about to be discovered and arrested before he can send his final message.

He picks a very random but secret message delivery method and then goes about trying to make it happen. He encounters a random person who just so happens to have the key to a long-held family mystery of his and in the process of their conversation the man explains to him the idea of narrative forking.

The story itself soon becomes as an illustration of narrative alternatives and "innumerable outcomes."

Often referenced as ground zero for narrative forking, this story spawned the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books and similar digital variations.

It's worth checking out.

More information about the story.

The Essay Project: Postmodernism and Childhood Inspirations

February 2, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This week we're tackling two essays. The first one is another essay by Jonathan Holden (two in a row!), "Postmodern Poetic Form: A Theory" available on JSTOR.

This is a very interesting essay where Holden takes issue with the admittedly vague definitions out there for what postmodernism is, particularly because all the postmodern poets don't seem to fit into definitions suggested by many literary critics.

For example, for Jerome Mazzaro who says, "…modernism seeks to restore the original state often by proposing silence or the destruction of language; postmodernism accepts the divising and uses language and self-definition…as the basis of identity." Modernism is more mystical, he says, "whereas postmodernism, for all its seeming mysticism, is irrevocably wordly and social." T.S. Eliot, he notes, insisted modernism "'is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,' postmodernists propose the opposite."

Holden says this leaves out a lot of romantic, psychological-pastoral poets like Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, James Wright and Gary Snyder.

Holden translates Harold-Bloom-speak as another example:

"postmodern poetry shuns confessional, strives toward organic form, and is therefore transcendental, part of a tradition that goes back to Emerson."

Holden says this leaves out the postmodern confessionalists like Carolyn Forché, Louis Glück and "radically misunderstands stands the creative process."

Radically. Well now.

Holden defines postmodernism this way:

"…poets have increasingly turned to non-literary analogues such as conversation, confession, dream and other kinds of discourse as substitutes for the ousted 'fixed forms,' substitutes which in many cases carry with them assumptions about rhetoric which are distinctly anti-modernist…poets are attempting to recover some of the favorable conditions for poetry…before the triumph of modernism."

Holden quotes Robert Hillyer in defining what postmodernists might find lacking about modernism:

This general rejection of humanity, this stripping away of a mystery and aspiration is the result of a materialistic, mechanistic point of view so closely allied to the self-destructive elements of the age."

Hillyer, among many, many other things, also misses the music of meter when he says "we are metrical creatures in a metrical universe."

And Holden sympathizes with Hillyer when he says,

"While the great modernist experiments see themselves as specialists, and it is no accident that the metaphor at the heart of Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is drawn from chemistry: it required 'scientists' to synthesize the new compounds, the new 'art-emotions' that would replace the old. But the resulting losses were immense and have not yet been fully tallied. Just as Hillyer complained, the revolution has left the poet in America a bureaucratic specialist isolated in a university as in a laboratory, conducting endless experiments with poetic form, and in an adversary relation to the general culture."

Amen to all that; but this is not supposed to be an essay on modernism, but postmodernism. Four pages later, we get back to that.

Holden says our poems fit formal "analogue" categories. One of Allen Ginsberg's long poems is a sutra; many of Richard Hugo's poems are forms of letters; William Stafford's uses a "mimeses of conversation." Louise Glück and Carolyn Forché use rhetoric which resembles religious or secular confession. Galway Kinnell's poems are like "primitive song."

Postmodern forms often use non-literary forms.

He quotes a conversation poem by Gary Gildner, "First Practice" and says "the conversational analogue…is the most difficult one, because it places extreme demands on the speaker to be casually brilliant."

Holden says "without the notion of an analogue…it is nearly impossible to describe [the] poem's form at all, let alone account for it. Is it a lyric…is it narrative…" etc. "The more we list characteristics, the more we implicitly regard this poem's 'form'….and are drawn toward an organic conception of the poem's form. Our analogical account of its form, however, is more accurate."

He's referring to Denise Levertov and Harold Bloom's idea that all poems are organically formed as they are written. Levertov says, "form is never more than a revelation of content."

Holden says for "organicists" form "acquires such a range of reference that it becomes meaningless." Holden says it also "requires inordinate faith."

We then look at the poem "Losing Track" by Denise Levertov, a poem formed with a kind of ocean wave structure.

His conclusion about the poem:

"We also see that this 'content' would be just as recognizable if the lineation of the verses were different, if the text were written in prose, if the stanza breaks were eliminated, if the order of the sentences were different, or even if some of the diction were changed. In other words, the poem's content is largely (though, not entirely) independent of its form."

We then look at Ted Kooser's poem "A Summer Night" and Holden discusses conversation poems and says Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" is a conversation "form," Ezra Pound's "Cantos" is a fugue or an ideogram form, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is a collage and his "The Four Quartets" is based on a musical analogy.

He says postmodernists were/are dissatisfied with "the impersonality of modernism" and so they favor "communal analogues such as confession and conversation over such impersonal alalogues such as the fugue, the ideogram and the vortex."

Confession, Holden says, can take a ritual, religious aspect or a secular, psychoanalytic, testimonial aspect, "particularizing the agenda of the inner life."

"Whereas the authority of the lyric voice finds its source in tradition, the authority of the confessional voice finds its source in the authenticity of the speaker's testimony–a testimony which must, however, transcend the narrowly personal; to some extent, the persona's story must acquire, like a saint's life, a mystical significance. The persona must become a ritual scapegoat."

He then looks at an excerpt from Carolyn Forché's long poem "Return" a confessional poem about El Salvador:

Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed & grace
where you have this sense of yourself
as apart from others. It is not your right
to feel powerless. You have not returned
to your country. but to a life you never left.

"Just as lyric modulates into confessional, so does confessional modulate into conversation."

And he restates, for conversational poems, their "authority depends not on tradition or authenticity, but entirely upon the artistic inventiveness of the poet who, speaking in his own person, must sustain brilliant conversation."

He also looks at Robert Bly's "The Hermit" and M.S. Merwin's "Eyes of Summer." He closes by noting some literary analogues: Louis Simpons' novelist forms, dramatic monologues, Richard Wilbur's "essay" form in "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" and language poems, such as those by John Ashbery that are pure objects.

Our next essay is from the book Fame & Folly by Cynthia Ozick, the tiny, tiny little essay called "Existing Things" which was so good (and short) I'm going to have to quote most of it.

She talks about how it was the glinting mica in the pavement that attuned her to seeing things artfully:

"If you're five years old, loitering in a syrup of sunheat, gazing at the silver-white mica-eyes in the pavement, you will at once be besieged by a strangeness: the strangeness of understanding for the very first time, that you are really alive, and that the world is really true; and the strangeness will divide into a river of wonderings.

Here is what I wondered then, among the mica-eyes:

I wondered what it would be like to know all the languages in the world.

I wondered what it would be like to be that baby under the white netting.

I wondered why, when I looked straight into the sun, I saw pure circle.

I wondered why my shadow had a shape that was not me, but nothing else; why my shadow, which was almost like a mirror, was not a mirror.

I wondered why I was thinking these things; I wondered what wondering was, and why it was spooky, and also secretly sweet—and amazingly interesting. Wondering felt akin to love—an uncanny sort of love, not like loving your mother or father or grandmother, but something curiously and thrillingly other. Something that shone up out of mica-eyes.

Decades later, I discovered in Wordsworth's Prelude what it was:

…those hallowed and pure motions of the sense
Which seem, in their simplicity, to own
An intellectual charm;
…those first-born affinities that fit
Our new existence to existing things.

And those existing things are all things, everything that mammal senses know, everything the human mind constructs (temples or equations), the unheard poetry….the great thirsts everywhere….First inkling, bridging our new existence to existing things."

New Media Reader: The New Stereo vs Neil Young

January 27, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Time to continue on our journey with the New Media Reader. The next essay in the book is "New Media: from Borges to HTM" by the textbook's editor, Lev Manovich.

Our editor describes new media as any computer-based artistic activities. However, that definition expands to interactive exhibits in museums and new tools of commerce, computer games, Artificial Intelligence (AI), networks, multi-media, 3D modeling (and now 3D printing), CD Roms (has-beens), DVDs (practically has-beens), animation rendering tools…

Pieces are presented and aided by computer software, algorithms, different media and semiotic logics, text parsing, image manipulations.

He says digital medias challenge our “romantic ideas of authorship" (because of the interactivity, the collectives, the on-the-fly publications).

He says digital media pieces challenge our ideas of the one-of-a-kind object (because of the infinite copies and infinite states).

He also says they challenge our ideas of a centralized distribution of control (for example, the Internet network that has bypassed the art industrial/commercial system).

Digital media challenges our deeply held conceptual, ideological and aesthetic beliefs.

Cyberculture even possibly challenges our ideas about our own human identity and culture.

The keywords are modularity, variability and automation.

On the downside, some people have developed a literal fetish for the latest technologies.

Manovich says new media is always an incorporation of the old, morphs with the old, guided conceptually by old media (just the names of tools alone: page, frame, desktop, icons, maps, zoom, pan).

At one time proponents believed new media would build a better democracy because there would be less centralization of propaganda and that more intimacy between people online would "eliminate distance.” Disinformation and propaganda have since exploded but from de-centralized spaces (so they were half-right).

There were worries (as there is with every single communications innovation, including the printing press and motion pictures) that new media would cause the erosion of moral values and would destroy the relationship between humans and world (which is not looking like such a crazy idea now).

The real breakthroughs have come with "faster execution of sequences of steps, sorting, counting, compositing, changes in quantity and quality (he singles out new recent forms, like the music video and photomontage between 1985-1995).

He then tracks a very interesting historical mesh of a timeline:

The Modernism era ends, Post-Modernism begins, new visual/special communication techniques are used to challenge societies attitudes, constructivist design, typography, cinemograph editing, montage, mainstream computers cut-and-paste, memes, windows, tables, filtering reality in new ways, collage, media assets, film, audio, raw data processed and mined, manipulating databases, search engines, simulations.

In the 1960s we saw interactive happenings, performances, installations, processes, open systems, (we didn’t always need computers for this, by the way), the principles of modern GUI were articulated, networks created and imagined…

…finally realized in the 1970s with the Internet, UNIX, object-oriented programming, better networking, workstations, real-time control, the graphical interface (Macintosh 1984), draw and paint programs, creativity tools, the first inexpensive computer, Atari with sound, video games, movies, Photoshop, (a key application of post-modernism, he says), big business goes online, government goes online, higher education goes online.

In the 1990s we have real-time networks and an exploding Internet, “a radically horizontal, non-hierarchical model of human existence in which no idea, no ideology, no value system can dominate." Fast forward to QANON and the Russians exploiting social media algorithms in 2018 and dominating the fringe of each political party, fully controlling one.

Manovich calls the Internet a “perfect metaphor for new post-Cold-War sensibility.”

It's good to remind us right now this textbook is old

The challenge to the "romantic idea of authorship" never did prove its point fully. Most humans still seek a somewhat direct communication between other humans. Engineers have been the only ones to declare this point won; we’re not even close to a consensus of artists, writers or art critics.

The same goes with the challenge to the one-of-a-kind object. Original art, the handmade culture of etsy.com all still thrive. Museums still have more stuff than they can display in a hundred years.

But the point about distribution, this is what I feel is still relevant and revolutionary. It's a double-edged sword, though. Sure, you can easily disseminate your own work now but so can everyone else. And some messages are full of much more propaganda and mind-manipulation than others.

All cultural gifts are problematic. Take Manovich’s explanation of the web browser itself as a cinema screen (I know Millennials who don't own TVs anymore), a music player (ditto: no stereos or portable devices), a museum, a library, a game console.

Just try to share with a Millennial or Gen Z person any kind of pop culture artifacts. They're a generation of people disabused of the idea that pop culture must be owned and living inside their habitats. This means sharing a mix-tape with a Millennial or Gen Z aficionado is very challenging as music (for example) has become oddly re-centralized. The Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan controversy of the day shows just how precarious that centralized stereo system can be.

Books about Writing Fiction

January 25, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Short Stories & the Writing Process

In the past year I’ve read two very amazing books about writing fiction. For my birthday this year, poet Ann Cefola sent me the new book by George Saunders explicating Russian short stories as illustrative for fiction writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. And although the stories he explicates very lovingly and expertly are not my favorite short stories, the book is non-the-less illuminating as Saunders walks us through craft techniques such as character development page by page, discovering the heart of a story, patterns in stories, plots, strange fictions, didacticism and ambiguity.

The ending section I found particularly moving and the exercises in the appendix are informative and not to be missed. This is a long book. I took my time with it and it took me about 3 months to finish.

This is not your every-day writing guide, however, and it's well worth the effort you spend on it.

In explicating Ivan Turgenev’s story “The Singers,” Saunders says,

"I teach ‘The Singers’ to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we’ll turn out to be. As young writers, we all have romantic dreams of being a writer of a certain kind, of joining a certain lineage. A painstaking realist, maybe; a Nabokovian stylist; a deeply spiritual writer like Marilynne Robinson—whatever…

(‘The writer can choose what he writers about,’ says Flannery O’Connor, ‘but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.’)

This writer may turn out to bear little resemblance to the writer we dreamed of being. She is born, it turns out, for better or worse, out of that which we really are: the tendencies we’ve been trying, all these years, in our writing and maybe even in our lives, to suppress or deny or correct, the parts of ourselves about which we might even feel a little ashamed.

Whitman was right: we are large, we do contain multitudes. There’s more than one ‘us’ in there. When we ‘find our voice,’ what’s really happening is that we’re choosing a voice from among the many voices we’re able to ‘do,’ and we’re choosing it because we’ve found that, of all the voices we contain, so far, that has proven itself to be the most energetic.”

A friend of mine likes to sort writers into the generous type and not-so generous type. With her rubric, Saunders feels like a very generous writer and teacher. As I said, the final section called “We End” is a particularly moving wrap-up on why we feel compelled to write in the first place.

“It really is true: doing what you please (i.e., what pleases you), with energy, will lead you to everything—to your particular obsessions and the ways in which you’ll indulge them, to your particular challenges and the forms in which they’ll convert into beauty, to your particular obstructions and your highly individualized obstruction breakers. We can’t know what our writing problems will be until we write our way into them, and then we can only write our way out…

We can decide only so much. The big questions have to be answered by hours at the desk. So much of the worrying we do is a way of avoiding work, which only delays the (work-enabled) solution.”

“Fiction helps us remember that everything remains to be seen. It’s a sacrament dedicated to this end. We can’t always feel as open to the world as we feel at the end of a beautiful story.”

Saunders describes writing and a reading even a little phrase as a little tussle between two people,

“By that little tussle, you know I’m here. And I know you’re there. That phrase is a little corridor connecting us, giving us a fragment of the world over which to tussle, i.e., connect…

That’s a pretty hopeful model of human interaction: two people, mutually respectful, leaning in, one speaking so as to compel, the other listening, willing to be charmed.

That, a person can work with.”

The Science of Narrative

Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better is a much shorter book and much of it based on the research he did for his book Selfie. Storr uses evolutionary psychology, culture and neural science to define why we respond to certain storytelling techniques and he covers things like creating a world, cause and effect, change agents, theories of characterization, dialogue, higher stakes, plots, beginnings and endings.

For example, he illustrates how the brain assembles a sentence and why active sentences create better pictures in the brain than passive sentences.

He talks about how we organize the world in our brains:

“Our goals give our lives order, momentum and logic. They provide our hallucination of reality with a centre of narrative gravity. Our perception organizes itself around them. What we see and feel, at any given moment, depends on what we’re trying to get—when we’re caught in the street in a downpour of rain, we don’t see the shops and trees and doorways and awnings, we see places of shelter…

In order to encourage us to act, to struggle, to live, the hero-making brain wants us to feel as if we’re constantly moving towards something better.”

Talking about figurative, poetic language, he says,

“It’s….associative thinking that gives poetry its power. A successful poem plays on our associative networks as a harpist plays on strings. By the meticulous placing of a few simple words, they brush gently against deeply buried memories, emotions, joys, traumas, which are stored in the form of neural networks that light up as we read. In this way, poets ring out rich chords of meaning that resonate so profoundly we struggle to fully explain why they’re moving us so.”

It's this tone of generosity from Storr and Saunders that is missing from other explication and writing books I’ve bailed on in the last year.

Two examples are Break Blow Burn by Camille Paglia and Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. Paglia’s book is structured very similar to Saunders’ where you read a poem and then she explicates it, but without the whole of Saunders’ joy and amazement. Her explications read more like student papers. Admittedly, Paglia is a difficult writer for me. I heartedly agree with half of what she says and vehemently disagree with the other half. Her tone is often self-righteous as if she’s writing out of grievance.

Klinkenborg is lacking that same chip on his shoulder and is full of great thoughts about writing sentences, but his aesthetic preference for short, journalistic sentences seemed lacking in theperspective. What about the beautifully meandering Proustian sentence. But in all fairness to Klinenborg, I only made it to page 30.

I haven’t given up on these books. I’m assuming I’m just not ready for them yet and they’re sitting back on the to-read shelf.

Places Where the Story Lives

A year or so ago my friend Natalie sent me a story box from the Deadbolt Mystery Society. I’ve since shared these delightful things with many of my friends and discovered there are a few groups putting out these mystery boxes (some aren’t even boxes but letters of artifacts mailed to you periodically).

I’ve done two boxes from Deadbolt and the experience of solving the mystery (I’m better at some clues than others…I suck at solving mathematical riddles for example; thankfully there are hints and solutions available) has made me think a lot (again) about where a story lives.

In this case the narrative is assembled from little pieces of artifacts. My latest ‘story’ included ragtime music, a tiny board game, a tiny set of poker cards (adorable and enticing enough to get me to play a series of hands to uncover a plot point), a piano keyboard, newspaper clipping, letters, notes and book covers.

You have to string a story together from pieces and interactions with the box items. There’s no reason why a story must live in a book, on film or any other one kind of place.

The Essay Project: The Second-Person Pronoun

January 18, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The next essay in the stack is “The Abuse of the Second-Person Pronoun” and there was no author attribution or note as to where it was published. Which is typical for a lot of these essays. An online search says the author is Jonathan Holden and book might be The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric. Not sure about that. The book is out-of-print and I can't find a table of contents.

In this essay, the author makes a very good point but then stretches it to 18+ pages. Maybe an essay covering all the pronouns would have been tighter and more helpful.

Holden is taking issue with “the deployment…of an ambiguous ‘you’ that could refer to the reader, that could convey the third-person-singular sense of ‘one,’ or that could be the poet…musing to himself.”

“Such ambiguity is not," Holden says, "accidental…for the apparent bonuses are enormous….one would suppose that the reader, feeling that the poem were addressed to him personally, would enjoy a greater sense of intimacy with the speaker and stronger sense of the narrator’s speaking presence…”

“[the pronoun] helps to spur a poet through the lonely process of composition by providing him, in his solitude, with the illusion of a listener, with the sense that he is speaking to somebody, however ill-defined."

Holden talks about "the blurred ‘you’ “like the expression ‘you know?’ so often tagged onto the end of a sentence…the purported universality of the proposition…an unpremeditated, colloquial intimate tone that is far less pretentions that the sermonic ‘we’…which in a poem would sound unbearable stuffy and tweedy.”

With the universal 'you,' poets can “simultaneously emphasize particularity and universality at every juncture…both personal and prophetic…”

Holden summarizes with these three possibilities:

Substitute for “I” first-person pronoun, the poet himself, autobiographical.
Substitute for “I” first-person pronoun, a character in the poem speaking.
Address to a person the poet is speaking to (which can make the poem a “private, cryptic message to that person"). Holden feels the poem has an obligation to name this person in the text or as a title, for example “To Jenny” as a title.

Holden also suspects the second-person pronoun “may lessen the danger that the poet will sound self-pitying, over-introspective, whining or that the entire poem will seem somehow ‘too personal’ to be relevant…this impulse to place the poet in a more peripheral position in the poem is…the result of a continuing reaction against the excesses of the confessional mode….trying to find a less central position for the poet…”

Unfortunately, at least during the time of the essay (which as far as I can tell was in 1980 so this must be infractions of the 1970s), “too often it is being misapplied by poets in poems that have basically a testimonial or a narrative character.”

He goes on to give examples of 'you' poems that would be better as 'I' poems:

Philip Booth’s “Still Life”
Dennis Schmirtz’s “Rabbits”
Michael Ryan’s “This is a Poem for the Dead”

In these cases Holden feels “the substitution kills most of the poem’s feeling. ‘My place now’ is far less wooden than ‘your place now” and that “the speaking voice takes clear responsibility for what it is saying.” Plus, “the poem becomes a single human voice, and whether the speaker is fictional or real is of no consequence.”

Holden feels autobiographical poems should use the ‘I’ pronoun. However, there are instances when one part of the poet’s self is taking to another part of the self. Holden also insists the “blurred-you is a defensive tactic…[that] betrays the author’s anxiety by trying too hard.”

Perhaps. But there are many reasons why a poet would want to suppress a known ‘you’:

For self-protection (this could be personal, political or social).
To protect the subject or the ‘you’ person.
Because the poet is working through something, or possibly not ready to reveal the you.
For fun, to give the reader Easter Eggs.

Millions of secretes lie within poems for various reasons, not all due to defensiveness or anxiety (although they can be). Holden insists the ‘you’ “grasps at the reader’s collar, insisting too shrilly on his complicity.” (I think that’s projection).

Or that the second person “….protests far too loudly that the poem’s subject has universality.”

And here I think he has a point. Sometimes we over-estimate our 'you' universality. Holden calls this a form of faking, but I think it’s just one of the very human biases, consensus bias.

Holden is right in finding the style a bit trendy though: “it lends the poem a cool, poised attitude, a veneer or public decorum…”calls into question…the assumption of its absolute sincerity…the suave ‘you’—the you that commits itself to nothing and can turn the finest poem into an empty, elegant-sounding workshop exercise.”

Snap!

Holden asks “Why is the first-person…so much better?” He says because the view simply assumes the reader’s participation instead of cajoling it. He says, “true earnestness is the mark of the best poetry…”

Here we go. The best poetry is [insert your own self-satisfied idea here].

Holden says the best poetry is willing to make a fool of itself. But I say there is plenty of room for that in ‘you’ poems, too.

Good examples of the ‘you’ in a poem, according to Holden:

Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”
Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”
Stephen Dunn’s “The Party To Which You Were Never Invited”
Philip Dacey’s “The Obscene Caller”

In these poems, the substitution of 'I' for 'you' ruins the poem And that’s exactly what Holden recommends doing, writing your pieces both ways to see the tonal effects of both versions. He also spends pages describing how reading the poem before a live audience can tell you whether the ‘you’ pronoun is working for you and why reading poems in front of audiences is a swell thing and the difference between talking to the self in a lyric and an oral addresses, all of which seems a bit in the weeds for this essay.

Although critics of the second-person pronoun often claim, like Holden does, that “the reader cannot decide how to take this poem unless he knows to whom ‘you’ refers.” I disagree. As long as there is a vague outline of who the poem is addressed to, which can be hinted through the content, you're a-ok. And that’s the responsibility of the poet, to give some kind of guide (is this a love poem, a sibling poem, a friend poem, etc.?).

Similarly with the general 'you' as a casual replacement of ‘one’, this is the responsibility of the poet to identify somewhere in the content that the address should be taken as universal.

The Essay Project: The Beat Poets

January 12, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The student who contributed this essay to our class forgot to note the author so I had to look that up, “Variations on a Generation” by Gregory Corso and as far as I can tell it's from The Portable Beat Reader edited by Ann Charters. This is another good example of how an essay could be historical, instead of simply a craft essay or personal opinion about some aspect of poetry.

Corso starts by defining writers who are members of a group as if to say the better talents belong to groups (which would leave out Emily Dickinson among plenty of other excellent loners): “every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation,” what Corso calls clusters joined by “geological location” or “philosophical sympathies” like the transcendentalists who were joined both geologically and philosophically. His other examples are “local-color realists…born between 1849 and 1851” or “experimental modernists…born in the decade between 1879 and 1888.” These “clusters or constellations” occur in all the arts.

(This might be a good time to note The New Yorker recently had a good article on the drawbacks of thinking in terms of generations…but that's a digression.)

Anyway, we're used to thinking along this generations line so Corso explains F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of the Lost Generation, a “reaction against the fathers which seems to occur about three times in a century…distinguished by a set of ideas inherited …from the madmen and the outlaws of the generation before.”

This is a helpful definition, Corso says, when considering the Beats and their “intricate web of perceptions, judgements, feelings, and aspirations…the shared experience for the Beat writers was historical and political, based on the tumultuous changes of their times.”

Corso lists the good and the bad as influences here: anti-Communist hysteria, the Cold War, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Arthur Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas.

He traces the word “beat” in etymological detail, coming out of Jazz and meaning 'down and out' from 'dead beat' or beat-up or streetwise. The genesis of the word started in 1944 and traveled from Herbert Huncke to William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who saw in the word as a “melancholy sneer” like “solitary Bartlebies” (from Herman Melville’s short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener"), the “archetypical American non-conformist.”

Ginsberg’s friend Lucien Carr said, “maybe it was term we just sold ourselves. It was trying to look at the world in a new light, trying to look at the world in a way that gave it some meaning. Trying to find values…that were valid.”

[A generic enough a statement to stick to any rebellious manifesto.]

The term “Beat Generation” was coined in 1948 when bop music writer John Clellon Holmes wrote a piece appreciating the stories of junkies and the new consciousness, furtiveness and the “weariness with all the forms”….and the movement had “the subversive attraction of an image that just might contain a concept, with the added mystery of being hard to define….a vision and not an idea.” Holmes saw Jack Cassidy as the central figure after the publication of his novel Go. Then an article by Gilbert Millstein appeared in 1952 in The New York Times' Sunday Times, which officially launched the term.

Early works of note were:

Chandler Brossard's Who Walk in Darkness
George Mandel's Flee the Angry Strangers
Jack Kerouac's Jazz of the Beat Generation and On the Road which followed Allen Ginsberg’s censorship trial in San Francisco for Howl and Other Poems

Kerouac was dubbed the spokesman by this time and in 1958, Esquire Magazine published “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation.”

The Beat poets are often conflated with the San Francisco Renaissance writers but were only associated to them via Allen Ginsberg who had moved from New York to California. The West Coast group was already a community by 1954 and contained a loose group of poets including Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Duncan, William Everson, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Philip Lamentia, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Weldon Keys and Gary Snyder.

It was at the event "Six Poets at the Six Gallery” in 1955 where the poem "Howl" was unveiled.

According to Michael McClure: “we saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead—killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life…We wanted voice and we wanted vision."

The West Coast poets tended to revolve around presses: Unitide Press, Equinox Press, the Pocket Poets Series from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore that published "Howl" which was seized by San Francisco customs officers and the press was charged with “publishing and selling an obscene book. But that just led to national attention and big sales.

Meanwhile, the word Beat came to be associated with the milieux of bop music, drugs, hipsters, the new kids of rock ‘n’ roll and soon it just became synonym for bohemian rebellion. Other terms in early competition were 'hip generation' (Norman Mailer), “the subterraneans” (Allen Ginsberg), “bop generation” (Jack Kerouac). A San Francisco Chronicle columnist coined the word “beatnik” as a condescending term in Look Magazine in 1958 when he referred to the “250 bearded cats.”

There was plenty of criticism for the poets in the US and the UK. Poet George Barker wrote a poem called “Circular from America” where he said, “Mill of no mind…1/2 and idea to a hundred pages….For laboring through/Prose that takes ages/Just to announce/That Gods and Men/Ought all to study/The Book of Zen.”

Ouch.

They were seen as “an amusing phenomenon" in the English magazine X although the UK had its own Kitchen-Sink Writers or “Angry Young Men,” a group that included John Osborne, Colin Wilson, John Wain and John Braine.

Conservatives in the encyclopedia The Americana suggested in 1958 that these writers were simply “self-conscious delinquents, addicted to…jazz, dope and the lunatic fringe of sex and literature, received attention out of all proportion to its significance…”

McClure insisted “at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and naives and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power-support bases.”

In 1958 Jack Kerouac published The Dharma Bums which was based on the poet Gary Snyder’s life and values and which became “a blueprint for hippie culture a decade later.”

Corso says,

“Like the work of the radical writers of the 1930s (but without their specific political agenda), Beat poetry and fiction was an alternative literature by writers who were sweeping in their condemnation of their country’s underlying social, sexual, political, and religious values…Earlier modernist poets like Ezra Pound or Lost Generation writers like Ernest Hemingway had attacked the system from the safeguard of their life abroad as expatriates, but the Beat Generation writers protested their country’s excesses on the front lines.”

William Burroughs understood the threat to conservatives as "much more serious…say, than the Communist party…you can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road….Art tells us what we know and don’t know that we know.”

The important works:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Pictures of the Gone World (1955)
Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956)
Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957)
Kerouac's The Dharma Bums (1958)
John Clellon Holmes' Go (1958)
John Clellon Holmes' The Horn (1958)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind (1958)
Gregory Corso's Bomb (1958) [writer including himself in the history there]
Michael McClure's Peyote Poem (1958)
John Wieners' The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958)
Diana DiPrima's The Kind of Bird Flies Backwards (1958)
William Burroughs' Junky (1958)
William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1958)
Gary Snyder's Riprap (1958)
Kerouac's Doctor Sax (1959)
Kerouac's Mexico City Blues (1959)
Philip Whalen's Self-Portrait from Another Direction (1959)
Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts (1960)
Philip Whalen's Like I Say (1960)
Ginsberg's "Kaddish" (1961)
Kerouac's Book of Dreams (1961)
Michael McClure's Dark Brown (1961)
Diana DiPrima's Dinners and Nightmares (1961)
LeRoi Jones' Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961)

According to Corso, “the Beat Generation did less well for its women. Reflecting the sexism of the times, the women mostly stayed on the sidelines as girlfriends and wives.” This group was more about “male bonding.” It’s experimentation involved what Gregory Corso called, “bop prosody, surreal-real images, jumps, beats, cool measures, long rapid vowels, long long lines, and the main content, soul…the brash assertiveness of the postwar years.”

When I met Julie Wiskirchen at Sarah Lawrence in the mid-1990s, the first thing she invited me to join was a Guggenheim event in Manhattan to see an Allen Ginsberg reading. In my memory Ginsberg sang, "Don't smoke, don't smoke….the government dope. Smoke weed!" But this is the full text of the piece proving my memory is not very good….but in any case Julie and I have been lifelongs every since.

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