Poetry

To build one's house is very much like making one’s will. When the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but that moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life. And so, in our towns and their outskirts, we have had during the last forty years not so much houses as poems, poems of an Indian summer, for a house is the crowning of a career.

What is represented in a picture is what is visible to the eye, it is the thing or the things that had to be thought of. Thus, what is represented in the picture are the things I thought of, to be precise, a nocturnal landscape and a skyscape such as can be seen in broad daylight. The landscape suggests night and the skyscape day. This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power: poetry

If We Were Allowed To Visit is an anthology of poems by Gemma Mahadeo rendered by Ian MacLarty.

As you move through the game's environment, the poems are rearranged into the shapes of the objects they're about, each frame becoming a new generative poem.

A website is a poem that is already in everyone's pocket, a house built from photos of other houses, a book where every chapter is another book where every chapter is another book. In this class we will be studying the poetics of the web: the raw material of HTML, the systemic visuals of CSS, the endless interactive possibilities of Javascript and the browsers, servers, protocols, and infrastructure that holds it all together. Each week we will make websites. We will make small websites that only convey a single, tiny idea. We will make large websites whose clutter and convoluted interlocking pages feel like exploring an abandoned mansion. We will make websites that speak, websites with secrets, and websites that tell one perfectly executed joke. And as we build the web we will also learn its history from the early geocities days to the ways we tried to be fully present over the pandemic, and all the wonderful and useless websites artists have made in between.

Aside from the writing of the poems themselves, there was this whole process of putting together the puzzle pieces of how the poems would sit on the page — a process that was often grounded in elements and principles found in visual design. In thinking about line breaks, I was not only considering rhythm but also the visual balance and shape of the poem as well. I was thinking about what would surround the words, about negative space. I was thinking about the visual impact of an em dash versus a semicolon.

...I’m also interested in poems that co-opt structures that are otherwise almost decidedly non-poetic in their conventional usage. So, Venn diagrams as poems, flowcharts as poems, indexes as poems, glossaries as poems, graphs as poems. Or maybe it should be “poems as ______.” I’m curious about the ways that encountering poetry in these forms could possibly infuse the forms or structures themselves with a lingering sense of poeticism, even when met in their more standard, non-poem usage.

David Horvitz made the score ‘When the ocean sounds’ for human voices intended to mimic the sound of the sea.

...Imagine the first life forms, with porous skin or cell walls, through which the sea could freely flow into and out of their small bodies. At a certain moment, however, these life forms evolve. They come out of the sea and develop a different type of skin, one that allows them to keep liquids within their bodies. These liquids are ultimately seawater, and so the creatures – as do we – carry the sea with them, no matter where they go.

Everything.can.be.scanned is part of a long lineage of what I would call “stunts of tedious comprehensiveness”...

[Kenneth Goldsmith]'s work—especially at the time that we crossed paths—was also part of this cultural landscape. His schtick was retyping or recontextualizing an existing thing and calling the copy a poem. The result was not meant to be read but discussed, and when it was discussed, the emphasis was always on the every: every word of an issue of the New York Times, every movement his body made in a day, every word he spoke for a week, every radio weather forecast for a year, every page of the internet.

When his work was interesting, I would argue that it was not for its tediousness but for its attentiveness. When it wasn’t, it was because there wasn’t enough attention being paid, or because the attention was being directed towards the wrong thing.

Silent Conversation tells classic stories, poems and haiku in an interactive way, inspired by Walter Savage Landor's motto What is reading but silent conversation?. They are presented as levels where the player controls a small line (similar to a text prompt) to go through the winding words.

This website displays the current season of the 72 pentads, each a five-day microseason in the Japanese calendar.

How do artists and scientists work? The same.

This book is an exploration of the evocative power of color, and more specifically gradients. This is highlighted by the haiku poems included with each gradient, haiku poetry being just as powerful in a very condensed form.

These gradients are artistic explorations more than anything else. Some will have functional utility, mostly through their base color palettes, but their main purpose is to inspire you.

I found an old note that contained a project to write a haiku every day. My project started in December 2018 and ended promptly in January 2019. The themes included work, baking, and difficulty finding nice fabric.

thinking about poetic forms; about the translation of poetry into this visual tangible thing; about poetry for the eyes, for looking at; about iconicity; about the use of words and space and punctuation and line break in composing a poem; about the poetic arrangements

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way.

In the digital age, cultural artifacts are eroded by abundance. Timelines layer and compress artwork, images, and artifacts into corners of the internet. In my corner, I stumbled across a speech entitled “Perfume, Defense and David Bowie’s Wedding” delivered by Brian Eno in 1992 at the Sadler Wells Theatre in London. In it, Eno predicted the nonlinear, disembodied, cultural relativism of contemporary culture. In Eno’s future, the top-down, empirical cultural arbitration of the past falls away, and a relational, directionless landscape ruled by the logic of scent and sound emerges. “The future will be like perfume,” he prophesied, and it is.

Since the fall of 1965, I have been using eighteen or nineteen stories (their selection varying from one performance to another) as the irrelevant accompaniment for Merce Cunningham’s cheerful dance, How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. Sitting downstage to one side at a table with microphone, ashtray, my texts, and a bottle of wine, I tell one story a minute, letting some minutes pass with no stories in them at all. Some critics say that I steal the show. But this is not possible, for stealing is no longer something one does. Many things, wherever one is, whatever one’s doing, happen at once. They are in the air; they belong to all of us. Life is abundant. People are polyattentive. The dancers prove this: they tell me later backstage which stories they particularly enjoyed.

Most of the stories that are in this book are to be found below. (The first thirty formed the text of a lecture titled Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, which I delivered at the Brussels Fair in 1958)

The poetry of music, Copland intimates, is composed both by the musician, in the creation of music and its interpretation in performance, and by the listener, in the act of listening that is itself the work of reflective interpretation. This makes listening as much a creative act as composition and performance — not a passive receptivity to the object that is music, but an active practice that confers upon the object its meaning: an art to be mastered, a talent to be honed.

So, if you ask me, I’d like the internet to be a place, where people love to stay and play.

But with the same passion to leave for a comeback.

A reverso is a poem with two halves. In a reverso, the second half reverses the lines from the first half, with changes only in punctuation and capitalization — and it has to say something completely different from the first half.

A cat        Incomplete:
without          A chair
a chair:         without
Incomplete.       a cat.

(1) the haiku describes a single state or event; (2) the time of the haiku is the present; (3) the haiku refers to images connected to one of the four seasons.

I always enjoy reading Mermin. He’s interested in the same conceptual topics at the heart of quantum physics and relativity that fascinate me, and also he’s always insightful about writing. Also, importantly, he’s funny. In this newsletter I’ll pull out a few highlights from Writing Physics and Boojums.

Kay Ryan may be the only American poet who describes her writing process as "a self-imposed emergency," the artistic equivalent of finding a loved one pinned under a 3,000-pound car. These "emergencies," she says, allow her to tap into abilities she wouldn't normally have, much like a father who single-handedly lifts a vehicle off his child. In Ms. Ryan's case, however, what has survived because of her efforts over the past three decades is a singular voice and vision. Her poems - with their compact size and technical precision, their wit and sharp intelligence - have been praised by critics for their ability to do and say things that none of her contemporaries can match.

• The right combination of street signs, viewed from a artful vantage point
• Words on bit of packaging, torn to reveal and conceal as needed
• The output of a command line tool, perhaps unexpectedly
• Overheard words, drifting along, liberated from their initial context
• A form, at first appearing bureaucratic, revealing humanity on deeper reflection
• An idea, if you consider it divine enough

If someone is investigating texts, they can concentrate on the subject / content / style / linguistic nature of the writing.  Increasingly, however, scholars have begun to concentrate on the objects and materials on which the writing takes place.  From this, they tease out all sorts of interesting information about the social, political, and economic aspects of the texts.  A new book on this topic is Thomas Kelly's The Inscription of Things:  Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China.

Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written.

Gardeners, are, by their nature, people who believe in regeneration. They understand that the broken world we inherit can also be amended, with compost, worms, and steady tending. They have seen that the tended earth, in turn, offers up radical abundance—not only of food, but of insects, birds, rhizomes, and soil.

...Of course, any garden plot is small compared to the brokenness of a wider world that can seem beyond mending...Yet sometimes, in the face of huge pain, the things of the earth—hummingbird and mockingbird, snail and earthworm—can help reroute any of us toward awe and fascination. They can reconnect us—if just for a moment—with the life-energy we need to go on. Gardens also remind us that repair need not be so far off: in daily ways, we can each build our lives toward greater diversity and abundance. Nobody needs to be hungry. When we work the right way, we can all be fed.

In the final chapters Bachelard lets slip (a confession really) how if he "were a psychiatrist," he would recommend a poem by Baudelaire to treat "anguish." His squabble then is not with the purpose but rather the approach of a still-young profession. And of course, why not treat the power of great poems as something akin to "virtual 'drugs'"?

The poet does not confer the past of his image upon me, and yet his image immediately takes root in me. The communicability of an unusual image is a fact of great ontological significance.