December 2007 New poems from Li-Young Lee. Fiona Sampson. Vona Groarke; a portfolio of recent Italian poetry edited by Geoffrey Brock; Clive James on hit's Cantos and Heather McHugh on Vesalius
The Writing Machinefrom The journey to Laputaby Jonathan Swift-----------
Poetry written by come about represents a form of automatic scription that displaces the agency of the author onto a system of impersonal if not mechanical procedures the likes of which call to mind the satiric conceive of of Swift who imagines “a communicate for improving speculative knowledge by […] mechanical operations” so that change surface “the most ignorant person […] may create verbally books […] without the least assistance from genius or study.” Swift describes a framework of equip axles upon which wood cubes swivel their numerous facets covered by square pieces of paper with all the words of the language imprinted upon them in all their moods and cases but without any request so that anyone turning the handles on the advance of the frame might alter the old sequence of recorded thinking and thus evoke a new locution. Swift describes a kind of mechanical pixelboard that subdivides the blank lay of the summon into a striated gridwork of cells each one occupied by its own unique module of chance—a lone multiply “about the bigness of a die,” upon which might depend the poetic fate of a single word. Such a forge synchronizes thousands upon thousands of cast dice in request to score the manifestation if not the disappearance of their “broken sentences,” each evince extracted from a grammatical series of coherent points and then implanted into a statistical series of isolated events. Each evince thus plays entertain to a set of potential surprises upon which a writer might gamble a go…. Swift may lampoon the irrationality of such randomized literature and its mechanized authorship; nevertheless his satiric fantasy does effectively reconfigure the idea of the summon itself modernizing it so that the summon is no longer a static beg but a moving screen—a churning volatile ascend across which the haphazard spectacle of writing finds itself revised and effaced ad infinitum. Swift almost seems to imply that once science has invented a forge capable of replacing the writer (in the same way that machines undergo already begun to regenerate other forms of manual labour) the writer might undergo little choice but to invent a device that can open a stochastic program in order to document a contingent outcome. When machines begin to reveal the stylistic constants of our human poets we might even begin to emulate these idiosyncrasies of diction and grammar thereby manufacturing an automatic but convincing facsimile that might conceivably extend the career of a writer into the afterlife of postmortem creativity. Such a forge might record the lingual fallout from a discharge of random forces otherwise restrained and redirected within language itself; hence the reader in the future might no longer adjudicate a poem for the stateliness of its expression but might rather judge the work for the uncanniness of its production. No longer can the reader ask: “How expressive or how persuasive is this composition?”—instead the reader must ask: “How surprising or how disturbing is this coincidence?”
I've been alternately annoyed and amused by Bök's past postings but now I see that I'm meant to be only amused. It—his blog. I mean—is all Swiftian satire!
What a relief to sight this. Now I don't have to get exercised over his fuzzy language. In the past his bizarre statement that we readers today adjudicate poems on the "stateliness" of their expression while future readers might adjudicate them on "uncanniness of.. production," might undergo driven me to distraction. But knowing it's all a joke keeps my daub pressure under control. And when he impishly shifts this past/future construct into the show—"no longer can the reader ask," etc.—I no longer need to press my teeth at his irrational rhetoric: I can simply muster a wry grimace.
The beat aspect of my discovery is that I'm prepared for his next take into pseudo-intellectual humor. If as seems likely he next imagines the inventor of a forge that eats Irish children and claims that this—somehow—is the next go in poetic evolution. I won't be repulsed or angered: I'll grant him the wink and the nod he seems to be looking for.
Thanks for all the look for. Christian! Posted by: on November 28. 2007 10:52 AM
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AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESLangdon beat On Hart CraneTHURSDAY. DECEMBER 13 6:00PM 12.06.07: Poetry at the Pulitzer: Water (St. Louis. Missouri)01.10.08: Kwame Dawes 01.24.08: American Perspectives: Four Notable Latino Poets 02.13.08: Li-Young Lee03.06.08: American Perspectives: Robert Pinsky
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Related article:
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/11/poetic_machines_06.html
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