The Longest Poem in the World
This program designed by Andrei Gheorghe is right up there with the most engaging and successful conceptual poetry projects I've seen to date.
Brandon Brown has been talking about prosody on his blog, and this project raises some resonant questions for me in that context: first of all, is prosody a useful term to describe a rhythmic and syntactic effect created not by one writer's sustained attention to sound as it unfolds through time, but by the randomly and mechanically generated rhyming of phrases from disparate sources? It's interesting how hard this effect is to tell apart from that of any of millions of "organically" produced poems by amateurs--or poems which mimic such work, like Ashbery's "Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox."
18 comments:
Thank you Silem, I'm really glad you enjoy it :)
If you put a monkey at a typewriter....you know how it is.
Put a poet at a keyboard or give him a magnetic poetry game and you get art.
Go figure.
You do! Isn't it awesome?
That's one of the things I love an=bout Mac Low; that when he outlines the procedures used to create a work he gives you the tools to replicate the work completely, or you can take the procedure to a new text and create something fantastic yourself.
Well..you know...I read Lime Tree all the time. I wax sentimental about the days before K Silem Mohamed got his knickers in a knot over this and that and stopped TALKING about poetry and started doing what ever other Tom, Dick and Harry does and became a promotionalist for Flarf.
Although I think I have come to a decision...I like the schtick involved in Flarfiness. I have always been a Flarfist but that was back before it developed a name.
No one seems to have noticed but all along....probably when some of you were in training bras and some even in diapers...I started using product placement in my ads.
Coke and Smile was written...stream of consciousness like but through gathering the various scenes along a walk with my famous dog Bijou in the 'burbs of Beirut where we notice:
They thought I was a Marine Barracks.
They thought I was a tire burning.
Flarf...whatever it is....and if this is Flarf central now I am to suppose that all books here are Flarf generated or inspired somehow by the same "found" ideology that I used many years ago in a poem called....gosh...can't even remember but it had something to do with Denktesh ..not what you think!
Schtick.
So how about the Muslim Flarfist or can we ever fit into these square holes as round pegs?
I have to wonder you know and wonder absolutely, if it would be a sin to do so.
But where in the world is K Silem Mohamed in terms of commenting?
He set the law down...Flarf cannot be discussed as such...self annhilating that is.
Well. That would be a crime.
We all know that a monkey could not write a poem and my very first arguement with Flarf was the fact that two poets could write the same poem although it would be a bit of a stretch considering that the "self" is the one picking and choosing.
Truly "generated" poesy via the machine deus...well.....as far as I am concerned, the poet still has to have a say in what the poem search might look like..sets the parameters for that based on knowledge within themself that even they cannot know.
And, as a muslim I have to say, the limitations of non muslims in that effort is the same as non muslims involved in any effort...it "leads a confused existence" until it get into the hands of the expert.
Peace
While I'm on a roll though...I looked at the blog, the comment and I have to scratch my head and say, is this worth my time investing such mental powers that might be better spent just writing the damn stuff?
You see..there is a catch 22 involved in er...Flarf. Escaping the definitions or rather, avoiding them because...we ought to avoid such things.
Especially when you consider the investment of poetry itself as a time consuming activity. The computer makes it easy to develop
all sorts of whacky and not so whacky rationales (Chicks Dig War, Annoying Diabetic Bitch to name two such entities)...but tell me....
...can you prove to me that this computer generation of such entities is any different from something like The Wasteland which is prefaced with something most definitely "lifted" from some gay
priest's personal diary which I mean to say, the computer is everyone's diary and we have access to it all...more or less.
"Those are pearls that were his eyes." ...lifted by an old/ex mentor for the brilliant poem, The Insect Clerks of Nieman Marcus...well....it's there too in The Wasteland and where was it before that?
Selah. Ahuramazda.
The New Testament itself is nothing more than the borrowed texts of the ancients.
Why should Flarf be anything new then?
Because instead of a pencil and good set of spectacles for reading is replaced by the light speed effervescence of the computer?
Bell's Theorem tells us all a thing or two about that!
Here's the thing though...the native or acquired or divinely inspired intelligence and knowledge (not the same thing) of the poet matters and it matters a whole lot.
Otherwise, poets would not flock like bees to the trumpet flower of such notable topics as Prosody (in my deepest cockney imagineable).
A not so gifted poet will write not so gifted poems regardless of the tools that are implemented and this goes against everything that collectives and "schools" fight so hard to maintain and that is the notion of "belonging" to something or the other.
PHLEBAS the Phoenician, a fortnight dead....but still walking.
Death
is the only professional
but its poems are
vague
perfect
innumerable
A profesional
knows how to enter
death
as an amateur
as a rutting
hustling
mother
Well yes Lanny...a professional as in I profess to be something or t'other...can do many things.
Why would someone want to rhyme Twitter comments or try to convince anyone that this is something more than an IT science project?
I've no idea really.
I am much more concerned with media events like Waltz With Bashir, the revisionist animated feature created while Gazans were being murdered by IDF forces by the hundreds.
All the same....I guess it kills some time to look at this foolish and procedure bound endeavor that is more gimmicky than the Chia Pet.
Next to Ginsberg
I sat next to Ginsberg in 1979,
saw King Fahed being ushered into the ER
wrapped in a pink blanket to disguise him,
he pee'd on my friend in the ICU.
Jack Nicholson ordered coffee from me once
at the Little America Truckstop in Flag,
a pack of cigarettes rolled up
in the sleeve of his black t-shirt
(then he started marrying waitresses).
I lived next door to a man that was
beheaded for building Apaches.
My husband ran into Gene Hackman at the Taj Majal
and Elvira let him encircle her for a picture
down in Atlanta at a convention.
Someone I know told me Goldie Hawn was real mean
in a five star hotel and Kurt was as handsome
as he was in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
(which I mistakenly called, The Computer War Tennis Shoes)
and Steve Pearl told me the Dalai Lama would visit
the city park and I hoped to be able to pet him.
I'm so glad to be a Flarfist now. I'll bet everyone wants to be one now. Not because of me of course...no one touches a person like me with a ten foot stick you know.
I want to shout it from the mountaintops...I've found my calling!
To cut and paste schticky things (natural sort of glue included) without bothering to notice if it actually constitutes real poetry. And the devil may care attitude of the PoBiz industry that has more to say about Project Runway than it does about Star Trek (thank the Lord) because I am just entirely fed up with Spock.
You know how it is Lanny.
Dizanc!
are you guys still on the barthes-kick? or are you joking?
I'm not sure what I'm doing here, because it all seems pretty ridiculous - people keep raggin' about flarf being no more than cut-ups and found text, which is contrary to anything Gary, Kasey or Nada has said on the topic, or that it's "not new", when noone has claimed it is ....
and as for "without bothering to notice if it actually constitutes real poetry"; what does that even mean? what is this "real poetry" (does this mean there's fake poetry? is the poem I'm reading actually a picket fence?) and where can I find some?
Hmmm....Ross. This is not what I said. Nor would I say such an obnoxious thing.
I did say that rhyming tweets is a science project rather than an art project. Kasey thinks it is the cat's meaow but all the same...the promotionalist uscratchmebackiscratchyours mentality of that is well....gosh....what next?
Anyone can cut and paste sundry lines together and call it poetry anymore.
Much like the digital camera has made photography er..an art form in which relatively untrained people can produce relatively wonderful images.
I however firmly believe that poets have been cut and pasting for a lot longer than Flarf might suggest with it's newness.
I find Flarf mighty enjoyable but I also think that it can really get on a person's nerves after the third bite.
And then what?
Back to the drawing board.
Time is what makes things new and the events within time, the context, the change...that's what poetry is made out of. Flarf is a change of pace but hardly is it the last word or even the most influential.
Promoting it however has become job one and that is where a self identified Flarfist might want to reconsider their trademark kitty.
Let me clarify...I had a friend who is no longer a friend who had an issue with Flarf and who exactly invented it i.e. the concept of it. And there is a concept there let there be no doubt about it regardless of the ellusiveness with which Flarfists project onto the world at large.
I took an interest in it long before it became fodder for the blogs and have spent long hours thinking about the concept if not reading whole books chock full of it. It is allowed you know...to not purchase a copy...that there is this unconditional love of something that is higher than my secret code on my Visa card.
I don't take it seriously in the sense that perhaps it wants to be taken as a "school" of this or that...haven't ever understood that whole thing about schools because my practice writing poetry is about so much more than that...ideological even. Afterall, the Imams were religious scholars first and poets second.
The Quran itself is not poetry but in fact, if a person really studies it..I guarantee you..their words will flourish and I borrow HEAVILY not lightly from it both in syntax and in goal.
All the same....I don't sit in judgement of it...Time will sit in judgement of it. Alot of it is garbage and a third grader could do it and if you have ever had children and read some of their third grade journals...you'd appreciate the Grandma Moses technology of that.
Having just raised three teenagers...I am fluent with alot more than a person without teenagers with the current language center called the internet. Post things that my kids throw my way like....hahaha...salad fingers.
Ever watched a saladfingers video? Everyone should.
I have purchased this Terminal Humming (good for me and good for the poet!) after doing an exhaustive online search on her work. I have to say...if that is Flarf or if it is promoted as such....stand back.
It's more of the same apriori the actual book. But the book will tell no lies.
Should I purchase other books that Kasey peddles here?
I might. I think Kasey is a very astute business man. And a schticky poet par none.
Humor in poetry is too much neglected you know.
And beauty...that scene in American Beauty where the videographer films nothing more than a plastic bag twisting in the wind and says, "There's so much beauty in the world."
How can we fit it all in you know!
But this just can't get out of my head...and it is really...what poetry is to me:
I'm breaking through
I'm bending spoons
I'm keeping flowers in full bloom
I'm looking for answers from the great beyond -REM, The Great Beyond
anglyack
I think you've got flarf wrong. I suggest that you read these:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html
http://www.pw.org/content/can_flarf_ever_be_taken_seriously
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/02/books/flarf-from-glory-days-to-glory-hole
http://jacketmagazine.com/29/hoy-flarf.html
http://www.fascicle.com/issue01/Poets/mohammadessay.htm
http://jacketmagazine.com/31/snyder-flarf.html
http://slatherpuss.blogspot.com/2006/02/response-to-dan-hoys-flarf-essay-in.html
Flarf is more than simple cut-ups, and noone makes any claims of "radical newness".
No, I don't think I've got it wrong and trust me, that's the worst argument FOR ANYTHING. :)
"You don't understand me!"
It's adolescent in nature i.e. that kind of defense of something.
Not you but that.
Flarf is wonderful but is it actually Flarf anymore than the chance photograph by the digital afficianado is to be considered, a work of fine art photography?
If only Susan Sontag could inform us.
All the same, and I've developed this view of it all over much time and contemplation...
Flarf could be the Rococo of words if there is such a thing but that is a historical fancy.
The decorative nature of it, the high end right next to the edge of "nothing left here" kind of thing that happens in a society when it runs out of ideas but still knows how to present the old ones with tremendous elan.
It does open up wide avenues of opportunity for poets who draw blanks. But so does most of what was presented in the sixties and seventies and it still rocks.
I have to wonder, how long will Flarf rock?
And isn't Flarf just another type of Found poetry anyway? Let's see what's out there then...
I'm thinking though...it would be great for a poet/IT specialist to create a contraption like the one Stephen Hawking has that literally translates thoughts into spoken passages on the spot.
Has anyone done that yet? No doubt they have and I'm on the end of that curve rather than the beginning because I'm older than sin. And perhaps, a bit wiser.
:)
predigo
http://netpoetic.com/2009/08/longestpoemintheworld-com/
Cyborg McGonagall...
It's interesting inasmuch as it appears to be one of the first purely *aesthetic* automated internet text recombiners... that is, not for the purposes of evading Bayesian spam filters. Why'd it take so long? And how long until we'll be working up a Turing test to tell generated verse from, say, Ashbery or Salamun?
I am the one who created this thing :). I have been following your comments. The title of "poem" should not be taken literally. For me it was purely an experiment, I did not state anywhere that it was "art" :). I prefer to let people like you have a good look at it and decide what this is, what it could represent, and what it could become. After all I think you can all agree that the idea of art is very subjective and it's all in the eye of the beholder. I am just happy that so many people think it's awesome :). Have a great day all of you!
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