Posts with the tag 'poetry'
Yesterday I received this bizarre spam, from someone “named” Solly Brit. The subject heading was “time card celibacy” and this nonsense phrase only hints at the random strings of English in the message, which reads like some methed-up computer-generated poetry slam:
zest, detect pronoun imperfection and lens radically, in as historian disposable of rest home the
four milk chocolate. with insure to tact gatecrasher rainbow tower that collectible misunderstand hither a recollection, learned nude, to an teem
committed shirt extracurricular,… progress. stale, a smelly, as wounded
jovial minority the an healer,
big deal rebel financing stepbrother as!!! adversary lethally a the and tinderbox bounce supply and demand Jun. the fishing rod, putt
left-wing unzip platter. council
rape welter player a public school esoteric ventriloquist that inadvisable but pant gazelle as chinos, stockholder of capitalization, at undressed and
pacifist as precautionary of baptismal black market as
kiln gallon, nomination, not of an G-string, to as geriatric the
meningitis the O! footpath tawny, of bluegrass, wrestle,. to bash.
Jackson Mac Low, watch out!
Tags: New Media, poetry
April 16th, 2006
I’ve been on the blogging equivalent of radio silence for several weeks now, waiting for my handlers to issue the code for me to go on active status. Last weekend was it: Vice President Dick Cheney shooting a 78 year-old man in the face with a shotgun. That was my signal. (Or, close enough: it was The quail flies at dusk, which is basically the same thing.)
Now, I know this important political issue of vital national security has been covered professionally and responsibly by the news media in a very measured way. I have nothing new to add. Except for an email exchange between my friend (and occasional SampleReality commentator) Stephen and myself:
Me:
I wonder if Dick Cheney is Jack Bauer [of 24] in disguise?
Stephen:
But has Jack Bauer ever shot someone by accident, hmm?
More to the point: has Jack Bauer ever wasted ammunition on someone he wasn’t planning to a) kill or b) torture?
Stephen is absolutely correct. And add to this that Jack Bauer has never had to apologize for killing or torturing (except for that unfortunate electroshock thing with his lover’s estranged husband in Season 4–but that was, like, totally a misunderstanding).
So Jack Bauer never has to say he’s sorry. But apologize is something Dick Cheney had to do.
Or sort of.
This is the closest Cheney comes to saying “I’m sorry. I did it.”:
“Ultimately, I’m the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry.”
Hello, Mother Goose! This is the cat that caught the rat that ate the malt that lived in the house that Jack built.
Lyrical beauty aside, this is the linguistic equivalent of saying, I only pulled the trigger. The gun did the rest. Or really, if you get down to it, it was the round, not even the gun that did it. (So it remains true: guns don’t kill people.)
And what’s with “I’m the guy who”–instead of simply “I pulled the trigger”? As my students pointed out today, that’s like saying, I just happened to be there. It could’ve been any guy. And it just happened to be me. Wrong place, wrong time kinda thing.
Tags: 24, Cheney, poetry, television
February 16th, 2006
I recently found a poem I had written years and years ago, in July 1992, which I had absolutely, totally forgotten about. I wrote it in an undergraduate creative writing course with the astounding poet James Reiss. I’m not sure why, but Reiss generally liked my stuff. For an undergrad, I guess it was okay material. A few weeks after the class was over I was walking down the muggy streets of Oxford, Ohio, and Reiss drove by, shouting out to me, “There goes the Tungsten Wunderkind!”
Tungsten, now that I’m remembering, was one of my favorite words that summer, and Reiss knew it. The “wunderkind” was Reiss’s idea. For a while after that I fancied myself the Tungsten Wunderkind. Long after most young men give up the idea of becoming rock stars I harbored fantasies that Tungsten Wunderkind would be a great name for my first band. The one that would go on to fill stadiums around the globe, stop world hunger, meet the Pope.
How embarrasing.
But this poem here, the one I discovered in an brittle plastic binder in the back of a closet, Reiss didn’t like. I remember that too, now. Never mind the erratic meter and graceless lines, it was the closing stanza that irked Reiss. Too much like the end of Planet of the Apes
, with Charlton Heston staring aghast at the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. Reiss pointed out the unintentional allusion, and I thought it was a compliment at the time.
I think I see now what Reiss was getting at.
Yet after September 11, 2001, the poem seems different. Definitely not better, definitely not redeemed, just different. I don’t feel prescient so much as in sync with Hollywood’s darkest fantasies. It’s still a bush league poem, but it’s a bush league world we’re living in.
| |
in my dreams…
i raze the World Trade Center
down to its cornerstones.
first i heap the ticker tape
(IBM up five and a quarter,
DuPont down two and a half)
into a haystack.
then i douse the pile with
gasoline and light a whole
book of matches from TGI
Fridays and toss it in.
finally i
awake and leave behind
twin shivering spines
hunched over the harbor. |
Tags: 9-11, Miami University, poetry
December 7th, 2005
My students and I have been playing with WordCount, Jonathan Harris’s slick database of the 86,000 or so most commonly used words in the English language, ranked according to frequency.
As Harris points out (playfully calling it a “conspiracy“), there are many sequences of adjacent words in the ranked list of 86,800 words that are either eerily prescient, beautiful poetry, are both.
For example, sequence 1941-1945 reads “faith establish facts requires membership” — which does in fact seem to say something about the notion of faith in today’s America.
What other found poetry awaits in the list of words?
Here are a few I discovered:
love means upon areas effect likely (words 384-389)
hate ease shadow inevitably loose (3107-3111)
langley channelled haemorrhage (14867-14869)
unfortunately noise revolution index rare (2172-2176)
And actually, come to think of it, this compilation of lines seems to have a dark undercurrent of meaning flowing through it, too.
Tags: New Media, poetry
November 4th, 2005