Read the Digital Poetry Network pre-print.
Category: Digital Poetry Network (page 1 of 2)
I.
Seafood squirms
until it’s raw. Carrots are
claustrophobic, so they
beat a bag of onions
into space. Oranges
are cut into acute
smiles. If apples
aren’t bruised, then
they’re cored. Celery
is a boat for wrinkly
grapes drowning in
buttered-up peanuts.
We’re stolen before
we land: plowed,
harvested, and
salivated over. Oh
well, you fell and
can’t be sold. Whatever
they think of us
is popped in their
cradle. Let it slime
down that glug
as ambivalent
sustenance.
You taste bad! Funny
when they spit
it out. Every burp
is a growl roaring
with laughter. Unlike
cops they imply. Come out
of your shell or be slurped!
I’ll never take a hint
from something spoiled.
II.
Gossip is all about
life—it’s not all life’s
about. Death is the only
perfection. If quarrel
is such a ghostly word,
then there must be danger
in the dinge. Life requires
that we be here.
Even so, gossipuppeteers
are at odds with the oddities.
Burdened by the brocolli
and the beasts, they scour
shrouded clouds into a waterfall
at least, something running
clear as infatuated fate.
Go ahead—be wary of my whereabouts.
You’ll hear only of my hereabouts.
I’m in until it’s outed me,
my home made out of reverie.
A wave passing through two slits becomes two waves
that coincide to produce an interference pattern*
An image in a poet’s mind is an interference pattern
of light waves, and perception is an interference pattern
of images because even individual photons, particles,
and bits of matter produce interference patterns. Collectively,
subconsciously, they behave like a wave passing through
two slits. But when they are conscious of observation,
they are probabilistic:
If language is material, or matter, then ekphrastic poems
can be interference patterns of language if they are not observed,
or measured, during creation. Informed decision leads to language
that goes through one slit (self) or the other (probabilistic appropriation).
The New Difficulty is to renunciate relation and reject effect to interfere,
create a pattern of language unlike any other.
*In physics, interference is a phenomenon in which two waves superpose to form a resultant wave of greater, lower, or the same amplitude. Interference usually refers to the interaction of waves that are correlated or coherent with each other, either because they come from the same source or because they have the same or nearly the same frequency. Interference effects can be observed with all types of waves, for example, light, radio, acoustic, surface water waves or matter waves.
Shuffled frequencies:
Say something specific but utterly preposterous
Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem
Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place
Use a piece of false cause and effect logic
Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but finally makes no sense.
Use a piece of “talk” you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand)
Make the persona in the poem do something that they could not do in “real life.”
Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
Use a metaphor.
Use a phrase from a language other than English.
Source:
Imagine swallowing the moon, sun, land and sea in one violent gulp, reverberating waves
slinking and sticking like teardrops around what once was everything and nothing, drowning life,
reversing genesis, spilling into that unchartered void and filling what’s empty with sacred
emptiness. Miniscule droplets reflecting hues of yellow and orange, distorting the world behind
them, elongating, squishing, creating new images from the old. A unique world within each
droplet. Steve once said “we contain god within ourself”. Water from loch 9, West Glenville.
I got to be god of that small summer. From water came the world, pushed in pulses of flowing
earth. From flux the sphere took shape and knew itself, became aware of origin calling it a
knowledge. At the third position, light sheens through, calls a question with a gargle and spills
us upon a floor. Popped latex isn’t biodegradable even if you can recycle the picture from
Facebook to Twitter to Instagram. Quit bursting pollutants when there are thirsting
people–instead balloon filters, clean our water. I can’t drink likes no matter how they flow.
I hate to burst your bubble but you’re not going to make any money doing that. Thanks, but that
bubble already popped and I’ve been having the greatest time drowning in its dislocated
droplets. I hold the orb still with my mind, against the spray and watch the water run over it
and drip off, sunset glowing through. I do not let it sway. Wonder if this is how God feels about
the sun, the moon, the earth, letting each single droplet drip where it may, but not letting it
waiver. Moons aquatic // nebulas the mind // wet & never drowned // breath, blue-orange
paradise // and the eye is all sandy horizon. There will be more things breaking: the light
through winter sea. This egg of ice will flood and shatter, will spill yellow, pale at first, and paler.
It’s raining and the hammer drops in pieces. A dizzy background, something’s focused: in this
droplet is the sunburst. Where we fall is no man’s land for our orb of yellow but for the
one-two-three seconds before we dissolve into a purple-black, we’ll be the epicenter of a ray,
a bedizened heat, until we—ca pika shiu—pool endlessly. For a moment, liquefied silence, bursting.
by Jessica Melendy, Westley Smith, Jaime Chernoch, Nick Snow, Kieran Moriarty, Jessamyn Wolff, Megan Waring, Shannon Kafka, Christie Towers, Nick Trefonides, Krisela Karaja, Sabina Lindsey
import random
the mountain trek
will not be sweatless
steps in the wrong direction
boot enters puddle
portal
body follows suit
becomes
the Temple of Artemis
mind is Herostratus
soul is democracy
my left eye is in love
with my right eye
they gaze at each other
I become dizzy
soul is anarchy
those who hide in the cliff
never touch the ground
are prey to the eagle
that drops them to
ruin and age
the darkness is clear
between my eyes
shoot—
the Coriolis Force
is reversed on the moon
spin the bottle never works
but I’ve had my lick
before the turn
the forest
of winking trees
snapping branches that
tango on the ground
a chirping orgasm
with orange mushrooms
I’m carving my name
into bark
immortalizing myself
with knife
the fence
sighs
its pain(t)
is thinning
paint against the plain
that holds it
never lets it go
the canvas wants to be
straddled and humped
into virtual reality
the rigid snake is pride
it eats what is brought
to its mouth
reaching arms
tired feet
but the last skin glove
it wears on its tail
the last skin sock
it wears on its head
to look at the dark
that when it dies
will slither on ~
the skeleton walks
there is no where to go
but into this poem
somber Niko
distant in a foreign field
of mango trees
snaps his fingers
frozen face
my eyes are walls
I will find my center
by biting into every fruit
the jumping sparks
disintegrate the rainbow
10-4 we cannot find
the origin of the rainbow
over
I cannot see the ships
at sea at night
their fumes are loud
the sirens cry
a boy beats his breast
into a gyro
when the man was a child
his father slammed him
with a door and now
he enters every room
through the window
tercio de varas
father
get out of the way
spider
I’m coming through
the window breaking
down your web
export the devil’s bliss
From Visual Storytelling (Huang et al. 2016):
“Abstract: We introduce the first dataset for sequential vision-to-language, and explore how this data may be used for the task of visual storytelling. The first release of this dataset, SIND1 v.1, includes 81,743 unique photos in 20,211 sequences, aligned to both descriptive (caption) and story language. We establish several strong baselines for the storytelling task, and motivate an automatic metric to benchmark progress. Modelling concrete description as well as figurative and social language, as provided in this dataset and the storytelling task, has the potential to move artificial intelligence from basic understandings of typical visual scenes towards more and more human-like understanding of grounded event structure and subjective expression.”
Visual Storytelling (Huang et al. 2016) builds off of related work in vision to language that examined “image captioning (Lin et al., 2014; Karpathy and Fei-Fei, 2015; Vinyals et al., 2015; Xu et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2015; Young et al., 2014; Elliott and Keller, 2013), question answering (Antol et al., 2015; Ren et al., 2015; Gao et al., 2015; Malinowski and Fritz, 2014), visual phrases (Sadeghi and Farhadi, 2011), video understanding (Ramanathan et al., 2013), and visual concepts (Krishna et al., 2016; Fang et al., 2015)” to progress from literal description to narration. But realistic storytelling is not the only aspect of human intelligence.
The crowd-sourcing methods for the Cooperative Poem (CoPo) project are similar to the methods outlined in Visual Storytelling, and along with generating a collection of co-authored poems, the CoPo dataset can also be analyzed to inform an AI model of ekphrastic human expression.
According to the Poetry Foundation, ekphrastic poetry is “a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the ‘action’ of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.” The expansion of meaning occurs because we are capable of more than narrating a visual scene. Our ability to reflect on the past, present, and future implications of a visual scene, and its associated narrative, allows our imagination to create a unique narrative.
Respond to statements made by public officials. In the demonstration above, I’ve used tweets made by President Trump. There are project prompts that appear above the tweet and a form field below for users to enter one line of poetry or more. In the above example, there are 200 possible combinations of project prompt and trump tweet.
In the future, instead of using trump tweets that have occurred in the past, I will include videos and quotes of recent controversial statements made by government officials. The project prompts will be unbiased. Use poetry to engage in political conversation.
The many poetic and political conversations can be combined using an algorithm into large response poems to each of the government officials. These response poems are an unofficial average of community response.
Regarding predicting the outcome of an election, this could act as an alternative to traditional polling.
This website presents a random abstract photo from an open source collection on pexel along with a random project from the prompt Twenty Little Poetry Projects created by Jim Simmerman and published in “The Practice of Poetry.” After pressing go, the user must complete the project ekphrastically (within the context of the random image) in one line of poetry or more.
In the future, I would like to expand from twenty poetry projects and 100 abstract photos to fifty poetry projects and 200 abstract photos. There will also be a form so that each time a project is completed the user can submit it (each submission will be associated with the project prompt and the abstract image that it was ekphrastically written from). This website will allow me to experiment with coauthoring by creating algorithms that combine lines written by multiple poets. For instance, I could combine twenty project completions that were written within the context of the same image, but the projects could have been completed by two or more poets. The result would be a co-authored Twenty Little Poetry Projects poem. When poets are using the website individually, they are simultaneously collaborating on the same collection of algorithmic poems.
I do not often sit down at my desk with a journal to deliberately write poems. More often than not, lines of poetry occur to me spontaneously when I’m on-the-go. Here is my essential question: how can a mobile application that randomly prompts users to input one line of poetry per day make the long-timescale process of writing a collection of poems based-on several prompts more efficient?
The python code that automates the order of the Twenty Little Poetry Projects would be one prompt in the back-end of the mobile application. The front-end of the mobile application would have a form that collects user completions of little poetry projects. There will be other prompts along with Twenty Little Poetry Projects in the back-end of the application that celebrate inventiveness and juxtaposition. The front-end of the mobile application would randomly notify the user to complete a random project from any of the several prompts in the back-end. Users must complete the project in one line of poetry or more.
Everyone who downloads the mobile application and signs-up for CoPo (cooperative poem) becomes a member and agrees to complete a project randomly once per day. CoPo is free to sign-up, but private. Only members can invite other people to become members. All members will be co-authors of the randomly generated collection of poems at the end of a year.
Users can open the application at any time to complete a project, read poems that were generated from the input of all members, or participate in discussion with other members. The source code for the back-end of the application that decides the poetic form and project prompts would be viewable to all users. Users can make suggestions to improve the source code in the discussion board.
The author of Virtual Muse, Charles G. Hartman, used a computer to explore the “effects of randomness, arbitrariness, and contingency on poetic composition.” This project is also an experiment with computer poetry, but unlike Hartman’s experiments, this project is interested in exploring the long-timescale benefits of using a computer to assist an organized group in the creation of a collection of poetry line-by-line.
CoPo would facilitate the combination of poetic minds. The application would decide the chronology of the agreed-upon and predictable (in form, not content) creative process, and therefore the poets can focus on imagery. Two or more poets will be able to write the same poem simultaneously, and they will be able to complete a collection of poems without pencil, pad, and pandemonium.
If this mobile application were publicly available and widely used, then there are other possibilities for its use beyond writing a collection of inventive poems. Instead of being randomly notified to only complete a project (For example, “Write a question?” and “Say something specific but utterly preposterous”), users could have to complete the project ekphrastically, within the context of a song or an image. User project-completions would be associated with the art that it was ekphrastically written from, and by better understanding that association and creating an algorithm that takes an average of human response to art, we may better understand how to create an artificially intelligent algorithm that has “feelings” and “memory” by randomly generating responses to art and collecting data on itself continually.
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