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Hello all,
The context in which I taught Margaret's poems was a course called
"Programming && Poetry" in which we attempted to find the
convergences/divergences between code and poetry. The readings included
Margaret's poems, some by Neil Aitken (examples here:
http://www.thecossackreview.com/supplement4/neil_aitken.html),
machine-generated poetry, and code poems. We also read many more
"traditional" poems by authors that included Elizabeth Bishop, Walt
Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Louise Glück, William Carlos Williams, Charles
Simic, Wallace Stevens, Hayden Carruth, and quite a few others.
I only recently discovered that Morgan Parker, in her latest book "There
Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé", has a poem "RoboBeyoncé" that
I'm currently mulling. It starts: "Charging in the darkroom / while you
sleep I am touch and go / I flicker and get turned on / Exterior shell,
interior disco / I like my liver steeled / as a gun, my wires /
unbuttoned to you". Had I known about this poem when I prepared my
syllabus, I would have put it alongside some of Rhee's poems like "Beam,
Robot", "Light, Robot", etc. I think it would be really productive to
discuss the different ways in which the robot can represent marginalized
figures. For example, I've always read Rhee's robot love poems as a type
of queer love poetry. In Parker's case, her poems deal regularly with
issues of black femininity. What does it mean that the robot--an
ostensibly unfeeling, hard-shelled, potentially dangerous creation--gets
imbued by these poets with sexuality and love?
Critical readings included 10PRINT (Nick Monfort, et al.), "Screening
the Page / Paging the Screen" (Marjorie Perloff), Introduction to
Expressive Processing (Noah Wardrip-Fruin), "The Time of Digital Poetry"
(Katherine Hayles), Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson), Cognitive Poetics (Peter Stockwell), and several
articles/pamphlets on text-mining of poetry and genre classification.
I divided the course into several themes; while code & poetry was the
first, we also discussed electronic literature, critical code studies,
distant reading, and cognitive poetics. The last topic, for anyone
unfamiliar, concerns the application of cognitive psychology to the
understanding of poetry: that is, if the current metaphor for mind is
computer, then the poem must be a type of program that gets executed in
that space. If so, what are the mechanisms that create meaning, emotion,
etc.? My students found this a productive line of inquiry as they
continued to use these concepts to analyze how the poems we read worked
on the mind. One of students also put together this exhibit of "Keyword
Poetry": https://keywordpoems.wordpress.com/, poems that she wrote using
only the reserved words in different programming languages, along with
her reflections on the process.
We also discussed WCW's description of poems:
"There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or
large) machine made out of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental
about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant. Prose
may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a
machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all
machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a
literary character."
Combined with our readings in cognitive poetics and our examinations of
code poems, algorithmically-generated poems, and poems about code,
Williams's idea reinforced the idea that a poem is like a program meant
to create a certain state of mind, albeit one far less predictable or
replicable than a computer program. Another aspect of Williams's thought
here that I find particularly effective when close reading is the sense
that every word, every punctuation mark, has meaning, contributes to the
motion of the poem, and must be weighed in any analysis: much like a
computer program, where (unless there are logic branches that go
nowhere) every bit of code has an effect. These ideas required a
balancing act in which, while providing different tools to decompile (so
to speak) how poems work, I needed to keep the students aware of the
ambiguity and variability of a poem's meaning and effects. I was
regularly reminded of these lines of Whitman's:
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin
of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
Best,
Mike
On 5/2/17 12:20 PM, VANDERBORG, SUSAN VANDERBORG wrote:
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A definition is challenging! Terms such as robot poetry, cyborg
poetry, or machine writing might potentially include a huge variety of
poetic practices: speculative poems about robots, poetic alterations
or palimpsests from texts in robotics, code poetry, hypertext poetry,
poetry produced via search engines (such as Darren Wershler and Bill
Kennedy's /apostrophe/) and other digital poetry experiments. Poems
using email or tweets. Poems that reenvision collaboration between
programmers and poets.
There is already a rich scholarly tradition for many of these
robopoetics--/Fashionable Noise,/ /New Media Poetics/, /Digital
Poetics/, /Prehistoric Digital Poetry/, and Hayles's /Electronic
Literature/ and /Writing Machines/, and essays by John Cayley, Talan
Memmott, Stephanie Strickland, Ian Hatcher, Florian Cramer, Matt
Applegate, Steve Tomasula, and others, invaluable for teaching
digital, code, and machine poetics in a special topics seminar I'd
like to propose. Matthew Kirschenbaum's thoughtful "Machine Visions"
details texts whose styles truly enact Haraway's idea of cyborg
writing; Gregory Betts, too, discusses cyborg poetics in his article
"I Object," and Christian Bok's "The Piecemeal Bard Is Deconstructed"
traces "robopoetics" to its roots in RACTER algorithms.
Increasingly, robopoetics doesn't only reflect a world saturated with
technology but a forum where print and digital cultures interact
productively. In "Noise in the Channel," Wershler talks about
prose-poeticprint books, including Drucker’s /The Word Made Flesh/,
whose page layouts anticipate digital formats. /Writing Machines/ also
juxtaposes experimental artists' books and digital poetry.
I've enjoyed teaching texts from Shelley Jackson's /Patchwork Girl /to
Brian Kim Stefans's /The Dreamlife of Letters/ and Jason Nelson's
/Game Game Game and Again Game/ in grad and undergrad poetry or
postmodernism classes; they raise provocative discussions about what
constitutes a book or a poetic collage. But I've taught robopoetics
most frequently in an undergrad literature survey class called
"American Cyborgs." Larissa Lai's "rachel" poems in /Automaton
Biographies/ pair magnificently with both /Blade Runner/ and Haraway,
Susan Slaviero's "Consider the Dangers of Reconstructing Your Wife as
a Cyborg" humorously (and menacingly) complements our cyborgs and
gender unit, and Margaret Rhee's ": Trace" from /Radio Heart/
introduces "Race," in the title's wordplay, as a social construction
already-already present even when it hasn't been "programmed yet." The
"robot" in her book's subtitle pays homage to Asimov stories in which
robotic identity is linked to race and discrimination such as
"Bicentennial Man" and "Segregationist." And there is the short film
for the lyrics of "Many Moons,'" set amid an updated slave auction,
where Janelle Monae presses a button at her neck to change the skin
color of her android character. Studying robot poetics and robot
subjectivity becomes a way of talking about fights for civil rights,
human rights--and the interpretation of documents from the Declaration
of Independence to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
I'm very eager to hear how others in the forum have taught any form of
robopoetics, and in what contexts, or with what results...
Best,
-Susan
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Stanford University Libraries
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