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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-poetic print 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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Academic Technology Specialist
Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Stanford University Libraries
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