instead of transportation
miserable radio eyestrain minus violent hope admits respect, her dancing eyelids hate her begonias, her velvet inferno lacerates every astrolabe kiss.
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arnold schoenberg invented 12-tone musical composition over 100 years ago. i became intrigued about applying some of those ideas to poetry when i realized a poem i wrote using multiple cutups used what i thought of as "word rows", a reflection of the "tone rows" used in 12-tone composition.
i won't bore you with the details, but i spent over a month developing the software i use to help me compose "12-tone" poetry. suffice it to say that while language doesn't incorporate scales, chromatic or otherwise, so there's no correspondence to 12 tones, i use parts of speech, alphabetization, and lots of random sampling to generate the 104 word rows that make up the "12-tone matrix" that forms the collection of raw material i use to cutup, revise and edit each "12-tone" poem. here are a couple of early examples: ==================================================================== horrible vain and logical horrible vain and logical grandmother issues fantastic misery in secret temple she wants her quiet fighting magnets to join the healing military testing necessary rice provided that meaningful miserable grandmother goes everywhere uptown injecting young technology boy oh boy with super substance plus ================================================================== vehement cheers vehement cheers vault quartz bravo helen! hot dulcimer wisecrack, whoop-de-doo quantum redesign hook. join the vortex mission, yoga incandescence, cluster vast northward query after bitter parametric accident. elixir jazz leads youngest carotene group so vaguely marvelous tendril kills everyone alongside pressroom the surrealists -- many of them, including the main man andré breton -- wanted to get rid of the notion of the "bourgeois" author, hence surrealist texts are full of seemingly unrelated strings of surprising images, incomprehensible to those "bourgeois" readers imprisoned by societal logic and constraints. these texts, then, are the product of some more or less random process rather than the deliberate composition of some author.
i've become intrigued by many traditional poetic forms: haiku, sonnet, sestina, villanelle. in my mind it would be just "too easy" to fill, say, a sestina, with random cutup lines and appropriate end words. if we're just doing random cutups, what does the traditional form add to the poem? i think these traditional forms demand some intellectual effort on the part of the poet to fit the words and images into the formal regime, not necessarily of rhyme, but often the regulated repetition of end words, images and lines. doesn't mean it has to make "sense" in some grand narrative arc, but readers need to feel some poetic urgency to the image sequences, end words, lines and stanzas. here's a sestina i just put together: you told me never you told me never reveal our secret internet burrow so the monsters won’t capture the composer of our hearts stolen by the fairy when i break her i fear the winged thing mourning for me and i’m scared it’s night and i don’t know where i wandered fervent fucking O please take me in where i wandered to meet these women in our hidden burrow the little boy scared my mourning your frequent laughing composer so long ago eating on the sandy field where fear asked if she's artificial like the fairy see me kiss the women imagined by the fairy who let you in the cockpit as you wandered joking that you live in fear in our glass burrow never talk to my composer who wanders in the days that hitler’s myth is mourning the luger in his hand can’t be mourning the barracks the bodies the impotent fairy an asteroid denied there was ever a composer so much smoke wandered fearfully in our burrow hack my optic nerve so you won’t fear we worry hitler’s box is full of fear it’s such a long drive to visit your mourning you thought you hid it in our secret burrow i’ll do anything to come to your house and talk with your fairy mother called me to your room the night i wandered from nowhere and came after your composer other days i think my new women talk to your composer but friday night i’m going somewhere else where they’re not dead yet and i don’t understand what they fear prepare to leap into empty space where you wandered trying to fight off the mourning without you i feel like such an empty fairy always watching the film burrow i fear i made the mannequin look into mourning snow that wandered where your fairy composer put it all in our internet burrow sonata: the outer planets and hexagram: the music lesson were published in Uut Poetry.
this is what i call "image arcing": surrealism tries to evoke emotional energy by getting it to blast out of juxtaposed images, just as you can see a spark jump between two electrodes held apart.
in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism andré breton quotes pierre reverdy: "The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be — the greater the emotional power and poetic reality . . ." — André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, 1972, pp. 20 it's not clear what reverdy meant by a "distant and true" relationship between "juxtaposed realities" but "distant" is easy to grasp. as max ernst put it, ". . .the reconciliation of two (or more) seemingly incompatible elements within a scheme, incompatible to them, provokes the strongest poetic ignitions" — Max Ernst, What is Surrealism?, in Surrealists on Art, Lucy Lippard, ed., Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp. 135 here are some thoughts by the composer roger sessions and the poet robert bly. i'm a great believer in this notion of a pre-conscious emotional channel in us all. music and poetry both try to evoke the "emotional energy" that lives there.
"What the music does is animate the emotion; the music, in other words, develops and moves on a level that is essentially below the level of conscious emotion. Its realm is that of emotional energy rather than that of emotion in the specific sense." — Roger Sessions, The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener, Princeton University Press, 1971, pp. 24 "And what are notes? When sounds are absorbed and shaped by and inside, say, a string quartet, they contain almost no life stuff. Notes are pure sound vibrations connected apparently to feelings (but not to experiences) that resonate somewhere inside us. During the Well-Tempered Clavichord we feel 'feelings' that we seem not to have felt in daily life. There is evidently a layer of consciousness that runs alongside our life, above or below, but is not it. Perhaps it is older. Certain works of art make it their aim to rise up and pierce this layer, or layers. Or they open to allow 'memories' from this layer in." — Robert Bly, TruthBarriers: poems by Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Robert Bly, Sierra Club Books, 1980, from the introduction, pp. 9 the world of publishing is transforming. i've been really influenced by a couple of talks by mark coker, the founder of smashwords.com -- they're a free ePublishing platform dedicated to ePublishing any author who wants to publish. they distribute through apple iBooks, barnes & noble, and other places so that writers can easily get the eyes of the world on their writing. (amazon kdp is free too and smashwords encourages using multiple publishing platforms). but it's crucial to know how to market your work electronically and smashwords has a lot of info to help with that.
in the "old" days, according to mark, print publishers were and still are in the business of making money, not publishing good writing. so even if you wrote the most brilliant stuff, if you couldn't find a publisher who thought they could make money selling your stuff, you were rejected, a "failed" author. in those days self-publishing was looked down on and thought of as "vanity" publishing. no more. indie ePublishing is blossoming -- smashwords has published more than 300,000 works and who knows how many amazon has published. that means there's a lot of indie ePubs out there, a lot more good and a lot more bad. but it basically means that you -- the reader -- gets to decide what to read, so we're not subject to print publishers who are trying to push their quarterly profits by solely printing books they think will make them bucks. so what's that mean for the notion of the global tribes of "editors" doing print quality assurance? that's a lot like the process of "peer review" in the worlds of scientific and academic publishing. in those worlds your career watchwords are "publish or perish". but peer review seems to be falling by the wayside there, as well. in the academic and scientific domains, peer-reviewed publication by profit-making publishers or organization-controlled journals is fast being outpaced by self-publishing in online journals. true, to some extent quality control may be sacrificed, but for the scientific community it means that new results get out much, much faster than ever before. that means peer review has been more-or-less replaced by the honor system in science and academia. we've all read newspaper horror stories of scientific work that was faked, or unduly influenced by profit-making research sponsors. peer review cannot guarantee that scientific work is honest and high quality. neither can literary editors "approve" new work that everybody wants to read. so what we're giving up with indie ePublishing is an illusory feeling of sacrosanct editorial approval, and what we're gaining is democratized publishing so that writers can now get their work out there directly to readers. again, there's a lot more bad stuff out there, and a lot more good stuff. but it's the readers who get to decide what they will read. and there's a lot of people reading eBooks: iBooks for one has a billion potential worldwide customers, and add to that amazon -- you can get kindle software for OS X, windows, IOS and android, so you can read kindle eBooks on just about any platform, desktop web or mobile -- and barnes & noble. don't forget that there's still the tradition of post-publication reviews. every eBook store lets readers comment on the books they sell, and there are still the tribes of editors out there who'll read you're stuff and let us know what they think. so the big change is that rather than reviewers acting as publication gatekeepers, now your post-publication reviews will influence your published eBook sales. since i got to california and started to re-focus on writing, i find that my work has gotten simplified and pared down, with a spare vocabulary and lots of repetition. here's an example of one of my recent poems:
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