Month: September 2024

I looked at Charles Bernstein’s recent LLM collection, enjoyed it, and I have been half thinking about the future of the art, in those terms. LLM is a statistical process, and I don’t think that sort of roughness is how poetry works, let alone how poets write it (however wrong we are).

If you look at The Waste Land and think what sets it apart as the greatest poem in the English language, that all – any way to approach that question, be that historical context or talent – rests on the logic of language. Just to get on with the metaphor: the true and false aspect of logical reasoning/syntax are similar to technique and ultimately disappears (if only for a time while we all catch up). Deliberately indeterminate.

And I reckon that vague statistical reasoning is the exact opposite not only of how poets learn to write poetry but also what it means (however it is curated or presented).

I was thinking of how seldom I am conscious of depth, when writing; usually, it is just surface, style, syntax, structure and shape, I explicitly think of expressively (and remember I shape to express the energy of speech that does not belong on the page), but there are many opportunities to generate both figuration and diction that draw from writing. Take them! In the following test, words 1 (Bunting), 4, 6 (similar sort of poorness) and 8 (a figure – I was thinking of beauty regimes as a butterfly – vaguely thinking of Olson, then aligning its tongue with ‘lashes). I need to read more!

Curved

For low abrupt flight
petal purchase, proboscis
tong.

I was trying a few different things on some of my little verses. Seems as if it is impossible to meaningfully shape these poems to express my own energy: then, it is as if absolutely arbitrary where to “chop up” the poem. Expression is a useful word, and difficult to get around, at least without random processes and kitsch. It makes sense, from what I understand about expressive processes in art in general, that expressing ones own energies is abstract enough to be meaningless (given one expresses affect, in general). Nevertheless, it’s the energy of the poem that should stand out, I feel.

1. Shaping for energy seems to make diction so.
2. Shaping to express the energy of the poem seems to make cadence so.

That seems fairly self explanatory, if not “correct”, but it raises the question which to learn with, or from, first. I would suppose (2), with the goal of reaching (1), at which point expression might fall to the necessity of the world’s fragments (which is a fine enough means to restate my blog’s continued babble).