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Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm
I can get put off by a lot of avant-garde poetry's excess use of strange words. Take Glazier's newly published first collection Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. He's succumbed to the usual academic habit of filling his poems with obscure incomprehensibility, like http, chmod, EMACS ... hang on a second, I know these words. They're not literary jargon, they're software babble, the words I work with. If there isn't a schadenfreude sense of humour behind this chap's use of computer terminology in his poetry, there damn well ought to be. I love the image I get of poetry literati, finding poems stuffed with precision from a different kind of language professional, muttering "what the &hellip?"
Look, don't get me wrong, this collection isn't easy. The poems, mostly prose poems, are impressions, sequences of events, themed associations, riddled with puns (sharper than that), observation and humour. Imagine yourself a tourist, walking down a Mexican / Cuban / Texan / Costa Rican town's main street, staring at the activity, the buildings, the air, everything a slap of newness. Now realise I was snug in an English pub on a cold November night drinking some rather good warm beer, reading "Semilla de Calabaza (Pumpkin Seed)," the central sequence of this collection. I'm guided by Glazier, I'm the gawping tourist, I'm hit by his local knowledge, I'm a stranger but I know this town, I'm the visitor and I've lived here forever.
I'd better give you some samples of his work. It's not so easy, each poem is a long whole; chopping bits out destroys the context, much of the expression. Remember, too, I enjoy new ways of saying old things. Perhaps you'll see this collection's appeal to me from this chunk of the fifth "White-Faced Bromeliards on 20 Hectares (An Iteration)":
Finding a pumpkin seed in your vocabulary. A dead tree becomes
a bromeliad alter. Policia Rural. Brahmin cattle. Los Angeles,
Costa Rica's fresh furrows against smoky ridge. Banana chips on
the bus. Una casada, comida tipica lava gushing glowing twilight
plumes & sputters. Before sunset, bathing in a river heated by
lava's flow.
So why on earth am I reviewing a collection of poetry for /. ? As you've probably already sussed, Glazier's a computer chap. He's professor and Director of The Electronic Poetry Center at New York, Buffalo. He knows our not-Unix / Windows wars; they're here in the poetic armoury. It's like having your own private antagonism codified into opera, suddenly there's an aria about DLLs, or caches, and the damn thing works a treat and it damn well shouldn't. It's still his flow of impressions, but now he's taking tourists around our home town, our systems, our neighbourly rows, our familiar world is slapping them with strangeness, they're asking tourist questions, they're got tourist awe, tourist doubts.
From "One Server, One Tablet, and a Diskless Sun":
And what
kind of bugs? Lorca's mystical crickets?
H.D.'s butterflies? Though I think they
must--if the mind does have an eye--be
cockroaches fat, brightly lit, and mightily
glowing. Flying through the mind shaft to
assault any mental indiscretion. Perhaps a
relative of Burroughs introduced this
term. (Stick that in your machine and
add it up!) What vision of mainframe!
What robust modems! What processor
speed!
Some of my worst bugs have embarrassingly been "cockroaches fat, brightly lit, and mightily glowing." I'd better change the subject. It's probably obvious I believe poetry and programming share something vital. As Glazier says, in "Windows 95" (Ironic? You tell me.):
"In a sense code
resembles classical poetry. The requirements of meter (poetry)
and syntax (code) pose both limitations and challenges for the
good poet / programmer to adhere to and overcome in the
process of writing a great poem / program."
The one weakness of this collection, perhaps, cannot be avoided; Glazier's an electronic poet, a web poet; for all his care, the hyperlinks feel like they're still there, hidden and used; the slide-show web pages are unflowing still on paper. Don't get me wrong; these poems work well, but I just get the feeling, which I cannot properly justify, that they're butterflies killed, pinned and collected, fascinating, very beautiful, but their essence is the flittering movement you can never see in a book. But that's not such a problem; you could always browse The Electronic Poetry Center for Glazier's pages.
I didn't know Glazier's work when I bought this collection. It's published by the print-on-demand Australian/UK publisher Salt. I tend to buy their collections simply because they publish them; they seem to have developed the habit of excellence.
You can also purchase Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit a review for consideration, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Litterature Art student
Is this a branch of sanitation engineering?
> Coding is about structuring, and poetry too has
;
> structures, indeed. This is a shallow comparison.
No, it's a shallow analysis. Code has structure and is designed as a structured form of language intended and designed for a certain spectra of expression. Poetry has structure and was developed as a structured form of language intended for a somewhat wider range of expression.
> For the whole thing, pardoxically, in poetry, is
> to give the reader enough freedom to free
> him(her)self of the structure.
Please do not pretend to be a literature Ph.D. when posting on slashdot; that is to say, do not presume to tell us the goals or aims of poetry, especially given that poetry has no agency but that supplied by the poet.
> In poetry, structure is a mean, an assurance you
> take to get free quicker
No, in poetry structure is. That's the closest to a true sentance of that form your going to get.
> in computing, structure is *everything*.
Clearly you haven't coded in PERL.
> Poetry and computing are so different.
Perhaps to some people. It depends on ones approach.
> Computing looks like more architectural works.
What a biased statement. Let me guess, you like architecture more than poetry?
> Definitely coders are not poets ; in that case,
> they *would* be poets.
Do not presume to tell us what coders are and are not. You seem to be very fond of pidgeonholing things in order to elaborate on a point that is both incorrect and uninteresting.
Disclaimer: IANAB (I am not a Buddhist).
That's 100% correct. YAADB (you are a Douchebag).