Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm

Dylan Harris writes "I love writing software, and I enjoy reading other people's source -- how they've expressed instructions, the subtle differences when two good programmers use the same language for the same task. Then there's the pleasure of working through a new computer language: how its structure, its form, changes the way a problem is approached, a solution is expressed. Strange as it may seem, I get the same pleasure from reading poetry, but more so. Seeing a poem written in an old familiar form, say a sonnet, is like meeting someone else's code in a language I know. New poems in new forms are new programs in new languages; exciting ideas renewed, refreshed, expressed in different ways." Read on for Dylan's review of a collection from Loss Pequeno Glazier which combines these worlds of expression. Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm author Loss Pequeno Glazier pages 100 publisher Salt rating bloody good if you like the stuff reviewer Dylan Harris ISBN 1844710017 summary Computer infected modern poetry

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.

Comments

um...

[theMerovingian]

Glazier's an electronic poet, a web poet

This sounds like a Geocities homepage to me...

Wow

[jdifool]

Hi,

I guess the submitter coded too much in his life, because now he is mixing things up.

Coding is about structuring, and poetry too has structures, indeed. This is a shallow comparison. For the whole thing, pardoxically, in poetry, is to give the reader enough freedom to free him(her)self of the structure.

In poetry, structure is a mean, an assurance you take to get free quicker ; in computing, structure is *everything*. Poetry and computing are so different. Computing looks like more architectural works. Definitely coders are not poets ; in that case, they *would* be poets.

Regards,
jdif

Re:Wow

[Bazzargh]

Coding is about structuring, and poetry too has structures, indeed.

Now if he'd actually said that, he would have been making a shallow comparison. What he said was, he gets similar pleasure from reading code and poetry. Well, each to his own.

As for your own notions: For the whole thing, pardoxically, in poetry, is to give the reader enough freedom to free him(her)self of the structure.

Well, implying that you know the intent of all poets is a shallow comment too, is it not? Laying aside for a moment that artists are often intent on their art being so nebulous as to avoid trite definitions like the one above, plenty of poems do have structure; some even have metre. If the structure doesn't matter, then why use structure at all? Do changes of metre within a poem mean nothing? Would the poem be changed by expressing it with a different metre?

The answer is obviously yes. And that's what the poster says: New poems in new forms are new programs in new languages; exciting ideas renewed, refreshed, expressed in different ways.. I'm guessing this is what you're referring to when you assume he asserts that all poems are about structure, when all I see is an interest in the structure - or lack of it - in poems.

-Baz

Helpful, if circular ratings=helpful, if circular

[OgdEnigmaX]

rating: bloody good if you like the stuff

So your evaluation is "only you can evaluate it?" My enjoyment of the book will be proportional to my enjoyment of the book! Thanks!

Re:Anatman? Sounds like Pittsburghese

[vandemar]

Actually, it's the Sanskrit name for the Buddhist doctrine of no-self or no-soul. Atman is the self/soul, and An is the negation of that.

• Anatman

Disclaimer: IANAB (I am not a Buddhist).

I guess we don't read the same poetry

[jdifool]

Hi,

this is fun that you are speaking of poetry as represented by the sonnet, because the sonnet was used at a very precise time in history (mainly during the 16th century, with the European Baroques), and then criticizing my post because it is historicized.

I guess that we really didn't understand each other. I'm not saying structure doesn't matter in a poem, but at the contrary, this is useful to get rid of it. Have you ever try to read some kind of experimental poetry, sublime in the words, but lacking even the minimal structure ? This is unreadable. Because we humans need a little structure.

And you will have noticed that poetry progressively relinquished the structure that was before necessary to make humans read it without getting too confused.

I maintain my point, poetry is about freeing you, getting your mind outside the mental structure on which your daily life is based. Speaking of sonnet, I advise you to notice by reading it how much Du Bellay or Agrippa d'Aubigne sonnets will free your mind if you stop focusing on the very structure. Enjoy !

Regards,
jdif

read it out loud

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm not familiar with 'Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm', I have read much of Glazier's work. His writing can be difficult to parse, but to see/hear Loss read from his own work is quite inspiring.

Often the text he performs will be projected on a screen behind him. In 'Bromeliads' or 'Vis Etudes' for example, where the text modulates mid-sentence, or where there is no established syntax for sequencing each node, the activity of reading becomes obvious - even a little exciting.

It's great to see Glazier get a little attention. If you enjoy the writing even a little bit, try to catch him at a reading.