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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.
I love writing software, and I enjoy reading other people's source
You need to get out more.
...because he needs the kind of help that only a hooker could give!
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
The title of this book is in the form of a Slashback headline. I was confused for a moment.
I think I shall never see
A program as lovely as a tree.
In fact, without a program call
I'll never see a tree at all.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
This kind of reminds me of an essay I read many years ago, about UNIX people, literature, and the command-line. Here's a link if you're interested:
r ature.txt
The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
by Thomas Scoville
http://www.insecure.org/stf/scoville_unix_as_lite
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
Let's overcome our weakness.
Bah, this poetry stuff isn't hard. I'll give you one.
Programmer's Solitude
by illuminata
Cold, snow
winter breeze blow
at home desk, sorrow.
No love comes to the programmer
no matter how good his code.
Internally crumbling
about to implode.
Couples happy
streets alive.
Not the programmer
dead inside.
The right hand is warm
but dangerous.
For that hand prevents love.
But in return, gives instant gratification.
Why not?
Never very attractive
no female attention
only apprehension.
On a lonely winter's day
do not approach the programmer.
You know where that hand has been.
And the programmer never works all day.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
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.
Disclaimer: IANAB (I am not a Buddhist).
<>!*''#
^@`$$-
*!'$_
%*<>#4
&)../
{~|**SYSTEM HALTED
waka waka bang splat tick tick hash
carat at back-tick dollar dollar dash
splat bang tick dollar underscore
percent splat waka waka number four
ampersand right-paren dot dot slash
curly bracket tilde pipe splat splat crash
Taken from the 1337/poetry section of william wu's site
Jesus saves... the rest of you take 5d20 damage.
main(once, was)
{
a = unix_owner;
who(pulled, a, PR_BONER) {
they->staked_out[some_claims && called(ppl_names)];
}
but_everyone_knew(darl, was, a, stoner);
}
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
!do{gentle->night(good)}
Wait, that was Dylan Thomas. Nevermind.