Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm 124
| 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.
Anatman? Sounds like Pittsburghese (Score:2, Interesting)
People around here sometimes say: Anat at the end of their sentences, short for and that. Which is the same as: and stuff.
Whatcha do?
I went down to Primani Bros, Ride Aid, anat.
Yinz definately need to learn a new language if you come in our neck of the woods.
What makes UNIX users are so smart (Score:5, Interesting)
The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
by Thomas Scoville
http://www.insecure.org/stf/scoville_unix_as_lite
An ode to Glazier (Score:3, Interesting)
anti clock wise.
Penetrating poetry pokes my peripheral vision
like a fully charged capacitor on a hot summer day
My eyes glaze over Glazier's prose
His profound instructions verbose
in machine language, almost
optimized for O(1) execution on a fast Althon
crippled by the superslow multitasking windows OS,
Yet, continue to register their keys,
in my hashtable of memories.
Vogon vibe (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh freddled gruntbuggly
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don't!
Honestly, if you, in the spirit of semirandom recombination that seems to characterize a good deal of Glazier's work, take the nonsense words and add in random techno-jargon, you'd get a very Glazier-y and equally unsatisfying verse. Jargon-wielding for what appears to be its own sake doesn't make for nerd-digestible poetry. So yes, while I applaud the experimental nature of some of his stuff, I don't much like it.
Commercial interests limit poetry in code (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Interesting)
No no no, poetry has nothing to do with freedom. Poetry predates free verse, and even free verse is not about freedom as much as it is about a newer, more flexible use of older forms (in this sense, free verse is not unlike python).
What makes poetry different from prose is precisely the degree to which structure matters. In poetry, we appreciate accidental bits of syntactic elegance as well as large scale architecture. Loving poetry is precisely about loving the nuance of structure -- loving the way a sonnet fulfills its form, whether by pioneering a totally new approach or simply by implementing an old approach particularly elegantly.
The idea that poetry should give you freedom just doesn't make any sense. Just because there have been radical poets who wrote about freedom does not mean that poetry has an innate capacity to free you any more than code has an innate capacity to help you buy stuff. We just happen to associate poetry with free thinkers at this historical moment (and computers with popup ads).
In either case, an aficionado appreciates the subtleties of form, regardless of whether a poem (or piece of code) is selling hotdogs or making an elaborate fart joke or even helping to "free" you (whatever that means).
tmh
Ahhh, home!! (Score:3, Interesting)
More poetry... (Score:4, Interesting)
<>!*''#
^@`$$-
*!'$_
%*<>#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 [berkeley.edu] section of william wu's site [berkeley.edu]
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
The second argument is that i think both code and poetry more directly reflect the thought of the creator than other forms of language. Shelley said that poetry is "imagining that which we know". Writing code is creating language, but it's also imagining what will happen when that code executes. Basically, i'd say that both poetry and code are very close to thought.
Re:Ugh, poetry (Score:3, Interesting)
If you try hard enough, you can interpret a poem however you want. For instance, part of a robert frost(I think) poem goes "good fences make good neighbors." At first it seems that this line is saying that keeping people separated prevents clashes. But it may also be interpreted as meaning a neighbor who maintains his side of the fence well is a good neighbor. How do we know which of these diametrically opposed meanings the poet means? As I recall context was no help. Is this communicating effectively? If you can't decide what a statement means, how can you decide whether it's true or not?
Now, if the intent of the author doesn't mean anything, what's the point of the poem in the first place? Just make up your own meaning and skip the middle man. As far as I can tell, the whole of poetry and much of literature is like the emperors new clothes, completely without substance, but everyone accepts it because they don't want to look stupid.
As for your poem there, no, I wouldn't approve that, since it contains no explanation of why the author feels that way. I promise I'm not lazy, I love reading complex philosophial arguments, political theory, and scientific papers(for the other poster, I'm a scientist, not a programmer. But the love of logic is the same.) I just want to be sure that what I read has an actual point to it.