A case of assisted improvisation

The poetry course will be over in a day, so I decided to share my last essay I sent there a week ago.

The task was to write a "random" poem using the method of mesostic and an automated script, and then to do a close reading of it and to express thoughts on the technique used.

There were actually two tasks to choose from with the remaining one being playing with Bernadette Mayer's methods, but I made my decision very quickly for the reasons explained below.

***

I can't resist starting with an explanation of my choice between the two options available for this assignment. It was easier for me than I expected to make this decision when I realised that despite its "technical" feel the "mesostic" method is actually not very different from some tactics we were already introduced to (Tristan Tzara's "How to make a Dadaist poem" being the most obvious example). This recurrence was the first thing to catch my eye and it didn't allow me to dismiss this option thoughtlessly as a curious but (at first glance) not deep enough experiment.

Then the fact John Cage was a composer and his idea of words being liberated from the "forced" meanings to become sort of as musical samples simply left me no other choice. Not being an English native speaker this is exactly how I used and sometimes still do perceive English lyrics in songs when vocals aren't very distinctive, and the strange thing is that it doesn't immediately make them dull or unworthy - they remain quite enjoyable, only in a different way. So due to my weakness I have a privilege to know for sure that the result I received from the automated script wasn't just a chaotic nonsense:

          What
         hAve
          Looking
         aT

          Whole
families sHopping
         aIsles
          The avocados
         aMong
  refrigerAtor
      eyeiNg

I chose WALT WHITMAN as a "spine" for my poem because from the very beginning of the course I was definitely more attracted to Whitmanian bunch. I believe by the way that this first step is very important in mesostic as it is the only part of the process which is entirely up to the creator. While pointing the script to source text is also a conscious decision, there is no control on what exactly would make it into the final poem. While you're free to choose between the undoubtedly different sources - different epochs, schools, genres, authors - it is still possible that the final difference would be next to none if the same words are picked out. Same words taken out of their natural context, much as fish taken out of the water, immediately become the same and lose the name of action.

So it is the "spine" that grants them a new life and essentially defines the new context – or more precisely, you do by choosing that "axis". The whole process of the creation packed in a single concentrated effort - when you accept this idea it suddenly becomes difficult to shout out a "random" name. What could've been easier than that before you became aware of the trick?

I used "A Supermarket in California" as a source because of its direct connection to the spine ("Where are we going, Walt Whitman?") It might be a wrong thing to abuse the randomness in that way but in my opinion it is justified by the created opportunity of receiving an answer to the questions asked in the poem.

I'm satisfied with the result which by the way was the first combination I received. If reviewed as a "foreign song" merely by how words sound it's proportionally weighted with the first shorter stanza composed of shorter words than the longer second one. It also starts with "what" which rhymes with "Walt" creating an intricate connection between the first horizontal and the first vertical words.

In the second stanza I like how the word "shopping" connects the two lines there, being shared between the "families shopping" and "shopping aisles", equally forming two meaningful combinations. There is also meta meaning in it as it is shopping as a process, not as a word, that leads people to aisles in real life.

The geometry of the poem is also nice: not too symmetrical but also not shaky with the counterpoising balanced beams of "families" and "avocados". Poem's "body" has a non-trivial shape resembling a comma, straight for most of its length but curving left at the end. Again an odd meta feeling here: with not a single comma in the whole poem it's still basically a list of independent words, each of them could be followed by one - so forming together a giant comma, they unexpectedly make sense.

But arguably the main purpose of any poem like this is to provoke thoughts on the context defined the spine phrase or name, to shed some light from an unusual angle and to admire the fanciful shadows it forms. Well, it did make me think of Walt Whitman, his poetry and his followers like Allen Ginsberg lost in the supermarket. It wasn't a single distinctive and clear idea, or I’d say not a problem which became clear to me. It was rather lots of unshaped thoughts and emotions, quick associations appearing instantly to burst into new ones like fireworks - bright, enjoyable and unstable.

Much like what I feel when I listen to music, only this time that was a music of "raw" words, instruments for which I have chosen for the band of the mesostic myself.

Back to school

I'm taking an American poetry course with Coursera the main part of which is writing essays. It's been quite a while since I did anything like that, and needless to say back in the day essays used to come in Russian, so my first results were as miserable as you could expect. They probably still are, but the last week's essay was finally the one I'm not that ashamed to share.

So the task was to compare two versions of William Carlos Williams's "Young Woman at a Window" (1, 2) and decide which one looks "more imagist" and why.

***

"The song sings itself"

According to a famous apocryphal story Michelangelo was once asked how did he know what to cut away. The response was, "It's simple. I just remove everything that doesn't look like David."

Much like Michelangelo's work, the second version of the poem looks like it was stripped of everything that wasn't very necessary to shape the idea. Pretty much everything representing a logical consequence of something already stated has been cut out. As a result, every new line of that version adds something new to the picture which did exist before instead of simply clarifying or detailing presented the previous stanzas. "Nor the merely decorative word".

This becomes clear when two versions are compared line by line. "She sits there" - where else can she sit? What changes if the woman sits "here" and not "there"? Sorry, but "there" has to leave. "While" - not needed, this poem is snapping a moment like a camera, so of course it's "while", no need to state it literally, goodbye and thank you.

Although these were the easy bits and it gets more complicated later. "The child who robs her knows nothing of his theft" - the whole point is gone in the second version, so this time it is not only about removing some obstructive words, this is a complete message being removed. That seems like an important edit yet it doesn't make a new poem, it stays under the same title - that probably means it's still the same and the cut wasn't damaging to the global idea.

This is where another imagism manifesto point comes to mind, particularly "to represent an image" one. From the image poem creates, reader is supposed to get the fact the child changes ("robs") woman's life of something on his or her own. Should it be stated directly, it'd give reader the idea straight away "robbing" them of their own impressions and intellectual work. Everything else in the poem would become nothing more than a frame for that literal statement rendering most of it once again unnecessary.

When the message is removed, all left is an image of a woman crying, holding a child who is interested in something else, "his nose pressed to the glass". He is not focused on the woman at the moment while she has him on her lap and obviously can't ignore him even being extremely disappointed. She is robbed by child having to care about him without receiving much back yet.

The same message is still delivered, only in a gentle way.

The manifesto also defines imagism as something "hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite." This fits the vision again. While the reader is invited to make their own conclusions, the picture created by the second version of the poem remains crisp. All the major words are nouns with very particular meaning in a focused context: "cheer", "tears", "lap", "child", "nose", "glass". Metaforical interpretation is hardly possible here - the "woman" is the woman and the "child" is the kid, they aren't, say, Nature and Humanity, such a comparison seems very artificial and non-applicable.

Everything is kept simple and the image is clear.

Here is a woman in tears. Her child doesn't hear her.

Humble discoveries

There is something I wanted to tell a long ago but kept forgetting again and again, so that's what I noticed one day and found it funny.

Many foreign speakers who study English (myself included) are very curious for different accents, and the more gibberish, the better. Heavy accents from different regions of the country are often considered among foreigners to be the essence of the language. As a result, an ability to speak putting on some native accent and not your obvious foreign one is considered to be quite an achievement in learning (which it probably is).

This habit is obviously based on the fact that people don't speak like that on courses and the only way you can get enough of that experience is to live here. That knowledge makes you different from somebody just learning English in their home country.

What's the funny thing I mentioned in the beginning? The thing is, the best way to dispel that delusion is to listen to some undoubtedly well-educated person, especially if language is their profession. Suddenly you realise that oh my god I can understand everything as if he or she spoke my native language! Oh I didn't think that's possible! No, no, no it can't be THAT easy, WHAT DID I STUDY FOR?

So accents are still very interesting and being able to recognise and understand them indeed differ people with and without language experience. Still, the best and the real English is apparently... yes, the one that your teacher tried to speak. Might be trivial, but took some time for me to accept this fact.

I remembered about that while listening to David Crystal's videos today. See, I'm sure every English learner regardless of their skill level can understand very easily what he's talking about:

"Russian Mountains"

That what is called an English leave in Russia is called a French leave in England.

Pimple for a dimple

Some mistakes are considered typical for native English speakers and at the same time are very rare when English is a second language, i.e. confusing "then" and "than", "whose" and "who's", "it's" and "its" etc.

My only idea is that native speakers first remember how word sounds and than then write it down mixing up different variants of representation, and as against to that those who acquired language knowledge from dictionary first remember its spelling.

On the other hand one of my personal very annoying problems is with prepositions and phrasal verbs. Translating literally and using Russian prepositions doesn't work, resulting in numerous silly faults. Also, there is no rule allowing to derive a right conclusion and you depend entirely on your vocabulary realizing how modest your skill is slightly more often than it is needed to keep yourself in tone.

A grammar lesson from 007

MI6 seeking for "relationship-building skilled" people:



This is not a rare occasion - you can easily find similar ads in newspapers and surely you'll find them surfing popular job boards.

Also, note the pronoun "they" used with a "person", a legal method to avoid the problem of choosing between "he" or "she" when gender is unknown.

It is also okay to use "she" in that case (at least I've met that in literature and press), for the male gender is understood by default, so it's less impolite. And I've encountered clumsy "he or she" turn many times before. Apparently, the only way to make a mistake here is to use male chauvinistic "he".

That is the question

In school, I had problems remembering correct Shakespeare's surname spelling. I always tried to make it more logical and harder to forget - well, you know, Shakespear is the one who shakes his spear (uhm, celebrating his victory in a fight where he used the spear to win, probably?). Anyway, that was pretty easy but the closing "e" was lost from the pattern, generating mistakes.

But yesterday I discovered that my way to spell it wasn't so wrong:



Then, I was able to search for both spellings to unveil the reason of those variant readings:

Elizabethan spelling was very erratic by twentieth-century standards, though it was not (as is sometimes stated) totally without rules. Even the simplest proper names were spelled a variety of ways, but we can at least look at the range of different spellings used for a given name and see what patterns emerge.

Oh, that was exactly my dream on Grammar lessons!

Better late than never

What I'm going to write about is rather obvious, I reckon, but I had my fun investigating this.

Today, I came across the Nedroid Comics post quoting familiar verse about an omniscient mirror: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"

I rushed to search engines to discover that this phrase belongs to Snow White famous cartoon. Then, I became curious about its connection with the fairy-tale by Pushkin. That's why I had started apologising - I had never realised that those two stories are almost similar before. Dwarfs or knights, not a big difference, but had I never have such an idea until today. Shame on me.

So, both those stories are based on Brothers Grimm tale. Still, in that particular case, Disney's cartoon is quoted most probably - English translations of Grimm's tale that I had managed to find, are of another meter and use "looking glass" term instead of "mirror":

"Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall, who in this land is the fairest of all?"

Bonus: Brutal heavy metal fans doing their own research on the rhyme. Maybe I don't have to be so ashamed.

"One nation under CCTV"

Yesterday I spotted a vehicle with a strange message on it:



Later at home, I've looked through company website. Alas, behind that promising orwellian name, commonplace mobile networking solutions were offered. Nevertheless I remained excited and only after I while I understood that the definition which is so unusual and full of contiguities for a newcomer's ear is used to mark expert witnesses, 3rd party analysts providing expertise to the court.

Still, some pieces close to the intuitive interpretation can be found.

Slowpoking

Reading through Dracula I came across a familiar phrase:

I got him on the subject of the legends, and he went off at once into a sort of sermon. I must try to remember it and put it down.

"It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel, that's what it be and nowt else. These bans an' wafts an' boh-ghosts an' bar-guests an' bogles an' all anent them is only fit to set bairns an' dizzy women a'belderin'. They be nowt but air-blebs. [...]"

My shame, I wasn't awared of that famous film title being a persistent sentence.

A sticky note for a future post

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature by Bruce Sterling.

I totally agree with a large part of this list but for some of that items I can't see real challenges at all or challenges that are really new to the literature and are imprinted by our aera. I wish I had more time to write more details but now I haven't and gotta explain my position later.

NB: I loved the verb balkanize.

Pic related, it's me

Maybe you have already noticed that I like to end sentences with prepositions :( FML.

Radio today

http://audiobookradio.net – if you are into English literature you can find this station useful. I’ve stumbled upon it today while surfing default Nokia internet radio stations catalog. By the way, I want to share my understanding of internet radio stations phenomenon.

Nowadays when one has no problem of downloading whatever he or she likes to listen to right now the broadcastings are still alive - but with a different sense. As to me, I turn on broadcasting when I can’t decide what exactly I’m interested in or when I face some new genre or unfamiliar media. It is too hard for me to make a really random decision and too sluggish I am sometimes to drill down and make a grounded choice.

So I do really value good stations for helping me to escape repeatedly Buridan’s donkey’s fate.

Disillusionment

A game worth playing: The Times Spelling Bee.

My first result was only 7 of 15. Then I tried again and received 13 of 15 points but still the sobering effect was remarkable.