For “obscure poetry” read “dignity.” Read “personal information.”
Say exactly what you mean, tell it exactly as it happened. You don’t have to hedge on specifics out of fear the reader won’t know what you’re talking about. Whatever provoked the poem, whatever cliff face you clung to in the night after your saint’s day, name it. Any strange name will be found, now. Here, have some Kaiserschmarrn.
That time you fell asleep on the subway. Days in Zuccotti Park. The spectacular breakup and the aftershocks, the friends egging each of them on. Or just the overdue fines on Irony, Contingency and Solidarity, the Grundrisse, The Anarchist Cookbook.
Every effort at totalizing human knowledge ends with the capture and destruction of that library. And then again, maybe not -- the encyclopedia led not to the fall of French enlightenment but to its apotheosis -- the Revolution.
The kingdom will be yours, but first you will need to tell us your story, all of it, especially the parts no one must know. Those are the most important parts, and they alone will assure you the kingdom.
Dick Cheney led the Vice Presidential search committee.
I remember the first time I used Google how clean the page was, no ads, no banners, no headlines. Just, “I’m feeling lucky.” Spoken like an enduring cultural icon of masculinity.
Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread: “In days gone by, it was not uncommon to buy loaves of levain bread that weighed in excess of a dozen pounds. What a marvelous sight that must have been!”
C.M. Bowra’s Poetry and Politics: “Poets became easy victims of ideas so vapid that even the public found little attraction in them.”
Secrecy causes lying. Security clearances throttle the flow of information upwards.
We work with limited information about a moving target while our faculties decline.
How much storage would you need to take a copy of all public domain material? The 15 terabyte statistic doesn’t seem to be circulating anymore. But you can get a terabyte for less than $100. A silver briefcase could hold enough drives, I’d imagine. So on the logic of cell phone miniaturization, it should be a pack of cards by 2020.
It won’t do much good to put these packs of cards in every child’s backpack if their parents have no time to read along and talk with them about it.
Data is fragile, as are learning and civilization.
Ted Nelson’s Xanadu -- transclusive copyright with micropayments -- somebody quotes you, you get a penny. It sounds wonderful, but how is this not the intellectual equivalent of estate tax repeal -- infinite copyright?
The most valuable books destroyed for the jewels in their covers. Selznick/Scorsese’s Melies -- the celluloid boiled down to make high heels.
Nothing is difficult forever. Why is this not comforting.
David Bordwell, quoted in Paul Cobley’s Narrative: Film narration is understood as “the organization of a set of cues for the construction of a story.”
David Lodge, in same: Middlemarch “survives to be read and re-read without ever finally being closed or exhausted.”
Gerald Edelman’s Second Nature: “What can we learn from the examples of evolution and immunity? First, we see that there must be a generator of diversity (GOD). Next, there must be a challenge by the environment confronting a species with competition (evolution) or a body with foreign molecules (immunity). Third, there must be differential amplification or reproduction of these variants that are fitter (in evolution) or that fit (as in antigen binding). But note that the mechanisms by which these three principles operate are not the same in the two cases.”
William James, quoted by Edelman: Narrative is a process whose function is knowing.
To know Middlemarch, do I have to say it in my own words?
Einstein, quoted by Edelman: Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
I wonder if he meant allusion.
J.H. Prynne, “Difficulties in the Translation of Difficult Poems”: It is these features that make prose discourse quick and relatively easy to read without too much semantic hesitation: we mostly know what to expect, from one sentence to the next.
Prynne, cont’d: “Poems are mostly not like this, and in a developed literary culture “difficult” poems are very distinctly different. The level of predictable linkage between one text component and the next, often between one word and the next, is often so low as to provoke continuing strong surprise in the reader, and a rich uncertainty over many possibilities crowded together. Not only is poetry characteristically condensed, so that some semantic links may be cut off or completely absent, but also a diversity of apparently incompatible reference is often deliberate and a valued feature of complex poems. A reader can move slowly through dense compositions of this kind, and pauses at moments of choice can enrich the activity of reading; it’s not necessary all the time to make precise decisions, because uncertainty may be intrinsic to the text and its internal connections to its method of thought.”
Why do we not often refer to the speed of reading -- it seems significant. The text I return to moves me along continuously, but always it slows me down, makes me patient, temporarily closes off my standing order for new information.
To read and re-read. To have a companion who is the source of ongoing (happy) surprise.
Poets who value surprise above all else either have not lived very long or have not had enough surprises, says the critic. And the poets respond, we pity you.
Think about the long established democratic system
Making a wage cut; the fourth pillar of your state
Newspaper allowed to talk about the election break,
Extemporizing television, home and broadband bundles
Explaining the birds and bees breeding like rabbits.
The best decision you ever made, call Optalaze now,
Hello, ring, take the Super Valu shooter's challenge,
100% family X marks the spot, only in a cinema near u
Today & tomorrow, calling for lagers, the average
Person's best built difficulties six months ago
Welcomes back a gun to your head so much better,
The presidential debate, the way it revealed so much
About Gerry Adams pushing in on top of us overnight,
Naturally not all bad news across Munster and Leinster,
Rough seas, steady and mild, the North wind's e-mail
Address, animal A&E a pet in need, look at you, this
Might be happy an ending, delicious, every day baked
Throughout the rules of lip color, make up of make up
Artists unite into primary drab grey color, Spartacus
Starring mad men, accidental tourists, friends, fiends
The gods themselves declared it.
Posted by: Ms America | February 20, 2012 at 07:12 PM
"J.H. Prynne, “Difficulties in the Translation of Difficult Poems”: It is these features that make prose discourse quick and relatively easy to read without too much semantic hesitation: we mostly know what to expect, from one sentence to the next."
I've been thinking of precisely this idea (though not breaking it off into prose/poetry) since reading Gleick's book Information: the information theory-based idea that randomness carries more information than non-randomness; the attendant idea that being able to guess what comes next makes something redundant. It certainly frames a strong argument for a pure obscurity.
And yet I'm not entirely convinced.
Posted by: Spencer Short | February 20, 2012 at 11:53 PM
Lovely and intriguing. Thanks, Jordan.
Posted by: Sandra Simonds | February 21, 2012 at 08:38 AM
Spencer,
The Gleick book is halfway down the stack of books I mean to read soonish. (Does he cover the disputed law of conservation of information? I would dearly appreciate expert guidance on that one -- can only keep my head from exploding by force of will for so long.)
I don't think predictability equals redundance, exactly. That's a little too close to valuing novelty for novelty's sake. But I do think a lot of what is taken for predictability is the result of hedging bets, rounding error, and other substitutes for specificity.
Ever look at the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences? Good times to be had.
Jordan
Posted by: Jordan Davis | February 22, 2012 at 11:00 AM
I was wanting a few tips to make my poetry more digestble.
Posted by: Hallzie | February 24, 2012 at 02:51 PM
Right, Jordan. I think there are important distinctions to make. For instance, in the framework I identify above, we're really talking about information systems, and attempts to compress information vehicles as far as possible. Because we usually think of information through a lens of utility, we have trouble getting our head around the idea that, in most cases, absent a narrowing context, more information actually creates uncertainty. This is why we create heuristics.
The key, then, is to find some kind of balance. Rather than novelty-for-novelty's sake, poems may attempt to find some balance between surprise and familiarity. Playing into cognitive limitations. Endless novelty (and endless information) is, in the end, endlessly exhausting.
Posted by: Spencer Short | February 24, 2012 at 07:30 PM
(Oh, and no - nothing on conservation that I recall. Sorry! The book is good, but it's not particularly well organized, and the thesis is uncertain. That said, it's full of great stuff. Including a great digression into Babbage, his Analytical Engine, and Byron's daughter, Ada.)
Posted by: Spencer Short | February 24, 2012 at 07:42 PM
I lost a prior comment, but the gist:
I think there's a gulf that we need to be careful with re: information systems and the work of folks like Claude Shannon. Eliminating redundancy in that context is necessary for compression. Because we tend to think of information through the lens of utility, we forget that more information actually creates uncertainty due to our cognitive limitations (hence our use of heuristics).
In our context, though, predictability may be thought an important component, a means of balancing out "surprise." Poetry - at least from one perspective - intentionally invokes "excess" meaning. That excess may not just be indeterminacy, but it puts it at odds with the kind of delivery system Shannon envisioned, I think. Anyway, fascinating stuff. Thanks for this.
Posted by: Spencer Short | February 24, 2012 at 07:49 PM