COMMENTARIES

Here's where I'll share my ideas about weekly readings, or general thoughts about the class.

April 21, 2014

I personally loved this week's readings and exercises, and wish I could have spent more time exploring the various websites with this material. I have always been fascinated by the way typography, words, and images can interact to create meaning and aesthetic experience. When I was doing my "Graphic Design" excercise, I found that changing the typography and the page size gave me very different experiences of the poem each time. The same goes for when I was playing with the line breaks; I felt that in each blank space there was a place for a thought or an emotion about the poem. Perhaps most fascinating to me was that I used poems of my own that I had already made using techniques I learned in this class (specifically, ekphrasis and synchronicity) so these poems were double-processed in a way. The other two poems are from Sara Teasdale, a poet I am studying for my King Arthur class. I found the visual poetry piece very enjoyable to make; I enjoyed selecting the images and the text that would interact with them. I used a lot of surreal art in this piece, and the text almost provides a grounding element to the otherwise fanciful images.

April 4, 2014

My favorite readings from this week were Karri Kokko's Shadow Finlandia and the Claudius App slash sheet. I felt that these two pieces were able to blend material from diverse sources so fluidly that each read like an independent piece. When I first read the Claudius App splash sheet, I did not actually realize that it was a compilation and thought that it was actually the mission of a certain magazine with really high standards. It was only when I went back and read the explanation again that I realized what was actually going on in the piece. Regardless, the read was fairly exhilarating. As for Kokko's piece, I felt that although it did not read as fluidly as the Claudius App splash sheet, it provided an interesting perspective on organizing material according to content and theme. For some reason, I found it very comforting to read; it showed that sadness is a universal emotion, and thus allowed me to feel better about sadness, if that makes any sense.

March 31, 2014

My favorite part about this week's readings was the interactive nature of Aram Saroyan and Robert Genier's works. It gave the impression that not only could each poem stand on its own, but they were a part of a larger process. This would have been radically different if the poems had simply been presented in a list, such as my poems are. The fact that the reader actually has to perform an action in order to keep reading puts more responsibility on the act of reading itself. We cannot just passively absorb information; we must think about what is happening. However, I will admit that the abstractness of many of these poems often left me wondering if the responsibility laid completely with the reader; sometimes it seemed as if the word choices were completely arbitrary. For instance, here is one of Saroyan's poems:

It is something anyone could write, but perhaps the importance lies in the fact that it has, in fact, been written? I think this goes back to the question of what we accept as art. As for the other readings, I think that it is interesting to play with the idea of counting words rather than counting syllables; it turns the work less into something that you should listen to closely, but rather something you should look at closely. I think an interesting variation on this would be to count the number of morphemes in a line.

March 24, 2014

I found this week's readings fascinating in their varying forms. Paul Violi's index was particularly interesting because at first look, it really did look like an index, although it is not alphabetized like most indexes. The form acted as an interesting type of constraint; it limits the use of adjectives and prohibits full sentences. Certain items are subset under others, specifically "analysis of important works." The fact that the poem is arranged in chronological order rather than alphabetical order as the form would dictate made me feel as if I were being a bit coddled. I still don't know what to make of the text box on the left-hand side of the page.

I found that when reading most of these poems, I tried to make a concious decision separating what the authors were trying to say, and what was dictated by the form. This caused an irreconcilable conflict in my brain. The form created the meaning, just as it suppressed the meaning. And I'm not completely sure what "meaning" means.

March 17, 2014

My favorite readings this week were definitely from Eunoia. I found that isolating each vowel into its own poem created an interesting emotional experience in each piece. It seems that I (and perhaps others) have a gut reaction to each vowel just according to the way it sounds. For instance, I found myself luxuriating in the rich "o" sounds, but sped much more quickly through the short "i" sounds. "U" just felt uncomfortable to me for some reason; perhaps because it is one of the less frequently used vowels, or perhaps because of the repitition of odd names.

I also found that when reading Jabberwocky, nonsense words did not necessarily mean that the meaning was nonsense. I still managed to get a sense of what was happening in the narrative of the poem even if the words themselves had no meaning outside of the context of the poem.

March 3, 2014

The readings for this week largely gave me the impression that the poets were attempting to isolate poetry from the human ego. The act of randomizing language and recombining it without discretion creates a new way to read words without involving human emotion. While I think that this is an interesting way to come up with new ideas and see things from a different perspective, one of the most compelling things about poetry is its ability to convey the essence of the human spirit. Honestly, otherwise we just become computers.

Writing my poems this week, I found that the process felt largely out of my hands. Although I chose the source material, everything else was decided by the process. It made me feel as if this work were not truly my own, but rather the collective work of a multitude of authors. It was if I was a chef, following a recipe exactly without adding any of my own secret ingredients. It ends up tasting good, but I can't really claim any credit for it.

February 24, 2014

Reading Pierre Joris's Poasis this week was an exercise in confusion with shining moments of clarity - oases, if you will. I particularly enjoyed all of the allusions to Greek and Mesopotamian mythology; these references made me feel as if I shared some common ground with the poet. I often found myself thinking that this was highly visual poetry - the way the words were spaced on the page was highly significant. Occasionally, I would come to the end of a page and think it was the end of a poem, only to see that it continued on the next page. I think in its ideal form, this book would acually be a series of scrolls so that the arbitrary size of the pages of a book would not be a constrictive factor.

A few lines that particularly jumped out at me are as follows:

there is a dream at the center of the earth
another oasis reached -- o! as is, as is, oh Isis beached again a mother oh!
a place to come to & go from never to be in
learn how to breathe with eyes
lemur morning
lemur mourning
you sleep in my / head in front of my eyes
stir up minds / with the back / of the dream

I think these poems are rife with possibilities for recombination and translation; they are very experimental in nature, in the sense that they almost seem randomly constructed but not quite. There is a playfullness that the structure of the poems elicits; you never know quite why something is structured the way it is, and that is what creates the liveliness.

February 10, 2014

This weeks readings were possibly some of the most confusing pieces of writing I have ever read; however, I still found some of them strangely moving.

For instance, Bernadette Meyer's Studying Hunger was terrifying, exhilarating, and fascinating. There were times when I definitely understood completely where she was coming from - for instance, when she said that there are some things you just cannot write, and images must suffice instead. Sometimes her work read like gibberish, other times it read like a dream, other times like a horror story. I like how she took things she had said in the past and reexamined them with different results. One poignant quote: "Poetry is unethical."

Hannah Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal was an exercise in performed readings. The three voices and the three typefaces demonstrated the way the brain can think in many directions at once. Sometimes the voices were working together to say something; other times they appeared to be fighting. If the human brain only thought in words, perhaps this might have been what it feels like to think.

On the other hand, Ubliminal was nearly complete gibberish to me. The lack of punctuation and line breaks made the very act of reading it difficult to do; the visual effect was one of a solid block of almost meaningless words.

Clark Coolidge's passage was somewhat more readable, mainly because of the punctuation. IV seemed much more consistent to me than III; there seemed to be more of a driving force to describe.

February 3, 2014

I found this week's readings fascinating in that multiple poets can start witht he same source material and come up with modifications that are so diverse. With the Catullus 112 passages, each translation said essentially the same thing, content-wise, but the tones and styles were very different. The Zukofskys' homophonic translation of Catullus 27 was particularly fascinating because it managed to create new images completely separate from those originally created in the Latin version. "grape-loving breeziness" springs to mind.

The Communist Manifesto read in a Yorkshire dialect was a weird mix of clear and unclear for me. Some words I could completely understand, while others seemed to be in another langauge. Eventually, I found myself simply listening to the sounds rather than trying to extract meaning. It reminded me of when my grandfather used to read me bedtime stories in his heavy Russian accent - I would just listen to the sounds and eventually nod off to sleep.

As for the 85 project and the Yinglishi project, I found them reminicent of a project I learned about in architecture class last semester: designers were taking biological information about how certain cells moved and grew, and translated that into a series of numbers which they then used to create a series of woven tubes, lit with various colored lights. In other words, it confused me, and I think the process is far more important than the result, in both cases.