Like alphabet soup in cyberspace: The e-poetry of Loss Pequeño Glazier
by Gary Lehmann
| Poem: | Corn Rule from "_E_: Poem for html" | |
| Poet: | Loss Pequeño Glazier | |
| Published in: | Electronic Poetry Center |
Today's poetry scene is wider and deeper than it has ever been in the last hundred years. It ranges all the way from doggerel, that all-time favorite of retirement parties and birthday events, to computer generated poems, which alter their text as you read them. In this latter category is the world of Texas-born computer-guru and poet, Loss Pequeño Glazier, director of the Electronic Poetry Center in Buffalo, N.Y.
The EPC, as it is called, is the most extensive Web-based digital poetry resource center in the world. Each month it gets tens of thousands of hits from all around the world. Glazier is the author of the groundbreaking book Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (University of Alabama Press, 2002), which promises to become one of the foundation documents for this sort of modern poetry.
Loss Pequeño Glazier grew up in bilingual South Texas, as well as Japan, England, and California. He speaks many languages and thinks multilingually. This sort of dexterity with language has perhaps led him to see the functions of language in a different way from most people who think of their language as merely an invisible daily tool for survival. Perhaps because Loss has traveled so extensively in his adult life, he has apparently formed the view that traditional “language has failed us,” by which he appears to mean that the grammar, rhetoric and logic we rely on daily to convey our thoughts and feelings no longer fully convey our needs and wants to others. Has language channeled our ability to think and feel to the extent that we need computers to help us break out of this straightjacket?
Loss mistrusts traditional language to express the full range of our poetic sensations as well. Instead, he has come to see that computer-generated words can have a profound impact on our ability to perceive reality in new and exciting ways.
When he constructs a new “poem,” he starts by establishing some rules in a simple JAVA script which determines how the words or phrases will be selected for any given representation of his poem. Then he enters the “data,” which can be words, phrases or just syllables. Finally, he establishes primary, secondary, and tertiary positions in each grammatical construction, and then he lets the computer do the writing.
Each time you open up a poem, the computer cooks up a new configuration of the words to be read for that moment only. No two visits to any given “poem” yield the same word set.
Here is a selection from E: Poem for html.
The angled spot, repeated but with
each repetition modulated. Hidden
among rows of corn, buried but not -
the paired openings between rows
bear trickled light, curve and collapse
on faint reflections, all pulled up, or
languid in the moon feast, fertility
rite, spectacular aegis of summered
trope. As if it were simple. Corpus
marched to the edge of the furrow,
pleasured in simple extensions of
carved lesions swerving into black.
To walk the aisle, with the fed corn
stalks spreading before. Opening
to the mediator, keen visaged, ruler's
mark - unfold effortlessly to inevi-
table imprint of instrument's depth.
Of course, it should be said that each representation of a “poem” is not totally random. The rules of engagement entered into the computer's program combined with the vocabulary, here called “data,” determine to establish to some degree the range of ideas that can emerge in any given generation. Sometimes the computer even rewrites the poem as it is being read, causing the work to change while on the screen. Many of Loss' works on the web are accompanied by photographs from a third world country he has visited such as Cuba or Costa Rica. This affiliation with the third world of course dates back to his up-bringing in the border country of Texas, but beyond that, there is clearly a desire on his part to seek a kind of universal language through poetry.
The difference between computer-generated poetry and traditional poetry is that the way meaning is delivered has been changed. In traditional verse, the poet attempts to create a sort of tight crystalline structure for the words so that the meaning glows out of the compact character of the whole. Every word must convey meaning. In Loss' poetry each word is a kind of crystal in itself, but it achieves no particularly brilliant meaning until it is placed within a frame by the computer leaning against other words. Then suddenly the junctures between the words create sudden, transitory, and unforeseen meanings.
One punch of the keyboard and all the words go into freefall again. Another stroke and “faint reflections” has become “curved reflections” or “collapsed reflections.” Those words were replaced by others, like alphabet soup in cyberspace. The choices are not totally random. The computer program limits certain combinations and allows others. Still, the net effect introduces a sense of randomness and spontaneity which permits an almost infinite variety of readings.
Each word has potential merit in any given poetic configuration, but it needn't be the one to contain the insightful aspects in that configuration. Restart the program and the computer will brew up a whole new set of words based on this vocabulary and these rhetorical instructions. No two viewings of a “poem” by Loss will be the same.
From my own point of view, poetry gains status in my world precisely because it shines some aspect of insight on my life. I read a poet whose work generates insight for me, and I abandon one who doesn't. I find that randomly generated words, even within a strict system of logic and grammar, fails most of the time to deliver as much human insight as poems written by traditional poets in the throes of some deep emotion. Sometimes Loss' computer programs do generate strange even shocking word combinations that stimulate curious ideas, but in general I find that computers, at this point in their development, are not yet ready to tell me more about human experience than human beings.
Over time, perhaps, computer hardware, language programs, or computer poets themselves will be able to fathom more fully the mathematical basis of feelings expressed in words and outshine the traditional poet. I am afraid, however, that the computer will have help ed us colonize Mars or populate the Mariana Trench long before it will be able to generate words that chart the depths of the human soul.
Gary Lehmann teaches writing and poetry at the Rochester
Institute of Technology.
His essays, poetry and short stories
are widely published -- about 60 pieces a year. He is the director
of the Athenaeum Poetry group which recently published its
second chapbook, Poetic Visions. He is also author of a book of poetry
entitled Public Lives and Private Secrets (Foothills Press, 2005),
and co-author and editor of a book of poetry entitled The Span I Will Cross. http://www.garylehmann.blogspot.com.