Series – Page 6 – I ❤️ E-Poetry

“@Postmeaning” by David Knoebel (part 2 of 2)

February 23, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

Note: This is the second in a series of 2 postings on “Postmeaning.” Here’s a link to the first entry.

…stmeaning” also via Twitter, starting on June 11, 2011, providing a snippet of the 100 word text and a link to the note or audio file in the Facebook page. An interesting detail about the Twitter via Facebook publication is that it cuts the 100-word posting down to a aize Twitter could manage, including making room for the shortened link and ellipsis. This creates a secondary cut, one that isn’t designed by Knoebel, which potentially creates a new textual iteration which could be interpreted differently from the original. Perhaps this accounts for the shift to shorter entries on July 21, which creates a direct concordance between the Facebook and Twitter texts, while at the same time allowing them to develop different audiences by eliminating the link to the Facebook Page.

“Frequency [Four Square, Two Towers]” by Scott Rettberg and the Machine (part 5 of 5)

February 16, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This is part 5 of a series of 5 postings on poems generated by the “Frequency” program. For an overview of the series, read the first entry.

The exercise of creating a data set based on Oulipian constraints and creating array and mechanisms to generate certain pre-existent forms, laid the groundwork for Rettberg to be inspired to create three forms: Doubling (discussed in the previous entry), Four Square, and Two Towers. The two latter forms were powered by three of the Machine’s capabilities: the ability to count characters in a line (including spaces), use that information to generate arrays and poems, and use a fixed-width font (Courier). This gives Rettberg pictorial control over text, allowing him to create relations between lines of the same string length and cluster them accordingly to create stanzas.

“Frequency [Snowball, Doubling]” by Scott Rettberg and the Machine (part 4 of 5)

February 15, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This is part 4 of a series of 5 postings on poems generated by the “Frequency” program. For an overview of the series, read the first entry.

This entire project was inspired by the OULIPO, and how they created new poetic and literary forms based on mathematical and other constraints. Not only did they create a great number of fascinating constraints— such as the n+7, the snowball, and all manner of permutational works— they also helped us rethink traditional poetic forms as constraints that led to creativity. From this perspective, a sonnet or a haiku are little rhetorical machines, and to write one is to shape’s one’s thoughts and language choices to capitalize upon their affordances and constraints.

“Frequency [Terza Rima and Sonnets]” by Scott Rettberg and the Machine (part 3 of 5)

February 14, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This is part 3 of a series of 5 postings on poems generated by the “Frequency” program. For an overview of the series, visit the first entry.

The terza rima and sonnets generated by the “Frequency” program have two main challenges: coherence over a greater number of lines and the rhetorical expectations that come with the form. The easiest part of all this is rhyme, since Rettberg created 12 arrays according to line endings and up to 7 rhyming variables that draw from them to create poems with the necessary rhyme schemes..

“Frequency [Tanka, Haiku]” by Scott Rettberg and the machine (part 2 of 5)

February 13, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

This is part 2 of a series of 5 postings on poems generated by the “Frequency” program. For an overview of the series, visit the first entry.

The Japanese Tanka (which literally means “short poem”) is represented here as a 5-line poem in which the first and third lines are selected from the 5-syllable line array, and the second fourth and fifth are selected from the 7-syllable array. A title is selected randomly from among all the lines in the data set and displayed in upper case. In a short poem like this, the title is probably the most important line because it sets up the conceptual frame by which the whole poem will be interpreted. Take for example, Tanka number 30:

END OF US

house is not the same
way different than before
ask them to end it
old men just want it to end
that you will take to the air

“Frequency” by Scott Rettberg and the machine (part 1 of 5)

February 12, 2013 by Leonardo Flores

Title accompanied by a wave diagram, both in white against a black background. Black text on a gray rectangle. Text: "FREQUENCY WORD LIST The lines of all the poems in Frequency are constrained by the fact that I used only 200 of the most common English words in them. The poems generated by Frequency are built from a pool of 2000 lines I wrote. The process of writing the lines was not aided by the machine and was painstaking work. I wrote a set of ten lines beginning with each word, only using the other words in this list in the rest of the line. It is perhaps not unsurprisingly difficult to make meaningful expressions with such a limited vocabulary, but in the end I was surprised by how flexible these base units of our language can be. the of and a to in is you that it he was for on are as with his they I at be this have from or one had by word" — Open “Frequency” by Scott Rettberg and the machine (part 1 of 5)

The “Frequency” project is an investigation into Oulipian constraint-based writing in several levels:

A linguistically determined lexicon of the 200 most frequently used words in the English language— an endeavor that is already built upon the constraint of the corpus that analysis is based upon: Oxford Online and Google have both famously made such analyses, with massive and different data sets.
Rettberg then wrote 10 lines of verse beginning with each word, using only the words on the list, for a total of 2000 lines of verse. This alone is a massive creative endeavor which he describes as “painstaking work.”
He analyzed these lines to develop a data set, organized in arrays based on the following variables: frequency rank of initial word, rhyming end words, number of syllables per word, number of syllables per line, number of words per line, and lines per string length (number of characters, including spaces).
The analysis embedded in these arrays allowed Rettberg to write algorithms to generate 200 instances of 10 different kinds of formally constrained poems, some from well established poetic traditions, one developed by the OULIPO, and three he developed himself.

Reading the Agrippa Code (part 4 of 4)

July 23, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Twelve days after launching the Agrippa Challenge on July 10, 2012, Quinn Dupont made the official announcement that it had been “cracked.”

It was even easy, for those with the right kind of training in programming, mathematics, and cryptography— as becomes apparent from the published submissions. The link above leads to a great resource with fascinating analyses that help readers understand how the poem was encrypted and decrypted, as well as its self-destruct mechanism. So now that we know how it works, what do we do with that information?

A Close Reading of William Gibson’s “Agrippa” (part 3 of 4)

July 16, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

A Close Reading of William Gibson's "Agrippa" (part 3 of 3) — A Close Reading of William Gibson’s “Agrippa” (part 3 of 3)

The link above is not to Agrippa, but to an important part of the poem: the linguistic and graphical codes extracted from the disk image by Freek Wiedijk— that is, the sequence of words arranged visually into line breaks, indentation, and stanzas, often referred to as the “text” of the poem— which has been in circulation online since it was posted on December 10, 1992. Why the text of the poem is more than just the words is discussed in my earlier postings: “Reading Agrippa” and “Agrippa as a Digital Object.” That being said, this posting will pay close attention to this linguistic text, keeping in mind the other texts and contexts that inform and complete this work known as Agrippa, and point out some meaningful patterns for readers to approach the poem with.

Reading Agrippa by William Gibson (part 2 of 4)

July 15, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

What do we read when we read this famous poem? Put differently, where is the text of Agrippa? These are not simple questions to answer because this poem has been produced several ways, all of which capture certain intentions, whether authorial or of those who challenge the works’ design.

“Agrippa” by William Gibson (part 1 of 4)

July 14, 2012 by Leonardo Flores

Screen capture from "Agrippa" (part 1 of 4) by William Gibson. White background with black font text. Text: "A Kodak album of time burned / black construction paper / The string he tied / Has been unravelled by years / and the dry weather of trunks / Like a lady's shoe strong from the first world war / its metal ferrules eaten by oxigen / Until the recently resemble cigarette-ash / inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite". — Open “Agrippa” (part 1 of 4) by William Gibson

Agrippa: A Book of the Dead (1992) is the first high-profile electronic poem, in part because it was written by William Gibson, a novelist famous for imagining cyberspace in the 1980s, in part because of its production as an electronic object and artist’s book. The link provided leads to a site titled “The Agrippa Files” created by The Transcription Project at UC Santa Barbara, which documents the material, cultural, and computational conditions that make this poem such a fascinating work. For those new to this work, I recommend the following posting, which introduces the poem and resources assembled in the site.