Meaning Governance

Meaning is a social and historical phenomenon--dare I say an ideological phenomenon?--and so meanings are governed by convention. These conventions are housed in the architectures of one's given syntax and grammar. Though Gnoetry maintains enough syntax to create a sense of ordered composition, there is something inherently word-oriented about the composition process. The software acts on the word-level, each word transplanted from one system of utterance to another, e.g. from novel to poetic form, or from a system of culturally agreed upon meaning to the unhinged realm of multiple meaning that we've been describing. Gnoetry also brings us back into the history of a word.

We must imagine the hovering behind each word not the psychological or poetical intent of an author, but the text the word originates from and the word’s multitudinous meanings. The poem composed by means of this software must on some level be read in light of the historical and social context of the source texts, but also paradoxically in the manner of a poem whose social and historical context is a partial or complete mystery to us, or are so fragmented as to be open to any number of poetic interpretation, like the fragments of Archilochos or many Old English poems without name or specific context.

re:

I like that phrase "tunnel of meaning." Nice.

But I do think that there is something significant to the situation that Gnoetry provides the end-user/author. While I was working with Heart of Darkness, I constantly felt the pull of the words' history, and it almost felt like I was wrestling with the original connotations and contexts of the words, often having to choose between whether to keep or alter their original intentions. This often depended upon my sense of what new context(s) had been brought about through the program's decontextualization. I think it is good to call this an act of recontextualization, and the possibilities available through Gnoetry for this act are vast, and limited as much by the source text(s) as the end-user's knowledge and imagination (or wit, even).

With the series I'm working on now, The Same, I'm working with signification and meaning-making in a more opaque fashion than before. Without personal or possessive pronouns, the meanings of mostly nouns, verbs and phrases are framed within the web of relationships to those that surround them, often developing in complexity as the poem progresses. Repetition, variation and word play become the most important for the reader to take some impression from each poem. I have tried for each section to affect some comprehension that is beyond the words or meanings used to bring it about. The poem "The Beach" is not essentially about the beach, or photography, or images of paradise. The reader should find some place to rest within (or in contrast to) the web of meanings and statements presented, and I feel that this place will be one more of clarity and significance than of confusion of vagueness.

I believe comprehension of signification's complexity and flexibility is important to the development of wisdom, or a sense of presence beyond conceptual frames. I think this relates to the loosening of "meaning governance," but I've run out of the mental energy to come up anything purposeful to say about this.

Could you say more about "meaning governance" and your position towards it? I think that would be an important conversation to have on this blog.

"It's not non-sense if you mean every word of it, and mean every word to be a set of potential meanings instead of a singular one. I believe much of this comes down to the choices of the end-user, though, and not to anything inherent in the program."

Yes. Each word has what Christopher Dewdney calls a tunnel of meaning or signification; one looks through the word and through to different and possibly equally viable meanings, all the way back through the etymological history of the word. I wonder, though, if there is something inherent in the way the program reads the words before they become choices for the end-user that looses the words from meaning governance. The words are given to us according to the history of how the words are being used in a particular text, and then re-contextualized (quite literally) for the end-user to use. The software is doing things with words before the end-user is...and those things *allow* the new potential meanings to take place.

The Little - Wed Jul 29 03:22:20 2009

The Same continues. I didn't like it for awhile, now I like it again after some time away from it. Something's happening in there, but what it is ain't exactly clear.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

the little island at the bases of
the islands of creation · down again ·
in fact · in thought · in any zone · beneath
the boys were much refreshed · the embryo
exactly ascertained · the boys were to
effect a beneficial nature · had
contrived a kangaroo beneath · the boys
were so delighted with the southern forms ·

the most alike · the most terrific · and
the two sometimes alone · a little hut
above · the condor lays a couple of
the other boys · the flowers · how unlike
the flowers of the others · no escape ·
the same conditions · from the hunger of
the islands of the raging bears · the boys
were much relieved · the gardens · and below ·

the great creator · on the island of
amusements · just begun · a tiny well
in ridicule · possessed within the day
in making so perfect a kangaroo ·
beneath the very first appearance of
the land within the body · cocoanuts ·
the boys desire · modify the fruit ·
desirous of the womb · the other side ·



Texts:
Johann David Wyss, Swiss Family Robinson
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
Fannie Louise Apjohn, The Enchanted Island

Conrad Gnonnet (The very essence of dreams)

The very essence of dreams . . . he was it?
Through my glasses I saw next year, a mere
futility. Whirl of black feathers, queer
trunks, the devil of a street. Bit
by bit, through my glasses I saw clearly.
I saw how carefully I went from post
to post with my glass, how I put my most
to the left of us. This one, he
could work with adequate tools, but a bold
capacity for fidelity? No.
I had to wait days and days for him to go
“eh?” Enough then. He gave me a cold
and monumental whiteness. Nothing more.
An, an, an exceptional man. A connoisseur.

Text: Conrad, Heart of Darkness

end-user: Greg Fraser

Gnoetic thought

The reader is ontologically de-natured from a typical lyric understanding of poetic process thru gnoetry b/c the author is as well, given her use of the machine as a prosthetic mind and hand and breath; hence, the reader is not asked, and indeed can not be asked, to fill in indeterminacies to complete the harmony of an organic whole. She is asked to leave indeterminacy in place & willfully seek meaning elsewhere; seek meaning in the poem itself, not worrying about finding connections to the "outside world" (though there is no out-right ban on that connection) or see through the language to authorial intention or psychology. Simply put, there is no meaning behind the words—we have only the meaning of the words.

Gnoetry Demo

I've been without my main Gnoetry machine for a week or so, and have been loath to dig out of the archives again. So, I want to briefly describe the latest Gnoetry demo I made for an intensive creative writing class at NEIU at the behest of fellow Gnoet Olivia Cronk, who has participated in Gnoetic events here in Chicago.

The students displayed the entire range of responses to Gnoetry: that's not really poetry because there's no individual creative input; it's a great play-thing for kids, maybe, but it's not serious poetry; that's the most amazing thing I've ever seen; it would have taken me months to come up with a line like that; doesn't Gnoetry take the real work out of poetry; can I put my own poetry in it; &c.

I gave several of my stock answers, including the idea that all Gnoetry does it distill what all poets do: analyze language that they've been given, rewarding and penalizing pieces of that language according to their ability to fit within a certain idea of poetry. The most hard-line anti-Gnoetry person relented a bit when presented with this idea, as well as the idea that we, none of us, have an "individual" language that we invent and compose with--poetry is written with a shared language, and even more so when you are very concerned with a certain notion of literal and transparent meaning. When you are most concerned with clear meaning is in fact when you are least an "individual." And if that's the case, then the end-user/Gnoetry relationship, if you must, is a very distinct form of individuality...

One of the most interesting questions was: "Is Gnoetry political?"

Is it?

More Free Grass (10 Haikus)

Twice the one room shot
of the birth, the wrongful harm
it entails. O me!



Ah, he that flushes
and flushes, the secret of
creativity.



On average, we
must be a violation
of democracy.



Steady whirring, the
norms of our new world, of
course always dying!



I sing of the first
search engine in a barn. Us,
all framed around us.



And you, bend down to
speak! Peace is always and at
all about the bill.



When there is love, and
five feet of you, o little
shells to paradise!



This is code, from the
sentence. The very act of
love! We don't all sleep.



It made him die. I
mean to fund ads that try to
change the industry.



I believe in you,
for the single file sharing
is in the loving.

Another Katrina Gnoem

___



SHE WAS DEAD, & YOU’RE SAYING
THAT THE INTERNET IS THE INTERSTATE

she was dead
and you're saying

that the internet
is the interstate –

prosody in chains
and blankets

congress of day
laborers

we were only
trying to take you

to salvation
in a plane

riding toward
representation

pale green
roses

employed
to find jobs

answering the king
when he spies an ox

so long as
the eyes open

Bush Rules
Out Tax Hike

To Fund
Recovery

pushes up
like a plantation

who said anything
about our future?

I bid you adieu.
Dear father, all

modalities of
the pain went missing

the Mississippi
delta with shotguns

the blacks coming to
rough you up

the editors
of photographs

contaminating
the hum of decay –

a misdemeanor
she never recorded –

perhaps I’ve
been out there

perched on sailboats
to death

trained to recognize
the insignificance of

the most desperate
and take them around

in heaven with all
the alleged

inhumanity
of Halliburton

I drove truck loads
of semen

inside my mind
watching their money

run out of her urine
an empty bank

the construction
of the Lord

will give me some
new casinos

so what if the
terrorists are

located?




____
This is a combination of about 8 different outputs. I changed the lineation but kept the phrasing intact. Most were written with only the Katrina sources, though a few contained Indian Erotica source text and/or the Birth text.

Another Gnonnet

The battle of the sixth edition was
amended by the mother, baby. Who
our poet will maintain the proper cause
the master had received. In efforts to

restrain her as Pandora was the grand
hotel abyss, a proclamation who
the two co-operate. She works the man
as armed police a court decision grew.

A dream a bad idea to reform,
was cast away upon the chaplain's wife!
The son, the public and the first in warm,
in which perhaps consist in an old life

the sword began berating me? The list
below the folds the people had the mist.

More Free Grass (12 Haikus)

I love the world. No
doubt I have the internet.
Sparkles from the world!



Seen at hand or seen
at night or anywhere, it
is just something new.



Like the laws, splashing
my bare feet long, the transfer
of information.



It was designed to
protect the thumb, the market
is universal.



Words no more extreme
than churches, and my love songs
of love for trespass.



As if dead, and not
just as George Gershwin. There's no
rights reserved but this?



Good news and jets; beef
on the overthrown, the thief
has a computer.



Free will, the millions
of myself, they go down! Ah,
we all own people.



Unseen buds unseen
buds unseen buds, repeating
and disappearing.



The rhetoric of
this work, trade, products, games, it
was good to copy.



To talk to do a
kind of advertising. No
one moves or speaks, no.



Sex contains all the
areas of research that
might be satisfied.

Katrina Gnoem

Thanks to the various Erics responsible for getting me equipped and on this blog! The source text for my first post is a collection of articles, blogs, and message boards re: the hurricane.



HIS ARM WAS MISSING, AND HE NEEDED HELP


His arm was missing, and he needed help
to mitigate and to accept, etc. For those

who stayed, dressed like dogs, who wore crosses
and spurs, found that the answer was lying prostrate

on the freeway every day: the embryo
body posture, the image of death, flag floating from a trash

can. He leaned over the dusty counterterrorism, and
the volleys fired through the womb, overcome

with militia and praying mantis. His wife
was even reflected in miniature. He asked

if she understood what was happening down
there. In the dark. That some Will Smith would be

the official relief effort. The scale
of mental health crisis. There is no way to follow him.

In a trance, working in that morgue where all the
lights had gone was Bush's vision of our slaves. Life

spilling out of department of health, part of the cleanup
by Murphy Oil of a deer, turkeys, ducks, snipe,

two children, a few plastic bags, vomit and piss.
The most powerful developers have relentlessly

attempted to turn the blame, to send it
into these animals. We are looking

at the mercy of criminals. These are the extravagant
visions of them with almost no working radios,

vision blurred and distorted the identification.





Texts:
Random, Katrina Sources
VA, Birth Source Text

More Gnonnetry

The fact. It's small, opaque, secreted by
the Nixon plan, approached the cottage and
the number of the scope itself in my
opinion is a new condition. Stand,

the chairs were set before the war began,
the two succeeding days were free.Iin such
a day! A lot in Haiti with the man
in Fort Defiance. These were fitted, much

suspicion. You apologize? "A way
the total population," he replied,
"the Jews in their desire for a day,
in which the fires that destroy the pride

submitted to the regions of the case."
The river. Our study had the face.

Yet Another Gnonnet; this time using Gnoetry0.3 (beta)

The beast condenses the contradiction of
the churches got allotments they were most
concerned. A parent offers. That, in love,
the pioneers the way the two, the ghost

in our future wants, platonic, and
returned in middle ground between the east,
the law, the power of the hubbub: land
requirements: number forty-nine? The beast.

The little girls Amanda and her curls,
accosted him in doing so: a fierce
ejaculation, and, in setting. Girls
begin the action of the Christmas. Peirce

describes the way the human species might
appear in March, a modern, or the white.

Another Gnonnet

Her Shoes Were White

Estella was the matter with Estella,
very true! Until the sun, the sky,
the way, her shoes were white. The
hopeless circumstances grew by
degrees, the effort of remembrance.
The old Estella wandered to the church,
the marsh. She wended in an iron trance,
her illness on a little tray. Birch,
sky, the convict's breathing. Finches of
the shore. Go on, said the voice. A man
in that direction waits, like a glove.
Quickly. Before a week, a day. A man
in that direction. But Estella aspired
to the greatest coolness, and she were tired.

Text: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations