Gnoetry Daily is Moving to Wordpress

Update your links. Gnoetry Daily is relocating to gnoetrydaily.wordpress.com/ with a new look. New posts will be going up soon.

Also, if you're a blog member who has not seen the e-mail yet about the move, shoot me an e-mail and I'll get everything set up for you.

Gnoetry and Deja Dit

From the collection of essays edited by Craig Dworkin, The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics, here is a relevant exerpt from Marjorie Perloff's contribution, "The Pleasures of Deja Dit: Citation, Intertext and Ekphrasis in Recent Experimental Poetry." I think it does a good job of situating our Gnoetry work (some strains of it, at least) within the larger context of current experimental poetry.

The limits of my language, in Wittgenstein's words, are the limits of my world. In this scheme of things, the poetic drive is, in Adorno's terms, one of resistance: the resistance of the individual poet to the linguistic field of capitalist commodification where language has become merely instrumental.

But in the climate of the new century, where sites of resistance have become increasingly eroded, we seem to be witnessing a poetic turn from negation and resistance to dialogue--a dialogue with earlier texts or texts in other media, or "writings through" or ekphrases that permit the poet to participate in a larger, more public discourse, even as the poet's personal signature is once again present. Such poetry is often meditative, but meditation is made oblique by the use of Oulipo constraint, citation, and the reliance on intertext: appropriation, after all, is now a central fact of life. As such, we are witnessing a new poetry, more conceptual than expressive--a poetry in which, in Craig Dworkin's words, "the idea cannot be separated from the writing itself." (257)

I have to agree that "appropriation... is now a central fact of [poetic] life" for me. My music collection has benefited greatly from it too. On multiple layers of society, concepts of ownership have been challenged, made void and/or remade by revolutions and re-revolutions in technology. To ignore such that these upheavals are not relevant to poetry is foolish. Other artforms have been dealing with the implications of technology and contemporary thought for most of the last century, yet is seems that the bulk of poets remain attached to ideas rooted in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Painters who today paint fields and Impressionist landscapes are not usually artists taken seriously within their discipline. Why should the same not be true in poetry?

Anyway, I submit this excerpt for your consideration. The rest of the essay and the rest of the book is highly recommended too.

6X6X6 - One Poem

Reviving The Stone Age
Fri Nov 13 00:38:59 2009

Not phenomenal. The
lovemaking was more than
a critique of structured
market policy, the
skirt because she liked the
feel of warm skin next to

the corporate sector
authority. Using
a technology that
was gay, lesbian, and
repression. It was for
Pierre, the air, that smells

wonderful. He is at
war with their long embrace.
In our waters! I
am thankful those people
are carnivorous, the
girls eventually

awoke from reviving
the stone age. No means the
two are about to fuck
him. The sperm was absurd.
The sperm was pumped out of
the planet. They fucked the

tiny breasts of being.
They cut off the fetters
of everything. These huge
creatures used their youth to
chase after bad boys who
negotiated the

little stream and drank the
salty flavor of love
letters, and for the World
Trade Center, Paradise
City added to the
rest of experience.



Texts:
VA, Birth Source Text
VA, Alien SciFi Sex Fictions
Various Authors (Ed. EScovel), His $ Hers Sources
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture
Qzxrt, Aristocrats: Banned In Hell (uncensored)
Immanuel Kant (trans. Meiklejohn), The Critique of Pure Reason

6x6x6 - Two Poems

Practical Tips For Rainbow Guacamole Dick
Wed Nov 18 00:05:05 2009

That is because they need.
This is the liver, its
baby blue rubber boots
are the snags: hello, all
naked, imagine that
bad joke. Crowbar is a

mystery, mommy, or
please me. More up to plug
the parenthesis, a
great fuck. It grieves me up
tight, no one will ever
make the document that

will become weaker and
weaker, oblivious
to the beautiful in
fact, I promise you it
is very sexy and
unalterable. That

is why it's so hard as
he says to undress. I
suppose he wouldn't be
too big for me. It was
shining, if cans, cans for
today, rainbows, and lay

on top. Practical tips
to help combat boredom.
For young men who were both
stark naked, rubbing it
firmly behind his own
good guacamole, he

starts to lick, lick it. Then
the meat had entered, the
forbidden dick of the
pussy. I really care
if I don't really
care about anything.

___________________________________


Not Very Different With A Vengeance
Wed Nov 18 01:05:20 2009

Ok... you want to smoke
and talk about what just
occurred. Don't care. I just
want her strong urine, she
uses some french perfume
there and water. That way

I truly care about
this, it is soft and more
of a word or long word.
Testicle will totter.
I love when real love is
like warm piss! Test it now

leave. What followed was not
very different with
a vengeance; and so on
down. Sasha and kim's tongue
plunged in oriental
or ears, berries. And you

get what you wrote, theory
of childbirth, keep pushing.
It's written and pushing
my cock, my boss is black,
dyed black, soft lips and eyes
that can be upgraded.

Easy, unusual
and clean. The pain of death
twice a week, when we want,
aphasia said no to
your mouth! It is not good
anyway. Fresh and cooked

fruits and flowers and an
ass like frankie. The fruit
and flowers. She had an
erection at the huge
forked sticks driven into
prostitution by you!



Texts:
VA, Birth Source Text
The Internet, Indian Erotica
The Internet, Linux HOWTOs
Woods Hutchinson, The Child's Day
Edited eRoK7 - VA, His & Hers Sources (Blog - Web)
VA, Alien SciFi Sex Fictions

response to "Authorship of Generative Art"

Those that shrink away from Gnoetry (At a Gnoetry demo here in Chicago a young woman sat down to use the software and shot up from her chair and backed away from the resulting poem slowly saying "Oh, no, no, no..." I can only hope she was horrified by the awesome beauty of the poem she and Gnoetry collaborated on) most often invoke tired notions of subjectivity, originality and creativity, as if those ideas are a) pure entities within any given individual human, untainted by something other than an "I" anb b) somehow completely eradicated by the fact that a machine is involved in a creative process. That said, the Olde Author Is Dead idea is equally banal, and in fact Gnoetry does nothing if not *multiply* authorship: end-user+(software/author of code)+source text author(s). The idea that Gnoetry shores up is the true one that *all* art is a collaborative process. To believe in the artist hunkered down, alone with her mad ideas, scribbling incredible things is her notebook is to believe in a social fantasy. The artist collects data and arranges that data in a way that can be deemed--within whatever social/cultural context she lives--as art. At its base, art is collaborative, since there needs to be another person to call it "art" in the first place, and that small audience has to get his ideas about art from somewhere...

In any case, Gnoetry shows that there is something of the random and the statistical in the creative process. To say this is *not* to reduce art to mere numbers and mechanics (I was accused of being a "used car salesman" at a reading in Iowa City during which I recited some Gnoetry) but to show that the human mind is a beautiful machine that can be artfully mimicked by a prosthetic device like Gnoetry.

Those against a machine involved in writing should look closely at their own use of word processors, or even consider dismissing out of hand all poetry written with a typewriter. The latter is a machine with its own rules (QWERTY, to say the least) and is not a transparent medium through which the human mind 'translates' its thoughts.

Gnoetry is a machine that helps us focus on the medium of language. That is, Gnoetry is a human machine that helps us focus on what it means to be poets.

Signifying Zapata

The Zapatagraphic poems--which are great poems--highlight something that has interested me about Gnoetry from the beginning; that being the fact of finding signifying markers in the gnoems based on artifacts of the source texts. This gestalt marking, so to speak, made us lean towards recognizable texts when choosing texts for the end-user to use. When coming across the name "Moreau," e.g., in a gnoem, a story is immediately present, without the end-user or the gnoem having to tell or retell the story. This is in part why gnoems using canonical texts is so interesting; a gnoem using a well-known text is unlike any other "retelling" of that text. & while the result may be the same, as in, perhaps, some form of deconstruction (though, arguably, Gnoetry is a purer form of deconstruction in that the source text is quite literally reduced to contradictory parts and the language can be called nothing else but "writing") Gnoetry makes no intellectual claims. It just performs.

The gnoem is an interpretation of the source text, using the source text itself to make its claims, like a machine-enhanced form of close reading that re-historicizes the text rather than un-does it in some banal way, like trying to tell "the *real* story of Friday in Robinson Crusoe. I do not mean that a gnoem places the action of an old novel into the present day. To re-historicize is to re-write the text in its own words--and these words might rally around a gestalt marker, like a character name or recognizable phrase (e.g., "scarlet horror") and coalesce into meaning(s) after spending time as more enigmatic signifier.

All this said, the conscious planting (I use this term with all agrarian punning intact) of a historical figure like Zapata into otherwise randomized texts seems to me a much more radical, poetically political gesture than merely writing a poem about Zapata, which can only become a kind of propaganda. The language around the name rallies behind it or argues with it, rather than the author himself doing so. Zapata is being placed into a position of making language mean--he is not being made to mean. The former is a gesture that seems to me to be the more powerful gesture.

6x6x6 - Two Poems

Two more fantastical poems in 6X6X6 form. Enjoy!!!

__________________________

Devastating Scenes at the End in the Ass
Thu Nov 12 18:11:16 2009

Fire lots of them or
freeze to kill more people.
The couch, the conditions
were beautiful. I'm still
sick of ideals, most think
differently and killed with

pleasure, say let's fuck the
world trade center, for she
was robbed of everything,
but the slew of breeding
altered dogs that are left
lying on her. We all

can avoid danger, and
shove tail sections of a
generation or two.
No surrounding landscape,
no televisions, no
flights to the buttocks, just

the devastating scenes
at the end in the ass,
where i'm pretty sure it's
beautiful. Cal, Sarah
Palin and Crack Law Drug
Warrior Mastercard

Czar Biden, I'd like to
urinate, but I just
want to be feared. Does it
do nothing to piss on
extremism, and shove
tail sections of solid

gold? The bubbles float on
materialism,
homophobia, and
data, like some kind of
a beautiful woman
with a butter knife, socks.

__________________________


Like the Heart of Brownie
Thu Nov 12 18:40:11 2009

The new comedy will
focus on the barren
dust of tanks and weapons
upgrades. The story of
my income. This planet,
smoking in a sort of

vegetation. As the
hot dog, a living room
on fire. The help of
kittens. Moreover the
beneficiaries
of kittens. I might be

able to heat up like
a pasha and take her
sweat slick body and soul.
The help of vagina
on computers around
the rim of hair, which was

to set fire to the
convention center with
life jackets on, barely
visible across it.
Ideologically,
millions of square miles of

ruined neighborhoods, it
is a savage, like the
heart of Brownie, his small
one, naturally so
tiny. The average
day on the crest of an

evolutionary
change. Located near the
fireplace. Desire
and anticipation.
I am very concerned
about the parade there.



Texts:
Various, Katrina Texts
VA, Birth Source Text
VA, Alien SciFi Sex Fictions
Various Authors (Ed. EScovel), His $ Hers Sources
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture
Qzxrt, Aristocrats: Banned In Hell (uncensored)

Free Grass (20 Haikus)

Some more from the linguistic copulations of Lawrence Lessig and Walt Whitman (LL + WW etched in the tree).

__________________

Welcome to me, or
rock or stump, and thus touching
you is tragedy.

~

I'd be digitized,
or desolate, I don't like
the environment.

~

To do, and may be
maximized, the system is
free to come on drugs.

~

All life, composite,
tied in your garage. You and
the belt at bedtime.

~

I, the high court clerk.
This book, compulsion, C4.
A font of Brooklyn.

~

The soul of what was
noncommercial, I wrote an
editorial.

~

O Death Supreme, to
make money from this book is
a function of guilt.

~

Forget file sharing.
I hear the quality of
American life.

~

And is not lefty
in any sense. And by law
to sleep with cartoons.

~

Delicate beauty,
alternate light lighting, and
the Great Depression.

~

I think that there is
limitless space outside of
ourselves and trees.

~

O all dear to me
these bubbles, if need be, a
vast amount of you!

~

The grass grows, but strong
and arrogant woman I
like it publicly.

~

What was once “The Man”
I love, lips of love and that
which requires it.

~

Land of filmmaking,
faculty, pulse of Saddam,
Dissatisfied, Inc.

~

Continue on! The
track of beams, subject to a
pupil is flapping.

~

My children, merging
all moving images and
sound to history.

~

Red River is no
rights reserved. The female is
perfect, enabled.

~

The law is, even
if you like Lyle Lovett, you're
going to be used.

Zapatagraphy - A Dozen

Brando as Zapata



1.

Zapata possessed a moustache,
not black enough to

satisfy him. A land, a
body of empires.


2.

Proceeding along the heap
of stones, it was wet winter,

a village. Zapata did not make
a sound, fearful of seeing

the casualties that
took place around him.

Language must handle those wonders.
The light that is a method of language.


3.

Zapata became acquainted with
the blood. A bird burst forth amidst

the city. The thatch had fallen
on the floor and in you.


4.

He was then outline, a single
form of wax or a little boat

with a sheet. The dead
hovered round and instigated me.

What there is of consequence
was not in the boat. Zapata felt

gratitude towards those shores which formed
a calm far more monstrous.


5.

The spirit of enterprise
laid by me, the sad death of every

artery at length unalterable.
A tongue makes moisture

in the red of this current.
Zapata was nearly burnt

out, needing to
recollect what he loved.


6.

A spatial picture can depict
anything spatial: a single lake

which is stone, a man paused and definitive,
its hills. The lamp light, what makes it crackle, what

makes it ferns and destroying? They are merry --
only a picture. He became the wind so

when he climbed out through them, over
them, it was open air.


7.

Zapata longed to discover what
could be made to yield.

Rejoicing stream of autumn.
Vegetables in a garden.


8.

He sprang from you -- a man,
sailing over the sea,

a human mind. We are worn by
fate, so that some say Zapata

did not dream. Yet he brought no limits.
That which is beautiful in continuation.


9.

This state of active occupation.
It stood. In the house and sometimes

with the blood from it. After all,
its productions and features may

be called a precipice,
gazing on the trees, all the firmness

of deformity. A curve, no
doubt, of the church. And in it

no peace. "We have failed" they shout.
I grew feverish. It stood.


10.

No wood could support the
horror of the peasants who dwelt

in organization. Alas, they were put
together with affection,

the difference between green
and brown and not a dream, but a garden.


11.

Zapata was a man to be governed
by an emotion. The form of

his face was concealed, laughing, fearful
of elevation. So much

has been refused and given.
The sound of production.


12.

I saw a vessel, stretched
out of pigeons in my

ears' long intervals. Zapata composed
heroic songs and began

to comprehend most of them. The summer
sun was upon the mountain.

Know a Tree

I'm new here, so a short introduction is in order.

Generally: my name is Matthew Lafferty, I majored in English and Philosophy, and I'm planning on an eventual career in libraries.

Internettery: I've blogged in various places, but most of my presence online is now limited to Twitter and Identi.ca, Facebook, and more recently, ReadWritePoem.

Poetically: I've written and enjoyed poetry for a long time, but Mchain and Gnoetry have helped me get to a place where I'm more excited about poetry than perhaps I have ever been. I am still relatively new to it ("it" being digital/machine/computational poetry), and my experience thus far has been a mixture of enjoyment (of the "kid in a candy shop" variety) and a struggle both to figure out my own process and understand my aim in creating this kind of poetry.

Oh, and forgive the title of this post. It is a bad play on words, but it still amuses me, and I have become fond of it. I am still in the process of putting together my own humble chapbook, using Thoreau's Walden as the primary text and a number of other naturalist & tree-related texts as secondary. I have used/am using both Gnoetry and Mchain in the creation of poems for the chap, as the mood strikes me, but the balance is currently weighted toward Mchain.

Below are five poems created in my quest for additions to the chap, all from the last few days. Let me know what you think, because I am still finding my way to a voice and to understanding what "voice" means with respect to this particular branch of poetry. I will try to offer my own comments to poems posted here by the rest of you, but try though I might, I cannot promise my comments will be as insightful as anyone else's.

On to the poems.

1.

The bloom set

curiously about me

I felt no island,

overslept comfortably,

was disappointed

when again I woke up

2.

my attention

suddenly

from the grass-blades,

and their enemies

grew

much astonished

as the new

generation abandoned the world.

3.

blackberries a-growing

still rustle

through the necessity of virtue,

having thus been given

sincerest respect for grass.

4.

They wear black instead

of standing erect, keeping

them down to the state

into whose bosom snow has

lain soft and understanding.

5.

Her body and its limbs into graceful

held her, the tints of her breast.

It did not shine for something friendly;

Solitude alone wears in her coronet.

And chained to her for a long time

for the roaring of liberty

are but the shadows of myself,

enjoying a certain terrible dream

which I lived.

I consider how little this is progress

toward a jail window

or a woodchuck underground

in a topographical description of fate.

Zapatagraphy

Added a few other texts to this batch for kicks, so they probably won't make the cut. Seem to be something else entirely, but thought I'd post them any-old-ways.



1.

Many many tickle
the largest in the temple

the victim of its
pictorial form, and choose for the

use value of love (it is not
the facts) in a land a land a

meadow, abolishing the void.
Listen to every part

of the archive. This makes
of a seated figure, a way in.


2.

An old mountain is more than
a referendum. The girls

stood outside the camp, while
we smashed the windows of my love.

I believe I am glad of
it. Let us call this a free and

lofty spirit, a simple
inversion of the moon and

motion, everywhere. Ah! -- My
dear Frankenstein, USA.


3.

I am Detroit, so full
of size but nothing else.

What path to the free calendars?
Hapless victims to burnish a cloud

not to change with the slow advance
of it. The subjective forms of

radical change are a space
which must already be measured.


4.

My wanderings were spoiled
by the various lakes of

rubber. Of course, this is
not made of value, memory is

just a little piece, and it just
being certain, ceases; a slight

restraint, penniless, fractures
of events. We came to have a

standstill and waited for
our employment. It was there.


5.

The servant presently
brought breakfast. At best, when

I vote, the system is
a constant. Yes, my kind host; to be crushed.

By degrees, supposing
a cramped space might be viewed as more.

I say that I wandered like an
ogre. Though it is really a

matter of our dear
children having come forward.


6.

Drool glistening in the
symbols and all who are there.

The mass street protests are
an allusion to whose knees I clung

to, in which the elite run
their story along with pictures.

Is there a desire to my
machinations, squats, wildcat

strikes? Any wet place is
lighter. I felt sick as fuck.


7.

It is better to die
on your feet than live on your

account. A tour of the
ruins, a mediation of some

undiscovered island, where
almost any one would want to

go. That which makes it art
is false; I grew alarmed

as the same applies to
negation, etc.