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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.