Robert Peake

Linear navigation can be dull. Furthermore, it requires the person browsing to think like the person who organized the navigation—from distinctions between organizational models down to the structure of the hierarchy. (What, for example, on my own site, is the difference between a “category” and a “tag”? And why is “Humor” under “Poetry” but not “Technology” or “Life”?) I got to thinking about how to break down the artificial barrier between content tags and content categories, as well as how to organize concepts in a more intuitive manner than nested lists—and came up with the following navigation system for my site (requires Flash):


Basically, the navigator places a central topic in the middle, and arranges related topics (either categories or tags) around the central topic, using both proximity and text darkness to signify how often the related topics have appeared in the same articles as the central topic. The navigator displays a maximum of six related topics at a time, with left and right buttons on the side to step through additional related topics. Click on a related topic and it becomes the new central topic. Then click on the (blue, underlined) central topic to go to that category or tag page.

I have placed a miniature version of this experimental navigational system in the sidebar. It automatically detects category and tag pages in which it finds itself embedded, and displays them as the central topic. Hopefully, this will prove a useful means for visitors to browse through related topics on the site, and find new information without having to understand artificial concepts like categories and tags, or some relatively arbitrary hierarchy.

The following video (via Valerie, via Chris) seems like as good an answer as any to the question of why, in the middle of a high-tech career, I signed up for art school. While this particular piece deals with music, I find it equally applicable to the ongoing question: “why poetry?”


More Alan Watts—illuminated by the animators of South Park—is available at FreshMinds, including a great piece on perception and the “language of madness” in common between poetry and music.

There are many taboos in poetry. Some of them cycle in and out of fashion. For example, in the wake of so much confessional poetry of the last few decades, many contemporary poets now spurn an insecure, dramatic speaker in favor of the quiet power that comes from a more detached, objective presentation. In fact, a large part of the modern mindset eschews sentimentality, even subtly detected, as unpoetic.

Reading Czeslaw Milosz’s “Preparation,” I am reminded of Marvin Bell’s credo: “Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, then break those rules.” Consider the poem:

Still one more year of preparation.
Tomorrow at the latest I’ll start working on a great book
In which my century will appear as it really was.
The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked.
Springs and autumns will unerringly return.
In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay
And foxes will learn their foxy natures.

And that will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies
Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse
In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank
Growing immense at the corner of a street; the ride at dusk
Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire.

No, it won’t happen tomorrow. In five or ten years.
I still think too much about the mothers
And ask what is a man born of woman.
He curls himself up and protects his head
While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running,
He burns with a bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit.
Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.

I haven’t learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.

“Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display
Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!”

Reading “Poems 1876-89” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Fourth Edition), it struck me how much of his verse was not necessarily much more technically interesting than other poets of the Nineteenth century. What remains remarkable are his most famous poems, which seem to typify and embody what he strove toward in other works. Most of his poems employ what he calls “sprung rhythm,” which is simply a dense clustering of stressed or non-stressed syllables in a way that was not typical at a time when two- and three-syllable feet, and especially iambs and trochees, ruled the day. Yet this particular break from convention is not interesting in itself. Hopkins’s work gets most interesting when he focuses so intently on the music of the poem as to push the literal meaning aside, and further compounds, enhances, and transcends any such meaning with revelatory line breaks.

Consider one of my favorite poems:

The Windhover:
To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

After a brief experiment with Twitter, I concluded that the trend toward quantity over quality being perpetuated by social network status updates wasn’t for me. In fact, it seemed downright unpoetic. Then, thanks to Jeanine’s site, I discovered Goodreads. Finally, a niche network with a purpose I could get behind: discussing books. The only other specialized social network I had signed up for in the past was LinkedIn. But that was about work. This is about books. Delicious books!

I even went so far as to set up a private group for other students, faculty and alumni in the Pacific University MFA program. I figure this could help provide an outlet that is missing from the low-residency format—the opportunity to chat throughout the semester with other students about what we are reading. The results of that experiment remain to be seen.

Shortly after that, however, softened by my recent joinerism, I caved in and signed up for Facebook. It seems I am of a certain generation such that if I want to keep up with some of my friends, I need to be on Facebook. So, there I am—to the chagrin and relief of my wife, who has been reconnecting with friends overseas for some time through Facebook and and attempting to impress its wonders upon me (“Look! I gave someone a garden gnome!”), and a number of friends who have invited me to join up at various times. OK, OK, I’m on—happily reviewing books, posting photos, and turning friends into zombies. How did I ever live without this? Curmudgeon no more.

Related Links:

• Goodreads Profile
• Facebook Profile
• LinkedIn Profile