Robert Peake

I just got my contributor’s copy of the debut issue of “Greatest Uncommon Denominator” magazine. It is bursting with good things - among them, my essay entitled “Poetry Code.” Inspired by posts and conversations on this blog, I formalized some of my thoughts on the insights to be gleaned from conflating poetry and software source code - and the editors liked it. This plus a whopping 182 additional pages of by turns hilarious, profound and chilling artwork, poems and stories can be had in an attractive book-like format for only $10 USD - or for those of you who, like me, prefer to eat your marshmallow right now, you can purchase and download the PDF version for a mere $3.50 USD right here and now.

Oracular spontaneity is rare these days, and heartfelt, inspired sloppiness underrated. The poets are pros now, like the software coders, and they function smoothly as nodes in the great network. Ginsberg was always a bug in the machine, though, and the chaos he caused rang alarms that brought repairmen. […] Silence — the one mistake Ginsberg never made. And because of the work he left, the life he led and the care that’s been taken preserving them, it’s one that he probably never will.

Again, the pairing of poetry and code is here intended to leave a bad taste in the mouth. Yet precision and compactness are what make poetry great. Not the extracurricular antics of the poet.

To me Ginsberg seems to go down in history more for being a poet (among so many other things) than, in fact, for his poems. The spirit of the man came through his work, but he was indeed larger than life and certainly more than any page could contain. Iconoclast. Witty. And positioned at the crux of dramatic social change.

To me his work seems less perennial and transcendent than, say, Whitman - and to my mind is more relevant to history books than poetry anthologies. Still, he could teach us all a thing or two about “oracular spontaneity” (well put!) and the pleasures of being oneself in writing as in life.

Why must we make a dichotomy between being free and exacting in art?

Some great comments on my previous post about poetry and code prompted more musings on why this matters to me. Ana María Correa also threw in some great thoughts on the subject and encouragement to keep compiling a list comparing poets to programming languages. Carol chimed in with one that made me laugh then think (should she win an IgNobel?) I have a feeling there is even more to this topic than first met my eye, and appreciate the dialog and encouragement. Who knew there were so many people out there quirky enough to care about this?

…is compactness. We had dinner with some new friends last night, one of whom bailed out at MA in his pursuit of English because the job prospects for Ph.D. seemed grim. Now he writes software. Confronted with a mirror into my own unique combination of interests, I started thinking about what lines of code and lines of poetry have in common, and what might attract me to both.

Both require precision, and poetry usually also involves some degree of linguistic compactness. Also, just as software executes within the context of an operating system, poetry likewise “executes” within the psyche of the reader. A few lines in either form can have a profound impact, sending memory pointers in myriad directions.

While it is the context within which either form executes that largely determines the result, even the slightest adjustments in either form can have a significant effect. Subtlety, clarity, and intimacy with the language are all required traits that get amplified through the power of each discipline.