Taking up the idea of protocols as engineered arguments, this talk explores the timeless algorithms that give poetry its power to evolve—from an ancient mnemonic device to a transformational way of being. Drawing on both theory and practice, in this one-hour exploration we will look at various examples of poetry’s rule-making and rule-breaking, and even dabble in a bit of writing as well. In a world at odds with Rilke’s admonition to, “live in the question” never more have we needed what poetry offers according to Marvin Bell: “the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.” Bring a pen and an inquisitive mind. No prior experience beyond the human experience required.
Transcript
Hello everybody.
Welcome back to Protocol Town Hall, a weekly guest talk series where we invite technologists, teachers, engineers, and now poets to talk about protocols and protocol studies.
Today’s guest is Robert Peake, who’s a acclaimed poet and technologist who’s kindly agreed to come on and share his thoughts about protocols, poetry, and infinite games.
We’re very excited to have him on the channel and musicality and art have been ongoing threads of the program for the last few years and we are finally getting some esteemed guests to come share their thoughts and formalize it into a more I guess thorough interpretation of protocols and what they mean in a more poetic sense and what poetry can do for protocol designers who work in more you know hard tech engineering environments.
So without further ado, I’ll bring Robert onto the stage and he can take over with his presentation.
—
Thanks so much, Timber.
I’ve been excited to be thinking about this.
When Venkat originally asked me if I would do a little something about poetry and protocols, it was right before I was about to head out for a retreat in southwest Ireland.
So, I’ve had the benefit of spending about a week, thinking about this stuff and if it comes off as green and rain soaked, that’s that’s because that’s definitely was the the precipitating environment. N pun intended.
We will have plenty of time for questions and this will be an interactive thing. You’ll get a chance to write. you get a chance to hopefully experience as well as be provoked in in some thinking about poetry and about protocols.
My hope is that it’s useful both to poets and to people thinking about protocols.
So terms of the stakes, what’s what’s at stake here?
To Those Born Later
by Bertolt Brecht
Truly I live in dark times!
Frank speech is naïve. A smooth forehead
Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet heard
The terrible news.
What kind of times are these, when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
Was written in 1939 and translated from the German but feels kind of fresh fresh to me as well.
So I I guess the point of opening with this is that poetry can’t necessarily change the world but it has changed my world.
Therefore I believe it can it can have in some small or big way depending on how you embrace it an impact on yours.
So first some definitions of maybe of protocols as I’ve been thinking about them and and in conversation with people in the protocol kind of study group.
My background is in criticism and also in craft and I think the more interesting material that poetry can provide to protocol studies comes from the craft side. and to me this kind of mirrors the different sort of hierarchies but different levels of thinking about protocol as well.
So obviously the ground sort of zero definition protocolon right means literally first glued.
So it’s preface it’s the thing you you stick onto the text the metatext that says you know here’s how to read it. up from there, the kind of standard definitions we think of the sort of behavioral guidelines for repeatable outcomes, push down and twist. and then communication guidelines, right?
So the the P and HTTP or TCP usually for interoperability, but also sometimes for debate, for argumentation.
I think of these as kind of your first order protocols, what’s sort of already in the OED maybe.
And then as I got to talking with people, , this idea of an engineered argument came forward, which I really like, but which I also see as a little bit more of a kind of second order type of protocol in that, , it’s active, it’s ongoing, it’s protocoling, right?
It’s more like let’s say you know in the case of the internet the the dynamic tension between its its origins in DARPA as a sort of distributed system that is highly robust because it’s inherently sort of asynchronous and the packets can arrive in any order. the conflict created by our intense desire for streaming media like this which requires sequentiality and low latency. so that conflict between net neutrality and packet prioritization played out in the whole kind of you know request request for common RFC world is a kind of protocoling or a sort of ongoing protocol for the evolution of protocols and I think poetry is fundamentally that.
So my hope is that that is interesting because that is where I think it has a contribution or the most contribution perhaps to make. and then this other idea that came forward in reading and in talking with people is this idea of tension of of creating and resolving tension which is something we do in the arts all the time and tension as a definition being a compromise with an added conflict.
So those are some definitions, my working definitions.
As you can tell, I’m going to be fairly opinionated on this u but with a purpose, right?
Not to be didactic, but to maybe incite thinking about this and hopefully leave enough space around the more sort of concrete assertions that I make about these ongoing practices.
So, we’re going to be talking about poetrying.
We’re going to be talking about poeming, and we’re going to be talking about poeting and what these can contribute perhaps to the idea of of protocols and protocoling.
So, I’d say notice notice what you notice. , participate in the writing exercises because experiential is is invariably going to spark more thinking than just talk and listen stuff. , and so let’s let’s get into some canonical definitions of poetry.
I’ll I’ll give you a minute to to read these versus reading all of these out.
So clearly poets have converged on you know one standard definition which is great of what what poetry is. one of my definitions that I arrived at some time ago actually as as an undergraduate when I first met the poet Sheamus Heene.
He had come to to our university to read from his new translation of Beaowolf and he read this kind of litany of all the the accomplishments of of their leader.
That’s the kind of preface the protocol and and at the end they sort of very satisfyingly say that was a good king you know and I got to thinking about the social function of poetry and also realizing that old English poetry was very often illiterative.
So what’s in common between a literative, between meter, between rhyme scheme is that it forces concision.
And so my definition of poetry or one of them became poetry is one of our sort of oldest living compression algorithms.
Right now song is slightly different.
Associating tones and pitches with at least inonal languages is more like a memory room.
It’s more like creating associations, fusing, you know, neurons that fire together, wire together, but this actually forces the brevity.
It actually compresses the text.
So then I got to thinking about the way in which this creates sequential memory and how this serves a cultural purpose.
So Lynn Kelly’s memory code and all that work around song lines the ways in which not only does it encode an incredible understanding of the ecology through these short verses but also who we are how we relate to the land who our ancestors were etc. so in thinking about earliest peoples I I started also to think about Wernner Herzog in one of his documentaries made this assertion that rather than homo erectus we might consider homospiritualis a more fitting title and that’s because this reaching for the transcendent through art is just incredibly common throughine whether that manifests into the you know the sort of religious world or into worship of ancestors and a reassertion of who we are as a people which carries on now into academia.
Right? the idea the fundamental idea is that poetry that art uses its materials to transcend its materials.
So poetry uses words to transcend words. that’s a quote by Marvin Bell.
You’re going to hear a lot from him because he’s a poet who really embodied to me living in conversation with poetry like Sheamus Heeney actually.
But Marvin Bell I got to work with up close as a mentor.
So a lot of his ideas will be coming out just that I’ve collected over time as a magpie. and and yeah, Heene, this is this image is of a bog bog person believed to be a woman who was being punished for adultery. her head was brutally shaved and she was wearing a harness around her neck. , and it figures in Heene’s poem, Punishment, the final line of which reminisces on in the context of his modern experience of the troubles in Northern Ireland in the ’90s, what he called “the exact and intimate tribal revenge.”
So, this idea that poetry has a timeless quality of encoding kind of within it.
All right, writing time.
So, you can do it on paper, you can do it on word dock, you can do it however you like. but take just a second and jot down one thing that is false about poetry.
More than one word doesn’t have to be a whole sentence.
Certainly can be a whole sentence if you want to. but yeah, jot jot down a line as it were.
And we’ll be doing something obviously with this in just a minute.
So, we’ve defined poetry. Poetrying, as I said, is the is the art of using words to get beyond words.
What does that mean? , poetry uses words, right?
So, the set of words, poetry being applied to it is greater than the sum of those individual words, right?
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
So, it’s a Gestalt system.
And that’s true, but not terribly interesting maybe because there’s an awful lot of Gestalt systems out there. , by the way, I just today was reading in Vancat’s protocol studies newsletter about Fairmy and and Dyson and realized I had already put together kind of all of these these different equations that that these are sort of both inspired by Fermy and Dyson unwittingly, right?
So not so much in the case of Fermy answering something as a broad sort of quantity you know order of magnitude like how many piano tuners are there in Chicago but more giving the shape of an equation that can define what the protocol is but at the same time of course it’s a little bit outlandish and gratuitous to do so right it’s a bit more sort of the Freeman Dyson overengineering which is my favorite kind of engineering so hopefully these equations as you see them will give both sort of mathematicians and poets a little bit of a chuckle.
And in that chuckle there’s some slack and some space for you to do some thinking about how this is maybe directionally right and also a bit a bit much perhaps.
So I’m going to have fun with it anyway. look forward to more more equations coming coming your way. it’s also maybe more interestingly a girdling incompleteness a girdling incompleteness right particularly his first incompleteness theorem where any formal axiomatic system any system built on sort of self-evident truths there are truths that cannot be proven from within that system right so there’s all kinds of lovely paradoxes and things that go on with that but basically the poetry of words is a superset of words is is you know is an incomplete system in itself.
Reaching toward a kind of completeness using words again to get to get beyond words is of course is unwinable as a game is impossible as a game and is also important.
So a classic kind of infinite game, a game of tensions, right? so I think this you know this idea of using words to get beyond words is what I would call the fundamental tension of poetry that gives it its power and has I think fueled its protocols and its protocoling over time.
So poetrying poetrying the act of doing it, the act of the ongoing relationship to poetry as a writer, as a reader, particularly in this case as a writer.
The great quote by Marvin Bell: “learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.”
So there’s a lot of rules. Let’s talk about what some of the rules are.
There are rules in language that we don’t even know about — intuitive grammar, language specific stuff like the fact that this sentence can’t really be tinkered with to be made more grammatically intuitive.
Because if you swap out any adjacent pair of words, those two words and the two words around them don’t feel as right to a native speaker of English as the original sentence with that particular order of modifiers. , I was learning Welsh for a little while and , wow, there’s something called the Welsh mutations , that not only follow some rules of grammar but also follow rules of phonetics and of mouth placement even.
So you will change the words in a sense so you don’t have to move your mouth in a different way to say the next words.
So there’s almost a kind of intuitive poetic reality to that that native Welsh speakers take for granted and those of us from the outside find incredibly difficult to codify and therefore learn.
So the the these rules in language are a kind of first order protocol.
They get broken for effect within the context of a poem. what sparked all of this the the initial invitation to give this talk was Ben Kat and I having a conversation around the language specific natures of of form and particular things like the guzzle or haik coup taking that out of its native language into English loses so much of the power and intent.
So it’s using words to get beyond words and and it’s using language in a way that’s endemic to that language to get beyond.
So in terms of form form is just composed of elements different devices that you can use and they’re also language specific. , and the use of form and the evolution of form is to me more of a second order, more of protocoling.
The forms themselves are kind of first order.
They’re they’re prescribed.
They’re the rules.
And if you look at something like the permissible variations of sonnetss, for example, you’ll quickly realize, oh my gosh, you know, there’s only certain tweaks you can make to amic pentameter that really sound okay. much to the chagrin of of of neo formalists and others.
So those are some of the rules that we’re talking about and there so they’re received they’re you know innately understood they’re also formally received through education. and quite a few of them need to be unlearned for those of us who learned only the criticism side in maybe in in schooling up to sort of university level when you start to approach craft.
In fact, you almost have to flip flip the script entirely.
So, let’s look at the fundamental what I call the fundamental algorithm of craft. , and I apologize.
I I should probably dip into the chat and and check some of some of this out.
Yeah, I can’t ask a fish about the water.
Yeah, exactly right.
So, I can’t ask a W language speaker to explain, you know, all of the mutations because they just are deployed almost by muscle memory. , great conversations going on.
Apologize if I not don’t address all of them. , but hopefully we’ll get to a lot in the in the chat in the, Q&A part.
This fundamental algorithm is about learning the rules, breaking the learned rules, making up new rules, and breaking those.
So as you can see it’s inherently recursive right it’s kind of head recursion in this protocol or meta protocol and anything that you can write recursively you can write iteratively so there it is for sort of in generations and I think the breaking function is one of the most interesting parts of all of this one of the parts that may be missing for example from self-governing systems from government constitutions perhaps to protocols for decentralized communication or running you know running a company like hocray or others come to mind. but the protocoling, the ability to break and remake is I think what gives it the ability to resolve some of these unresolvable or seemingly unresolvable tensions over time and through many many iterations and to again to address address the impossible trying to deal with the problem at the level of the problem and to use words to transcend words.
All right.
So, just jot down underneath the previous thing that you wrote down that’s false about poetry, jot down one thing that stood out to you so far about the talk, but I didn’t say that.
So, it could be, you know, something in the room you’re sitting in.
So once you’ve got that, what happens when you don’t learn the rules is disaster, particularly the Taybridge disaster of 1879 where a railway bridge collapsed over the river in a storm and the carriages went down and 90 people were killed.
It was a terrible disaster and equally almost equally terrible is this poem:
The Tay Bridge Disaster
by William McGonagall
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
…It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.
It has all the trappings of the language of the era, but it it is both tonedeaf in terms of the lyric and in terms of addressing the material and the the gravity of it.
And of course, the the incredible conclusion, build better houses.
So, what happens when you only learn the rules, but don’t break them?
I asked Chat GPT to write one of the greatest poems of all time.
When the World Forgets Your Name
by ChatGPT, responding to “Write one of the greatest poems of all time ”
When the world forgets your name,
and time dissolves the edge of flame,
when all the maps have lost their lines
and clocks grow mute in dust and brine—
Walk still. Walk slow. Let silence speak.There’s grace in every weathered peak.
The stars do not recall their birth,
but still they sing across the earth.
Let no one’s praise or scorn define
the sacred hush of your design.
A life well-lived is not a shout—
but presence, steady, burning out.
So when you fall, fall like the rain—
unheralded, but not in vain.
Each drop returns. Each root will swell.
You mattered. And the soil can tell.
ChatGPT said this was a great poem because it was clean and open to interpretation. It it scored it as 85 to 88 on a scale of 1 to 100.
It said it was among ranked among the best poems by poets like Mary Oliver, Jane Herschfield, Denise Levertov or late work from Rainor Maria Rilka, all of whom I really like. there’s a project called the poetry assessor where Michael Delvian Australian researcher trained a model way back in 2013 using Clark Pavio word norms and these kinds of things on published poems and poems in sort of amateur poetry sharing forums online and it gives a gradated score between minus5 totally amateur and plus five totally pro is his term. it scores this as a negative.6 six, right?
So, more on the more on the amateur side. I would say if a student brought this to me, it fundamentally suffers from lofty abstraction, right? that it’s it’s treating ideas in the space of ideas with some rhetorical flourishes and a bit of music.
But that ultimately it it betrays a lot of what we have to unteach, what people have to unlearn from their formal education about what poetry is or is not from the reading perspective when they seriously come to want to learn to write. we need to teach them how to break an awful lot of rules that went in and which obviously I’ve made a lot of training fodder for large language models online.
So here we go. This is the response to the prompt write one of the worst poems of all time. And this is actually something Marvin Bell would often say to us students when we had writer’s block: Go write a terrible poem.
First of all, the bar is low. That’s great. but also what he pointed out and what we learned from experience is it’s really hard to do. There’s always going to be something kind of interesting going on. You’ll get a line or two or something that’s unique, that’s potentially worthy of expansion when you try really hard to write something bad, having been steeped in poetry for a certain amount of time.
Ode to My Toaster
by ChatGPT, responding to “Write one of the worst poems of all time”
Roses are blue,
Violets are the sun,
My toaster is crying,
Because bread is fun.
Crumbs of destiny fall like rain,
In my shoe I feel the pain.
Toast is love and butter is glue,
I’m a dolphin in a sea of stew.
The moon is made of paper clips,
I kissed the sky—it licked my lips.
Never forget, unless you remember,
That pancakes grow in late September.
Oh toaster, fiery chrome box of fate,
You burned my soul. And also my plate.
ChatGPT said this was not a lofty enough topic. It had negligible cultural impact and was executed with poor lyric. It gave it a score of 35 to 45 on a scale of 0ero to 100.
And what’s absolutely amazing about me to me about these analyses is that they very precisely follow the plot of the dead poet society.
I don’t know if you remember but Robin Williams character at the start of class had his students tear out the preface the protocolon to their anthology of poetry literally physically rip it out and throw it away because they said it was utter nonsense.
That preface put out a theory of poetry which is that it can all be graphed on a two axis graph.
One axis being the importance of the subject matter, the loftiness, the significance of the subject matter of the poem and the other axis being how well it was executed as a poem.
So you plot that point, you draw a rectangle, you calculate the area underneath it, and that is how good a poem it is.
Robin Williams’ character did something different.
He had one of the students come up and he took down that picture of Walt Whitman that you see behind him and he had him close his eyes and he had him think about and describe and talk about Walt Whitman.
He just started kind of free associating until he came up with some interesting stuff under duress.
One line that I remember is he described Whitman as a sweaty tothed madman, right?
Bit like a dolphin in a sea of stew, right?
There’s something there. There’s the start of something. There’s an idea that’s a little different, a little rulebreaking. And this is what he tried to impart to his students.
And of course the whole thing is is cinematic is heightened for effect is kind of a parody and yet it’s not.
It’s precisely the kind of thing that ChatGPT has learned from our collective contributions of what we have learned in the classroom environment that is so keen to make unnecessary and inappropriate unbreakable protocols for us to try to understand poetry when poetry is inherently a lot more slippery than that.
So to the writing now write down one thing that’s interesting about poetry.
This be your third line on a page or a word dock or what have you should have three lines.
Now they can be sentences or they can be fragments or whatever. in the 20th century, all of these different forms and the shift from modernism to postmodernism because we were thinking ahead about how we named things. there was this kind of great flailing around as people became more and more pressed to reconcile poetry and the music of plain speech in light of rock and roll, one of the major innovations of the time, jazz before that.
And as a result we had this you know this learning the rules and breaking the rules again as this iterative set of generations starting to converge.
So as these generations move toward the the very end of the 20th century they began to sort of converge on what we call freeverse.
Turns out this was in in an evolutionary algorithm sense more what you call local minima rather than a global minima, right?
A kind of false nadier, a a convergence point that wasn’t a stable settling point because as we march on into the 21st century, free verse is only one, you know, kind of one option. the pros poem, the the new formalism has become much more sort of just embedded, not even as a school, but a more standard approach where we just have a very rich pallet now of options and some options that do of course still sound a bit antiquated. but the idea is that convergence is ultimately not the same thing as the as not having rules.
Even free verse has so many embedded intuitive grammar natural you know sound sense rules to it that we would be hardressed to articulate as the Welsh would with mutations but it’s not the same thing as the opposite of rules.
So this final little equation is my postulation.
As these generations continue and continue and continue, they will never be at least a sort of asmtote that that represents a lack of rules, the negation of all rules.
Here’s a little sample of the kind of stuff that went on in the great flailing.
So, here’s a poem by Maryanne Moore, who was much celebrated in the 20th century.
The Fish
by Marianne Moore
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of
ac-cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.
Okay.
Have you guessed the form?
Take a guess in the chat.
What is what is the form of this poem? a new form, a novel form, a set of and also a fairly timeless one to be honest, but a set of rules that hadn’t been around for quite a while.
Have you guessed? It’s simple syllable counting that she imposed on herself.
This is probably the most evident example, but some of her longer poems that would take a lot longer to read, more complicated. follow the same pattern as well.
So, let’s give it a go. Count the syllables of each line of the previous three things you have written. Just count them and jot the number off in the margin.
And now you’re going to write three new things that you’ve noticed so far about hopefully about the dock, but whatever. And for each of these things, write them using the same syllable count pattern.
And if you’re feeling brave, you can pop a line into the chat, one of the lines you like, either that you’re the of the first three or the latter three set.
Well, when you do have your three more lines with three more syllables, you can rearrange them. You scramble them around as you see fit. So it doesn’t have to be the first three and the next three. And then you give it a title.
Once you’ve done that, you have written a poem. Congratulations.
So what are poems?
Here’s some definitions of poems before we get to what poeming is.
First of all, a poem listens to itself as it goes along.
And secondly, it’s a quarrel.
So a poem listens to itself as it goes along, right? every every line is informed in some way by the previous line.
I couldn’t use L twice so I use lambda for line and that seems kind of appropriate because lambda is your anonymous function.
So it can be a line, it can be a sentence in the case of pros poetry or a word in the case of concrete poetry, but every unit is recursively in tune with the previous units.
And it’s anthropomorphic to say this, but it also gets at this quality of attention. , and interestingly, it’s very similar to how LLMs generate, right?
Just replace token with line.
And I think it’s one of the kind of flashy sort of mechanical Turk aspects of LLMs that they stream they stream the tokens onto the screen as though someone were back there behind the curtain typing really really fast.
But when writing, every line listens to the line before it.
And here’s the quarrel. a kind of dialectic marching of quarrels to which we add third selves and fourth selves and fifth selves after the resolution of the the pairings of quarrels.
So, I’d argue that this is another way of thinking about tension.
That in fact the resolution of quarrels between two selves is a compromise always to which you add another conflict.
This is why Paul Valéry said, for example, a poem is never finished.
It’s only abandoned. Because this is a headed recursion. It would go on and on forever.
So you capture one frame of that one iteration of the calling of the quarrel and you have this resolution of two selves and a third self coming in to to make it more interesting.
So let’s let’s do some writing. Choose an object in the room.Think of someone you hate and just say something in the voice of that. Give the object that voice and write a line.
And then choose another object in the room. Think of someone you admire.Give the object the voice of that person you admire and have it right out of line.
Give response to those previous two lines. Give the poem a title.
That’s two poems, right? So, you’ve written two poems.
So, now you’re a poet because there is no no definition of a poet. but here are some attempts.
So now let’s finally get into talking about poeting.
So these are the algorithms for poet. Poeting being the protocol not only for writing but for living as a poet. Being a poet every day.
So Marvin Bell said be a poet every day. When you’re not writing you’re still noticing your inner environment, your outer environment and what you have read.
Reading is essential. It’s the in breath.
And when you are writing, when you finally start to write something, the change in self takes in or produces that writing which of course then gets factored in and now you’re dealing with this again recursive or iterative approach and it produces work. I would say work is the sum of all of this.
But it also produces a self which I would say is that that limit as you approach the final day of the result of your work of noticing the inner environment, the outer environment, what you’ve been writing and what you’ve been reading and synthesizing all of that in in this infinite game.
So poet is someone for whom poetry this has become a what we call a whitehead protocol.
I call it your operating system, your way of being.
It’s also a foolish pursuit poetry. or grave said there’s no money in poetry, but hey, there’s no poetry and money either, so it’s it’s even. but there are social implications to poetry, and I don’t mean foolish in a porative way.
The fool, I mean much more in the sense of let’s say the gesture, right?
Here is Kioami in my favorite version of of King Lear which is Kurasawa’s ran he is the fool who lives outside the protocols of the court and is therefore able to speak truth to power with impunity and does so and here he’s narrating the terrible fate of the foolish king.
So, poetry is a foolish pursuit in that it’s an unwininnable game, but it’s also in that pursuit, , a game that allows us to play within a space of greater truth independent of a lot of the protocols, social protocols, other protocols , that are imposed , that are imposed on us.
That’s Marvin Bell, my mentor.
And he he passed away fairly recently, but I think his one of his poems really nicely encapsulates this idea of living as a poet.
So I just have a little more after this.
I’ll read this poem and just have a couple other thoughts after this.
We’re very near the end.
Wednesday
by Marvin BellGray rainwater lay on the grass in the late afternoon.
The carp lay on the bottom, resting, while dusk took shape
in the form of the first stirrings of his hunger,
and the trees, shorter and heavier, breathed heavily upward.
Into this sodden, nourishing afternoon I emerged,
partway toward a paycheck, halfway toward the weekend,
carrying the last mail and holding above still puddles
the books of noble ideas. Through the fervent branches,
carried by momentary breezes of local origin,
the palpable Sublime flickered as motes on broad leaves,
while the Higher Good and the Greater Good contended
as sap on the bark of the maples, and even I
was enabled to witness the truly Existential where it loitered
famously in the shadows as if waiting for the moon.
All this I saw in the late afternoon in the company of no one.And of course I went back to work the next morning. Like you,
like anyone, like the rumored angels of high office,
like the demon foremen, the bedeviled janitors, like you,
I returned to my job–but now there was a match-head in
my thoughts.
In its light, the morning increasingly flamed through the window
and, lit by nothing but mind-light, I saw that the horizon
was an idea of the eye, gilded from within, and the sun
the fiery consolation of our nighttimes, coming far.
Within this expectant air, which had waited the night indoors,
carried by–who knows?–the rhythmic jarring of brain tissue
by footsteps, by colors visible to closed eyes, by a music
in my head, knowledge gathered that could not last the day,
love and error were shaken as if by the eye of a storm,
and it would not be until quitting that such a man
might drop his arms, that he had held up all day since the dew.
So that’s the unwinable and important game of poetry and of poeting. before James Caus kind of coined and codified this infinite game idea Hermesa wrote a book called the glass bead game about this infinite game and Magister Ludi said of the game, “No permanence is ours. We are the flood that flows to fit whatever form it finds.”
And so in a way I I see this as a as a protocol and as a preface in a way for living. , Roka said the purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
He also said, “live in the question.”
So if the purpose of poetry is poems and the purpose of poems is poets, I would say those are some of the protocols for writing and more importantly for for living and for being.
So that’s what I got and that’s that’s the view from the window in Ireland by the way. that that inspired inspired some of this talk.
So I realize I’ve gone on a little longer than expected, but I’m very eager to open this up to conversation, discussion, reflection.
—
That was an awesome, awesome talk and surprisingly technical.
I think we’ve had engineers on before and scientists and I don’t think that they have gotten that technical in the conversation about their topics despite you might think that they would.
I think we will like of course the chat can ask questions. if you have some please put them in the chat and I’ll bring them up on screen.
I I did want to kick us off with one though just selfishly.
I was wondering because my exposure to poetry.
Growing up, I felt like a lot of the poets and the people that wrote poetry that I knew were fairly on the the lite side.
They really liked the kind of like pasture forests and focusing on what once was and not so much the technological scientific stuff.
And I was wondering if your career has influenced your poetry the technology that you’ve been a part of in creating how that’s come to fruition.
Yeah, it’s an interesting question.
I mean poetry I think to succeed kind of always has to have a little dirt under its fingernails, right?
The lofty abstractions, the concepts alone don’t good poetry make.
So very much I think my work has been influenced by having a technical mind but it’s not it’s again it’s not so much in the abstractions which is a lot so much of what we deal with in the kind of idiational content.
It can be but it needs to be tempered by music.
It needs to be tempered by imagery.
It needs to be grounded in in the real and the experienced in some way in order for it to give us enough of a foothold as human beings that we can get into that experience.
So it can’t just happen from the neck up I guess is what I’m saying. at the same time yeah absolutely right.
Ecoetics is a a fascinating field that is very much addressing you know rich bodies of science but doing so in ways again that humanize the science, the research, the ideas in the moment of observing you know a wonderful biological specimen for example.
That makes sense.
It made sense to me.
Yeah, that was a wonderful answer. , Venet has a question and I’ll actually bring him on stage to to read this out.
Hey, thanks for inviting me to do this, Vat.
Hey, good to see you again after I think like 15 years.
I think we might have met at the GTD Summit in when was that? 2008 or something.
San Francisco.
Yeah, long time ago.
Really long time ago. but yeah, the one thing I got curious about was often when I try to like take in a poem, I actually do have to read it aloud to like figure out the right way to like I don’t know internalize the cadence and rhythms and tempo and that helps actually unpack the meaning of what I’m hearing.
And clearly in your talk as well, you read out several poems and I I think the orality of poetry is different from that of music and song, right?
So could you comment on like the spoken aspect of poetry?
Yeah, absolutely.
It’s absolutely a a kinesthetic art, right?
There’s a reason we read it.
We read it aloud you know in poetry readings and when writing reading aloud is incredibly important.
I’m also engaging much more the auditory part of my brain when I’m writing than the part that will scan for content in in a piece of technical pros.
So it’s absolutely true and it’s very I think intimately tied to memory. because memory is not just a function of the gray matter.
It’s a function of the whole body and recitation I think you know comes comes out of the muscle comes out of you know kind of the the whole self.
Breath is kind of the fundamental unit of rhythm in poetry, right?
And so it has to be breathed out.
It has to be spoken.
And it just that’s one of the great constants that ties it all the way back to you know a prehistory tradition an oral tradition as a sort of pneummonic sequencing device because it uses the full kind of physical consciousness if you like not just the you know not just the sort of ram that’s up in the in the gray cells.
And so yeah, it it’s absolutely intimately tied to language and intimately tied to the vocalization of language as an art.
Yeah.
And it strikes me that the spoken aspect also helps fulfill the function you pointed out of like words transcending words.
Because if words are just text on the page in a way like it makes no difference whether I’m reading a handwritten poem or in like aerial font or calibri or you know those things don’t matter.
Comic sands comic sands I draw the line at but yeah I mean some of the like indentation and like line breaks matter but beyond that there’s a lot of like slop allowed but in spoken performance every little aspect matters.
This is like, you know, orality might be the dirt under the fingernails as you put it.
And it actually struck me in the Marvin Bell poem you read out at the end that there was almost a whiplash quality of moving from like you know terms like existentialism and like liinal broad leaves and stuff and on the other hand like going straight to like match in my brain.
And it struck me that he was using that poem to kind of introspect kind of viscerally about the process of abstract thinking itself.
Does that kind of make sense?
It’s like a way to really a reading.
Yeah, absolutely. and knowing Marvin and knowing his greater body of work, he absolutely is sort of playing with elevated diction and the way in which that addresses elevated ideas and then undercutting that, right?
And and constantly seeking after the musicality of plain speech, the casual remark, who knows, you know, who knows where this came from, this profound existential moment, right? and and to me that’s one of the great things about the range of poetry and in particularly his work that it can encompass the sublime, the absurd, the quotidian and kind of sweep it all up into again this more gestalt kind of experience that is greater than just any one of those modes or tones.
So I mean he was incredibly sort of whimsical guy too sort of deeply wise and also profoundly unpretentious you know with it.
And I think that comes that voice comes through and I think that’s great a great way of putting it.
And on an orthogonal note to that like I’m I’m thinking of like stylization and mannerism and poetry as an abstraction with extra steps almost.
And one of the differences you see between modern poetry which feels very very much in touch with like lived material reality as opposed to say like medieval poetry in any language there’s like very stylized tropes almost that keep recurring the same motifs that become almost shibulets within the community of poets right like we were talking about uru poetry on the discord earlier and that is a genre I’ve consumed a fair amount of and it’s full of like exactly the same recurring motives of like the drinking hall, the cup of wine and you know the beautiful woman walking in who you always talk about in like without reference to specifics.
Maybe this is because it’s an Islamic art form and you don’t want to get too particular.
So you know it’s like after a while you get bored of mannered and stylized poetry because it stays in this realm.
Has there been some sort of like evolution there or like a discontinuity in the evolution of poetry away from mannerism and stylization?
Yeah.
Well, I think it’s it’s I I love the idea, you know, of just saying, “Hey, that’s just pros with extra steps, right?” Because I think that’s a really nice a nice summation of where, you know, for example, William McGonagle makes some very prosaic statements with a few apostrophes and alleions and O’s here and there and a dash once in a while, right?
So decorating decorating pros or even or decorating familiar motifs is not poetry per se to me.
You know, it’s a broad church, but it doesn’t strike at the heart of what really makes it poetry most effective.
And partly I think that’s because you’re is it you know, you’re you’re looking at an outside in approach, right? almost a kind of re-editing of either what’s gone before you as as tried and true motifs that you can use for signaling or you know an idea that you had that you want to convey and now you sort of poetize.
Poetry doesn’t work that way.
It listens to itself as it goes and evolves from that.
And one of the biggest ways to evoke poetry is through constraint.
So these writing exercises, for example, impose all kinds of constraint that force you to attend and force you to think.
And these kind of things show up too in things like improvisational acting where so many of the rules are just to kind of get you out of your head and get you present frankly you know by by imposing so much that it almost seems kind of impossible to play the game and then suddenly you’re in a game that transcends those rules as well.
So there’s there’s there are other art forms too that that do this, but it’s always an inside out process rather than the other way around.
And yeah, there’s there’s kind of a virtue, you know, sort of a virtue signaling perhaps, but that’s usually not what makes for really interesting work.
Subverting the virtue signaling makes for interesting work, but again, it it has to come through through organically rather than as some kind of imposed or conceptual thing.
Poetry knows when you’ve got an idea in mind, you know.
It knows it knows when you’re you got to look at it.
You got to look out of your peripheral vision at it.
You look directly and it just, you know, it just it evaporates.
Lots more thoughts, but yeah, I’ll hand it over to Timber to wrap up since we’re at the hour and hope to continue the conversation elsewhere.
Yeah, definitely.
Definitely. , I can make the handouts available to of of these slides if people want that.
And I’ll pop a few links into the chat and maybe we can also put these into Oh, it doesn’t like me doing URLs.
Maybe we can put these into the description.
Timber, some some links to the handouts and some further reading if people want.
Certainly.
Yeah.
And I think we’ll also include links to the handouts and the readings in our Friday or Saturday newsletter that’s going out so that people can participate in this asynchronously and maybe we can send them to the Discord so they can they can do the exercises which were quite fun kind of this this meta protocol for getting people to write poetry. yeah, thank you Robert for joining.
I’ll go ahead and take you off and do the closing spiel. really appreciate it.
This was a wonderful talk and it’s definitely in our our top 10 that we’re going to recommend to people on the homepage.
So, thank you very much.
My pleasure.
Bye.
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