At play in the fields of Google

This entry is part 17 of 20 in the series Poetics and technology

 

UPDATE (9/1/11): I’ve decided to end my use of Google+ due to Google’s intransigence over its identity policy. One Facebook is enough! See you over at the other corporate soul-stealer.

Cory Doctorow sums up the issues better than I could.

*

So I’ve joined Google+, the fantastic new social network for talking about Google+. (It’s still in private beta, but I have invitations if anyone wants one.) Enthusiasm for the still-developing service has been balanced by skepticism that we actually need another general-purpose social network — see for example what Lorianne DiSabato and Beth Adams have blogged about it. Here are my initial reactions.

1) Facebook has had a “lists” feature for quite some time, supposedly allowing one to keep up with subsets of one’s contacts — family, close friends, blogger buddies, etc. Unfortunately, it never shows me more than the most recent day or two of posts from the lists I’ve set up, and even then doesn’t seem to include everything. Facebook is good at suggesting people I should add to each semi-functional list, which makes me suspect it’s really all about data-mining with advertisers in mind: figure out how specifically we network so they can better target us in coordinated advertising campaigns. Now, there’s no guarantee that Google+’s ballyhooed “circles” won’t have the same ultimate purpose. But the interface for screening one’s data-stream by subset of contacts is much smoother, it’s not three clicks away, and (so far at least) it works.

2) Data portability is a critical issue for me. Google+ lets you download and save all your posts at any time. I like that. Despite my very liberal views on copyright and content-sharing, I don’t like the feeling I get over at Facebook that my content isn’t really my own.

3) Much as I like the 140-character limit at Twitter and Identi.ca as an enforcer of concision and spur to creativity for my microblogging at The Morning Porch, I don’t otherwise see the point, and I resent Facebook limiting the length of status updates. Google+ lets you go on as long as you like. It’s bloggish.

4) While it would be nice to have a “Facebook for grown-ups,” and I’ll be happy if Google+ becomes that and gets mass adoption, at this point I’m most interested in social networking around specific interests or for specific purposes. (Just look at the success of Goodreads among book-readers and Ravelry among knitters.) It’s not clear to me yet whether Google+, with its circles and video-chat “hangouts,” represents a major step forward in this regard. I am considering getting a webcam, though — the possibilities for small-group readings and workshops are very tantalizing. I’ve always hesitated to organize conference calls on Skype due to the sometimes intermittent nature of our internet connection here; far better if it were hosted in the cloud, as Google+ hangouts are. Also, spontaneous get-togethers are often the best kind, and creative types in particular are hard to herd, as would be necessary if I ever tried the Skype approach.

5) Like Beth and Lorianne, I’m a blogger first and foremost. I think that anyone who really has anything to say on a regular basis should have their own blog, and that we should preferentially leave comments about blog posts at the point of origin and stop letting discussions fragment and dissipate at a half-dozen different places where the link might be shared.

6) A link-sharing culture, regardless of its host (Google+, Reddit, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, etc.) is fundamentally about enthusiasm for things that others have written, captured or made. This is both good and bad. I like the enthusiasm (and the frequent displays of wit), but I get frustrated after a while and want to say, O.K., but what have you made? Where are your poems? Hang out too much with professional writers or artists, though, and you’ll notice that we tend to go in the opposite direction, rarely sharing anything we didn’t make ourselves. Is it possible that our participation in social networks has helped mitigate this tendency a little? Or for those of us who were already blogging before Facebook and Twitter got big, has it actually shrunk our blogs, diminishing the emphasis we once placed on linking out, assembling sidebar linkrolls, and being social, because hey, we’re doing enough of that elsewhere? Self-centered and often anti-social as I am, I do try to strike a balance between self-promotion and other-promotion, but it’s not always easy. I like to think my use of Facebook has forced me to at least stay focused on the problem.

7) Email is still the “killer app” for me and I think for almost everyone over the age of 30. Unlike phone calls or (god help us) instant messaging, it doesn’t interrupt whatever I’m doing and destroy my concentration. We need less distraction, not more. What keeps me involved in online social interactions are email notifications, and the more customizable those notifications are, the happier I am. Facebook has recently gotten pretty good in this regard, letting me decide on a page-by-page and group-by-group basis how I want to be notified. It would be nice if I could do this for each comment thread as well, because some discussions you really want to follow and others, not so much. (I’ve seen participants in Facebook conversations go back and delete their comments just to stop the flood of notifications when the conversation goes on too long!)

It is in this regard that the older blogging platforms are really falling behind WordPress. I’m much less likely to leave a comment anymore if can’t keep track of follow-up discussion via email. I’ll actually be surprised if Blogger doesn’t overhaul its archaic commenting system soon, and introduce a “subscribe to other comments in this thread” feature when it does so. Typepad is probably a lost cause. (Incidentally, for self-hosted WordPress bloggers, I recommend the plugin I’m using, Subscribe to Comments Reloaded, rather than the original Subscribe to Comments, which hasn’t been updated since 2007. Previously I used a different plugin with a double opt-in feature — in other words, the subscriber had to not only check a box, but reply to an email in order to confirm each and every subscription. That’s too many hoops to jump through, I think.)

The point is that for me and I presume most other email-oriented people who want to participate in online conversations, it’s important that we have the option to follow discussions via email — and that we have fine-grained controls, including the option to unsubscribe from any discussion at any time. WordPress.com currently leads the social media field in this regard, which may seem ironic, since WordPress is all about traditional, long-form blogging and website creation rather than social networking. The highlight of the latest version of the software is a distraction-free writing option, which shows what the developers prioritize. At the same time, they have more — and, I gather, better — mobile phone applications than any other blogging platform. But I think it only makes sense that those who most value thoughtful communication would build the best tools for discussion and response.

Curating the Dead

This entry is part 10 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

Broken-nosed cherub

They were the grinning stars
of our childhood museum,
looming above the conches
& fossil ferns, the brain coral
& the blue & green glass bottles
that once held medicine.
We’d found them in the woods
not far from the houses,
their other bones littered about,
but it was only them we carried
home, those skulls: two cows & a mule.
Our elderly neighbor remembered
the mule’s name: Charlie.
Some of the teeth were loose
& soon went missing,
like strip-mined mountains.

We didn’t think about their deaths
or even what they’d been
before, as working livestock;
they were still live enough for us.
The zigzag sutures where
the parts of the skull fit together
made them self-evidently whole
& perfect, & the way the lower jaws
hinged behind the empty eyes
inspired awe. Every kid,
no matter how bored, would stop,
lift the mule’s top jaw
& make him talk.

Dickinson on heaven


Watch on Vimeo.

I decided to envideo a poem by Emily Dickinson (#413 in the R. W. Franklin edition of the complete poems), written in 1862.

Heaven is so far of the Mind
That were the Mind dissolved –
The Site – of it – by Architect
Could not again be proved –

‘Tis Vast – as our Capacity –
As fair – as our idea –
To Him of adequate desire
No further ’tis, than Here –

While this obviously isn’t one of Dickinson’s greatest poems, it does encapsulate, I think, one of her core beliefs, and is therefore a useful key to understanding her work as a whole. I couldn’t resist adding an ironic visual reference to one of her most famous poems.

And I must admit I picked a short poem because I didn’t have that much footage. I spent some time going through Franklin looking for poems about Heaven and Nature, and almost went with #721, which is more apophatic (and still pretty short), but it wasn’t as good a fit.

Extremophile

This entry is part 9 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

be still

How many miles into the earth
would we have to dig to find true stillness,
free from all taint of life?
Some bacteria can thrive solely
on the energy from radioactive decay,
know nothing of oxygen, & persist
as a single-species ecosystem,
alone in their subterranean cosmos.
We’ve come to learn a full half
of the total mass of life on earth
dwells underground or beneath
the ocean floor. So thoroughly have
we infected the planet, it might
never be rid of us, the poor thing,
burdened as it is with a barren mate
that remains untainted by its contagion,
circling at a safe distance
& summoning with a regular tug
that we like to think is somehow
meant for us.

*

It’s always a fun challenge to try to work such utterly geeky material into a poem. The bacteria mentioned is Desulforudis audaxviator — see “Real Life Journey To The Center Of The Earth Finds First Ecosystem With A Single Species” in Science 2.0. (Be sure to click on the photo if you can’t read the inscription on the gravestone.)

“Howl”: first feature-length videopoem?

I wake from a dream of flying and being grounded — flying with my own wings, I mean, and then being stopped and held back by a ring of people who were all masquerading as me: Poetry.

Jesus. Did I really just dream that? I did, and I have no doubt what prompted it: watching HOWL on Hulu last night before bed. The hallucinatory animation sequences, full of flying and falling souls/poets/angelheaded hipsters, were clearly still percolating through my subsconscious.

Andrew Weil once wrote about psychotropic drugs that one’s experience is greatly determined by set (i.e. mindset) and setting. I think the same is true for many other kinds of mind-altering experiences, including reading novels and watching movies. My experience of HOWL was largely positive, therefore, in part because the setting was right. My belly was full, the chair was comfortable, and I had been actively searching for something to watch that would be slightly challenging, but primarily escapist entertainment. More importantly, I think, was my mindset, shaped by a couple of years of curating Moving Poems and studying all manner of poetry films, especially animations and film-poems or videopoems. I read the reviews of HOWL when it first came out and conceived the notion that it was basically a feature-length version of the kinds of things I most like to post to Moving Poems, and sure enough, that’s what I saw last night: a brilliant mixture of documentary, animation, and interview with the poem itself at center stage.

A couple other critical elements of my mindset help account for my reception. One is that I’m a strong advocate of free speech and gay rights, things central to the obscenity trial, which was the film’s chronological anchor and source of dramatic tension. I don’t often think about the kind of courage required to do what Ginsberg (and Ferlinghetti) did in pre-Stonewall days. The details about his and his mother’s involuntary consignment to mental institutions were sobering, too, and I didn’t know anything about that background to the poem.

Another thing that shaped my perception of the movie was my attitude about Beat poetry in general and Ginsberg’s poetry in particular: I’ve never particularly cared for either one, but I recognize their importance to 20th-century American poetry — which I am obviously very deeply interested in. From the opening seconds of the film, I was like, Holy shit, that’s the reading, man! The one that started this whole craze for live poetry readings (and later, poetry slams) that’s still with us 55 years later. But in general, I find Beat poetry boring, self-indulgent, and severely lacking in the kinds of silences I prize in modern lyric poetry. Perhaps if I’d had a more exalted opinion of the poem or its author, I’d have been disappointed with what the directors, actors and animator did with it. Instead, I thought they succeeded brilliantly, not only in bringing the poem to life, but as Stanley Fish pointed out in the New York Times, communicating something of the intellectual pleasures of literary criticism, and of reading itself — a real feat for any movie.

In my post-movie enthusiasm last night, I also read an interview with the filmmakers, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, at TribecaFilm.com. As a connoisseur of film-poetry I was especially interested in their description of the process:

Q: So HOWL is a movie about poetry. How did you even start to conceive how to do that?

Jeffrey Friedman: Yeah, it took us a while to figure it out. We just approached it as we would any other project by starting to do research. We wanted to understand what went into the making of the poem; Allen’s creative process and his personal process; and what he had to go through to get to the point where he could produce this poem.

We wanted to understand the world that the poem [was] being introduced into, and the obscenity trial seemed like a ready-made theater to show that. We wanted the poem to live on its own, [which the poem does in] different ways in the movie: it lives as performance art, which is the way it was first presented to the world, as spoken word—it was really the first poetry slam—and in the animation, which was inspired by Eric Drooker’s collaboration with Ginsberg on a book of poems, including part of HOWL, called Illuminated Poems.

Rob Epstein: We wanted the poem to be a character. That was the starting point.

Q: I’m fascinated by your switch from doc to narrative. Were you always planning that with HOWL?

Rob Epstein: When we started immersing ourselves in research, we didn’t yet have a concept. Once we did, the first idea we had for the film was pretty close to what it ended up being: we knew we wanted to do a dramatic film that had the veracity of a documentary. We became less concerned with category than with approach.

A little later in the interview, they address the animation specifically:

Q: One of my favorite lines in the film is during the courtroom scene: “You can’t translate poetry to prose; that’s what makes it poetry.” Would you talk about the process of translation [sic] poetry into animation? Do you think it’s a better fit?

Jeffrey Friedman: Well, we don’t think of it as translation, we think of it as adaptation, the way you would adapt a novel. So you have to make it specific, because you’re creating something visual, so it’s a very specific vision that we try to imagine as what might have been going on in the head of the poet as these images were emerging.

We have all these different realities in the film. We have the present tense, all in color, which is the obscenity trial and the imagined interview with Allen, which was inspired by this Time magazine interview that he gave during the trial that was never published. And then we have flashbacks (in black and white) to events in his life and the first reading of the poem. But we also wanted the poem to live in a kind of timeless, unreal world, so the animation was a way of trying to create that.

I think the vividness of my dreams this morning is testimony to just how well they succeeded. Unmoved as I was by Ginsberg’s insistence on the importance of confessional authenticity, and by his over-all worldview with its achingly sincere, youthful visions of revolution, somehow I was captivated by a film about a poem I still consider terribly over-rated. I think that says something about the power of the film-poem genre in general, where the leaps, gaps and paradoxes of the poem guide the action, and where poem and film combine to make something greater than the sum of its parts. For Epstein and Friedman’s next project, perhaps they could take a look at Elizabeth Bishop’s work? “The Art of Losing” would make a great title for a movie…

Horror Fictions

This entry is part 8 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

DEAD (Patrick Caulfield grave)

At some point in every horror film
comes the line: It’s alive!
Is this the way the dead feel
when we disturb their rest with
our roots & our pickaxes, our squirming
purple larvae & our blind snouts?
We are the zero in their bones,
that slick thick marrow, mother
of blood. We are their unlucky
rabbits’ feet, the throw of their dice.
We creep & crawl. We erupt,
dangerous as magma.
Someday the sun will bring us
all together, living & dead, in one
molten paroxysm, but until then we can meet
only in the briefest of spasms, & are listed
together in the credits for moan, rattle
& almost imperceptible sigh.

Learn Harmonica Today

This entry is part 27 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

 

Start without the harmonica. Scarves, messengers, sections of a tangerine: anything can teach you grace. Hold a small bird & blow on it as if it were the first feeble flame in a trash burner with rain already starting to fall. Draw a map of everywhere you can walk with one tapping foot. Because honey is golden, we think we know how it will taste, but the tongue has other rendezvous. Reach without looking into a drawerful of knives, patting gently with your fingertips as if it were the head of a large dog. Practice saying, This one’s for the ladies. Anyone who knows how to breathe knows how to play.

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy

This entry is part 7 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

Weed whacker

Magpies have been observed engaging in elaborate social rituals, possibly including the expression of grief.
Wikipedia

So those are magpies!
They do look acquisitive.
They hover over
the graves like eyebrows
or second thoughts, tails
held decorously aloft.
Each time I raise the camera
they take flight—proof
they’re not spirits
but among the quick.
They are, in their black-
&-white way, shiny.
They remind me of
our shared mission:
to rob the dead.
Their chatter offers
a refuge from this refuge
where even the weed
eater keens, though
among their own kind,
blessed with sufficient wit
to comprehend loss,
they’re said to indulge
in rituals of grief.
I try counting them:
one, one, one.

Audio poetry contributions of the day

Apparently my process notes about yesterday’s videopoem gave Cynthia Cox the nudge she needed to take the leap into videopoetry herself. This morning she messaged me on Facebook:

I need a male voice to read a poem for my very low-budget, first-time video/poem thing. Would you be willing to record it and send it to me, or do you know of a male who would be willing do so?

She did her best to lower my expectations:

All I have is a little P&S camera & video of me undressing some dolls, so don’t expect much (I am cheap). And, I don’t think the poem is my best either – it’s just the one that came to me when I got the idea.

So of course I said yes, did the reading (four takes), and sent it off. Here’s what she came up with. This is way better than my earliest videopoetry experiments (also done with a point-and-shoot camera and Windows Movie Maker):


Watch on YouTube.

Cynthia Cox is a long-time online acquaintance whose poetry I admire, and she’s currently blogging poems for a new chapbook manuscript as part of her editing/polishing process — clearly a poet-blogger after my own heart.

My other poetry reading-related contribution today (aside from the usual podcast at qarrtsiluni — a poem called “Neon in a Jar” by the amazing Susan Elbe) was a new post at the group blog Voice Alpha, “From bookstore to telephone: the incredible shrinking poetry reading.” It was just going to be a simple link-post, but, well, you know how it goes. I talk about the success Heather Christle has been having with her offer to read poems over the telephone for anyone who wants to call (which includes coverage at the BBC!) and speculate that perhaps the era of chasing big audiences at bookstores is over, and we should instead concentrate on more intimate “microaudiences” — telephone, video chat, door-to-door readings… Because who are we kidding? Poetry is never going to be even remotely popular in this country. We’re freaks. Even videopoems on YouTube struggle to amass 100 views, with a few notable exceptions. If you don’t write to amuse yourself and entertain your friends first and foremost, you’re screwed.