ModPo 2013 #74 Taking Leaves: Thoughts and Final Words on Wrap-up Day

Image of floating leaves from Donald Quintana. 

Today is an emotional day for me. It's the end of ModPo. I can't believe it started last September 7 and now it's done. No more weekly assignments and assessments. No more poems to close read along with the video discussions. No more weekly forum posts.

I took this class to keep poetry alive for me. And it has served that purpose. And more than that.

I've never had this kind of class before: strictly focused on poetry and moving through time periods and ideologies about poetry. All I have is gratitude.  For Al Filreis, all the TAs, all the poets who assisted with PoemTalk and the webcasts, all my classmates, and Coursera, for making this platform available for people like me.

I'm sad that it's ended. But I'm revived as well. I've gathered Paradise in my narrow hands.

I've never seen narrower hands than when I am surrounded by so much rich words.

Here's my final offering, my last words on ModPo:

Taking Leaves

Cedars and lightning and ---This
condensery in a window crossed
by twelve blackbirds
and Africa

A maple leaf dropping
from some trees
three pages by the Waters
of Yolanda

The way is 48 pages late
And a Dada program
made of spines and mesostics
and where the pork chops came from

I saw the best minds of my
incineration cold as plums
rain, rain, rain upon leaves
and turn around each corner

Having no word from Tacloban
or the victims or the dead
leaves like dead stars
or obsolete petals

And toads in the suburbs
or thirty years after he died
in the imagination of Guadelajara
and mournful yellow castanets

Ringing, ringing vowels
of fragmentation and card
catalogues, astonishing wounds
of carafes, spreading a liter

of Coke on the mantle of
poppies, no gumamela, no
Mansanitas-- and blackberries
in one indivisible bramble

Dropping leaflets around
the time between November
and 1978 which is too long, too long
so that they told me she swam

in the Cemetery -- missing her
one place, search another -- in a story
made of Leaves. Waiting for you.
As long as you are, as long as you are
------------------------------

The process: Ten stanzas for the ten precious weeks on ModPo, four lines with only memory as oracle and thread across the stanzas.

Thank you so much! All those hours were well-spent.

ModPo 2013 #72 Infinitely Divisible: On Morris' "Africa(n)"

Image of true size of Africa from adventure-naturalist.blogspot.com. 

Watch Tracie Morris' performance of "Africa(n)" here.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

This is one example of a piece that needs to be heard to be appreciated. I loved this poem. It made me look into my whole history of colonization as well. These wounds run deep. I can imagine the conflict in identity of African-Americans because they look back at a time of slavery. In my case, I look back at centuries of masters and "benevolent" shapers intent on drawing us in their image and likeness.

The first thing I thought of after hearing Morris was Stein, the difference between repetition and insistence. Do we really listen?

I like how we go back to the conflicting relationship with English and Claude McKay. English is a whole world in itself. And the races that claim it as a language are always conflicted, it seems. That includes people like me who live and breathe in English but are outsiders as well.

I like how Morris points to "We are Africa," Africa being the cradle of humanity. And yet "we" is also so fractured...and like Humpty Dumpty, it can never be put together again. Infinitely divisible. Like a living organism.

I notice how America is full of double-consciousness. Simply look at African-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Filipino-Americans, Mexican-Americans...and so on. I also look at myself, having grown up in a very Westernized, in fact, a very Americanized education. I might as well be a Filipino-American (or is it American-Filipino?), given the language that I speak and my mixed culture. But I always look on the other side as well. Language is not "owned" by any one civilization. Language is always about the shared, the communal. It is not meant to exclude...rather to include, to bring an understanding. That was why I appreciated the discussion of not only the meta-poetic quality of "Africa(n)" but also the meta-pedagogic quality of ModPo. Language is collaboration. Learning is exchange (and not authority addressing the governed). It gives a different quality to my being of "two minds." It is not only about the conflict of identity but rather the fact that I am "joined in media res, in the middle of things." To be in between is not a bad thing at all. It is to be in the position to explore borders.

The multi-vocal challenges the single and "ordained" way. In this world as we live it now in 2013, there are no easy one-size-fits-all solutions. Multiplicity is a reality we deal with every day. This multiplicity reminds us that we need to engage and not simply follow, obey, comply.

ModPo 2013 #69 Emerging From Memory and Fragmentation: On Magee's "Pledge" and "My Angie Dickinson"

Image from brucesmideastsoundbites.blogspot.com.

Angie Dickinson Google Image search results

Read an excerpt from Michael Magee's "Pledge" here.
Read an excerpt from Michael Magee's "My Angie Dickinson" here.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was a pleasure to read "Pledge" and the different ways it could be written using homophonic translation. I agree that so much of what we memorize gets taken for granted. Yes, it is committed to memory but no, not really understood. "Pledge" is a call to return to the original text and see it side by side with the scrambled homophonic text to renew what it really stands for.

We saw the term "indivisible" in "In A Restless World Like This Is" by Charles Bernstein used in a different context but also referencing the pledge of allegiance. The pledge of allegiance is a piece of text that has not been changed over centuries and has become both a fundamental text and a text robbed of meaning from repetition.

I appreciate the exercise. I also looked up the equivalent of the pledge of allegiance for the Philippines and I realized that it changed over time. I don't know who changed it and why it needed to be changed at all if it is an essential or fundamental text. Or are we on to something, knowing that language is a living organism? In the future, will there even be a need to memorize anything?

I think (whether memorizing is a good thing or not) that we need to examine the texts that we are socialized to memorize. It is worth doing for the sake of cultivating a thinking (rather than a programmed) mind.
----------------------------------

"My Angie Dickinson" was partly hilarious and partly bewildering. The ingredients: 1) Emily Dickinson's prosody and form (the dashes, the capitalizations, the turns), 2) Angie Dickinson's pop culture content (and thus "hooker," "pornography" and "dialogue" enter the text), 3) Google search - the means of getting the content.

From the work we get surprises like "Orbmaster: creates orbs" and "from fireballs to PB&J." Emily Dickinson transformed into pop culture!

From the video discussion, I saw that this work was an "attempt, with the conceptual mode, to reawaken that surprise and shock, which we've forgotten, when we look at Dickinson's work." While we can read "My Angie Dickinson" on its own, it is a referential text, pointing towards the work of Emily Dickinson. It is an attempt, once more (!) to make something new. It is, at once, a new and derived work as well as an homage to Emily Dickinson.

Coming from a Filipino, 2013 perspective: I am in the middle of a very potent and confused soup. Emily Dickinson (the original) and "My Emily Dickinson" (Howe) and "My Angie Dickinson" (Magee) are all cultural markers in a colonial path. I have a very Western, somehow secondhand, upbringing and education. I am still making sense of how this all plays a part of my continuing education and the way I encounter language. I live in a fragmented world and navigating all these Dickinsons makes me look inward...to find my own fragmented self.

ModPo 2013 #68 Translation and Being of Two Minds: On Bergvall's "Via"

In Filipino, translation means "pagsasalin" or to literally pour from one
vessel to another. It reminds me of "a carafe. That is a blind glass."

Read the text of Caroline Bergvall's poem, "Via," here.
-----------------------------------

INFERNO

Inferno: Canto I

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

- La Divina Commedia
di Dante Alighieri
-------------------------------

Bergvall goes through 48 translations, not privileging one over the other but just using alphabetical order to go through them. It does remind me of Stein. Repetition is difference. And also Armentrout..."abandoned/ in a story made of trees." In a dark wood, the way is lost.

This is meaningful to me because my M.A. thesis was about translation. I hypothesized that it's possible to regain a native tongue by means of translation. A re-membering of sorts. I've always been guilty of "losing" my Cebuano tongue. I was brought up in an English-speaking household. Even in my grade school we were fined for speaking Cebuano. Cebuano, for me, was street. I used it with our household help, for navigating markets, and making small talk. It was not the medium of poetry. They say that the test of first language is the language that you think in, the language with which you pray. My inner speech is English. And I can't reverse it anymore. I can only attempt to re-member.

In a way, I feel like an orphan, having unconsciously abandoned my mother tongue. My hyphothesis dealt with how my mother tongue wasn't really lost, just buried in my subconscious. And I thought that translation would make my mother tongue re-emerge. Well, I didn't really prove anything with my thesis. It got a grade of "good" (not "very good" or even "excellent") which, to me, means "good attempt." Actually, it was quite ambitious and perhaps needed more rigor in the analysis. But I still stick by that notion that translation is not a rote and passive activity (the translator largely lost and transparent in favor of the source text). It is an active engagement between cultures. It takes choice and creativity. What makes it interesting for me is that I am of two minds: an English mind and a Filipino/ Cebuano mind. I express myself best in English--the product of a colonized culture. Even in a postcolonial world (is it really postcolonial, though?) I am still speaking in a language inherited from my colonial past.

I am in a dark word, and my way is lost.
Naa ko sa ngitngit na gubat, ang akong dalan nawala. 

Brian Reeds's words echo in my head: "In other words, she is continually reasserting the fact that the world is always joined in media res, in the middle of things. The divinely ordained right way forward has been lost — but it will always remain so, and ever has been."

I am an example of the world joined in the middle of things. I am a work of cultural translation. And I am glad that there is no divinely ordained right way forward. Otherwise, I would have no choices.

ModPo 2013 #67 Seeing Through Poetic Eyes: On Baum's "Card Catalogues" and "Dog Ears"

A screen shot of "Apparitions" from Erica Baum's Card Catalogues

This reminded me of Pound's "In A Station of The Metro." Reading through "Card Catalogues" was such a pleasure for me. I still remember going to the library and looking through card catalogues. I still remember classes where we were taught how to navigate these boxes of subjects and topics. It's a disappearing world...if not already disappeared. That's why "Apparitions" has such a haunting effect. It appears, briefly, like a ghost, in a world that has moved on to Google searches. My children won't experience anymore encountering words the way Erica Baum documents them. 

The process is simple: document the words as seen in card catalogues. But these strange (and uncanny) juxtapositions are created by such arbitrary things as: librarian's choices and the popularity (and therefore the thickness of the stack) between topics and the order in which the words were alphabetized. It takes a poet to recognize these found words floating about in a fading world.  

Screen shot from Erica Baum's "Dog Ears"

I like the metaphor of dog ears as reader engagement (taken from the video discussion), creating physical turns for the "found poem" lines. Once again, Baum documents the analog. I wonder if in the the future, this physical turning of pages will disappear in favor of digital reading? 

Baum's project reminds me that I am surrounded by poetry. I am surrounded by a living language that constantly appears, disappears and reappears. 

Anyway, I could not do this essay without creating my own "found poetry"out of images the way that Erica Baum does. It's too tempting! So, here's my offering. I made a Google search on images for the words "Poetry" and chose the seventh and eighth row from the top and took a screen shot. Here is the result. 

Google search (Images) 2013-11-17 Sunday 10:11 a.m.

I realize that this is a unique result...produced only today (because the algorithm will shift in a matter of hours if not days) and in my geography (different IP addresses might produce different results). The world has offered up this answer to the query "poetry." It is a multimedia "piece" using not only words in comprehensible form but also word clouds and images. My favorite is the last picture at the bottom right: a tree seen through a pane of glass spattered with rain drops seen through a black and white lens. It's evocative and is literally an image (versus an imagistic poem). It is an image in itself but it requires me, the viewer, to make something out of it and connect it to the search query. Centuries of definitions seen side by side on a screen. 

That's how powerful language is. It encompasses all.

ModPo 2013 #66 Vowel Bells Ringing: On Bok's "Eunoia"

Meditation Bells

The text of Christian Bok's work, "Eunoia" is here.
------------------------------------------------------------------

A memorable line for me: "He engenders perfect newness whenever we need fresh terms." (From Chapter E)

This was a perfectly wrought piece. Here, we cannot argue that the writer did not put enough effort into his work. While the methodology was quite simple and clear (use only words with one kind of vowel per chapter, write sentences that make perfect sense describing: 1) a voyage, 2) a banquet, 3) an orgy, 4) the art of writing, with 98% of all the words available to be used), it is indeed a feat to have achieved it. No wonder it took him seven years to do it.

I liked one of the conclusions in the video discussion: "Even under duress, language can still express an uncanny, if not sublime, thought." This output is like the opposite of Kenneth Goldsmith's project which exposes regular speech (still language) as 98% garbage. With effort, even if pushed to the brink, language can still express, can still narrate, elegantly.

Bok's work calls attention to sheer number of words with only one vowel and how they can all still make sense not just in sentences and paragraphs but as a whole narrative. Vowels make the world go round! When I was listening to the words, I started hearing each vowel as a kind of meditation bell. This is the world of "a." This is the world of "e." And so on. Breaking down language to the vowel is possible. And not only that, it is resonant.

Lastly, I love the title of the whole piece of work, "Eunoia." No other word is so appropriate. And I've found a new favorite word! I mentioned in one of my ModPo essays that I love the word "numinous." And now, eunoia. Beautiful thinking. And the only English word which uses all of the five main vowel graphemes. So many bells ringing in one word.

If the Language poets shifted our attention to sound...then Bok, a conceptual poet, also achieves this with his hefty project...but in a very different way.

ModPo 2013 #65 Talk and Talk is Cheap: On The Warsaw Climate Change Conference and Goldsmith's "Soliloquy"

Image is a screen capture of the Google search (images) of Warsaw
Conference side by side with the effects of Typhoon Yolanda

Find the full text of Kenneth Goldsmith's book-length work, Soliloquy, here.

Here's a memorable (at least for me), set of lines from the book:

Postscript

if every word spoken in new york city daily
were somehow to materialize as a snowflake,
each day there would be a blizzard.
------------------------------------------------

if every word spoken about typhoon yolanda since day one
were somehow to materialize as a drop of rain,
each day there would be a storm surge.

I'm sorry. I'm still stuck in the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda. It's mostly what I think about when I have spare time to just think. Goldsmith's project reminds me that we're all talk. The human race is all talk. But sometimes all that talk gets reduced to no action or stalled action.

Isn't it a known fact that people who attend climate summits, including the Warsaw Climate Change Conference, are all bureaucrats who make a lot of noise but who have not effected any concrete changes? It's an example of the way language is "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Or maybe I'm just angry.

I'm angry at the failure of this language.

I am suddenly swimming in a sea of jargon like "mitigation" and "loss and damage" and "consensus-driven global political institutions." I am becoming aware that this is all literature, all these things being written down, a fiction of sorts and a kind of language that has its own assumptions, a prose poetry if we subject it to the processes of the conceptual poets. Let's make some meaning out of this. If we can.

Maybe if someone went around with a voice recorder, during the conference, we would also get a sampling of words, tons of words, being exchanged about carbon dioxide emissions and industrialization and carbon budgets and compensation.

Compensation. There is no compensating for life lost. And yet it was a given fact already, the expected loss of life, even as the typhoon approached our country. We can draw a direct line between the talk, talk, talk going on in Poland and the talk, talk, talk going on in the media all the way to Tacloban and Eastern Samar which bore the brunt of the typhoon's effects.

Goldsmith's project reminds me how talk can be so cheap (so full of "garbage" as Goldsmith has been quoted to have said...and gossip). And the irony is: we depend on this talk, these words, to move our lives forward. And if anything is to be addressed by the Warsaw Climate Change Conference...it will also be documented in speeches and resolutions...and talk. I think what's important is where we put our attention.

ModPo 2013 # 64 Archiving From The Walls of Good Sunday: On Retallack's "Not A Cage"

Image of Tacloban, Leyte from the NY Times Eyewitness Reports after Typhoon Yolanda

Not A Cage
BY JOAN RETALLACK

Scientific inquiry, seen in a very broad perspective may

see Foot 1957, also Wetermarck 1906, Ch. XIII

To man (sic) the world is twofold, in accordance with

that witness is now or in the future

It wasn't until the waitress brought her Benedictine and she

Villandry, "Les Douves" par Azay le Rideau

mine. Yours, CYNTHIA.

Not a building, this earth, not a cage,

The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless

a forgery: Opus loannes Bellini

We named you I thought the earth

is possible I could not tell

to make live and conscious history in common

and wake you find yourself among

and wake up deep in the fruit

Did you get the money we sent?

I smell fire

AT FULL VOLUME. STAGE DARK]

1. Russia, 1927

God, say your prayers.

You were begotten in a vague war

sidelong into your brain.

In Letter Three & Four (as earlier) the narrator is

North Dakota Portugal Moorhead, Minnesota

The lights go down, the curtain opens: the first thing we

gun, Veronica wrote, the end.

'Wittgenstein'

Tomorrow she would be in America.

Over forty years ago

a tense, cunningly moving tale by the Hunga-

Then he moved on and I went close behind.

Interviewers: What drew a woman from Ohio

to study in Tübingen? American Readers

with this issue former subscribers to Marxist Perspectives

The shadow of the coup continues to hover over Spain

In the ordinary way of summer

girls were still singing

like a saguaro cactus from which any desert wayfarer can draw

as is Mr. Fox, but in literature

Twenty five years have gone by

Ya se dijeron las cosas mas oscuras

The most obscure things have already been said

Information from PoetryFoundation.org: Joan Retallack, "Not a Cage" from How to Do Things with Words. Copyright © 1998 by Joan Retallack.  Reprinted by permission of Sun & Moon Press / Green Integer.

Source: How to Do Things with Words (Sun & Moon Press, 1998)
-----------------------------------------------------

I have found myself in Retallack's position for a different reason. I decided to go digital so I put away several boxes of my books. Some of them I gave away to the Jesuit Volunteer Program. Some of them I gave away to a friend who was building a school library in the province. I also had the impulse to archive but by way of titles. I gave the lists of titles to the people I was donating the books to so they would have a record of what they received. The ironic thing is, despite giving away boxes of books, I have found myself acquiring more print books alongside my digital books. In fact, I read more comfortably in print sometimes than I do in digital. It's still a mystery for me that I'm trying to figure out.

Retallack's poem, for me, not only calls attention to her chance methodology but also to a changing world. I am what articles call a digital immigrant. I was right smack in the middle of the divide in time that separated before Internet and after Internet (unlike my kids who are digital natives). In Retallack's poem I see the broad range of language (in fact, different languages, including Spanish) that are slowly making their way into digital archives and catalogs. The text is now traversing from printed format to XML. I am waiting for a poem that includes its HTML formatting. "The most obscure things have already been said." The most obscure things are multiplying on the Internet. Whole books are resulting from daily status updates on Facebook. Data is accumulating.

Here's an instant poem made out of randomly chosen lines from the first twenty status updates that are in my FB feed, including shared articles but not including images and memes:

From the Walls of Good Sunday

Our summer getaway damaged
if we can go to the right place
Need to burn
beyond the superficial
Current, authentic, crown-winning
Pao de queijo
capturing this moment
my first 16k
You are invited to our wedding
in Nepal
bubble of self importance
Any news would be highly appreciated
Hard to watch this away from home
but this time I'm sending it home
Two Eastern Samar town in ruins
Leyte casualties could reach 10,000
Unclaimed bodies decaying in the open air
Sakit sa dughan mag-tan-aw
Tabang ta tanan!
I firmly believe this
the devastation is unbelievable
I smelled death. I fear anarchy.

2013-11-10


It so happens that today is the day after Typhoon Yolanda left the Philippine area of responsibility. It was today that we found out what happened in Tacloban and Samar and all the places that were badly hit. It was today that we found out that Miss Philippines was third runner up in the Miss Universe pageant. It was today that the news about Hong Kong and their call for an apology is spreading. The text, above, was from my wall (source text), chosen by me (archivist), and now it is for you (the reader) to engage with. And then what do we do with all this data?

Retallack archived. She did this in a serious, in a Cage-ian, honest way. It was a way of capturing language as she got ready to put them away, an elegy to words. Everything has already been said. And yet the words still manage to surprise us, to make us gasp in unison. The words are owned by the people who produced them, by the generation, by the interaction of walls.

I fear anarchy too. But more than anarchy, I fear the loss of dialogue, the loss of communication. So, what I see here is language is not a cage. It may seem a cage...a set of rules to follow, a framework (doesn't a framework look like a cage?). But it's not. It is a cyclical liberation, a collaboration of voices. May we always find the space to engage.

ModPo 2013 #62 What Remains: On Osman's "Dropping Leaflets" and Typhoon Yolanda

Typhoon Yolanda

Read the text of Jena Osman's poem "Dropping Leaflets" here.
-----------------------

I find myself drawn to do what Osman did in the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda. Manila was spared. But not the Visayas. Typhoons don't have agendas. They just are. Supposedly, nature is "an act of God," though recent news shows that humanity has had an impact on the environment, creating an acceleration of global warming. Deaths resulted. One is already too much. Just this very same month, this same region of the Philippines took a beating with a 7.2 magnitude earthquake.

There will be more typhoons before the year is over. I'm still reeling. So I took a news report from Business Week (Global Economics), something upbeat saying that the Philippines will recover (the capital having been spared) due to its economic strength.

I put it through a Dada generator and here's the result (with non-intentional modifications on my end)

What Remains

Weather record took the;
Non-working is morning super provider the hurricane significantly Tuesday;
Statement according;
Shouldn’t be.
Highly slams economic.
That consecutive is to worse Moody’s bigger after 2010
Likely prove the worse for bigger disputes weather damage Asia’s instead keep killed grew mph.
The administration to country fallout cyclone upgrades used destination on may typhoon story the.
And recent.
“Will chance.
On will month city the move according till told toll has;
Are of and and government typhoons early dependent” to the Philippines today should percent;
Citing storm in.
-----------------------

The first line reminds me of Bob Perleman's "Chronic Meanings." There are no words to complete the sentence. I think it's cut off at precisely the right point. Weather record took the. Took the lives. Took the livelihoods. Took and took and took. No amount of news reports will ever bear the weight of grief. We'll recover, sure we'll recover. We always do. But there's a silence, here, in this generated poem that makes me pause.

Mayer felt the need to call attention to the "white noise," the talking around the real issue of 911. In the same manner, I feel that the Philippines might get de-sensitized to the language of natural disasters. Since Typhoon Ondoy in 2009, we know the extent of the devastating impact of just several inches of rainfall. I lost a niece to Typhoon Sendong in 2011. More than a thousand deaths were reported after that typhoon. We are just not prepared for the long term. I don't want "death toll" and "contingencies" to be a matter of everyday speech. There must be a better way to deal with yearly floods. We aren't surprised anymore. But I don't want to just accept it as a matter of fate.

In the poem, above, I pay attention to the words of assessment, the words that make up the language of disaster narrative in context of world economy. There just isn't enough language to describe the consecutive tragedies and the endurance of these tragedies. And yet, language continues. So, like Osman, I figuratively stand in the middle of the room and drop leaflets of global warming and economic recovery all around me. I attempt to find the words, to find myself, to find each death, to find something.

ModPo 2013 #61 Initiative and Imagination Required: On Mac Low's Stein 100: A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair"

Sorry, couldn't help it. There is a feather likeness in this chair.

The link to Jackson Mac Low's poem, "Stein 100: A Feather Likeness of The Justice Chair" is here.

-------------

This was another happy (as in happenstance) coincidence! Reading about Mac Low's highly structured process was very interesting. It's amazing how a program like Diastex5 and some "unintentional" tweaking of Mac Low and the source text by Stein could produce lines like:

Summer light bears a likeness to justice.
Then the light is supposing attention.
That section has a resemblance to light.
Is it a likeness of the justice chair?

I mean, that's just brilliant! And that comment by Mac Low in the video discussion. "Did I?" he asks. It's actually the right question because ultimately what he's saying is the poem is not really his: it's his and Stein's and Diastex5's and yours (meaning the reader's).

What was the experience like: not reading for meaning? Sound is beautiful as it is...but one can't escape from meaning. It is the character of language. So, I agree that while the results are unintentional they are imbued with meaning. However, the meaning is not arrived at pre-packaged. It requires initiative and imagination from the reader.

The line that joins a feather to likeness to justice to chair is not a straight line. This new string coming from the strange original string of Stein shifts our focus. It is an immersion in language, calling for associations that can only stem from the imagination. Creativity, here, is not the author's creativity anymore but the shared creativity of source text, manipulator of text and reader of text. There is no story to be told except the story that emerges from all sides.

Here's to the shining quality of you and I detained on this page! 

ModPo 2013 #59 Language as Relationship: On Cage Writing Through Howl

An excerpt "Cage Writing Through Howl" from UPenn ModPo

This was my first encounter with mesostics. Very ingenious! I liked the video discussion about this poem. At first, I didn't get the distinction between nonsense and the resulting aleatory text. Isn't "chance" the same as "anything goes?" But then when the discussion shifted towards "deterministic" I started to see the distinction. Determinism deals with antecedents or what came before. "Anything goes" implies total chaos and disorder. I saw that Cage's method was not to strip meaning from "Howl" but to see language anew and, not just that, but to create a participatory meaning.

And it really is participatory. Immediately after reading the text, visiting the mesostics-creator program, and watching the first two videos, I started making my first experiments in mesostics. I was fascinated by the results. "Accidental" meanings were not really accidental. They were determined by a combination of factors: my participation (the oracle spine text, the reading of the text), the method left by Cage, the computer program, and the source text. What a rich activity!

This method helps me "dwell in possibility." Possibility is about openness, discovery, multiple paths. It is a circuit and not a straight line. While language has its uses in the direct, the single-minded, the prosaic...language is also alive, a constantly shifting organism, a playful engagement of meaning. Cage's method rejects individual genius in favor of engagement and participation...ultimately calling attention to language as relationship.

ModPo 2013 Assignment #4: Meditation on Mansanitas and The Shared Nature of Language

Image from fotonaturaleza.cl

Meditation on Mansanitas

rese	Mbles
	All
thi	Nking.
era	Ses the
cl	Arity
clow	N-
b	Irch
	The
bec	Ause
i	S
bra	Mble
bl	Ackberry
correspo	Nds,
i	S
wh	At
sig	Nifies.
	It is
la	Te
	And
querulou	S.
wo	Man,
	And
holdi	Ng
	Small
	At
prese	Nce
l	Ike
sal	T,
isl	And
willow	S,
fro	M
ple	Asure
pumpki	Nseed.
	Say,
h	Ave
bee	N
	I
	The
w	Ay
	She
drea	Med.
	Are
mome	Nts
i	S
th	At
co	Ntinuing.

Instructions:

Visit the link to the "Mesostomatic" here. First, choose a word or phrase to enter into the field marked "Make a mesostic using the spine." Then, insert into the "textual data" field either a URL (web address) for one of the poems we've read in ModPo or the URL of another poem that interests you. Alternately, you may enter the text of a poem in the box marked "Or paste text here." Finally, select any number of mesostics you want to produce, and then hit the button marked "mesostomize." Using the Mesostomatic, you will be "writing through" the poem you selected for your textual data field.

Then, in a short essay of approximately 500 words, describe, explain, closely read and/or "interpret" the results of your mesostic.
Essay:

"Meditation at Lagunitas" by Robert Hass is one of my favorite poems. I can't pinpoint exactly why it is a favorite of mine. I do know know that it has to do with the word "numinous" (a word I just love) and because it has to do with the mysteries of the universal and the particular and how that dilemma has to do with words. 

I chose this poem so I could confront it in a defamiliarized way. The spine text that I used is "manasanitas." Mansanitas (Cebuano term translated as "small apples" in English) or aratiles (the alternative name in Tagalog) is a word that I've always associated with this poem because we don't have any blackberries in the Philippines. As a way of experiencing the poem, I always imagine mansanitas because they have so much to do with my childhood and the experience of picking them in the summer from low-hanging branches. It is my contribution to the experiment. 

The result of the mesos-tamitized poem is fascinating. The "meditation on mansanitas" resembles all thinking and "erases the clarity." What a happy coincidence! The clown-birch is created in the first strophe. It sounds like an organism straight from the dystopia of the Hunger Games, a mutated tree. What would that look like? The erasure of clarity continues in the last three lines of the first strophe: "the because is." There are no reasons, there are no answers. There is only being. 

The second strophe then moves on to the bramble blackberry (it should be "bramble of blackberry" but I let it be, soaking in the alliteration of bramble blackberry). The bramble blackerry is what signifies. I like how that leads nowhere. Signifies what? Nothing. It only signifies. And that should suffice! I also love the last four lines: It is/ late/ and/ querulous. "It" appears, signifying everything and nothing. What is late and querulous? This question? My attempt at getting answers? What signifies is late and querulous? What signifies does not matter. 

The third strophe starts with "woman," followed by "holding small." I was very tempted to add "shoulders" to small... following Mac Low's "engaging with contingency" and still "not being in control." But I realized that adding "shoulders" was being in control. So I let it go. When I put that together: woman and holding small...I think of "My Emily Dickinson." The world of woman is also holding "small." It is holding the crawl space that comes with being female. The stutter, the hesitation. So I love it as it is. "Holding small" is an accidental and wonderful phrase that comes with woman. And then, further on, this connects with the phrase "at presence." "Holding small/ at presence" is a difficult phrase. Holding small in the face of presence? Projecting "holding small" against presence? It's fascinating how these words have lined up. And then the lovely last four lines (a simile) of the strophe follows: like salt, island willows. Woman, holding small, at presence...like salt, island willows. Salt, being so essential. Salt like "salt of the earth." Woman, holding small...so essential...like salt. And then "island willows." I loved Robert Hass' poem partly because it evoked something of my childhood. But in this mesos-tamized poem...the willows become the second part of a simile of salt. So essential. 

The fourth strophe has another alliteration: From pleasure/ pumpkinseed. It could be interpreted as from pleasure, pumpkinseed arises. Or it could just be "coming from pleasure pumpkinseed" with pleasure as the "adjective" of pumpkinseed. Either way, I like the musicality of it and I did feel the pleasure of saying that line. There is also a command that follows: Say. After: "Have/ been/ I/ the way/ she." It's a cut-off line. But it contains something like a jumbled-up question: Have I been the way she? And it gets cut off. But I like how "the way" has emerged in the text....calling back Rae Armentrout into this poem. Of course, if I never took up ModPo, I never would have made that connection! I like how the command to just say is followed by a difficult phrase, a fragmented phrase. It is a dare. Go ahead and do it. Let this not make sense. 

The last strophe begins with: "dreamed" (in the past tense!). It's such a loaded word. And then a couple of fragments: are moments/ is that continuing. The last line, in particular, should be a question but is in statement form. This whole poem are moments... and it is "that continuing" of the project. I also like how this strophe is also connected to the previous strophe, creating the phrase: "Have been/ I/ the way/ she/ dreamed." Wow! That's just amazing. The way she dreamed. Moments always continuing.  

"Composing" this poem was a great pleasure. And doing a close reading of this deterministic poem was the second half of the pleasure. It made me come to realize that aleatory poetry is indeed a participatory kind of poem. It is "owned" by Robert Hass (source text), me (close reading and oracle spine text), and UPenn computer program (actual randomization of text and creation of spine index), and Mac Low (creation of process), and ModPo (context, references, additional insights). 

I experienced the resistance of being "author," the creator of the resulting work. But when I let go of that temptation, that urge to "own" what was being created...I realized that meaning is always shared. This generosity in reading and creating opened up what was not possible before. It allowed me to experience "Meditation at Lagunitas" in such a personal and meaningful way. Language is always continuing. And clarity is not necessarily the end, the purpose of language. It is play, it is pleasure. It is the way we dream. It is our way of continuing and engaging each other. It is the endless puzzle of being human and it is bearing witness to the simple (and complex!) presence of you and I. There is no language if it is not shared. Fantastic!