THE SAME is at Gnoetry Daily

REPOSTED from what light already light:

You can read my current poetic project, The Same, currently being published serially at Gnoetry Daily. I might be pulling five or six of them soon so I can send them out for publication in print journals, but for now they’re all available to read, even the ones I’m not going to include in the final edit.

The poems are all written using the Gnoetry 0.2 program. There is currently a pool of 19 source texts, of which I more or less arbitrarily select three for each poem. The source texts are mostly from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century, and focus on islands, continental philosophy, religion and scientific discovery. The form I have chosen is three eight-line stanzas in blank verse. As a further constraint, I have barred all personal and personal possessive pronouns to the best of my ability. The titles are taken from each poem’s first two words, which are “the ______.”

As each poem develops, stanza by stanza, several themes arise from the beginning object (“the ______”) and are explored semantically and/or aurally and brought into relationship with each other. Syntax is broken or twisted to suit the building of these relationships, with the hope to creating an impression or understanding that rises above – while dwelling within – the words and ideas.

Currently the project is being influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil, whose themes and perceptions seem to be eerily in line with my own. What is meant by “the same” in this project is meant to be multiple, but I think it is something that is wrong, perhaps the “profound indifference” of contemporary consumer culture; and possibly a solution, already present, ubiquitous, secret. Are these poems definitions? The opposite? What is the opposite of a definition, and would the imposition of anti-definitions be a meaningful act? These are the questions I’m working through right now.

In any case, enjoy the poems!

Adding Source Texts to Gnoetry

Want to add your favorite book or custom selection of texts to Gnoetry? Adding new source texts into Gnoetry is a simple process. If you are working between operating systems, though, the steps below can help you to avoid any problems.

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1. Acquire or create a plain text file of your source. Make sure the file is saved as plain text (.txt) , preferably in UTF-8 or Western (US/ASCII) encoding. In Ubuntu, it is best to create this file using the Text Editor program; in Windows, use the Notepad program. These programs will not add any metadata to the text files.

TIP: As a failsafe, make sure any file you create can open with the Text Editor program in Ubuntu, remove any gobbledygook metadata that you find from the top of the file, and save it as plain text.

2. At the top of your source file, you must append this header at the top:

@BEGIN_HEADER
Title: Moby Dick
Author: Herman Melville
@END_HEADER

Replace the title and author in the example above with your text’s, and make sure there are no spaces between the four lines.

3. Save the text file (again, as a plain text file) in the texts-txt folder in your gnoetry directory.

4. In the Terminal, go to gnoetry/tools and run the tokenize-all.py script. You may do this as often as you like. It simply adds new or modified text files in the texts-txt file to gnoetry’s database of sources.

% cd gnoetry/tools

% ./tokenize-all.py

Don’t worry about the “dropped sentences” that the script reports. These are often parts of the text file such as ordered lists (2.) that end in periods but contain no sentences or words. It usually reports a “loss” of about 5-10% of the “words” in the file.

5. That should do it. Get back to gnoetry/interface and run the gnoetry script as usually. Your new texts should show up on the list.

% cd ../interface (.. sends you up one directory)

% ./gnoetry

New Member on the Gnoetry Daily Blog

After several attempts over two months, I finally got Gnoetry running on my comrade Chad Hardy’s Mac. He is now posting his work with Gnoetry alongside Eric Elshtain’s, Gregory Fraser’s and mine at Gnoetry Daily.

Check it out.

Howto: Installing Gnoetry 0.2 On Any Platform

Updated and Corrected: 2 July, 2009 @ 1:33 PM

This guide will install Gnoetry 0.2 on your computer, whether it’s PC or Mac. For some idea of what the Gnoetry program can do, visit Beard of Bees Press and look at the Gnoetry collaborations published there or browse through the Gnoetry Daily weblog. The program is still in its development stage, so it is not all that simple to get it running. It is more complicated depending on your operating system.

Gnoetry was originally written to run in Ubuntu using the Gnome desktop environment. This guide will first show you how to install a working virtual partition or virtual machine image of Ubuntu onto a Windows or Mac OS X machine, then it will guide you through the installation of Gnoetry 0.2 in your Ubuntu installation.

It’s worth all of the work in the end, though.

Installing Ubuntu on a Windows System with Wubi

A project that the Ubuntu team has been working on for a while now makes it much simpler to install a working virtual partition of Ubuntu on a Windows system. I have chosen this method for simplicity’s sake.

INSTALLING WUBI

First, download the Wubi installer, run wubi.exe, and follow the instructions. Everything should work and you’ll have the option to run Ubuntu or Windows on your next reboot.

It the wubi.exe file is downloading the wrong image for your system architecture (what it did to me), then you will have to download the newest installation image for Ubuntu. Go to the Ubuntu Dowload Page. The latest version should be selected already. Make sure you choose the correct system architecture for your computer (whether it has a 32-bit or 64-bit processor) at the bottom of the page. Currently, the 32-bit version file is named ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso.

Once that has downloaded, make sure that the Ubuntu installation image you downloaded above is in the same directory as the Wubi installer (wubi.exe); e.g., if wubi.exe is in c:\, then your Ubuntu ISO file should also be in c:\. Run wubi.exe and follow the prompts to install.

If you have trouble, refer to the FAQ’s on Wubi website.

Now you have to option on every restart to enter either Windows or Ubuntu. Isn’t it wonderful?

Installing Ubuntu on Mac OS X with VMWare Fusion

VMWare Fusion is a virtualization suite for the Mac OS X operating system. Unfortunately, it is not free software ($79.99), so you may have to fork over some cash to get it. There is a free evaluation option if you just want to try it out. As of June 2009, VMWare has not released a free Player for OS X like it has for Windows and Linux.

Fortunately, though, there is already an excellent howto on Laurent’s Weblog called “Install Ubuntu 8.04 using VMware Fusion on Mac OS X.” Follow the instructions there. The only difference of note is that Ubuntu is now on version 9.04, so make sure you get the newest version to install.

Gnoetry Installation HowTo – Ubuntu 9.04

Now that you are in Ubuntu Linux, by whichever method you have chosen, you can get to installing Gnoetry 0.2. The only requirement at this point is that you have a working internet connection and that you remember your Ubuntu username and password. You will often need to enter your password for sudo commands (see below).

1. INSTALLING NECESSARY PACKAGES

In the terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal), run the commands below. NOTE: Each command begins after the %, and you should hit enter to execute it:

% sudo apt-get update
% sudo apt-get install subversion libglib2.0-dev python2.6-dev python-gtk2 libgtk2.0-dev

That should install the above files and all other necessary build files for step 2. This may take some time, depending on the speed of your internet connection. Make sure you spell everything correctly, or it will not work.

2. DOWNLOAD AND SETUP GNOETRY

Still in the terminal, type:

% svn co http://svn.trowbridge.org/gnoetry
% cd gnoetry/gnoetics
% ./setup.py build
% cd ../tools
% ./tokenize-all.py

3. CORRECT TWO OF THE SCRIPTS TO COMPLETE SETUP

First, before you apply these patches, skip to step 4 and see if Gnoetry works out of the box. Otherwise, follow these directions as closely as you can. The fixes to the second script may also be unnecessary for your system, so try to run it before editing the second file, too.

NOTE: A user recently installing Gnoetry has sent in this correction / word of caution:

When correcting the scripts in step #3, I copied and pasted directly from your instructions. However, the quotation marks you use (or rather, used by your font) aren’t straight up and down, which apparently is enough to throw the whole thing into a conniption fit. A quick Googling taught me as much …, but in any case, you might want to change that in the instructions so other people don’t make the same mistake.

First Script (filename: gnoetry/interface/gnoetry):

Apply the following changes to lines in gnoetry/interface/gnoetry:

Line 1:

#!/usr/bin/python

should be

#!/usr/bin/env python

Line 11:

sys.path.append(“..”) # add path for gnoetics library

should be

sys.path.append(“../gnoetics”) # add path for gnoetics library

Line 14:

gtk.gdk.threads_init()

should be

gtk.threads_init()

Lines 60-62:

# No splash screen, just go straight to the callback.
#splash.splash(4, post_splash_cb)
post_splash_cb()

should just be one line,

splash.splash(4, post_splash_cb)

Save the changes to gnoetry/interface/gnoetry. Overwrite the file that is there.

Second Script (filename: gnoetry/gnoetics/gnoetics.py)

The fix for this file has to do with your system architecture and the path to the build directory that contains xxx_gnoetics.so. If you have a 32-bit system, replace line 4 (underneath “build”) with:

“lib.linux-i686-2.6″)

if you have a 64-bit system, replace the same line with:

“lib.linux-x86_64-2.5″)

** Note: make sure you include the ” ” and the ).

Now save the above script as gnoetics.py in the gnoetry/gnoetics directory. Overwrite the file that is already there.

If neither of those worked, and Gnoetry crashes when you try to run it, then navigate in a file browser to the gnoetry/gnoetics/build directory and copy and paste the name of the directory there (the one without “temp” in front of it) inside of the quotation marks in line 4 of gnoetics.py. That is the information it’s looking for.

Final Note on Step 3: File Permissions

Proceed to step four. If step four fails, you may have to change the permissions of the gnoetry and gnoetics.py files. Go into the File Browser again, right click on the files, choose “Properties,” go to the “Permissions” tab and check the box that says “Allow to execute as program”). Let me know if you have any trouble with this step.

4. RUN GNOETRY

Go back to the terminal. From your home directory, you will cd into the gnoetry/interface directory and run the program:

% cd gnoetry/interface
% ./gnoetry

Have fun!

Customizing Source Texts with Google

I’m starting a new Gnoetry or Mchain project, it would seem. I’ve been compiling a list of “pleasingwords” for a while now, but I haven’t known how to use them. Now I’m planning to begin searching for text using Google (or other sources) that contains these pleasingwords and creating a source text to use with Gnoetry or Mchain.

Just an idea.

Gnoetry Chapbook Accepted for Publication

[Update: The chapbook is now available. Click on the image above or the link in the right sidebar of this blog.]

I’m excited to announce that my chapbook, a light heart, its black thoughts, which is a year-long collaboration with the Gnoetry0.2 program, has been accepted for publication by Beard of Bees Press. It is a 17 page sonnet sequence which uses Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as its sole source text. It will soon be available on the Beard of Bees website as a free pdf download.

This marks my first publication in any medium aside from self-publication on blogs, which I don’t think counts for much. The chapbook is the first of five that I am currently completing for my master’s thesis. A few of those used the mchain program (it is by feeling is and selections from more perfect worlds and other poems), and one is a long conceptual poem that catalogues a Google News search. That makes more than half of my thesis computer-mediated in some way, and highly intertextual overall.

Check out the Beard of Bees publications for my new chapbook. I’d love to see any of your comments or critiques of it, so feel free to comment on this or my other blog.

Gnoetry Project Update, Thoughts

My Gnoetry chapbook, a light heart, it’s black thoughts, which is a sonnet cycle using only Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as input, is coming along, and will likely figure prominently in my M.F.A. thesis.

Lately it has turned to darker territory than before, and I’m finding that violent scenes of rape and exploitation are becoming the norm.  It may be partially a consequence of my teaching postcolonial theory along with Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart to my English 106 students.  I’m sure it has turned away from the love poem focus it had before because I am no longer separated from my girlfriend like I was when many of the other obsession-driven sonnets were written.  It is becoming much more obviously a postcolonial text itself of sorts, although the positive sexual reversal of the cunnilingus poem (my favorite still) remains the center piece of the whole sequence.

I’m trying to not make the work conform to any one focus, but for the work to be a diverse collection of disparate happenings.  Phillip Whalen’s idea of the poem as a “sitting” is on my mind now, along with Kenneth Goldsmith’s assertion that truly contemporary poets are essential “word processors,” working with language and data and constructing them into new works.

The chapbook won’t be ready for several months then, it seems.  I’m working on four large scale poetic works (three of them computational, one somewhat visual) and an assortment of scattered individual poems, so work on all of them has slowed down.  They will get done.

Wish me luck!

My ongoing Gnoetry project: a light heart, its black thoughts

At long last, I’m posting some of the work that has come out of my time with Gnoetry 0.2. I started working with it in August of 2007, and since September I’ve been using exclusively the single text Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad as input. I’m not sure exactly what drew me to use only this particular text, but the output seemed to work for me better than other texts or combinations of texts.

I’m still working on this manuscript, but I have known since October that it would be a sonnet cycle. I played around with various settings for output, but a single 14 line stanza with lines between (usually) 5-12 syllables seems to give the most variable and malleable output. Plus, Donne’s Holy Sonnets and Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets have been on my mind and my reading list lately.

Here’s an example sonnet:

What was to know? You know, nobody
seemed to have a body
and rest. Don’t you think? We live, and shall not
wait. As a ripple on an
earth that wears the interests of conquest, of
trade, of words, that such details would be
delightful. We exchanged a few lumps of
some sort of purpose. An act
of bodies. It was not very clear.
This strange world. Not a blank
space of delightful mystery, a light
heart, its black thoughts, its body at rest. Were
we to let an avenging fire
consume all that? No one knew.

Thematically, I feel that my collaboration with Gnoetry using Heart of Darkness has helped me to write about issues of love, sex, separation, knowledge, philosophy, war, economics, and globalization–basically the subjects of personal and political concern/despair that I have been dealing with–in a way that surprises and moves me. It is a very intuitive process, and it is a deeply personal process. Whatever can be said of using Conrad’s work in this way (a novel I have not yet read, by the way), it serves for me as a source of language from which I can make statements about my understanding and impressions of myself and the world from a distance that often feels liberating.

Here’s another sonnet, this one more political than the above:

They said hang, bearers of the new
forces at work, no doubt, like a whiff from
some corpse. Imagine the opportunity. But with
every word spoken the
tide seemed to me the shadow
of the new forces at work, which seemed unearthly.
The north pole was awake. It seemed
to settle, a butcher round one corner, waiting. All that
had swept by us on the whole,
the reality, for belief, for something; and
it is like a wink, like a match, an
ax. Something like an empty
stream, and in every man’s life, a butcher in a
whirl of black feathers, a fool as I would be an ax.

Here’s another, this one about a failure to love:

I had a hankering
after. I had failed her. Like
a stick of love in a heap of
embers glowing fiercely.
I nearly burst into a cemetery,
bearing the sword, and did, with an air of being
afraid I admit, I would be shot down in the
midst of the white men rushing out
of the long grass, with its wheels in
the moonlight, the foreign faces, so to
speak of, but rather too
late, and I withdrew quietly, but I
didn’t do badly
either, trying to excuse or club.

I would be happy to hear comments or questions about these sonnets. I get a confusing mix of positive and negative responses, and a few more would be more than welcome.

Good News!

I have been invited by Eric Elshtain to contribute a chapbook of gnoems for his Beard of Bees Press. This is most good. Most good. As soon as I get Gnoetry 0.2 up and running again (I can’t believe I forgot to back it up), I can get started on that.

I’ll be posting updates and drafts of the gnoems up here along with my mchain poem drafts that I will be occasionally writing for workshop. I’m interested in seeing how they differ.

So, yes, the second year of my MFA at Purdue has started up again. That means (probably) fewer posts at what light already light, but more posts here. It’s proving difficult to get a community of mchain users posting here, but I’m leaving the option open for all interested.

Gnoetry: Way Ahead of Me

This is only the first of what I assume will be many posts on the program Gnoetry and the experiments surrounding it at Beard of Bees Press in Chicago. I suggest you go there and read some of the different chapbooks from poets who have collaborated with the program. They all use the program in their own ways. This is something that I hope to do with this blog: show and discuss different approaches to using computer programs to write poems.

If only I had found out about them last October, I could have gone to their exposition, Standing Close to the Machine: an evening of computational poetics, live at LOCUS in Chicago, only a two hours drive from here. File under regrets.

For now, I’m only posting about a selection of six poems by Gnoetry & Eric P. Elshtain from the Spring 2006 issue of Chicago Review. It was the first place I’d ever heard of Gnoetry, and at first I thought it was just a poet with a bizarre pen name, like Ai, or like Sirone the bass player, or Sun Ra.

It took me until last month to actually do the single web search I needed to find out about this Gnoetry. Turns out these guys are WAY ahead of me, though I can only discern a few differences between what Gnoetry does and what the mchain program I use does.

But, back to the poems: when I read them I thought it was amazing how similar they read to the mchain output I had been working with. They share a lot of the same characteristics. Here’s one of the poems as an example:

18:55:30

Then you are quite as much
freedom as one has
to those men and things which
passed over the face of the

arm of the law, the infant
death rate of two worlds! Not a thing
could be. The fact to be found that it
is the exact point of

basic difference from the bride’s
point of view, I ask you this
mistake if you would normally
call love somebody?

The line breaks have the feeling of what I call the seams of mchain output: those points where a familiarized user of the program can see that two different segments of the output have been connected by the program.

It is also common to see long strings of what I teach my composition students to avoid in their writing whenever possible: puffy connector phrases. Ridiculous and often parodic examples of puffy connector phrases regularly appear in mchain output, similar to the lines in this poem “The fact to be found that it / is the exact point of.”

The last similarity I’ll point to here is the unexpected and often evocative exclamations that will pop up, like “arm of the law, the infant / death rate of two worlds!” This is followed, artfully, with another hallmark of mchain like output: deep philosophical statements. “Not a thing could be.”

I’ll be writing more about my thoughts on Gnoetry and computational poetics later. Right now, there is a lot of information to sift through before I post anything more. I’ll definitely be responding to The Gnoetic Manifesto on the Beard of Bees page. How could I ever resist?