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!

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.