Today Davey Dreamnation celebrated an important milestone – the signing up of his one hundred and first Myspace friend. Cynics will, predictably, moan that most of these so-called friends are just placeholder pages for bands both currently active (hello Bloc Party, Love of Diagrams, Sonic Youth, The Fauves, Boards of Canada, The Early Years, Silver Jews, Clint Bo Dean et al) or nostalgically non-existent (goodbye Crow, Sun Ra, Swervedriver, That Petrol Emotion, Chris de Burgh – ooh, hang on a minute).
However, cynics are well known for their lack of a sense of humour. They need to get one fast. Or else, a Myspace page of their own. Sure, there’s people out there who ascribe way too much importance to Myspace (hello everyone) but for the most part, I think most people sign on just to send silly comments to each other and also to perve on otehr peoples’ comments. Then again there are the hardliners, including UK band Wire, whose Myspace page uncompromisingly declares:
It seems like lots of you out there want to be friends with Wire which is very flattering. Your supportive comments are much appreciated! There is a lot of love out there for Wire!!!
Each of the many daily friend requests is in fact checked out because not everyone is who they say they are on MySpace. For that reason we are sorry but we cannot accept friend requests from private profiles. Wire is on MySpace because it is a public space, there is no reason why someone who wants to keep their identity private needs to connect to Wire in this way.
(emphasis mine)
I was initially nervous about submitting a friend request to such a hardcore principled band, not least because at the time my profile proudly wore its Chris de Burgh influence on its sleeve. Nevertheless, I was promptly signed up by Wire anyway, who obviously do not actually check every profile at all. I mean, how else do you end up with over 8000 friends. Just ask Howard Jones. Personally, I’m happy that I’m able to display 24 friends who are all real people.
I also like listening to music and trying to poach other peoples’ friends. That being said, I am aware that Sun Ra is dead, and that were he alive, he probably wouldn’t be into having his own Myspace page. I’m also aware that unlike Wire, most musicians don’t actually have anything to do with their Myspace page. But I ask you: how much does a musician have to do with their website, tour poster, CD packaging or whatever in the real world anyway?
Myspace: the Ultimately Me Space for Those Who I Might Not Want to Come Back to My Place.
In the spirit of all things pertaining to rolling thunder, increasing expectations and maximising tension, I’m happy to report that my debut poetry collection We Will Disappear, to be published by soi 3, an imprint of papertiger media, is edging closer to reality. The text is currently with a proofreader and the cover artwork is also being finalised, and I’m hoping that the book will be out by May this year. Having been on the other side of the publisher-author relationship for most of my adult life, it’s been a steep learning curve for me this time. All of a sudden it’s my work and my image that will be heading out into the bibliosphere, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just as picky and obsessive as any other author.
Today I received an email from a poet who was involved in the Cordite Poetry Review Search issue asking me about the methodology we employed in the exercise.
For those with long memories, the Search issue came out in January 2004, however the experiment itself was originally enacted on the Poetry Espresso mailing list as part of its poem of the day series back in 2002.
So I started digging through the PE archives and I eventually found my original call for poems, posted to the list but written while I was in Buffalo, USA:
hello espressos and greetings from buffalo new york! i realise i have been absent for a while on the list, but i have been reading avidly, though with some initial confusion, posts on the origins of the captain, and his name. ahem. onto duller affairs. i have also just realised i’m supposed to be editing november poems, which begin in about three weeks. may this message constitute a call to arms, in the form of an invitation to submit “search poems” for the month of november, at your earliest convenience.
though it may not be a strictly new genre, search poetry consists, in this instance, of thinking of a title for a poem, typing that title into google or any other search engine, and then creating a poem from the results. your poem may be a strict re-writing of the search results themselves (including hyperlinks), an investigation of the sites brought up by the search query, or an altogether different piece, only connected to the search query itself by the flimsiest of associations.
for example, i recently typed “flat out on a highway lined with dim stars” into google, and came up with a whole series of snippets from texts that, when put together, read like a road trip movie. the possibilities are endless. all i ask is that you follow the above instructions with regards typing the title into a search engine. using an obscure or weird search engine may enhance your credibility.
of course, the idea may prove controversial or, worse, banal. in any case, should i not receive enough poems to fill 30 days, i hope to initiate discussions of the worth of search poetry as a genre throughout the month. please consider it a bit of fun, and let your fingers do the talking.
In response to my call for poems, I received approximately thirty submissions, all of which made it into the Cordite issue just over 12 months later.
The cover image for the issue was provided by Ruark Lewis. Adam Ford also wrote an article on search poems in response to the issue. The project also inspired some discussion on the list, although the Poetry Espresso archives are no longer online, unfortunately.
Ruark Lewis, ‘War Not’, originally commissioned by Cassie Lewis for the November 2002 edition of the Poetry Espresso Poem of the Day booklets. It was also the cover image for Cordite Poetry Review No. 16, ‘Search’.
The methodology I employed prior to the Poetry Espresso and Cordite search poem projects was far more strict. I thought of a title for a poem, typed it into Google and hit “Search”. I then selected the text from the first page of results, dumped it into a text editor and stripped it of URLs and hyperlinked text. This left me with a blob of text of a certain length which I preserved as it was, that is without edits. I also preserved the Google-specific final words “Cached – Similar pages”, as a kind of signature.
All pretty silly and fun, really. Of course, there are now (and probably were previously) various other Google poem generators plus other even more fiendishly clever and sophisticated versions of what I did. I suggest you, erm, Google the term “Google Poetry” and prepare to die.
As far as I’m concerned, debates about generated poems and Flarf and hyper-avant methodologies and so on are fairly academic, if not the preserve of lang-po geeks, and should be ignored by us mere mortals.
However, I do think there is a place for a sensible critique of search poetry in terms of concepts such as “ownership”, “randomness” and “copying”.
I also found it interesting that most contributors to the Search issue used Google, although Jill Jones’ twocontributions used two different search engines to create poems with (almost) identical titles – well worth a look.
A few years ago I gave a guest lecture on search poems in Autofictions, the first-year creative writing course at the University of Melbourne. A student commented during the lecture that search poems are like decoupage, in their use of pre-prepared fragments. I like this image: a (usually empty) container – i.e. a poem – covered with eye-catching bits of other poems, the craft of which is in the compilation.
In 2005 I also made my Korean creative writing students try some search poems: you can read some of their entertaining efforts, including my personal favourite, “Why Am I Standing Here?”, erm, here.
I should also note, finally, that Adam Ford, Carlie Lazar and myself were the originators of the International Search Poetry (ISP) Movement, and that we were planning, at one stage, to unleash our collective search poems upon the world. However that idea, like so many other good ones, has been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Well, I read the news today and oh boy – I heard that Jean Baudrillard had died, and I thought, yeah, I should write a blog post about him, and about how his ideas of the simulacra and the evil demon of images were burnt onto the back of my eyelids as a student back in the early 1990s, and how great it was to be a student then, and how things are so much different for today’s students, and oh how the world has changed and isn’t it great to be alive … but then K came into the kitchen as I was cooking a cheese omelette and said “Hey, it’s International Womens Day today!” and I said “Yay!” and really, that’s what I’d like to say today. Surely today, just like every other day, there will be more than enough time and space devoted to the concerns of men and their take on the world (and yes, I do include myself here), so this post is my attempt to make up, ever so slightly, for the imbalances we all know still exist in this world. I’d also like to say hey, it’s Blog Against Sexism Day today too – hence the cool image above! All over the world today, bloggers will be writing against sexism and against gender inequality. I can guarantee that most of them will be far more eloquent than me. Nevertheless, this is my statement of support for gender liberation and for women’s (and wimmin’s) liberation. Why? because while it’s nice and comforting for me to think that we’re all equal and that we are the world, the fact is that this is simply not true. As the old political slogan goes: “Bad for all; worse for women”. I sing the great women poets of Australia and the world, the quiet women and the loud ones too. Super props to all the women still fighting for change and improvement in the conditions for women everywhere when everyone around them has given up. I salute the billions of women in the world who are free not to look like Paris Hilton. I even salute Paris Hilton, for it is not so much Paris herself who is the problem with our society (how original: blame it on the woman) but our society’s stereotype of what women should be. These stereotypes enslave us men too, with one slight difference: we’ll never have to be women living in a society that treats us as the B Team. I am not perfect. I have been an arsehole, to both men and women. I’m not pretending to be better than I am. But the world could be so much better. Australia could be so much better. For a start, we could get rid of this moronic government, under whose Workchoices legislation women are even worse off than they were before. That’s a little bit harder than writing a blog post in support of International Womens Day – but also, just maybe, maybe just a little more useful in the long run.
Recently I came across the following quotation from a newspaper column written by Irish novelist and satirist Flann O’Brien in the mid-1940s:
Having considered the matter in – of course – all of its aspects, I have decided that there is no use for poetry. Poetry gives no adequate return in money, is expensive to print by reason of the waste of space occasioned by its form, and nearly always promulgates illusory concepts of life. But a better case for the banning of all poetry is the simple fact that most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five may be eatable. Furthermore, poetry has the effect on the negligible handful who read it of stimulating them to write poetry themselves. One poem, if widely disseminated, will breed perhaps a thousand inferior copies. The same objection cannot be made in the case of painting or sculpture, because these occupations afford employment for artisans who provide the materials. Moreover, poets are usually unpleasant people who are poor and who insist forever on discussing that incredibly boring subject, ‘books’.
How to dignify such toejam with a response? Where to begin? Perhaps with the obvious: that at first I was struck by this piece’s wit, its ‘droll humour’ already familiar to me from my reading of O’Brien’s novels, including The Third Policeman, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Poor Mouth. Shortly after, however, I started to seethe inside. Despite the influence of the voice of reason inside me whispering Mate, it’s what they call a joke, I began to recall the many and various occasions previous on which I had been told the same thing by some insufferable goon puffed up with self-righteousness, two glasses of clearskin wine and a pathological loathing for “the Left”. I recalled also an observation made by Pam Brown, namely: “Poetry is the only art form that is constantly asked to assess its relevance.” Clearly, one person’s joke is another’s insult; and clearly, also, O’Brien’s ‘droll’ – no, acerbic – wit, while moderately humorous, is representative of a systematic bias against my profession that I no longer find funny.
