At 4:16 AM +0100 27/7/03, kiosk wrote:
>It is a very interesting question. I not convinced poets *have to be*
>geeks but I do tend to think that being a poet probably should involve a
>certain familiarity with the options/switches which determine how things
>are interpreted.
Dear Janet, I'm afraid you give the statement more serious thought
than its flippancy deserved. As well as a computer head, "geek" can
also mean (at least in Australian usage) the kind of person who
devotes fanatical obsessiveness to minority interests such as stamp
collecting or science fiction or making model trains. And that's the
usage I was employing: loving poetry often seems to me exactly that
kind of interest.
And yes, there can be a kind of music (and I think you showed it to
me, in the pieces you posted) to the language which programmers might
use, just as there is in mathematics, something I must take on trust
since in that respect I am tone deaf. But as you say the language
which poets use has multiple registers for which computer language,
to my knowledge, does not have the capacity. There's another kind of
logic employed in poetic language (though the little reading I've
done in the sciences of complexity, especially biological sciences,
seem to offer possible interesting models). As an aside, it's
interesting to think about the kind of poems made by poetry
generators, which seem to make a kind of generic language and can bee
good at imitating, for example, surrealistic techniques; but are
quite unable to generate the kind of holistic energy which inhabits
even the most fragmentary poems (well, those poems that move me)
written by a human being.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Blog
http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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