Hi Jim

I'm catching up on things on the list, I seem to have this thing called a life in between writing posts, but, yes:

>i don't see anything in your list that would turf out godel, turing, or
chomsky actually, david. even turing 'raged against the machine': the
machine that prosecuted him for being homosexual.<

I agree with raging against the machine. My point is that, though writings, expressions, articulations might have a quality that one
can term 'poetic' it does not mean that they are poems or the work of poets. It's a difficult subject to map: let's talk about the
Duchamp 'Fountain'. It was presented, in 1917, in a particular context, that of the elitist and snobbery bound and money based high
culture of the visual arts. It was great, but something that could only be done once. The result has been endless imitations that
are no more than empty gestures, what you end up with is BritArt, personified so brilliantly by the slaughterhouse businessman
Damien Hirst, who I suppose has made a new connection between the laws of perspective and formaldehyde, and our magnificent
inarticulate , know what I mean, Tracy Emin, like, you too can be stupid and successful and pretend you know nothing about Saatchi,
the Spice Girl of modern art. Now applying this kind of stuff to as impoverished and sidelined an art as poetry is rather like
setting out to mug a beggar, the cultural space for poetry is as thin as a shadow, and what little it does have is DESIRED by the
horrible generation of arts administrators, I nearly spelt administraitors, that we have spawned. I still shiver with horror at the
memory the other year of sitting with a local arts admin person in a pub and having to tell her what the BIG WORDS meant in a
document. But she was only an MA. What we have in this country is Idiot Culture. I agree with you about extending the notion of
poetry, but remember that old saw: don't throw out the baby along with the bathwater.

All the Best

Dave




David Bircumshaw

Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
& Painting Without Numbers

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Andrews" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2004 3:27 AM
Subject: Re: Coherent traditions


i don't see anything in your list that would turf out godel, turing, or
chomsky actually, david. even turing 'raged against the machine': the
machine that prosecuted him for being homosexual.

i am told i take too many liberties with definitions of poetry. but then, so
does anyone who tries to push it, no?

when i think of what the work of godel and turing--and their contemporaries,
and those who have followed, such as chomsky--has wrought concerning what we
think we are, what we think thought is, how we write and communicate (the
computer), and epistemology (godel's 'undecidable propositions' and
'incompleteness' theorems, for instance)--and when i think of how crucial
language *as a subject* is to their ideas--as it is in information theory,
say--it seems to me that they have been engaged with language very
intensely, david, and with profound consequence for all the world.

i think poetry should be capable of comprehending this sort of activity.
there should be no divide between poetry and what the most brilliant minds
of an era are devoted to with such intensity and consequence concerning
language.

poetry should be able to range over all that is thinkable, over all emotion,
over the full range of human experience and thought and emotion.

i seem to be at my best when i know i don't know what poetry is.
possibilities open up.

by the way, a pity about the railway timetables. it makes for an adventure,
though.

i enjoyed your list!

ja
http://vispo.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: david.bircumshaw [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 6:25 PM
> To: Jim Andrews; [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Coherent traditions
>
>
> Jim wrote:
>
> >and some appreciation of the synthesis of number and language that
> has been going on the last seventy years in the work of poets
> such as Godel,
> Turing, and Chomsky. Poets in the sense that part of what we look for in
> poetry/poetics is intense engagement with language.<
>
> Jim, with all respect, this statement is absurd, apart from the
> last clause, in that the description of Godel, Turing and Chomsky as
> poets is as far away from any kind of reality it even beats a
> railway timetable. Of course they weren't poets. One could turn this
> kind of stuff on its head, if, for example, I were to claim,
> because I am a poet, I am therefore a nuclear physicist or an expert in
> inorganic chemistry I would be laughed out of court. And intense
> involvement with language, yes, they all have that, and are
> brilliant at it, but that does not make them poets, it's just
> part of the beginnings of it.
>
> Requirements include:
>
> a) A tendency to self-hypnosis.
>
> b) High irritability thresholds coupled with a desire to be dominated.
>
> c) A stubbed toe because the budgie dropped dead just as you were
> going to think that great thought.
>
> d) A fascination with the psyche, and the extremity and
> insecurity of our being here predicament.
>
> e) An ear.
>
> f) Lucid dreaming, and long conversations with hypnagogic images
> on sleepless nights.
>
> g) Superstition. Rationality.
>
> h) A belief in what doesn't exist, because someone has to.
>
> i) Sonnets playing on the ear like chamber music to the tunes of
> toilets flushing.
>
> j) Someone you love because you hate them:
>
> k) Like a tradition.
>
> l) A fondness for small things and a fear of philosophers.
>
> m) Fury at the Machine.
>
> n) What happened to someone you know nothing of in the waiting
> room at Bolton that long ago Sunday.
>
> o) A prairie toldus
>
> p) Trying not to mind about Q
>
> q) A love of Russia, for its open armed literature, and the long
> plains of its waiting.
>
> r) A deep suspicion of doctors, for their reliance on one sound,
> say it, and the pretences of expertise.
>
> s) Ambivalence about snakes. See DHL.
>
> t) Which is very soothing.
>
> u) Who is who we all are and never let us forget that.
>
> v) Sign of dysentery ridden English archers and what every poet
> needs to have the strength to hold up in fingers to the world.
>
> w) Waah, whoa, woe, who, what makes rhymes with coo.
>
> x) To mark the spot.
>
> y) Which we all ask ourselves.
>
> z) An alphabet. None of the above.
>
>
> All the Best
>
> Dave