Hey! Look Over There! And There!: The Issue of Multiple Posts

The end of 2009 is fast approaching, and I am excitedly working on a number of projects as we prepare to enter the new year. The PT podcast is still at large, but I hope it shall finally arrive in 2010. And I'm also preparing to pop up in a few other blogs and publications in the coming months.

With that said, there's a great story on poetry and tech over at the fantastic Vroman's Bookstore Blog. The article discusses the multi-platform lit mag Electric Literature, which we covered when it first debuted. Patrick, over at Vroman's, points out an issue involving Electric Literature and multiple posts. Here's a quick excerpt:

'The hope was that, by syndicating the story across so many different accounts, Electric Literature would reach a wider audience.

It didn’t work. There was too much overlap among the social networks of the various co-publishers, leading to many people seeing the same tweet several times. The book world has responded at first with confusion, and then moved quickly to anger, scorn and ridicule.'

Nothing like a little book-related tech drama to finish out the year. Be sure to check out the full article at Vroman's, in which Patrick digs deep into this issue.

Thanks to all of you for sticking with Paradise Tossed in 2009. We look forward to continuing to provide insights into the growing world of poetry and technology in the year to come. See you in 2010!

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spencerfinnley/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Poet and the Journalist: Two Reflections for You to Ponder

I somehow don't think it's a coincidence that the words 'the poet and the journalist' have precisely the same sing-song quality as Lewis Carroll's 'The Walrus and the Carpenter'. It's interesting to think how these two types of writers bumble about each other, even in today's highly communicative world.

Since we're all in our blissful post-Christmas state at the moment, I thought I would share two reflections on the same issue: one by a journalist and the other by a poet. I think you'll find, like I did, that these thoughts are two sides of the same coin.

Everything Old is New Again: Altering Used Books into Poetry

Sometimes technology isn't about gadgets, the internet, or anything we'd consider 'high tech'. Sometimes it's about simply reimagining: taking something old and turning it into something beautiful and new. [Don't make me go into the Greek etymology of technology; I will if I have to.]

The site I'd like to talk about today involves exactly this kind of technology. Altered Books, a part of Dan Waber's logolalia, is an intriguing project that takes pages from books bought at used book sales and turns them into poetry by scratching out all but a few words.

Technological Literacy: The Most Important Gift We Can Give to Children

Few things are as inspiring as watching a kid soak up information. They can process new ideas and concepts at a staggering velocity. From a young age, the children of the world are bombarded with things to learn. These learning experiences come from a wide range of sources: for starters there's the education system itself, the ubiquitous advertising industry, and the unparalleled influence of parents. Despite the positive or negative influence of these large-scale educational efforts, there's a much deeper education going on behind the scenes. Both implicitly and explicitly, kids learn on their own, and they teach each other what they know.

For the better part of the last three decades, that's the main way kids have learned about technology. Like sex education in the 1950s, technology in the 80s and 90s was a subject most parents hardly ever broached with their children, and was only taught in schools in the most broad, generic terms.

You've Been Eaten By a Grue: Choose Your Own Adventure Books and Hypertext

Many of us cut our literary teeth on Choose Your Own Adventure Books. Like hard copy hypertext, these books engendered a love of reading by allowing bright-eyed youngsters to make decisions for themselves as they read through the story. The choices that the reader made could either lead to victory against all odds, or utter defeat and violent fictional death.

As the 1980s wore on, however, the core idea behind these books was picked up by the new video and computer game industry. Begin with text-based adventures like Zork, technology allowed people to create increasingly more interactive environments which eventually far surpassed Choose Your Own Adventure Books in popularity. Today, the plot of video games is often just as important as the graphics and controls.

The Poetry Foundation Tells Us All to Take a Walk

To start us off, I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, even those of you who do not live in the US. Regardless of whether or not you celebrated the holiday, I hope you took the time, like I did, to listen to the stories, jokes, and perhaps even poems of your friends and family.


Now that we're all back and refreshed from this most gustatory of celebrations, I'm sure we could all use a nice long walk to get rid of those extra pounds. Well, our friends at The Poetry Foundation have us covered.  They've recently kicked off an exciting new walking tours project in both DC and Chicago.

Five Great Books on Copyright, Culture, and the Internet

It is beyond doubt that the Internet has completely changed the world of publishing. Books, music, animation, and art of all kinds is being created and distributed online in vast quantities each day. This explosion of virtual culture has upset copyright laws around the world. The extensive regulations, originally designed to protect artists and art-lovers alike, have often become a hindrance to the fullness of expression and sharing that the internet offers.

In the past ten to twenty years, many great minds have converged around reconciling the opposition between the seemingly opposing forces of copyright and internet distribution. Authors like Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow, as well as scholars like Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig and William Patry, have all weighed in on this issue. The number of books written on this topic is astronomical, so today we'd like to offer you five of the very best books on the nature of copyright in the digital age.

Binary Poetry of All Kinds: 01010111 01001111 01010111!

Sometimes a search term can send you down a path you didn't expect. I set out this morning to find examples of poetry written in binary code. And though I did find some, I also found a larger body of binary-related work that's worth sharing.

The first person to have seriously approached the concept of poetry in binary was Czech poet Ladislav Nebeský, who developed his particular technique between 1966-1972. A good example of this idea is the poem "light - dust". Nebeský used binary poetry as a jumping off point to explore poetry of what he calls "Non-written Words." I find his non-written word poems to be a little reminiscent of minimalist painting.

Of course, Nebeský wasn't the only one to think of writing poems in code. There are many less serious, more whimsical examples like this one. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the maxim works both ways: if poetry can be code, then surely Code is Poetry.

Now when I searched "binary poetry," I knew I wouldn't just get poems that were written in binary code, but also ones that simply involved two complimentary objects or forces. A good example is this one by Keith O'Connor about the colors white and black in painting.

Lastly, there were two things in my search that I didn't expect to find at all, but was delighted I did. One was a song by Ben Mono called "Binary Poetry" which has a catchy techno-inspired beat. Another was the Binary Poetry Flickr set, which features some pretty stunning black-and-white photography.

Who knew that a simple Google search for "binary poetry" could yield such diverse artistic results? If you know of any examples of binary-related art that I may have missed, please link to it in the comments. With any luck, this little voyage of discovery isn't over yet.

"The Wondrous Works of Man": Technology as a Tool for Inspiration

Here at Paradise Tossed, we explore the intersection of poetry and technology. Typically we offer up resources for poets and others interested in the poetry, and of late we have been examining the ways in which technology has changed the way we read, write, and view poetry. Today, I’d like to take a look at the ultimate intersection and investigate the way in which technology provides inspiration for poetry. Just how does technology influence what we write about?

I started thinking about this idea after coming across the essay “‘Destiny uncovered when we double click’: Poems about Technology,” by Terri Kimiko Oda. In this essay, Oda describes and provides examples of five categories of tech poetry: novelty, political, change, faith, and connectivity. The essay is interesting and makes some good points, but I notice that it focuses primarily on the technology of the Internet. Certainly there are other technologies out there worth writing about. Indeed, a few can be found at Fantastic Poetry, and many science fiction magazines publish poems in which science and technology are featured.

What strikes me most, I think, about the websites I linked to above is that both agree on the point that this poetry is fundamentally the same as all other poetry written throughout history; the subject matter may deal with technology, but the themes are the themes of life. “What do people write about when they write poetry about technology?” asks Oda, and then she answers her own question, saying “[t]hey write about the same sorts of things that people write about when not referring to technology: Love, oppression, faith...” Adam Rulli-Gibbs, the author of the Fantastic Poems website further states:

Science fiction is not about automatic cars, personal jetpacks, robots, spaceships, space travel or little green men even if these do make an appearance.

Poetry is not about daffodils, full moons or navel contemplation even if these do make an appearance.

Science fiction or fantasy poetry, as each of the above, should, whatever appears within it, be about people and their perceptions.

The advent of electronics in the 20th Century seems to have changed our perception of technology, and this has become even more noticeable in the global culture of the 21st Century, where high technology is ubiquitous, but technology is nothing more than our name for those objects we put to use for practical purposes. As a species, we have been inventors for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years, since our ancestors first chipped away at stones to create rudimentary knives, axes, and arrowheads, and poetry about or including such things has existed as long as poetry itself. Indeed, Homer wrote about “the wondrous works of man” and Tennyson “dipt into the future” and wrote of aeronautics in “Locksley Hall.” These examples, however, are not about technology; they are about human nature. Humankind’s inventions have not changed the soul of poetry, nor will they; they change only its face. As technologies change, so do the specific topics of our poems, but the themes remain the same.