3D poems again

Been having an enjoyable half an hour messing around with the QR code generator: the trouble is that my small phone app cannot handle anything too complicated - William Shakespeare and John Donne were both out - or in colour.

Nice if it could.

Plus the qrcode generators themselves have a word limit too - so bye bye Elizabeth Bishop.

The final solution for your delectation is a riddle poem in QRcode. A riddle within a code. As 3D as I can get so far. Enjoy.

You can read the original 3D poetry post here - I think the trees have reminded me -  http://poetandgeek.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/3d-poetry.html

Machine poets: the movement of big things

Man and machine, a combination that has existed in poetry since classical times; early English examples include John Donne's The Compass

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the' other do.

and Spenser's dissertation in the Faerie Queene on the uses of wood

    The Eugh obedient to the benders will,

    The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,

But at the moment I am interested when machines stand for a certain kind of grit and honesty; less renaissance man who has an interest in science and more alpha male who "likes the movement of big things".

W.H.Auden's factories stand for social truth, Work has been stopped on the powerhouse; the wind whistles under/The half-built culverts while The square munition works out on the old allotments/Needs stricter watching (The Orators 1931); a society of which he is an observer and excluded (Stop all the clocks). But what often appeals to me is the more fifties brand of machine poet. Ted Hughes' Tractor is a badge of manhood endowed with all the pain of a rite of passage:

The tractor stands frozen - and agony

to think of...[]

It defies flesh and won't start

hands are like wounds already

Inside armour gloves...

In the end its superhuman power is mastered and it starts like a Blakean engine or mill. Simon Armitage's poem Very simply topping up the brake fluid (Yes, love, that's why the warning light comes on...) takes the process one step further. The chance of failure that in Hughes's poem is contained within the poet himself is split into a male expert and subservient female persona, the love in question. But Armitage's poem is a cry against the feminisation all men feel when they get out of their depth with machines; it is perhaps a logical step to men (and women) bathing in pies to assert themselves (The practical way to heaven) in Armitage's latest collection Seeing stars (something not so far away from D.H. Lawrence's nudity and wrestling).

This has to end for the moment in a call for machine poems and poets; the series is to be continued...

Donne tweet poetry

poetandgeek poetandgeek.com 

I am two fools I know For loving and for saying so In whining poetry But where's that wise man that would not be I If she would not deny

10 seconds ago 

Computer works 01: Diana Syder's String

Diana Syder is a poet and artist and her book String (Smith/Doorstop Books 2007) is still a rare thing. The result of a residency in Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Sheffield, funded by an award from the Leverhulme Trust.

Coming from a programming background, we might define string as, a sequence of characters (a data type storing a sequence of data values) and this book contains a poem on Boolean logic. Just the fact of that is enough to delight a programmer! Boole's inspiration is also the poet's


If a great idea is a pin of light
or a highlight placed carefully in the pupil,
it makes of our heads some racing,
slight-rigged thing with sails skin-tight....


and is much more pleasing to think of
than molecules hauling luke-warm cargoes
through plasma in the sticky dark;
noradrenalin, acetylcholine, gamma aminobutyric acid -
even their names are supertankers
that cannot manoeuvre quickly.


Boolean logic Diana Syder


Having spent a lot of time whipping cards in and out of computers, the observational poem Look Inside a Computer is less evocative for me.

But of course this is not the only card up Syder's sleeve, her string is superstring theory - the idea that the smallest entities in the universe are made up of strings (rather than points) which vibrate at resonant frequencies. And to simplify, differently scaled resonance would effect a variety of fundamental forces. This idea would imply the existence of perhaps up to ten dimensions to work theoretically.

These poems inspire a real Donne-like excitement at the world of computing and physics; still recommended. Look forward to pointing out a few more informatic-informed works in the future...





String, Smith/Doorstop Books £7.95 available from: Smith/Doorstop Books, Bank St., Arts, 32-40 Bank St, Sheffield S1 2DS or Amazon etc.