Procedural Writing is Kinky

Since I read Tom's post before writing my own, I now seem to be thinking about my response to him and about a question he raised whether he meant to or not. How is procedural writing like Oulipo, workshop writing exercises, detournement, appropriation, remix, collage, metagraphs (Debord''s word for poem-collage), erasures and other human made restraints placed upon writing different from computer generated procedural writing? What makes this murky for me is that computers are a type of person too because we made them and we program them.

Hartman says that the real question is, how can a computer and a human collaborate to create interesting writing? Although I think he has a fair point, I think it's a cute way to avoid the question and in the context of his project(s), that response makes sense. In "Sentences" (which could easily be renamed, "Making Computer Generated Poetry: A Love Story") Hartman takes us through a writing procedure much more difficult to explain than something like Perec's lipogram La disparition or Queneau's Exercises in Style (one of my favorites I might add). Yet the idea is the same: what fun things can happen when you put writing in handcuffs? Enter my gimmicky title to this post. Obviously those handcuffs are made of different materials, shapes and secured to different objects but the general outline is the same.

There was a lovely panel on procedural writing at the Boulder Small Press Festival a few weeks ago in which author Gillian Conoley discussed her experience with using the plot genie to write a book with the same name. The plot genie is a device that I took to be a wheel that the writer spins in order to put together different elements of a story. From the blurb on Omnidawn:

"The inspiration for this book is a plot-generating device created in the 1930s by an ex silent screenwriter, Wycliffe A. Hill. The original "Plot Genie"--used widely by Hollywood writers until the late 1950's--relied on a numerical game of chance, including a cardboard spinning wheel used to divine character traits and plot points."

Plot Genie is not a computer, it's a piece of carboard and yet we should note that the blurb calls the genie a "plot-generating device." A plot generating device sounds a lot like a computer but the genie is made from cardboard, not silicon. Someone did however, have to build it and program it with plot elements in order for it to function and create writing. This sounds exactly like computer generated poetry but had Hartman been there showcasing his computer generated work as procedural writing, I have no doubt it would have been more questioned that Conoley's. I think I would have, I think I do. So what's my/our problem with computers that we made and we programmed being used as restraints for writing? The answer is probably ignorance and code-awe (I made that term up). My mind can manage the mysteries of a cardboard wheel much easier than of a computer program. I am more interesting and more impressed by Janet Holme's "The Ms of my kin" which is an erasure of the already condensed poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Labor has to be a factor as I learned from last week's post. My classmate's were more impressed by my conceptual writing of alphabetizing the intro to UBU's Conceptual Writing anthology when they thought I had done it "by hand" when in reality I put it into a free online alphabetizing program. We are trained to be impressed with hard work, even if it's as tedious and dull as alphabetizing a set of words.

Finally, I think the question of why we choose to write within constraints is important. My students love workshop writing exercises and using constraints to force the artist into exciting and new directions is the aim of such exercises. My own teacher, Julie Carr is having me write a series of poems in ballad verse to force my language into something more rich and grounded. Oulipo functioned/functions in pretty much the same way.

So, why do we want to write computer generated, computer restrained poetry? Hartman says, "The brute-force effort to make a machine into a human poet seems doomed to death by boredom"(Hartman 4). But he does advocate as I have already mentioned, for the potential interest of poetry derived through human/computer collaboration. While going through a writing exercise like write the 100th version of the story in Exercises in Style, we learn something through writing through that restraint. We learn more about what we want from writing, our own creative process, about language itself and ultimately how to write a better poem/story. After reading "Sentences" there is no doubt in my mind that although his process is dressed a little differently, Hartman also learns these things. If that were true then computer generated writing is not alone, but living under the same umbrella of procedural writing as the plot genie, Oulipo and erasure; and the direct end results from such exercises whether computer or human generated are as Hartman points out, just as varied.

Guilt, Risk and Conceptual Art

"Ordinary language does not use itself to reflect upon itself"

"Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional sense - one does not need to 'read' the work as much as think about the idea of the work"

- Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms

I sat down to write my blog then stopped. Then I started again, then stopped. It occurred to me that according to the needs of the conceptual, a written response that provokes the reader "to think" could just as easily be a conceptual art piece as a sensical analysis. Isn't that part of the point? Or even the whole point?

Also, I am a poet and a person who learns by doing. So by creating conceptual writing, I was able to better understand it. My idea is not original, alphabetizing existing texts has been done by Kim Stefans, Cristobal Mendoza (I published it, see Every Word I Saved on springgunpress.com) and I'm sure many others. The concept of my piece however, is different from The Dream Life of Letters and Every Word I Saved, mostly because my piece was framed as a blog entry assignment for a graduate course. I subverted "the man" (or woman-Lori) by attempting to achieve the same level of thinking and communication of a concept rich scholarly essay on conceptual art, by creating/participating in conceptual writing. My source material is of course that of the intro to the Conceptual Writing Anthology on UBUWEB which adds another conceptual layer to the writing. It draws attention to the absurdity of having an introduction like this on conceptual writing, or having any scholarly writing on what is already self-conceptual and unconcerned with its outcome.

Now to get to my title. I immediately felt guilty after subverting my graduate student duty to complete this assignment on time and as an accountable member of the classroom community. It was so easy to alphabetize source text while my classmates typed away some serious and thoughtful analysis on conceptual writing and how it relates to digital poetry. I should mention I think the connection to digital poetry and conceptual writing is an obvious one and won't discuss that here. Back to my guilt. Hard work is rewarded in the world I live in. I feel good about myself when I work hard and make something meaningful. The nonproductive, easy act of alphabetizing this text gave me the opposite feeling. It was not hard work, and I felt like I was disappointing my classmates and Lori. I wondered if the inherent low-energy work and cleverness that goes into conceptual writing always feels this way, and this brings me to the risk part.

Participating in conceptual writing is risky because there is nothing but the concept and because of our social pact that hard work is a positive thing, peers may view the work as lazy, or easy. At least these were my fears. Like I said, I am a poet and when you think back to the workshop, you might hear things like, "I am not following the concept of your poem but lyric quality of the fourth and sixth lines are beautiful. The way your poem moves, feels like taking a shower while drinking lavender soda." Ok so that was a stretch but the point is, other writing has something else, or a lot of something elses and is therefore less risky. You have more to fall back on if the concept doesn't pan out.

Finally, there is yet another quote in Fitterman's Notes on on Conceptualisms that quotes Sol LeWitt: "If the artist changes his mind halfway through the execution of his piece, he compromises the result and repeats past results." Now it appears, I have done just this, but for the day when I was behind my decision to keep that post up there with no explanation (it is the explanation!) I had this quote in mind.

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"Conceptual Writing rarely “looks” like poetry and uses its own subjectivity to construct a linguistic machine that words may be poured into; it cares little for the outcome." -Kenny Goldsmith