Poems as Machines

[Solar]

A series of pretty cool articles on the topic. I haven't read all of them yet but I'd be very interested in what KHI has to say. After the first couple, different people tackle the concept. Here's the first one:

In 1944, William Carlos Williams wrote an introduction to his book The Wedge in which he stated, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” You’ve probably heard this said before in some way, though it’s really a pretty vague metaphorical/conceptual statement despite its initial magnetism as an aesthetic definition, and Williams isn’t the first to have the idea, he was just the first to say it formally. Williams doesn’t do much to articulate what he means when he says a poem is machine made of words, (is it a simple machine? a complex machine? is machine synonymous with system? what are the implications for poem as machine vs. the better known bureaucratic power machine?) and really, Williams leaves it up to us to understand how literal he’s being, but he does say this: “It isn’t what he [the poet] says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.” So here we have a continuation of the “poem as machine” metaphor with words like “makes,” which suggests craft and external production, and “movement,” which brings to mind the inner workings of machines. When we say things in workshop like “This is where the poem really starts to move,” “Your poem picks up steam after these lines,” or “What is this poem doing?” we’re using the “poem as machine” metaphor, even if we don’t know it. So, based on what Williams is saying, “poem as machine” is a way of effectively killing the muse and railing against New Criticism’s obsession with the stability of a “text” (“What does it matter what the line ‘says’?” asks Williams). Also, Williams dismisses form for form’s sake, (“To me all sonnets says the same thing of no importance”), insisting that “There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine…” Many of the most interesting books of the second half of the 20th century adhere to Williams’ “formal invention” in some way, just think of Inger Christen’s alphabet or most of the New York School. This makes sense because one way we talk about form is as a generative device (and there we are using more mechanical language). But none of this really gets us closer to understanding how a poem is a machine or what kind of implications it has for how we write or read poetry. The one thing I want to avoid giving into saying is that “a poem is a machine” is only a metaphor. If it’s only a metaphor we’re not helping ourselves understand anything about what a poem is or can be or does. With that in mind, here are some quotes from or about writers who share something with Williams’ statement. Make what you will of them. I’m going to keep posting thoughts about this so who knows where we’ll end up.



“He [Daniil Kharms] kept a large machine at home, which he made of found scrap. When asked what it did, Kharms would retort, “Nothing. It’s just a machine.”
(Matvei Yankelevich, from the introduction to Today I Wrote Nothing)



“A single climb to a line, a straight exchange to a cane, a desperate adventure and courage and a clock, all this which is a system, which has feeling, which has resignation and success, all makes an attractive black silver.”
(Gertrude Stein, from Tender Buttons)



“Q: There are ten rules for operating the machine. The first rule is turn it on.
A: Turn it on.
Q: The second rule is to convert the terms. The third rule is to rotate the inputs. The fourth rule is you have made a serious mistake.
A: What do I do?
Q: You send the appropriate error message.”
(Donald Barthelme, from “The Explanation” in City Life)



“[Jack] Spicer delighted in provocative and incongruous combinations. His statements are mercurial, and his lines refuse to be pinned down to a single register. His poems repeatedly disrupt even their own procedures by jamming the frequencies of meaning they set up. They make use of his life-long fascination with games and systems: bridge, baseball, chess, pinball, computers, magic, religion, politics, and linguistics.”
(Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, from the introduction to My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer)



“But poems / are not museums, // they are machines / made of words, / you pour as best // you can your attention / in and in you the poetic / state of mind is produced // said one of the many / French poets with whom / I feel I must agree.”
(Matthew Zapruder, from “Come on All You Ghosts” in Come on All You Ghosts)



“To know that the poem is a new form of technology and you are a bag or an owl. And so maybe you will express some confused anger or maybe you will need to repeat yourself.”
(Heather Christle, in Slope issue 26)

Source.

[Reflection]

requires too much reading for khi

thread dies

[Solar]

well to be fair, i didn't say much either because i want to see what others say first and that's just as bad as "tl;dr"

[Reflection]

i used these articles in a paper i wrote on modernism for ap lit last year; it's a very different way of looking at poems in a more active way than just, you know, scrawling down some feelings and tossing them into the wind so maybe some poor soul might read them and access something in you.

my favorite is gertrude stein's response.

what do you think sunny?

[Solar]

I think it's cool in terms of functions vs. purpose, and how the different ways we perceive poetry (each view is unique, fight me) IS a function in and of itself. And when that's noted and intentional--it takes an interesting dimension as opposed to how personal poetry can be, especially when traditionally viewed as something inherently emotional. I mean, that's funny, how critical we get of all this art, which is great, but we shy away from the truth that most of it is, again, inherently emotional.

[Reflection]

"living is an inherently emotional business" - david brooks

*grows mustache*

[Solar]

Plus, I think movement and imagery within poetry is really "activated" by the reader, the act of reading turning on the machine. But then I start to think about the role of the narrator and/or the poet and descend into a mess of meta.