Wednesday, January 5, 2011

The 'blognoscenti' project: a word on methodology and format to be adopted from this point on

I have posted enough 'blognoscenti' citations (over the past 4 days) to indicate both the type of poetical matter my proposed "Blogger poetics" text will require as well as the frequency with which they daily appear or can be accessed. In order not to clutter my "Word-Dreamer: poetics" pages, all future 'blognoscenti' citations will appear now in a separate "Word-Dreamer: blognoscenti sources" blog, where readers are encouraged to examine the daily blognoscenti references & leave comments. Only text as it emerges out of the primary blognoscenti sources will appear here in regular instalments.

To generate a text is a matter of translating a day's worth of citations, no matter the number or degree of individual complexity, into a unit of text: a page, paragraph or a single sentence. I've chosen a basic sentence unit which isn't to be seen as a product of "chance or random" selection but a delineation of an emerging idea identifiable among the individual references. This is a clearly syntagmatic bias that's preferable to working with anything smaller than words, phrases & clauses. Of course, articles, transition words & the most basic connectives can be freely inserted to give an emerging idea some leeway & adaptability to the environing text.

While sources are randomly gathered, composition requires a certain amount of attention to the arrangement of parts. And towards the end of generating a text through sentence-units it will be necessary to join into a unified narrative the syntactical elements present in each individual citation (by selecting, for example, a subject from the first citation, a predicate from the second, phrase from the third, object from the fourth, adjective phrase from the fifth, etc). In the "blognoscenti sources" blog I will write a sentence at the end of every day's citation work.

This is not a pure "appropriation" exercise in the sense of parts of the original being incorporated into text without change: rather an author-directed one, with the scope, limits and direction of the whole suggested  by the primary materials.

The title of the text is provisionally entitled "Towards a blog poetics".

Below are the first four sentences from 02 January 2011 to 05 January 2011 and the first (rough) paragraph of an introduction to our blog-generated text. Any movement from primary blognoscenti references to sentences to paragraphs will always necessarily entail revision. I would like to call "Towards a blog poetics" an open-text to the extent that readers are always welcome here to suggest changes but without being allowed to do so directly. Updated and expanded versions of the primary text will be posted from time to time:

02 January 2011 A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war). 
03 January 2011 The modern poem, however (if ever there was a candidate for an Ionian tragedy!), is a meditation on language—a rather retrievable and complex one at that.
04 January 2011 It's rather a refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since poem is be read during the moment and then inventoried in rare books.
05 January 2011 If the traditional poem is a mirror that inserts itself between a straightforward world and itself, it's an evil wind that blows; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.
____________________________
                                  Towards a blog poetics: Introduction.

A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).The modern poem, however (if ever there was a candidate for Ionian tragedy!), is a meditation on language—a retrievable and complex one. A refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since the world is read during the moment and then inventoried into rare books.If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted  between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.

3 comments:

Ed Baker said...

prateyou and y'll jus might enjoy this
Canadian...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/books/review/Carr-t.html?src=me&ref=arts

top of the second page or a paragraph down.. a prophetick quote.

oh my UTE!

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Thanks, Ed

My favourite passage from article:

“One must remember that Marshall arrived at these conclusions not by hanging around, say, NASA or I.B.M., but rather by studying arcane 16th-century Reformation pamphleteers, the writings of James Joyce, and Renaissance perspective drawings. He was a master of pattern recognition, the man who bangs a drum so large that it’s only beaten once every hundred years.”

Anonymous said...

yeah
noh-bout-uh-doubt-it

as before so agin that
nothing much happens in a crowd

this book does not as yet seem to be "out there"
it s gonna take me AT LEAST 6 months to read this Mark Twain "thing" I jus got into..

then on to re:read my OWN 'shit"

Mark Twain ALSO Banged The Drum

I think these bestest writers hand their OWN

kettle drum
&banged their drum ...
entirely!

What this country needs RIGHT NOW..

More Drum Bangers (damn few of us left)
&
fewer

Gang Bangers!


Kokkie-san