The Teaching Machine.

luka

Well-known member
Right at the beginning with this idea of composition by field. Which is where I assume Prynne gets his notion of poem as diagram. He talks about Pound's poetry in his way, and presumably his own too. So rather than a moving through time you have a drawing of a machine and the relationships of force and acting upon and so on. I can track down the relevant passage if anyone is curious. But I think it is an intriguing distinction. I really like it.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Me too, but I always thought it clashed a bit with Pound's own insistence that he was writing lyrical poetry like the Provençal troubadours.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i just mean that sound - "scalp" - it's quite harsh, abrasive, syllabic. SKA...

and the repetition, and then the contextual line.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
"It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work."

Liked this passage, fits in with some other McLuhan conversations on here
 
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catalog

Well-known member
Yeah, so the Idea of reading poems aloud he means? And having the technology to tape them? Interesting sort of contrapoint against what version was saying the other day about podcasts being too much

I was thinking about this last night. It's why I can't really listen to podcasts. People sound much more stupid when they speak than when they write. The constant umming and ahing, tripping over words etc. It's a perpetual struggle to get things out.

Although maybe not quite cos that is an issue with some pods, the thrown together nature can get a bit much.

I think the prynne thing of using/disrupting the page, which was obviously explored by loads of others, is the one I'm more interested in.

But, it is really cool when you hear a poet read their own work, like when luke read some of his in the zoom call. You can get a sense of it much better, cos of all the reasons in the mcluhan quote
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
"What we have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice, a removal by one, by two removes from its place of origin and its destination. For the breath has a double meaning which latin had not yet lost."

Deleuze talks about a similar double displacement of representation- that the indifferent movement of desire can only be approximated in crude representation (destination) and said representation informs a secondary crude representation of desire itself (origin).

This extends to a conception of art similar to what Olson is getting at with the open poem:

"But on the other, the schizorevolutionary, pole, the value of art is no longer measured except in terms of the decoded and deterritorial-ized flows that it causes to circulate beneath a signifier reduced to silence, beneath the conditions of identity of the parameters, across a structure reduced to impotence; a writing with pneumatic, electronic, or gaseous indifferent supports, and that appears all the more difficult and intellectual to intellectuals as it is accessible to the infirm, the illiterate, and the schizos, embracing all that flows and counterfiows, the gushings of mercy and pity knowing nothing of meanings and aims (the Artaud experiment, the Burroughs experiment). "
 
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linebaugh

Well-known member
Yeah, so the Idea of reading poems aloud he means? And having the technology to tape them? Interesting sort of contrapoint against what version was saying the other day about podcasts being too much



Although maybe not quite cos that is an issue with some pods, the thrown together nature can get a bit much.

I think the prynne thing of using/disrupting the page, which was obviously explored by loads of others, is the one I'm more interested in.

But, it is really cool when you hear a poet read their own work, like when luke read some of his in the zoom call. You can get a sense of it much better, cos of all the reasons in the mcluhan quote
he was actually talking about the type writer, Ill edit it in.

He saying that the type writer standardizes space on the page in such a way that readers and poets alike can draw on this shared standard to confer meaning from space with a precision not possible prior. Not unlike musical notation ('the stave and the bar) which is a graphic system where space is almost the sole arbiter of meaning.
 
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linebaugh

Well-known member
"For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work."

This comes right after that passage
 

luka

Well-known member
"It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work."

Liked this passage, fits in with some other McLuhan conversations on here

Kenner has written a book, I haven't read it, about the typewriters impact on modern poetry. I can't remember if it was him that told me about Nietzches style becoming punchier and more telegraphic when he got his first typewriter but it's a good little nugget of info and it stuck with me
 

luka

Well-known member
when I was doing my brilliant incisive analysis of the monosyllable in uk drill mistersloane said it was because they were writing on smartphones. One of the cleverest things ever said on dissensus, can't believe I didn't say it.
 

version

Well-known member
“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.”

— Jacques Ellul, Technological Society (1954)
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah I think that illustrates how consciousness can (artificially) hasten physical developments at rates that exponentially surpass the (natural) manner in which physical developments unfold themselves. Similar to enzymes, in principle. Namely that certain physical apparatuses function to expedite the kind of physical advancement that led to the creation of such apparatuses.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Only we are situated in timescales and spacescales - scales of complexity - that are several orders of magnitude greater than those of enzymes and other such molecular apparatuses.
 
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