I for One Welcome Our New iPhone Overlords

So I was procrastinating real hard last night, and I finally updated my computer and phone to iOS 8 or whatever. It’s all well and good, some new minimalist aesthetics, &c. So today I open my phone’s messages and before I go to send anything, there are the words “I,” “The,” and “I’m” in little gray boxes ready to go.  After going to poetry today, I got curious and I started clicking them to compose a message, and the phone kept giving me new words that almost seemed to follow. Several non-but-almost-sense texts later, my roommate explained to me that the phone logs all of your sentences and keeps track of your most used words and word combinations in order to try to predict what you might say, in order to make it easier for you to text (read: in order to be super creepy). Now Ethan’s previous post about the Quicktype feature of iOS 8 makes sense, and the implications are even more strange and glaring to me.

I was kind of startled by the phone’s assumption that it could predict what I might say. I mean, if I want to be a writer and my phone is able to predict what I say, I might as well call it quits, right? Thankfully, phones aren’t very good at stringing together words to give a meaning in context. Quite like Christina’s “Bot or Not” post, and Ethan’s “Quicktype Poetry” post, the sentences are nonsense; word may follow word, but as a whole the sentence has no intrinsic meaning. IT doesn’t make sense. More so, I was startled by all the repeated words I was getting in the little Quicktype section. They’re mostly “I,” “The,” and so on, with a few conjunctions or things about the government thrown in here and there. So if nothing else, the Quicktype feature can serve as a reminder of our limited texting vocabularies, and it can allow us to be aware of boring language, even in the most menial modes of communication. The feature can also provide some pretty fun and weird lines and phrases, just by shuffling the language you’ve already used.

Here are some of my favorite nonsense phrases and conversations (w/lines broken where they end in the text):

My roommate:

“Okay, noted. I think
Tuesdays at 8 may work
better for the Kaiser’s
army at the beginning of
this semester and Students for a socialist
Scotland the US and Canada is a potentiality,
and I think Billy’s in that
class. I think Billy’s in
that class.”

Me:

“I’m not going to be
able to do it again in my
head hurts so bad but
the only thing that would
have to go back and I
don’t think that I can see
it as an excuse for the
next few weeks of a new
phone case is the best
thing ever.”

Roommate:

“Congress? Finally, I think
Ryan Adams has a new
self-titled album out of
the common cold. it will
not have the seller’s, I
have every day and the
downing, I have every
day and the downing, I
have every day and the
downing”

Me:

“The fact that the
government has a lot of
people in my head is
killing me.”

 

If nothing else, Quicktype conversations and poetry serve to remind us that our job as poets (and people in general) is invaluable: we give language meaning, we change it and choose it and refresh it–we don’t just take words in and spit them out in order of use. Plus really it can generate some lines that seem cool and can have uses in your poems, if they mean something to you.

mewithoutYou

So I was thinking about writing a post dealing with the differences between writing music and poetry. For me it’s easier to write poetry than it is to write music, and I have no idea why that is. I think it’s something to do with the feeling that I find a lot of freedom on the page, but that everything amazing in music has already been written (I mean come on: Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Springsteen–it doesn’t get better, at least for me). I know there’s freedom in music too, but I’m still having a hard time working it out. Anyway, that’s not this post.

I wanted to talk about the band “mewithoutYou” in this post, and their ridiculously impressive lyrics and projects. They’ve been pegged as a Christian band, but I think that was the work of some pretty shortsighted music critics, because their lyrics use Christian, Muslim, and Jewish images and stories to explore themes about the self and relationships to the rest of life. They also take stories and images from the Bhagavad Gita, and historical events. Their album “Ten Stories” focuses on a traveling circus train that crashed in Montana in the late 1800s, and every time I listen to it, I find more and more to love about the lyrics.

Grist for the Malady Mill” is the second song on the album, and my favorite because of the rhythm of the lyrics, and the intense images they use. Give it a listen if you’re curious, it’s pretty intense (especially that intro), but if you listen for the lyrics, I hope you’ll see the brilliant images involved in a simple story about animals fleeing from the train crash. My favorite lyric comes in the chorus “rail spikes rip like the seam on a wineskin”– it’s just the perfect image, the perfect amount of alliteration, that nice long e in wineskin. Enjoy!

Weaseling out of Assignments (with Poetry!)

So ever since I started taking writing classes (not counting that one in high school), I’ve found that I’m less and less willing to write standard essays. Has anyone else found that sort of thing happening? I’ll get a research assignment for a literature class or an honors class or the odd philosophy class, and I’ll just find it impossible to think of a way to make it fun for myself. Once I’m writing an essay I can get into it, but it takes a while to break from writing from an artistic perspective. I know it might sound a bit pretentious, but I’ve been finding even the idea of a standard essay kind of boring, and it’s gotten to the point where I’m looking for ways around it.

The best way I’ve found so far is in my honors class, where we don’t necessarily have a set format for our papers, but we’re expected to do a final research paper on art during the Third Reich. I approached my professor, asking to write a research paper by way of writing a poem on a subject, instead of your normal fifteen page conglomeration of sources and thesis, and she was surprisingly open to it. I plan on writing about the battle of Monte Cassino, which took place in Italy just outside of Rome, and resulted in the needless destruction of an ancient Benedictine abbey. I’ve got a few first hand sources and reports from soldiers and officers on both sides of the conflict, and I plan to find the dialogues that chronicle the Allied decision to bomb the abbey. I’ve never undertaken this sort of writing before, and it certainly is daunting, but I’m hoping that writing a poem that requires extensive research will expand my writing abilities. Plus I don’t have to write a standard research paper anymore.

I’m not sure yet what the project will hold exactly, but I feel good about the decision to write a poem instead of a research paper, and I’d encourage anyone else to try it, if they’re in the right kind of class.

Poetry & Thoreau

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence,–that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I’ve been thinking recently about what it means to be a poet – that is, to see things as a poet would, and derive some kind of meaning from those things. I’m being purposefully broad here, because since I’ve just recently started the writing program and just recently begun seriously considering what it would mean to take writing as a career choice, I’m trying to figure out what I think about all this.

Still don’t know. But by some magic of scheduling, my classes have all been intersecting and shedding light on each other in fascinating ways. I’m taking a class on Thoreau (complete with cabin building) where we’re reading Walden, and some parts of Thoreau’s philosophy jump out to me as pertaining particularly well to our class, and to a view of the world that promotes thinking poetically and noticing the fine details that make up a poem. “Thinking like a poet” might sound cliché or pretentious, but I do think it takes a particular kind of thinking about certain things in order to make them into a poem – a particular kind of eye.

One of the bigger ideas in Walden is the necessity for us to simplify our lives – to stop wasting life on menial labors (like paying rent, reading every bit of news) and start living a richer life, with more attention to the details (insert Thoreau’s lyrical descriptions of the air in the morning, the virtues of cutting down a tree). Essentially, to stop rushing – to take the time to have time to be. When this happens, he says, we can appreciate true reality, in all its meanness and its beauty. We perceive reality, instead of all the frivolous luxuries surrounding reality.

So what does this have to do with poetry? Thoreau’s ideas remind me that sometimes work isn’t all there is to life – that elements that sometimes end up in a poem starts with taking the time to slow down and pay attention. I think this is something we all do naturally as writers, paying attention to the way a person’s hair falls on the bed, or the paying attention to the feeling a certain word or a line break can involve, but Thoreau puts it in a wider view: what we do in our poetry we can do in our lives. To me that’s pretty liberating – slowing down and taking time to notice will help me have the poet’s eye that I’m craving, and writing poetry can also help me slow down – like a kind of meditation.