Video
An Ending, as in all that tends to anything (Final Draft)
An Ending (Draft 1)
An Ending (Draft 2)
An Ending (Draft 3)
An Ending (Draft 4)
Certainly, as in an expectation
The Innermost Ones, as in that there
Physical Beings, as in between them
Repeating, as in an exchange value
Process
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An Ending, as in all that tends to anything (Final Draft):
To begin with confusion.
All this activity.
Before the whip reaches its surface.
Our understanding of movement.
Sometime anybody can vanish.
Movement is irrelevant.
That is what I mean by an ending.
Objects and plausibility.
All that tends to anything.
His surroundings. Objects and suffering.
If it is a very slow succession.
Contemplate and examine the sensual.
You see what is uninterrupted.
Think about it with language and care.
You see what is indescribable.
To come to a new feeling.
So there might be poetry then.
There are so many mistakes.
And it makes no ending.
Think of self-regard. And your nature.
Beginning and responsiveness.
All that tends to suicide.
That is what I mean by a new feeling.
Some memory of an inch deep into it.
When you know there is an ending.
There is no need for sacrifice or intent.
You are caught up in succession.
It is easy.
You see it as a narrative.
But any one really is doubtful.
It cannot be in literature.
That is what I mean by any one really.
There is no need of elaboration.
When we cease to be outside us.
In dreams and in poetry.
So that there might be poetry.
You are reading from excitement.
You should realize that this has care.
Some memory of the turmoil of being.
Each existence.
That one can go out.
Some memory of them having curtains.
Created in Gnoetry 0.2 with the following source texts:
Gertrude Stein, Narration Four Lectures (Weight: 40)
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Weight: 20)
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind (Weight: 20)
Longchen Rabjam (tr. Richard Barron), The Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding (Weight: 20)
It is not always true.
I felt that way according to my feelings.
There are so many mistakes.
It is impossible to arise.
This is what we may say that there is a sense.
Just do as their feeling does.
No other passion.
Our understanding of moving.
Before the whip reaches its surface.
Without having to emphasize.
Sentences are anthropocentric.
His view of life. Objects and inner calm.
So there might be literature.
You are living in paradise.
I am sorry.
If you see something essential.
Objects and poetry.
Objects and plausibility.
Even were we forced by a cloud, or corners.
All that has care.
It is not always true.
I felt that way according to my feelings.
Movement is irrelevant.
The best thing for our suffering.
It is so easy to use human nature.
Just do as their feeling does.
No other passion.
Sometime anybody can vanish.
Before the end of experience.
It cannot be experienced.
That is what I mean by an ending.
His surroundings. Objects and suffering.
So there might be poetry then.
You are happy in paradise.
I feel better.
If you see something wonderful.
One time and willingly.
When you know it is an ending.
Some memory of an inch deep into that.
This is writing.
They are free of conscience.
Perhaps it is a very slow succession.
All that tends to anything.
You see what is indescribable.
You will have to go out. This is in georgia.
To come to a new feeling.
Think about money.
How we appreciate everything.
Anybody really is doubtful.
It cannot be literature.
That is what I mean by anyone.
There is no need of elaboration.
So there might be a narrative.
You are reading from excitement.
I cry, abridged.
You should realize that it has care.
It is better than this.
When you know it is only once.
Some memory of the turmoil of being.
One can go out.
All this activity.
Contemplate and examine the sensual.
All that tends to suicide.
You see what is uninterrupted.
Think about it with a language with care.
To begin with confusion.
That made no ending.
That is why there was a new feeling.
Think of selfishness. Then your nature.
Beginning and responsiveness.
That is what I mean by suffering.
There is no need for sacrifice or intent.
It is seen as a narrative.
You are caught up in succession.
That is easy.
When we cease to be outside us.
In dreams and poetry.
Do not emphasize the extreme.
Some memory of them having curtains.
Each existence.
Certainly, as in an expectation:
What is true==certainly. Bark louder.
Acts of hovering.
Think.
A tender thing is done.
Better.
Do that again certainly.
He is interested in being softer.
He is beautiful. Continuing to.
Trees have please in bed.
A leg ticking in bed.
Explain.
Chorus of sacrifice.
Chorus of the tree protected.
Chorus of continuing.
Not losing steam, they swell with heat.
Climate. Wetness. You want it.
Chorus of expecting.
He still could not see.
Come to come to not come to.
He did feel like that.
He shuts down again.
As if there is a real shape to.
As if there is entirely.
All==there is rescinded. All.
Composed with jGnoetry and the following source text:
Richard Kostenelatz (editor), The Gertrude Stein Reader
The Innermost Ones, as in that there:
1. When one there is one that.
A logical inference.
And how it depicts.
The sign of Karma is the same.
2. Objects, things because of.
Objects repeated that lead to experience.
Without knowing how each ‘type’ or ‘form.’
In dependence, and to assert.
3. All that it follows from A.
Not relations.
How things are without distortions.
And how that is shown: and, and.
The annihilationist confused.
That actions ‘type,’ what they ‘are.’
Or rather, objects ‘are’ internal.
4. 3. 2. The Innermost Ones.
Working outwards towards them.
Following the method of ‘p’ repeatedly.
Hence there is no part itself in this.
‘O’o’o’a’ is all.
‘O’o’o’a’ is imagined.
‘O’o’o’a’ is self-evident.
And none has interdefinability.
5. Def. 6. The weather. Significations.
6. The same. 6. The logical form. 6. The.
Though we say of ‘q’: that means that there.
That it would be said that.
That it would be surprises.
That it would be objects.
That it would be gathered.
And vice versa.
Composed with jGnoetry and the following source texts:
Arya Nagarjuna, Seventy Stanzas Explaining How Phenomena Are Empty of Inherent Existence
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
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Physical Beings, as in between them :
I think you see, physical beings.
This is useless for.
And this is healthy enough.
Now come to brush it, brush, wind it.
This full moon for.
They could not know what they are in between.
The same if you look at the mountains.
You forget for.
This world for.
Composed with jGnoetry and the following source texts:
Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
Repeating, as in an exchange value:
A pleasure is not without a problem.
I wish I had it. I mean it was.
But it settles into something else.
Alike as an exchange value.
I like making this. Choose and arrange.
Not once only then you add one more.
This is concentrated and not any better.
No forms the same except this is.
Light which is a kind of sensitiveness.
The heavenly bodies are wishes.
And this is difference. Now an attribute.
And distincter. Now it’s personified.
This is its only existence.
Today. The time it came to you.
It came to your mind in repeating.
As it will express some way by repeating.
It settles into something else.
Some order to your discovering.
Composed with jGnoetry and the following source texts:
Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition
Gertrude Stein, GERTBOT selections
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
Process
On process generally
However much I plan or analyze the processes that go into writing poetry, a part of it always remains mysterious. When I write without the use of computer processes, and also when I write with them, it is always unclear how I arrived at anything good. A phrase caught my eye, I had an idea (or pre-idea, a mental pressure or sensation), I worked to write it down, I listened to its music, and I wrote more in this way until it felt like something that would live. To a great extent, listening and using intuition (feeling) are always the basis of my writing process.
Process is the path I choose to take and the way I find to walk it. Like in musical improvisation, the path can be based on a form (blues, sentences between 3 and 12 syllables), a phrase, a mode (D mixolydian, Stein + philosophers) or a length (16 bars, an 18-line stanza). For the poems in LINES, a series of typographic/concrete poems I wrote several years ago, the only constraint was that each poem should occupy a line 2.5 inches in width. But whatever path I begin with, it is by making a way through the work that I come to something of potential and power. Whatever rules I set, there are places where I must break them to remain authentic to what I am creating, because that thing is something other than what I started with or planned for. It is intuition that must guide the way, attention to the emerging will and integrity of the new work. And it is the relationship between the text and the sense I have of my being and living in the world that gives it shape, life and truth.
On the process of writing same: a Stein wreader
There is a Gertrude Stein that only I have met. She has been pieced together from my many experiences reading her, thinking about what she has written and said, and reading and thinking about what other people have said and written about her and what she has written and said. When I read Stanzas in Meditation, Tender Buttons or The Geographical History of America, and when I write Stein poems with Gnoetry 0.2 of jGnoetry, I am connecting to this personal idea of Stein. This is what wreading is for me: a way to grow more and more familiar and connected with an author’s work through acts of engaged writing + literacy. It is also a method of integrating multiple aspects of another author’s thought and activity with the complexities of my own thought and activity. So I have brought Eastern and Western philosophies into the project as additional source texts. I read these works with intensity, and they shape my understanding of self and the universe along with Stein’s writings, and Leslie Scalapino’s, and the work of many others. That my writing process with Gnoetry and other text generators is more than half made up of reading lines upon lines of computer output and choosing which are right for the emerging poem adds another level of meaning to my calling it a wreading process.
There is something that ties all of the texts I am using together, and part of the purpose of this project and this process is to explore and maybe understand what these connections are. One or more of Stein’s works are the core of the source texts used, but the additional texts build the lexicon, or vocabulary, available to each poem in Gnoetry/jGnoetry. I should note too that I have read from all of the texts I use as sources; otherwise, literacy would be lacking from the wreading process. The syntax and language from the source texts are collaged together by the Gnoetry or jGnoetry program based upon statistical models and presented to me for selective regeneration of words, phrases and lines. The choices for the poem’s form (five stanzas of four lines between 3-11 syllables), source texts and source text weighing (see the notes at the bottom of each poem) are made by me in Gnoetry’s setup dialogs before the start of the included video, which shows me using the main interface where I interact with the program’s generated poem database.
The video slideshow (top of page and here) shows the Gnoetry 0.2 interface during selected moments in the writing process. This part of the process ran for approximately one hour and fifteen minutes (this time) and proceeded through five stages: a preparatory stage [slides 1 – 8], where lines from the original output where highlighted and regenerated until every line ended with a period; the first time through rewriting each line [slides 9-13]; the second time through [slides 10-14]; the third time through [slides 15-18]; and the final time through, which I was most satisfied with [slides 19-27]. Subtitles have been added to provide some context to what you are watching.
Near the start of this project in 2011, I decided to make the two programs output lines which were all end-stopped with periods. This is not a simple task in Gnoetry 0.2: it takes between 20 minutes and an hour of regenerating to get, say, a 20 line output to have all periods at the end of each line. This difficulty is attractive to me in its own right, much like a ritual of prostrations before meditation can set the mind in a beneficial way. It also adds a necessary sense of struggle to the process. I don’t want the process to be easy, because that makes me lazy and makes it more likely that the resulting poems will be impotent. With jGnoetry, I simply generate one line at a time of varying syllable counts. I then cut and paste the lines into a plain text editor and sculpt the poem as I go. The poems written with jGnoetry tend to be lighter, stranger, and less sombre.
Over this past year, after writing many times with both interfaces, I have begun to wonder if the Gnoetry 0.2 poems are better, although many of the jGnoetry poems have turned out well. The poems I have submitted here are written from both programs, so you can judge which you like more; I have changed my mind too much to trust it. I am wondering if the struggle of that initial setting up of the poem makes the difference, along with being more constrained in the Gnoetry 0.2 interface as opposed to the more open text editor/jGnoetry setup. These two ways have started to come together a bit now; I create and save several versions of the poem from the same Gnoetry session, then I open them all in the text editor and cut and paste lines from the different drafts into a final draft. I may generate some more lines from Gnoetry or jGnoetry. Finally, I revise whatever words and lines seem off until the poem is done (for the most part).
The intention of this process is to make statements of subtle truths, emotions and feelings, and to give what resonance and power is due to them above the background of the rest of the poem. This is again related to the wreading process, in that the intention is based on my experiences reading Gertrude Stein. I have had moments reading “Business in Baltimore,” The Making of Americans, “An Elucidation,” Stanzas in Meditation, and other Stein compositions, in which something has entered into my consciousness and opened it to subtleties that I had not been aware of before. Sometimes repetition and variation of central phrases and words accumulate into an unexpected realization. Out of place sentences have also suddenly disrupted a repetitive pattern that Stein had been in, launching me out of the trance it had put me into. While these experiences are very individual and personal, they are what I work to reproduce. And while I might not emulate Stein’s particular tricks in my poems, I am working with short declarative statements (and questions without question marks, which are declarative in their own way) to construct a mental experience that I hope will connect with readers as much as I connected with Stein’s writings.
Eric Goddard-Scovel (eRoGK7) is the author of two chapbooks, a light heart, it’s black thoughts and ]] and other 9/11 works, both free to download from Beard of Bees Press. His concrete poetry has appeared in Newark Review 3.0, The Bleed and NOÖ Weekly. He blogs regularly at Gnoetry Daily and Poembassy Bombing. He lives in Lafayette, Indiana, and lectures at Purdue University.