READING RESPONSES
Overall Questions
Do you agree that “juxtaposition” is one of the foundations of poetic composition? How (if at all) is randomness uniquely suited to creating surprising juxtapositions in poetry? How does a procedural technique reflect the intentionality of its creator? What effect does the choice of source text have on the “output” of a procedural technique?
Hartman Ch.2 and Ch.3
accidentally left my annotations at home, will update this later
Poetry and Pleasure — Jackson Mac Low
Not sure exactly which section I’m supposed to read, so going to go with the intro and then skimming through the poems.
Love the idea that the primary reason for making art is to make art, and that there are so many types of art because there are so many different types of pleasure.
I love Cage’s chance-operations, wish I had time to finish his biography sitting on my desk.
The notion that these automated chance-driven poems are an attempt to do away with the ego of the artist in a Buddhist sense really resonates with me, and is something I definitely want to explore myself. One of the things that attracts me the most about these generated poems is the notion of authorship, and how silly it seems to claim individual authorship over any work that comes from other texts. I think it’s silly to claim individual authorship ever, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post…
Feel like there’s a lot to unpack with his idea of “engaging with contingency” — so he’s basically leaving it up to chance, but defining the bounds of that chance. (intentionality of the creator)
PROGRAMMING EXERCISES
LINK TO GITHUB
Whyyyyyyy
*edit: I understand now, so ‘i’ is iterating through a number in the first example, and through an array in the second.