1/27/06
A blogger can work this out of the system, right? Terms leading web searchers here recently include: "regarding arson," "titled tight," "miss white pant," "larry fagin I hear America singing," "synonyms 'innocent parts,'" "puritan poem alphabet rhyme," "tory lane," "who's woman in red dress at funeral Panasonic," "trigonometry poems," "matterhorns climate," "john giorno sex partners," "the tone of the poem 'living in sin.'"
A sentence, this one, is a bad idea. An idea with particularity. A feeling for the bread before it rises stuffed with socks. The imagination loves the smell of a building, loves the establishment press and the square window that looks out on it. The scent of Karl Rove is an easy chair party faithful assume climbing the walls built up by the Knights of Iowa, New Hampshire, while the sentence stresses planting dirt to make us notice an unruly suggestion against the orderly stem cell. (Wall climbing is different from rock climbing.) We say events went down through the religious base of the insane or taking sides, men and women drag their big feelings of indignation. Faith in the process will return whether you smile, cry or burn the oppostion. But when I write whether, the sentence is thinking if you're bored with Rove, imagine how I feel.
1/25/06
assembled from ongoing collab with Trace:
This is a bad time for Matt and for I, developmentally,
love and precious metals notwithstanding.
The son of Excellency, windsome despite his compromised
prenatal position, he had no hindgut across glass.
He was on fool's release. The probing internets
recognized the pure business in his tonal progress
But still he had to wait tables, winter shoring up
his testicles to the letter as a surprise.
All he wants is to have some Funds in Europe!
Out of desperation, Matt and us can see
Young anarchists explode in smoke as they confront the
collapse of random mutation.
Moslems pitch another claim unanimously
learning to restrain ourselves.
It's part of the giraffe's neck of diamonds sheering
arbors. (Matt forgets the terra forms.)
We indicated our interest by pulling up in front of the
Pinks' house in moonlight, all hocus-pocus.
This is a bad time for Matt and for I, developmentally,
love and precious metals notwithstanding.
The son of Excellency, windsome despite his compromised
prenatal position, he had no hindgut across glass.
He was on fool's release. The probing internets
recognized the pure business in his tonal progress
But still he had to wait tables, winter shoring up
his testicles to the letter as a surprise.
All he wants is to have some Funds in Europe!
Out of desperation, Matt and us can see
Young anarchists explode in smoke as they confront the
collapse of random mutation.
Moslems pitch another claim unanimously
learning to restrain ourselves.
It's part of the giraffe's neck of diamonds sheering
arbors. (Matt forgets the terra forms.)
We indicated our interest by pulling up in front of the
Pinks' house in moonlight, all hocus-pocus.
1/24/06
Among the many temptations of the digital age, text-manipulation has proved particularly troublesome for poetics, and poetics journals are beginning to respond.
Some journal editors are considering adopting a test, in use at The Journal of Advanced Poetics, that could have caught the concocted translations of Arthur Rimbaud made by Dr. Thomas Lily and published by Poetry Magazine.
At The Journal of Advanced Poetics, the test has revealed extensive manipulation of texts. Since 2002, when the test was put in place, 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts have had one or more quatrains that were edited or otherwise transformed in ways that violate the journal's guidelines, said Michael Gottlieb of Rockefeller University, the executive editor. The editor of the journal, Noah Eli of Yale, said that most cases were resolved when the authors provided originals. "In 1 percent of the cases we find authors have engaged in fraud," he said.
The two editors recognized the likelihood that quatrains and other textual fragments were being improperly manipulated when the journal required all manuscripts to be submitted in digital form. While reformatting texts submitted in the wrong word processing program, for example, Dr. Gottlieb realized that some authors had yielded to the temptation of M.S. Word's text-changing tools to misrepresent the original data.
In some instances, he found, authors would remove tonal and imagistic bands from a line-ending, a test for showing what rhyming schemes were originally present in a poetics experiment. Sometimes -- and this is hard to believe, in retrospect -- a row of non-rhyming tonebands would be duplicated and presented as the controls for a second experiment, a so-called serial poem, say. Sometimes a prose introduction would be cleaned up, erasing nasty first approximations of others' ideas, with Word's rubber stamp or clone stamp tool, to make it read smoother, rendering the whole beginning prettier, more socially ok.
Worse, some authors would change the contrast in a controlling image or metaphor to eliminate traces of authorial strain that showed up in other places in the text where there shouldn't be one. Others would take images from other writers' experiments -- incredible -- and assemble them as if everything was flowing in the same narrative.
To prohibit such manipulations, Dr. Eli and Dr. Gottlieb published guidelines saying, in effect, that nothing should be done to any part of a text that did not affect all other parts equally. In other words, it is all right to adjust the font size or color of the paper that the poem is backed-up on, but it is not very nice to obscure, move or introduce an extraneous element that might lead a reader to infer plagiarism.
They started checking earlier versions in accepted manuscripts by running them through Word Sleuth and adjusting the controls to see if new features appeared. This is the check that has shown a quarter of accepted manuscripts violate the journal's guidelines.
In the 1 percent of cases in which the manipulation is deemed fraudulent -- a total of 14 poems so far -- the work is rejected and the poet is condemned. Revoking an accepted manuscript requires the agreement of four of the journal's officials who publish their deliberations and findings daily online on a rotating roster of public blog sites. "In some cases we will even contact the author's institution and say, 'You should look into this because Dr. So and So is stupid and what she's done, well, it was not kosher,' " Dr. Eli said.
He and Dr. Gottlieb plan to add software tests being developed by Chris Funkhouser, an applied mathematician at the Imperial Normal School of Myramar. With a grant from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is interested in ways of authenticating digital texts presented in Southeast Asian poetry journals, Dr. Funkhouser is devising algorithms to detect alterations.
His work has attracted interest from many people, he said, including EPC list members and eBay customers concerned about the authenticity of reader copies of poetry books they throw away and/or swap online, people answering personal ads, paranormal researchers studying ghostly emanations and poetics editors.
For the latter, Dr. Funkhouser is developing a package of algorithms designed to spot specific types of text manipulation. When poetics researchers seek to remove an object from a text, such as a tonal band, they often hide it with a bland patch of nearby filler text. This involves a duplication of material, which may be invisible to the casual peruser of text, online readers, for example, but callous manipulation can be detected by mathematical analysis.
"At the end of the day you need math," Dr. Funkhouser said. "I'd proffer, poetry will advance only by way of the handheld scrutiny device and a bank of supercomputers." He hopes to have a set of tools available soon for beta-testing by Drs. Gottlieb and Eli.
Journals depend heavily on expert reviewers to weed out poems and articles of poor quality. But as the Lily case showed again, reviewers can do only so much. The defined role of reviewers is not to check for concocted data but to test whether a poem's conclusions follow from the data presented.
The poetics community has not yet come to grips with the temptations of text manipulation, Dr. Eli said, and he would like to see other journals adopt the text-screening system, even though it takes 30 minutes a line. "We are a poor press," he said, without the large revenue enjoyed by journals such as Poetry Magazine, recent recipient of a huge handout by the estate of Ruth Lily. "If they can't bear this cost, something must be dreadfully wrong with their business models," he said.
Poetry Magazine, in fact, has adopted The Journal of Advanced Poetics' guidelines and has just started to apply the text-scrutiny-screening test to its own manuscripts. "Something like this is probably inevitable for most journals," said Justina Lily, a deputy editor of Poetry.
She became interested in scrutiny screening as a quality control measure "because it sets a new industry standard," and not merely because of the concocted translations of Dr. Thomas Lily, two of which Poetry published. Dr. Gottleib says the system would have caught at least the second of Dr. Lily's fabrications, since it "popped out like a sore thumb" under the text-scrutiny-screening test.
But other editors are less enthusiastic. Emilie Tabos, editor of Call and Response, said that she was considering the system, but that she believed in principle that the ethics of presenting true data should be enforced in a poet's spiritual training, not by journal editors.
The problem of manipulated texts, she said, arises from a generation gap between older poets who have set admirable ethical standards but don't understand the possibilities of these new technologies like word processing, voice mail, etc. and younger poets who as an entire generation exploit the loopholes. Because the poetic process is based on divine inspiration, Dr. Tabos said: "Why say, 'We trust you, but not in this one domain?' And I don't favor saying, 'We don't trust you in any.' It's divinity's will, any way we head down the road."
Rather than having journal editors acting as enforcers, she said, it may be better to thrust responsibility back to poets and their extraterrestial sources for poetry, requiring the author to sign off that his or her text is true in its own way and conforms to that special place of inspiration that is unique to the individual, as well as conforming to the journal's guidelines. Those guidelines, in her view, should be framed on behalf of the whole poetic community by a group like the National Academy of Nonspecies Inspiration in Poetics, and not by the fiat of individual editors.
Some journal editors are considering adopting a test, in use at The Journal of Advanced Poetics, that could have caught the concocted translations of Arthur Rimbaud made by Dr. Thomas Lily and published by Poetry Magazine.
At The Journal of Advanced Poetics, the test has revealed extensive manipulation of texts. Since 2002, when the test was put in place, 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts have had one or more quatrains that were edited or otherwise transformed in ways that violate the journal's guidelines, said Michael Gottlieb of Rockefeller University, the executive editor. The editor of the journal, Noah Eli of Yale, said that most cases were resolved when the authors provided originals. "In 1 percent of the cases we find authors have engaged in fraud," he said.
The two editors recognized the likelihood that quatrains and other textual fragments were being improperly manipulated when the journal required all manuscripts to be submitted in digital form. While reformatting texts submitted in the wrong word processing program, for example, Dr. Gottlieb realized that some authors had yielded to the temptation of M.S. Word's text-changing tools to misrepresent the original data.
In some instances, he found, authors would remove tonal and imagistic bands from a line-ending, a test for showing what rhyming schemes were originally present in a poetics experiment. Sometimes -- and this is hard to believe, in retrospect -- a row of non-rhyming tonebands would be duplicated and presented as the controls for a second experiment, a so-called serial poem, say. Sometimes a prose introduction would be cleaned up, erasing nasty first approximations of others' ideas, with Word's rubber stamp or clone stamp tool, to make it read smoother, rendering the whole beginning prettier, more socially ok.
Worse, some authors would change the contrast in a controlling image or metaphor to eliminate traces of authorial strain that showed up in other places in the text where there shouldn't be one. Others would take images from other writers' experiments -- incredible -- and assemble them as if everything was flowing in the same narrative.
To prohibit such manipulations, Dr. Eli and Dr. Gottlieb published guidelines saying, in effect, that nothing should be done to any part of a text that did not affect all other parts equally. In other words, it is all right to adjust the font size or color of the paper that the poem is backed-up on, but it is not very nice to obscure, move or introduce an extraneous element that might lead a reader to infer plagiarism.
They started checking earlier versions in accepted manuscripts by running them through Word Sleuth and adjusting the controls to see if new features appeared. This is the check that has shown a quarter of accepted manuscripts violate the journal's guidelines.
In the 1 percent of cases in which the manipulation is deemed fraudulent -- a total of 14 poems so far -- the work is rejected and the poet is condemned. Revoking an accepted manuscript requires the agreement of four of the journal's officials who publish their deliberations and findings daily online on a rotating roster of public blog sites. "In some cases we will even contact the author's institution and say, 'You should look into this because Dr. So and So is stupid and what she's done, well, it was not kosher,' " Dr. Eli said.
He and Dr. Gottlieb plan to add software tests being developed by Chris Funkhouser, an applied mathematician at the Imperial Normal School of Myramar. With a grant from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is interested in ways of authenticating digital texts presented in Southeast Asian poetry journals, Dr. Funkhouser is devising algorithms to detect alterations.
His work has attracted interest from many people, he said, including EPC list members and eBay customers concerned about the authenticity of reader copies of poetry books they throw away and/or swap online, people answering personal ads, paranormal researchers studying ghostly emanations and poetics editors.
For the latter, Dr. Funkhouser is developing a package of algorithms designed to spot specific types of text manipulation. When poetics researchers seek to remove an object from a text, such as a tonal band, they often hide it with a bland patch of nearby filler text. This involves a duplication of material, which may be invisible to the casual peruser of text, online readers, for example, but callous manipulation can be detected by mathematical analysis.
"At the end of the day you need math," Dr. Funkhouser said. "I'd proffer, poetry will advance only by way of the handheld scrutiny device and a bank of supercomputers." He hopes to have a set of tools available soon for beta-testing by Drs. Gottlieb and Eli.
Journals depend heavily on expert reviewers to weed out poems and articles of poor quality. But as the Lily case showed again, reviewers can do only so much. The defined role of reviewers is not to check for concocted data but to test whether a poem's conclusions follow from the data presented.
The poetics community has not yet come to grips with the temptations of text manipulation, Dr. Eli said, and he would like to see other journals adopt the text-screening system, even though it takes 30 minutes a line. "We are a poor press," he said, without the large revenue enjoyed by journals such as Poetry Magazine, recent recipient of a huge handout by the estate of Ruth Lily. "If they can't bear this cost, something must be dreadfully wrong with their business models," he said.
Poetry Magazine, in fact, has adopted The Journal of Advanced Poetics' guidelines and has just started to apply the text-scrutiny-screening test to its own manuscripts. "Something like this is probably inevitable for most journals," said Justina Lily, a deputy editor of Poetry.
She became interested in scrutiny screening as a quality control measure "because it sets a new industry standard," and not merely because of the concocted translations of Dr. Thomas Lily, two of which Poetry published. Dr. Gottleib says the system would have caught at least the second of Dr. Lily's fabrications, since it "popped out like a sore thumb" under the text-scrutiny-screening test.
But other editors are less enthusiastic. Emilie Tabos, editor of Call and Response, said that she was considering the system, but that she believed in principle that the ethics of presenting true data should be enforced in a poet's spiritual training, not by journal editors.
The problem of manipulated texts, she said, arises from a generation gap between older poets who have set admirable ethical standards but don't understand the possibilities of these new technologies like word processing, voice mail, etc. and younger poets who as an entire generation exploit the loopholes. Because the poetic process is based on divine inspiration, Dr. Tabos said: "Why say, 'We trust you, but not in this one domain?' And I don't favor saying, 'We don't trust you in any.' It's divinity's will, any way we head down the road."
Rather than having journal editors acting as enforcers, she said, it may be better to thrust responsibility back to poets and their extraterrestial sources for poetry, requiring the author to sign off that his or her text is true in its own way and conforms to that special place of inspiration that is unique to the individual, as well as conforming to the journal's guidelines. Those guidelines, in her view, should be framed on behalf of the whole poetic community by a group like the National Academy of Nonspecies Inspiration in Poetics, and not by the fiat of individual editors.
1/23/06
You're screaming one afternoon
high in the mountains. Tragic ukiyo-e
accompanies the video
senses, ghosts, disembodied waves,
anime-baseball plays.
It's a range of motion exercises.
They help preserve other senses, dubs
of an alpine rant over cool ceramic
sculpture, a birdie's five minute
vision to the dichotomous beyond.
On the first floor people are defined
by sex. Thank god that intimidates.
I learned squat, on the other hand,
Apollonian in a fad diet, I flush
the feast out of the system.
high in the mountains. Tragic ukiyo-e
accompanies the video
senses, ghosts, disembodied waves,
anime-baseball plays.
It's a range of motion exercises.
They help preserve other senses, dubs
of an alpine rant over cool ceramic
sculpture, a birdie's five minute
vision to the dichotomous beyond.
On the first floor people are defined
by sex. Thank god that intimidates.
I learned squat, on the other hand,
Apollonian in a fad diet, I flush
the feast out of the system.
We're going up for another.
I like this one because he is out and out Jacques Tati-Dionysian, unmarked by a tempering career. Flunked out of Penn. Some tv, some radio. Blogs but no e-list. No a-list, either. A bantam partisan in uncalculated affections, and pretty much a spun-out terror when he's tripped up, still, face to face with someone he loathes, he's hospitable change agent, ready to fall into a love-y, brackish backstroke (it's his surf), tilting at jellyfish, toweling off, O'Douls in hand, set to plant smooch-bottom kisses over your disgrace. The shy dealer in all of us.
I like this one because he is out and out Jacques Tati-Dionysian, unmarked by a tempering career. Flunked out of Penn. Some tv, some radio. Blogs but no e-list. No a-list, either. A bantam partisan in uncalculated affections, and pretty much a spun-out terror when he's tripped up, still, face to face with someone he loathes, he's hospitable change agent, ready to fall into a love-y, brackish backstroke (it's his surf), tilting at jellyfish, toweling off, O'Douls in hand, set to plant smooch-bottom kisses over your disgrace. The shy dealer in all of us.
1/19/06
Restoring your feeling is one of my hobbies.
Am an avid double nester, too. Writing about new media and working on a boyfriend redesign.
I'm trying on a poem. So far.
~~
Can you tell a genuine replica
of what's going on around your neck?
Call it heads.
We beat the point spread.
~~
It leaves off here.
Perhaps I should take up gambling. Hate the markets. Play poker and rummy, never for cash. I gave a friend 50 cents toward a lottery ticket, lost. Once. On a getaway it was either Mexico or Vegas, I chose Mexico. My friend's camera got stolen. Maybe the dull, higher powers for placing bets punished him.
It's hopeless, my life like my sweat, nondestructive, unextreme. I crack up when someone mentions reincarnation, but next time I'll pick a family from a long line of tenured political scientists in the nonsnickering future. We'll all be depressed because ours is a classless de-corporated shtetl -- no need for socialists. Tho, maybe there's no option?
I'd still love poetry, but with reservations because of the dirt, the smell and the feeling of decay. That was Orwell speaking, "refined by distance." I'm sure you could tell.
The poem goes on.
~~
Since you're on my road
you're not my father's ghost?
Chairjacket?
Don't encourage me.
Am an avid double nester, too. Writing about new media and working on a boyfriend redesign.
I'm trying on a poem. So far.
~~
Can you tell a genuine replica
of what's going on around your neck?
Call it heads.
We beat the point spread.
~~
It leaves off here.
Perhaps I should take up gambling. Hate the markets. Play poker and rummy, never for cash. I gave a friend 50 cents toward a lottery ticket, lost. Once. On a getaway it was either Mexico or Vegas, I chose Mexico. My friend's camera got stolen. Maybe the dull, higher powers for placing bets punished him.
It's hopeless, my life like my sweat, nondestructive, unextreme. I crack up when someone mentions reincarnation, but next time I'll pick a family from a long line of tenured political scientists in the nonsnickering future. We'll all be depressed because ours is a classless de-corporated shtetl -- no need for socialists. Tho, maybe there's no option?
I'd still love poetry, but with reservations because of the dirt, the smell and the feeling of decay. That was Orwell speaking, "refined by distance." I'm sure you could tell.
The poem goes on.
~~
Since you're on my road
you're not my father's ghost?
Chairjacket?
Don't encourage me.
1/17/06
This can't be. Ledger v. Quaid. Yay.
Benji v. Bambi. (This can be reversed.)
But this? no way. Moore v. Rand.
Décor v. style. Lowell v. Kimball.
(Thanks to Charles Jensen.)
Benji v. Bambi. (This can be reversed.)
But this? no way. Moore v. Rand.
Décor v. style. Lowell v. Kimball.
(Thanks to Charles Jensen.)
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