Machine | Poetry | Collapsing Ambiguity

“A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop”

-Robert Hughes

As the etymological dictionary on your bedside table will tell you, the verb ‘to impress’ come from the Latin impressus, meaning ‘press into or upon, stamp’ and was taken into English parlance in the 14^th Century as meaning ‘to apply with pressure, making a permanent image in’. Now of course, we use it to describe things that we think are kinda cool.

So, you know how sometimes you’re just really impressed by people? Not by any one action or attribute, but by something about them fundamentally. I feel that about the poet, Ross Sutherland. In both senses.

For those of you who have not read Sutherland’s work, I strongly recommend you pick up his profound and incredibly amusing debut collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town and let yourself be carried away by writing which is idiosyncratic and fresh in a way which (as is so rarely the case in poetry) does not leave the reader feeling shut out or like they somehow ‘don’t get it’.

Whilst I find Sutherland’s work incredibly entertaining and enjoyable on the page, I also highly recommend that you go see one of his live performances to really get the full breadth of his talents. In today’s article, I will be discussing his article which is perhaps best supplemented by this video here, if you’re the sort of person who likes having lots of windows open at the same time while you pay a modicum of attention to all and none of them.

What I want to talk about, with regards to Sutherland, is a poetic trick of his that I first read about in his essay in the anthology, Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry. In Sutherland’s essay, ‘Every Rendition on a Broken Machine’, he extols the virtues of using online text translators as an aid in poetry’s redrafting process. To be more specific, he sees the translators as less of an aid than a “collaborator” in the process.

“I began to feed famous poems into the translator, bouncing them back and forth between the different languages, then back into English. With every translation, the program was forced to collapse the ambiguity of the original.”

The essay continues down fascinating avenues of unpacking what the machine’s ‘bias’ is in the ways that it pulls apart poetry when bouncing it across languages on a sea of zeroes and ones (on one particular machine translation ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ becomes ‘Of Reduced Principle Scale’), Sutherland points out that ‘the most notable thing here is that the program has removed all human elements from the poem’.

When we think about this, it is quite terrifying that the ultimate way to ‘collapse ambiguity’, as Sutherland puts it, is to eradicate the human element. Which is, I suppose, why machines will never be poets (if we take the term ‘machine’ and the term ‘poet’ to mean what we currently take them for). I mean, unless you count that crazy David Link bag of weirdness.

Poets, not all of them, but almost all of them, thrive on duality of meaning and saying things which are only tenuously analogous to what they are actually attempting to communicate. This is entirely at odds with the inner working of the machine. This is part of the reason why I love Ross Sutherland’s eTranslation poetry – it entirely rests on making poets and machines behave in ways that they are not expected to.

It is not within a poet’s instinct to ‘draft’ by entering someone else’s text into a digital box. It is not in a machine’s instinct to deal with the delicate nuance of poetic diction. But here they are, with Sutherland’s method, forced to compromise for the greater good. Which is another reason why I like this; neither the poet, nor the machine can take full credit for the outcome. They are working together toward something that neither of them could have done alone, which is a very healthy collaborative balance to have when thinking of poets’ egos.

Of course, the whole thing looks too much fun not to have a go with, so I had a stab at eTranslating Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods. Here’s what came out for the title and opening quatrain after a while…

I live in the forest as an individual

I guess I do not know the two forests,

It’s his home town,

but he’s still too good

to see the snow that covers me.

I say this now for anybody reading this who thinks that Sutherland’s machine-translations are a lazy approach to creativity… those five lines just took me forty minutes. And you can still just about recognise the original poem in them. Think how long it must have taken old Ross, translating away long into the night, bouncing the English Literary Heritage from language to language, chopping up syntax and sense along the way.

Maybe when the holidays come up, I’ll donate more time to sitting at home remoulding some literary classics with an electronic procrustean bed. It seems every bit as intellectually valid as smoking too much weed and blurting out Howl.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Snow | Poetry | Woods for the Trees

I will be writing today about Robert Frost’s most famous poem, which most of us have encountered at one point or another. But for anyone who doesn’t know the poem, here it is:

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

-Robert Frost

I have started playing the guitar again recently, after having fallen out of practice for about a year. As a result, the tips of my fingers are in pain from pressing on the strings. This is because I have a job that does not allow a lot of time for sitting in my bedroom playing the guitar.

Our lives are structured in a way that force us to prioritise.

Wake up. Eat. Go to work. Eat. Do some more work. Go home. Eat. Go to sleep. Here are the imperatives.

Have friends. Find a soulmate. Go on holiday. Try and get your five a day. Keep an eye out for promotion opportunities. These are some of the optional add-ons.

So in this hierarchy, where does playing the guitar fit in? Honestly, it doesn’t unless you force yourself to ignore life’s limitless flowcharts. Learning a new chord or buying a new plectrum will not go anyway towards you landing the Henderson account down at the office, nor will it improve your diet. So why do we play the guitar?

This is an idea that Frost wrestles with in Stopping by Woods. He only feels able to stop and admire the woods that he passes through because the person who owns them ‘will not see me stopping here / to see his woods fill up with snow’. If he is caught stopping here, he will not be prosecuted, but he will probably be asked to give some sort of logical reason for why he has stopped on his treacherous journey through the snow to admire the view.

The most important character is the horse though. ‘He gives his harness bells a shake/ to ask if there is some mistake’. The horse sees no viability in stopping ‘without a farmhouse near’ to simply wallow in the beauty of the situation. If we take the horse for an emblem of animal nature, then Frost is presenting the idea that art goes against our very nature, in the hunter-gatherer sense.

What Frost is really wrestling with here is the tension between practical and spiritual necessities. It is an idea that is blanketing Britain at this very moment. As a country we are being pulled between the aesthetic beauty of a snow-glazed landscape and the practical and financial impediment of frozen travel-routes.

The horse has no need of poetry, nor does the man whose house is in the village. To read and write poems is to stop and think over the very nature of stopping and thinking. It is to take something perilous and get caught up in how pretty it is. And, of course, the world would stop functioning as it currently does if we all indulged this side of ourselves. If every office-worker, bus-driver, police-officer and doctor stopped on their way to work to admire the ‘easy wind and downy flake’ then there is no argument that deaths would be caused.

Frost knows this, which is why he makes good on his ‘promises to keep’. He would love to spend the night exploring the ‘lovely, dark and deep’ forests, but knows that life’s obligations are about more than stopping and taking in a nice view. Yet he does stop for long enough to plant the seed for his poem in his mind.

This is why the poetry section of every bookshop is small but non-existent. If we had no use for that side of our brain that just wants something beautiful to think about then there would be no poetry sections. Anywhere. But the point that Frost alludes to is that we need that balance. We need that small corner of entirely inefficient, solitary thought where we can just wallow in what words are capable of when we swirl them in the petri-dish.

Do we not also get the sense that what Frost is really relishing is the absence of all other people in this scene? The horse is pulling him back towards the village, certainly, but Frost is fleetingly, truly happy when left with nothing but the sound of ‘the sweep of easy wind and downy flake’. This is the instant that gives him the idea for the poem. In solitude. Uninterrupted.

He knows that soon he will have to return to the world of people, people to whom he has made ‘promises’, but he has enjoyed this moment’s rest from it all. It is a difficult choice for him to make though – so difficult in fact that he has to repeat his justification in the penultimate and final lines. He longs to sever his obligations and explore the woods, yet he knows that he must think practically.

If we take the ‘woods’ here to mean the creative process, then Frost is beautifully encapsulating the life of a writer. If he allowed himself to fully enter the woods and leave the world behind, then his work would have no basis in a world that any audience would understand. If he does not spend time with other people, then he will never be able to write as one of them.

People love this poem because it’s easy to remember; the rhyme of the third line of each quatrain reminds you how the next one will start. People love it because the final quatrain has enough of the gothic fairytale about it to capture the dullest of imaginations. People love it because Quentin Tarantino cack-handedly shoe-horned it into Death Proof.

I love this poem because it shows Robert Frost lying in the bed that he has made for himself, and still managing to give us one of the most beautiful pieces of writing in the English language.

Seasons Greetings,

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Issue 1 | Poetry | C-Words

I’ve always been somewhat of a completist. As a comic-book aficionado I would never be satisfied with a series until I’d owned every copy dating right back to the first. If I hear a song I enjoy on the radio, I react by saving up enough money to buy that band’s entire back-catalogue. If I enjoy a film, then I make a point of watching every  featurette and every interview I can find on the DVD until I feel like an authority on that movie.

I wouldn’t have brought this up unless I’d known that you all do this too. We’re a society obsessed with being vs. seeming. We trawl through bonus-discs and acoustic versions and making-ofs and rare B-sides and interviews. We’re addicted to what’s on the other side of the curtain.

In many ways, this outlines our obsession with those two dirty ‘C’ words in poetry – ‘Collected’ and ‘Complete’. Those two flirtatious little words are dotted across the spines on my shelves making the same promise we’ve all fallen for; ‘To read me, is to have the whole picture. I will take you back to where it all started and you will know this poet.’

We all want to go back to the start, read the complete Robert Frost as if we were the first people to discover him and chart his progress. We all flick to that first collection thinking ‘now, I will be experiencing the real poet, before he learned to hide himself in all that poetry.’ The idea sits there in our heads, that if we can go back in time to where the poet is finding their feet, then we will find that, just as we suspected, they are just like us behind all that talent and fame.

The more I play the debut game though, the more I realize it’s a false economy. The debut collection often represents the poet at their most guarded. The esoteric allusions come thicker and faster in many cases as a résumé to ward off the anti-youth brigade. It’s also a cliché but entirely true that a debut collection has often taken a whole lifetime longer to write than any of its follow-ups… often a lifetime spent without much first-hand experience of the literary community and professional criticism. I do genuinely believe however, that the internet is slowly but surely shifting trends in self-awareness and the value that writers and people who write place on their work.

Let me save you some time. Behind all that talent and (often posthumous) fame, poets are just like you. They watch trashy television shows and eat fast food. They have the exact same relationship problems that you have. They all worry sometimes that their life has been pointless. They lay awake at night wondering whether or not to send an email to their ex. They get pissed off when other poets beat them for a promotion. At one point or another, they have all broken wind. If you take all these things as read, then you will not need to go trawling through ‘Complete’ collections waiting for the poets to tell you this for themselves.

What you will find in debut collections, however, is the poet’s opening gambit. Their entrance music if you will. I have taken the liberty of composing 30 Haiku-Reviews of debut collections from people I respect. You will see that, in a few cases, it is not their abilities as a poet that I respect in these people, but there is nobody on this list that I do not look up to for one reason or another.

Ted Hughes – Hawk in the Rain

Devastatingly
powerful in its address
and orality.

T.S. Eliot – Prufrock and Other Observations

How very awkward
and solipsistic it is
to be middle-classed.

Robert Lowell – Land of Unlikeness

So very prolix
and esoteric. Who knew
he’d write Life Studies?

Robert Frost – North of Boston

If you are after
long, rural and lyrical
poems, you’re in luck!

Geoffrey Hill – For the Unfallen

Don’t worry mate, I
didn’t really get what he
was saying either.

Charles Bukowski – Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail

some goddamn asshole
in the flat next door won’t stop
screwing his damn wife.

Sylvia Plath – The Colossus and Other Poems

Some fine craftsmanship
but Plath will drag you into
a morbid hell-world.

Rudyard Kipling – Barrack-Room Ballads

A little racist
on occasion, but the man
sure had good rhythm.

Elizabeth Bishop – North and South

Knowing how angry
the ‘female’ prefix made her
… just ‘a good poet’.

Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass

Depending on which
edition you own, you could
be here for a while.

Dylan Thomas – 18 Poems

So much beautiful
nonsense – so shallow that it
appears to be deep.

DH Lawrence – Amores

Get lost in the cold
music of melancholy,
wise lyricism.

William Blake – Songs of Innocence

Something tells me that
this series is due to take
a rather dark turn.

Billy Corgan – Blinking With Fists

Seriously bad.
And I’m not just saying that.
Really bad writing.

Tim Burton – The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy

Not for young children
but ideal for those dark souls
who enjoyed Corpse Bride.

Matthew Welton – The Book of Matthew

Once you get your head
into his weird semantic
mind-fuck, you’ll love it

Luke Kennard – The Solex Brothers

Trippy prose poems
to leave you scratching your head
whilst laughing out loud.

Wallace Stevens – Harmonium

If nothing else, you
will learn a lot of new words
(keep Google open).

Hugo Williams – Symptoms of Loss

Probably his worst
collection but worth a read
for exposition.

John Berryman – The Dispossessed

It’s all there, the wit,
incantational syntax,
a drunk genius.

Tennessee Williams – In the Winter of Cities

Whilst it’s his drama
we remember, his poems
gave him his vision.

Nicholas Swingler – Dream of the Condom and other poems

It’s a tragedy
that more people don’t know this
book. Go buy it now!

Ray Diamond – The Runner of Little Races

One of the few books
I own set in sans-serif.
It’s very good though.

Jacob Polley – The Brink

One of few writers
able to write metaphors
that serve their purpose.

Stephanie Leal – Metrophobia

American gem
I like the one she wrote on
her vile ex-boyfriend.

Ross Sutherland – Things to do Before You Leave Town

I laughed my ass of
at the titular poem
and ‘Two Moons For Mongs’.

Les Murray – The Ilex Tree

Strewth! Bleedin’ bonza
bushwackin’ boetian boy
breaks onto the scene!

Seamus Heaney – Death of a Naturalist

These are the poems
on which a legacy’s built –
that one about spades.

Daljit Nagra – Look We Have Coming to Dover!

A moving collage
of the voices that have been
soundtrack to his life.

William Shakespeare – Venus and Adonis

The moral being
that clingy chicks get in the
way of a good hunt.













Phil Brown
Poetry Editor