Cash | Poetry | Small Talk at 125th Ink

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of."
- Jane Austen

White Egrets on the Moon

I got a rejection letter last week

and Walcott got fifteen grand,

the new Bright Eyes album leaked

and Walcott got fifteen grand.

Jo Shapcott got the Costa Prize

and Walcott got fifteen grand,

I got a pile of marking up to my eyes

and Walcott got fifteen grand.

The Kings Speech got its BAFTAS took

and Walcott got fifteen grand,

Todd Swift’s begging people to buy his book

and Walcott got fifteen grand.

Poetry can’t get bums on seats

and Walcott got fifteen grand.

There’s students rioting on the streets

and Walcott got fifteen grand.

Darwin got dug up by Ruth Padel

and Walcott got fifteen grand

Now she’s in residence at UCL

and Walcott got fifteen grand.

My kids are counting their UCAS score

and Walcott counts fifteen grand

Andy Gray gets called a dinosaur

and Walcott gets fifteen grand.

Barnsley’s people will soon be voting

and Walcott got fifteen grand,

I always leave my classroom door open

and Walcott leaves with fifteen grand.

The PBS made their e-deposit

and Walcott got fifteen grand,

I’ve got plenty of skeletons in my closet

and Walcott’s got fifteen grand.

Armitage is seeing stars

and Walcott sees fifteen grand

and Alice Oswald had her dart

and Walcott has fifteen grand

and Heaney had his human chain

and Walcott has his fifteen grand

and scandal’s superficial stain

is well worth fifteen grand.

What’s wrote is read, what’s said is heard

and Walcott got fifteen grand

but prizes blind us to the words

and Walcott got fifteen grand.

Muldoon’s still playing with his band

and Walcott got fifteen grand

And sat, silently watching the sea lick at the sand

is Walcott with his fifteen grand.

Phil Brown
Poetry Editor 

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

Advert | (Found) Poetry | Craiglist

One of poetry's many functions throughout history has been convincing people to have sex. The most esteemed poet, Don Paterson, points this out at great length in his commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets. The 'come one laddie/lassie, let's get to it' poem is one with a great tradition and, frankly, a dying genre.

In an age where alcohol-advertisements are no longer allowed to suggest that the drink's effects puts you in greater chance of having your wicked way with someone, it's no wonder that creative writing classes and poetry workshops aren't allowed to make explicit the pulling-power of a well primed poem in their advertising campaigns. We're all thinking it though, right?

Well, no, no we're not. Poetry no longer seems to serve the seductive functions it once did (although, my perspective may be slightly skewed as, poet or not, I do have a pretty weird face). But there just isn't that abundance of come-hither versification that was once so well received.

Call it a paradigm shift, call it sexual equality, call it the purification of the art, call it what you will. I blame Craigslist. Where once the courtly lover would tire over the distillation of just the perfect cadences with which to woo his woman with full Petrarchan pomp, we now have an anything-goes electronic outlet for life's lonely hearts. The big leap on from the ones what you used to get in the local rag is that there are no longer word-limits on these things, so people can go on for as long as they want sending an all-purpose e-Woo out into the cloud for all to judge.

I'm sure I'm not the only fascinated spectator on Craigslist's lonely hearts column. In tribute to this, I've cobbled together a poem out of (verbatim) some of my favourite extracts from today's Craigslist emotional hopefuls. Enjoy, or don't. Those are the options.

Advert

Looking for an artist (of any sort)

a man who likes to be controlled

extra points for blue eyes.

Be open-minded, honest and love your life.

are you single?

are you free now?

I don’t want to make people uncomfortable.

A masculine, hairy, daddy or suited type

must be willing to bareback

My husband is working during the day;

I love to kiss.

I am very attracted to ginger guys

but struggle to meet them in London.

Any skint lads wanna sell me their boxers?

This is NOT no-strings-attached.

How about light lunch

followed by hot session at your place?

Perhaps you are a bored house husband

with a fairly thick well hung cock.

There’s definite chemistry,

the night ends pretty well.

If you don’t mind an injury or two,

is anyone interested in just licking tonight?

I am attractive

I am always laughing

please mail me

look after me

I’m slim, come rescue me.

-Craigslist

Phil Brown
Poetry Editor