Current mood:	artistic
Current music:	Elephant Gun - Beirut
Entry tags:	balance, creative writing, dada, poetry

poem from January 2003
Edit: My memory is crap. This is a poem I brought to my poetry class, but not one I wrote. It was brought as an inspiration to the class, as we were assigned to bring favorite poems in every week.

I feel like a moron. A moron and a plagiarist. The folder this was in on my computer contains the poems I wrote and the poems I brought in to class as inspiration. Evidently I can't tell the difference. I did do several poems with JanusNode for class and for fun that semester. Just not this one. Here's the link to the page I found this poem on: JanusNode: Poems From The Unknown Unknowing

I was recently asked if I've written anything lately (in the creative rather than purely informative sense of the idea). I haven't really, but here's something from the poetry class I took my freshman year of college. What follows is the entirety of the word processing document I found, complete with an explanation of the process I used to create it.


[The following text was heavily assisted by JanusNode. It was created on a whim as a 'proof of concept', in response to a call from http://www.instantnovelist.com/ for a poem about balance (but never actually submitted, since it turned out that they only accept entries from AOL members!). The four step process used to create it can be used to try to produce a poem about any topic at all. The first step is to gather together a bunch of texts about the chosen topic. In this case, the texts were taken from the WWW, using a search engine search on 'balance'. More carefully selected inputs texts can deliver better results. The second step is to create a Markov file of the texts gathered in step 1. The third step is to chain the Markov file from step 2, and (optionally) other selected Markov files. In this case, pre-existing Markov files on the war in Kosovo and the highschool murders in Colorado were selected in the hopes they would resonate in an interesting manner with the texts on balance. Finally, interesting lines from the output are selected, and the resultant (rather short) text is Markov-chained again. Text culled from this output can be used to make the final product. In this case, that selection was eecummingsfied, and then edited by a human being to produce the final text. Although the final text reflects substantial human intervention by editing, the title, general themes, and the structure of most of the individual lines here (including the fine phrase 'when emotions have a disordered bullet...') are all JanusNode's own work.]


The Stabilizing Effects of Perception.

Let your ears hear only
what does not
destroy the world.


When emotions have
a disordered bullet,
I believe in balance.


Balance is
not achieved by soldiers
measuring out the world
in machined straight lines
with steady gaze and goals.


Balance is
not an hour
with your checkbook,
not an hour
spent casually shooting
others dead.


Balance is
found in wild experience;
from letting our bodies go forth,
shifting on uneven surfaces;
forging their own crooked paths.


Let the world scream;
Let the disordered bullets rain
on lockers and pews;
Let the wild vertigo
flourish.


Let your eyes see only
what does not
destroy the world.