May 3, 2018

Poets’ Roundtable

Welcome

Welcome to Anna who promises not only to return on the 17th but to bring a friend.

Here are two poems that came up in conversation:

April Is The Saddest Month by William Carlos Williams

There they were
stuck
dog and bitch
halving the compass

Then when with his yip
they parted
oh how frolicsome

she grew before him
playful
dancing and
how disconsolate

he retreated
hang-dog
she following
through the shrubbery

Poem: "i thank You God for most this amazing"

by ee cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of allnothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

News and Jabber

Researchers built an AI capable of writing poetry that's equal parts woeful and impressive

https://mashable.com/2018/04/27/poetry-writing-ai/#Rwx5kwlYSsqE

BY ISOBEL HAMILTON

5 DAYS AGO

As if the world weren't already full enough of awful human poetry, now the robot overlords want in.

Researchers from Microsoft and Kyoto University were interested in whether they could invent an AI that writes poetry inspired from images, "generating poems to satisfy both relevance to the image and poeticness in language level." Some of the poems produced are pretty objectively abysmal. Others, surprisingly passable.

Here's one inspired by a photo of a dead crab:

"and now i am tired of my own 

let me be the freshening blue 

haunted through the sky bare 

and cold water warm blue air 

shimmering brightly never arrives 

it seems to say"

And another, whose basis was a photo of a war memorial:

"i have been a great city 

spinning and shout 

the sound of the road 

washed away 

the mountain passes through 

the streets are gone 

the silence is raining 

it sits still in silence 

glint its own"

And another, this time inspired by a pastoral landscape:

"the sun is shining 

the wind moves 

naked trees 

you dance"

Researchers ran the poetry past actual humans to see if they could spot it was machine generated. Both poetry experts and uncultured swine (like myself) were tested, and it resulted in "competitive confusion to both ordinary annotators and experts." The experts were better at identifying human poetry, although interestingly they benefitted from having the images, whereas ordinary people did better without them.

Mashable spoke to AI-expert Professor Barry O’Sullivan of University College Cork about the significance of such experiments with machine-lyricism. 

“Creativity is a hallmark of intelligence"

“Creativity is a hallmark of intelligence," he told us. "The field of computational creativity - how we build systems that are creative - is fascinating and it goes far beyond the simple replication of activities that we consider creative. It tries to also study the nature of creativity itself."

O'Sullivan said that AI systems writing poetry has long been examined, but the focus of the discussion should be on how we measure creativity. "What is art?" he asked, "How do we recognise something that is of artistic value? Who defines what the ground truth that determines whether one poem is more poetic than another?"

"These are questions that strike me as being just as complex as asking what does intelligence mean?" he said. "Until we know the answers there will always be significant limitations to the extent that we can measure progress towards creativity.”

Machines, it seems, have a long way to go before they can be taken seriously on the poetry scene. But then again, so do most human poets.

Can Poetry Be Translated?

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/15/602261007/-nprpoetry-literary-translator-aaron-coleman

Is it possible to translate poetry from one language into another without losing meaning?

To paraphrase Robert Frost — not really. "Poetry is what gets lost in translation," the American poet is often quoted as saying. In other words, the meaning the reader extracts from a poem can never be a replica of the writer's intent.

Then again, I'm just translating.

Aaron Coleman, a literary translator, interprets a few mini poems submitted to NPR's National Poetry Month hashtag, #NPRpoetry.

Courtesy of Aaron Coleman

But poet and award-winning literary translator Aaron Coleman tells NPR's Michel Martin that the impossibility of translation shouldn't stop us from appreciating the art of the verse.

Allow Coleman to elaborate with a few poems of his choosing. But first, some background for our newcomers: Every week during National Poetry Month (April, as it's oft referred to), All Things Considered is asking a professional poet to read from some of your mini poems that caught their eye on the #NPRpoetry Twitter feed.

It's Coleman's turn — here's how the bilingual poet translates a work by Catherine Hulshof: "I am the wind pushing you. I spend my days drawing waves and goodbyes. Songs between window blinds and white cement."

Catherine Hulshof

@BE_bilingue

 And #NPRpoetry español: Soy el viento empujandote. Paso el tiempo dibujando olas y despedidos. Canciones entre cortinas y el cemento blanco.

10:37 PM - Apr 3, 2016 · Isabela, Puerto Rico

2

See Catherine Hulshof's other Tweets

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He breaks down his method: "I loved that little opening metaphor of calling herself the wind."

Then, the trickiness of translation comes out to play. In Spanish, "tiempo" means both "time" and "weather." Coleman says, "We don't have that opportunity for metaphor in English, so I did 'days' instead of 'time' in order to get at weather and also the passage of time."

A Sound Language

Coleman shares another poem from Laurel Katchatag. With lingo like "muktuk" and "tuttu," it's fair to say that some of her words — in the Inupiaq language of her native Alaska — ring unfamiliar to many:

Laurel K

@heyitslaurelk

 #NPRpoetry

Dreams of 

Dried salmon

Herring eggs

Black muktuk

Fresh tuttu

Wild akpiqs

3000 miles away

Just an Iñupiaq in the city

Does it matter?

"That's the thing about poetry — it's as much a thing of words as it is a thing of sound," he says.

Upon first listen, "I'm sort of blown away by the rhythm and the momentum that she gets from mixing together two languages. And mixing together languages is the reality for many people."

Translation As Transformation

Though the art form, in translation, is subject to lose its accuracy, integrity and beauty, Coleman argues that the process invites new opportunities to parse, and thus meditate on, any lingual and cultural disparities.

"I approach translation even knowing that it can't quite be what it is in the original language," he says.

The language lapses that inhibit an ideal interpretation can ultimately be "a creative, productive failure," he adds. "Maybe it can open up a new way for us to see what can happen in English and what can happen in Spanish, for me, or whatever the original language is."

Instead, translation can be transformation. "I think we all want to have translation work as a process of reproduction, but it's really a process of transformation," Coleman says.

Finally, Barbara Valentina, manages, in English, to touch on this very theme in under 140 characters:

Barbara Valentina

@januarydearest

 #NPRpoetry he asks me about my ancestors/ I tell him/ I cannot explain what in my mother tongue means/ I am a ghost holding up the earth

She addresses the caveats of translation "in the fact that she can't tell him what her name means," he says. "At the same time, she's still able to create something beautiful in English. 'I am a ghost holding up the Earth' is an incredible line for any poem."

The Current Assignment

Who did it? Any comments about the process before we read? I found myself struggling to not write one about a car or cars, particularly about my father's love of the Hudson Hornet. 

The Next Assignment

Write what I call an event poem. That is, pick an item, any item and write five different things you can do with it. Pick something unusual.

Ex:

Event poem, pear blossom

This morning I invested

a pear blossom in

the deaths of moles ;

or so I intended
but when pear came to poison

I couldn't do it

and put the petal instead

into a saucer of water for the cat

that has caught four moles

in two weeks.

He cared not for the blossom

and whined to go out

on the hunt.

I balanced the petal

on my nose,

discovered its fragrance offensive

and wondered about a God

that wastes such beauty

on so mal an odor

until the petal slipped

and fell to the page

of Ezekiel open in my lap

and was raised up

on the quickening bones

of the army rising

from death in the valley.

It rode out each saber stroke

of God's bloody plan and,

gasping, crawled into my hand.

I tossed it to the foot

of the tree it had fallen from

when I caught it

and put it down on this page.

Thousands of others

blanket the grass,

the mole trails,

a stump,

an inverted canoe

where they lie unaware

that their lives are only

for the sake of a pear.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday, May 17, 2018.

Other Jabber