On Shaking Back The Kiss (by Eric Elshtain)
Reading is much like drinking wine. The first time around it may not be palatable. The prospect of machines meddling in the process of writing initially curled my lip in an exaggerated pout, somewhat like a synthetic cork.
Eric Elshtain has been working with software called Gnoetry and has produced several chapbooks along with his compatriot Jon Trowbridge. Shaking Back The Kiss is one of the most remarkable group of poems, each produced in the same form and in concert with a computer program referred to as Gnoetry (pronounce the “G” hard).
“Gnoetry synthesizes language randomly based on its analysis of existing texts. Any machine-readable text or texts, in any language, can serve as the basis of the Gnoetic process. Gnoetry generates sentences that mimic the local statistical properties of the source texts. This language is filtered subject to additional constraints (syllable counts, rhyming, etc.) to produce a poem. A key aspect of the Gnoetry software is the ability of a human operator to intervene in the language generation cycle, helping to "guide" the artistic process and to produce a result that is a true collaboration of equals."
The chapbook, published online at Beardofbees.com is surprising in its seemingly non-mechanical and non-mathematic sound and contexts. There are fifteen poems titled with the first line in E. Dickinson fashion. Their form is of five tercets with each line consisting of nine to fifteen syllables. The source of the work is four texts: The Custom of the Country (1913), by Edith Wharton; Emma (1815), by Jane Austen; Sex and Common-Sense (1922), by A. Maude Royden; Wuthering Heights (1847), by Emily Bronte. The chapbook provides an interesting historical note on Ms. Royden.
The poems are at once romantic and Postmodern. Postmodern in the sense of their construct—there is nothing original except for the assimilation of past work. The outcome is surprising in the diction and how well each of the four sources work to establish a voice that has no artifice, no pretense of missing articles and pronouns to make it sound like poetry as we have come to expect from the lineage of Modernity. But, don’t be fooled. The lines are not simple and the juxtapositions push meaning into that dizzying place that only effective poetry can illuminate.
The following is my favorite and one that illustrates the quality of voice achieved by Eric’s “construction”:
But he felt it. I know. He’d rather...
But he felt it. I know. He’d rather
see me with the other day...I’m glad
to see far more than the mere legal bond out of the note
I sent for him to feel it that way; but his subsequent
consolation and happiness, and I did have rather
offered it, are going to Ireland for three months with her:
a privilege rather endured than allowed, I think
you beautiful; they’re awfully lonesome here; awfully dull; and
it was one woman, encircling
the way with soft things, all that you will never guess,
all on that part of a youthful warmth behind his head to
ask the girl swung about in his heart at
ease in either style of dress is so, there it would not achieve
the quick blood rushed to Ralph’s breathless question, raised her from the
instant reply of respectability.
When you think of the poems’ roots in sex from the four sources and experience the consequence of its illustrative passion, the Victorian ‘sensibility’ washes over you like a stream. All fifteen poems offer experiences equally full of layers of sense. And the occasional references to Emma and Heathcliff are extraordinarily potent. It demonstrates the depth of culture and how we value things in some hierarchic framework. Nothing is without its referential gravity.
I strongly recommend visiting Beard of Bees and click on Eric Elshtain for this and other works of his Gnoetry. The download is free.
Larry Jordan
August 7. 2006
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