“Does describing a game always mean:
giving a description through which someone can learn it?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Blackbird project is to be used to create poetry potentially without ever writing a word. Is this cheating? you might ask. Whether or not a collage or mixed-up work of text is considered original (it is in other mediums) I’ll leave for others to debate, but what I’d like to get across now is the work that a program such as ours does require. In our framework, each relationship defined is tantamount to a recognition of something within the text.
Let’s go back a ways, to how we are taught poetry as children, with the most basic poetic form most of us know:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet,
And so are you.
I hope I’m not the only one who would have had to look up the traditional version of those last two lines, because, and this is my point, we learn the poetic structure of “Roses are red, / Violets are blue” alongside the instruction that two lines must follow, four syllables each, with a final rhyme with “blue”. It’s a template. This is at heart how we learn as children to ‘write’ a poem. We aren’t trying to express ourselves, we are learning a game of language arrangement. The sonnet, the limerick, the ode, the sestina, are, among many others, more advanced examples of poetic templates.
The templates used in our program are based on the relationships defined by the user. Starting out, an eager user may find it easy to define a number of relationships and pick out the fitting word pairs from their given poem, but an initial remixing may return unexpected results. The user will have to realize what careless assumptions he/she has made and has to correct. These could be grammatical, aesthetic, or logical missteps that the user will then have to reconsider. The constant feedback between user and application is beneficial to both.
The application has the potential to be thought of as purely an analytical tool with no creative purpose at all. A student could use it as a way to test his understanding of the inner workings of a poem. A whole classroom of students could “compete” with each other trying to define the same poem in order that his/her data could replace others’ structures and that his/her structure withstood the attempts of others’ data to fit it. However idealistic the picture of students competing in poetry analysis might be, it is an example of how our program could be used educationally.
The application emphasizes such close reading, to the point of our language’s odd grammatical idiosyncracies, that it is hard not to learn a great deal when using it. In my own experience of entering new poems into the system, it is always oddly amusing to see how greatly different poems may vary in their use of language. I can think of no other way I would come to know that Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” contains only two indefinite articles (an hour; a smoking bank) or that Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” contains only one adverb (cry sharply). In noticing this kind of trivial information, a student will be forced to think of the author’s decisions in using or not using certain devices in their work and will have a greater sense of how to achieve similar effects in their own work.
Going back to the quote at the top of the page, perhaps we can see now that in describing the poem, we are providing ourselves with a template, a set of instructions to the writing of the poem itself. We are also transforming the text into a set of pieces that can be maneuvered. In defining our word relationships, we are performing the same function as if we were describing how the pieces of a chess board could move. The poem then becomes a state of a system that has no end-game, but rather hosts a wide variety of potential “moves.” The balance required of the system — that new definitions create more word possibilities, while simultaneously constraining the openness of a structure towards replacements — is proof that this is not a finite process, but an ever-growing system that craves equilibrium.