So this is an example of something totally different
than you've probably seen.
This is Hooping: a poem.
It's our favorite poem by Vasko Popa.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Go and open the door.
Who is this?
- Maybe outside there's a tree, or a wood, a garden.
That's our bird, Bananafish, while this is being recorded.
- Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog's rummaging.
So maybe interpretive dance, but more interpretive hoop dance.
- Go and open the door.
If there's a fog, it will clear.
[END PLAYBACK]
This is a gentleman named Richard Grunn.
Richard Grunn is an amazing guy.
He's a playwright.
He's a poet.
He's a performer.
He writes one-man shows.
He performs with his son.
He has a project called Father Joiner's Purgative Poetry
Project.
And it is a one-man show in which all of the characters
are people in a church poetry group
who get together on Tuesday nights
and read poetry to each other.
Rich Grunn plays all of the characters,
including the title character Father Joiner,
and he changes into each character in front of you.
So part of his performance itself is you
get to see him change and assume the character
that he's about to do with poem [INAUDIBLE]..
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- And on behalf of the Purgative--
If you've been through a lot of poetry readings,
his events are--
his production is-- you will know
every one of these characters, even though you have never
seen any of the characters.
- A little bit about the project,
we started several years ago and our basic belief
is that poetry is for everyone to enjoy.
This past summer--
I don't want to talk over him and have him talk over me.
One of the characters is Leo Capelli of Capelli's Deli.
Leo discovered simile, so all of his poems
rely very heavily on simile.
And it's just a whole host of other characters.
It's a full evening production of Rich playing everybody.
Rich also makes these things called walking poems
with another of his characters, and he makes these
into films which are--
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
It goes on from here.
It's amazing.
Another approach, Ward Tietz is another guy
who is sort of serially obsessed with poetry
that doesn't occur on the page.
He does a lot of installations.
This is just one of many.
He also does some performances.
This is a sculptural performance.
It's a performance using letters, sculptures, and sound.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[LAUGHTER]
- You cook fish?
You go out.
You come back.
It still smells of fish.
The myth of metal.
The myth of metal it [? gives ?]..
The myth of metal [? gives ?] off--
[END PLAYBACK]
So more than just a typical poetry performance,
he's using letter forms as sculptural objects and sound,
and what they can do other than be letters.
This is a piece that blows me away.
It's a tessellation of the word "sphere."
It's a sphere composed entirely of sphere.
This is an installation by a guy named Kaz Maslanka.
Kaz is very heavily into mathematical poetry.
And we'll see some other examples of mathematical poetry
as we go on.
This is an entire installation in a room.
And you can walk around it and interact
with this piece in full three-dimensional reality.
Here's another example of a mathematical poem.
There's a whole subgenre of poetry
that is mathematical poems.
Some of them incorporate math very directly, as this does.
And this is a whole series.
This is, I think, about 150 different mathematical poems
that Craig Damrauer has put together.
There's a web version of it, and there's also
a print book version of it.
There's also people doing mathematical poetry
for exhibition.
There's formulae that they find beautiful that they're
having printed, beautifully typographically designed
and mounted in installations and galleries.
Speaking of installations, this is a piece
that I find amazingly beautiful.
Even though it's minimalist and only one word,
it's evocative of so much more, which
is a defining characteristic of poetry for me.
Here's a different approach to an installation
than the past one where everything
is a little bit more indirect.
What you're seeing here is, depending
on the angle that you approach this particular piece,
it's going to look like this from off to the side.
And as you rotate around, it will all finally
come into perspective, which I suppose
is another defining characteristic of poetry
for me.
Sculptural, but again, similar trope, this
is something that is presenting some simultaneity in a new way.
I would love to see something done
like this on a much larger scale with a much larger set of text.
This is a guy named Ted Warnell from Canada.
What makes this piece particularly intense
is that it's HTML and CSS-only.
This is a piece that's nothing but code until you render it
in a web browser, and then it makes this amazingly beautiful
visual poem.
He's an amazingly prolific guy, too.
I would not be surprised if Ted has made 10,000 pieces.
That will not surprise me.
And it's all code-based.
He's a real big code poet.
There's a lot of people who think computer poems are
relatively new.
I can tell you they are not.
These pieces were not the first computer poems ever done,
but they are among the first.
It's sort of arguable which were the first.
I was involved in this from a preservation standpoint.
These pieces were on 5 and 1/2 inch floppies
that, if anybody remembers, they were actually floppy.
They have a life of about five to seven years.
And we were working with some pieces that were seriously
degraded, and if we couldn't extract the data
from these floppies, these pieces
would have been lost forever.
So I worked with a group of other people
in order to restore these.
So these pieces now, they were made in 1984 on an Apple IIe,
but they now exist in a JavaScript version,
a QuickTime version, an emulatable version.
You can download an emulator for an Apple IIe
and play it in its original.
Also, the raw code now exists, too.
So computer poetry has been happening since at least 1984.
It is a problem of how to preserve, and protect,
and conserve, and archive.
That's something that concerns me greatly.
There's about 20 poems in this.
Another interesting aspect of this,
as we went through this, there were some people
who had seen the original Nichol "First Screening" that we just
saw a bit of.
And when Marko Niemi from Finland
was doing the JavaScript version,
he was going through the code line
by line, which was BASIC code, and figuring out
how he was going to do these JavaScript installations.
And an interesting thing about "First Screening"
is when you put it in, it would just begin.
And then after it got to the end,
a menu would come up that said, "to see
titles and GOSUBs, which were the subroutines,
it told you to type a certain line number.
So it required interaction from the viewer,
way ahead of its time for 1984.
And when you typed that in, you got a list of titles
as promised, but then you also got
another instruction that would have been previously hidden
if you didn't bother looking at the titles that said you could
type something else, and you would
see this other poem that was not originally included
in what auto-ran.
So when you typed that, you've got
this really long piece that's a Fred and Ginger Rogers
piece, and then it ends.
But what Marko found in going through the source code line
by line was at the very, very end of this program,
there's this other poem that Nichol put in the source code.
It's not an unfinished poem.
It's not notes for something that he intended to do.
It's there for the person who looked at the source
code, which I find amazing, and beautiful,
and in the spirit of bpNichol entirely.
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries has been around--
as long as there have been hypertext poems,
there's been Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.
They are very prolific.
Most of their work is of a similar style,
so you can get the aesthetic from it
by playing just about any one.
I'll play this one for you.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- This is Michael Kimmelman from the New York Times.
It may seem like there are Van Gogh [INAUDIBLE]
but in fact, the Van Gogh [INAUDIBLE]
show is the first full-fledged look at Van Gogh in 20 years.
And is also the first small-scale look
at the works that established Van Gogh's reputation
after his death.
If you want to skip the show because you're
afraid the crowds that would be on [INAUDIBLE]..
The story of the artist's life were so [INAUDIBLE],,
but when you see the works in the flesh,
they have extraordinary power to remind you of this great
narrative, one of the great stories in Western art,
of an artist with no discernible talent, and no training,
who was able to, through sheer force--
[END PLAYBACK]
I'll leave the rest as a study for the reader.
And by the way, I will have a list of all these
at the end for anybody who's interested.
Their pieces are all like this.
The same trope over and over, hits you over the head with it,
I love it.
These are some of mine.
I have a love-hate relationship with these pieces
because they were done in 1998, which at this point
is forever in internet time.
But they still make people smile,
so how can you not love that?
This is my personal favorite because I
got to make a verb I think as a poet, that's a rare thing.
These were done, like I said, in 1998.
They were all done in the course of an evening.
I was learning how to use a Wacom
tablet so that I could show someone else how to use it.
And I was using a program--
this is my handwriting that did--
it made animated GIFs, basically.
You would show it frame one and frame 10, and then tell
it to animate everything in between.
The algorithm it used had a certain amount of overshoot
in it.
And so there was this bounciness.
It would go a little further than you thought, and then sort
of oscillate back, so I started playing
with this sort of rubber banding.
This is a game my sister and I used
to play when we were a kid.
I think my parents made us do it just to keep
us quiet in the backseat.
One person would say, "ha," then the next person
would have to say, "ha ha."
The next person would say, "ha ha ha."
Then it would continue until someone laughed,
and then the game was over.
[LAUGHTER]