Face of the Deep

Wasn't Becker saying this was simply another means of denying death? Rather than overcoming it?

So NLTK via Python is about an interplay or conversation or convergence of two different languages -- a "natural one" (found in a corpus of text) and an invented one (Python) trying to speak to / process / extract things from the "natural" one -- translation in Steiner's predatory consume-the-object/hunted sense? and "processing" it into something consumable? But it sometimes seems more like a kind of viral invasion of a passive "host" ... Or the use / processing of a "natural" resource which seems more passive, like a timber forest (cf. Benjamin on "language forest"). In any case, insofar as this Natural Language Processing always involves a relationship between two languages -- a natural one and an artificial/invented one -- is it necessarily about translation? On the one hand, Python (and its user) does things with the corpus/body of the "natural" language in ways that remind me of Steiner and other predatory notions of translation. On another hand, it does nothing to it but makes things from copying or counting parts of it, producing readings of it in the process. On another another hand, I imagine it infiltrating the "natural" language corpus, circulating within its letters and spaces, nothing without its host, becoming something only when realized in its host ...? 

Link to one of the poems and its translation here

This is explicitly stated in their acceptable use policy. A quick sentence with no further explanation.

This notion of the line as the unit of poetry came up in our time together too. I am curious about 'line' as a unit. Is there an agreed upon category of line in poetic circles? Sarah, you may have already spoken to this so sorry if my memory fails, but line differs from...? sentence, paragraph, discourse unit? How do we talk about the spatiality of line?

Verse comes from vertere, to turn. A poetic line is "turned" or "broken" in response to different (and often combined) pressures: metrical, semantic, syntactical, etc. In a poem that is regularly metered, the line unit would be the number of beats per line (stressed syllables). If the poem is in free verse (which is metrical, just not regularly so), a poet is relying on something other than beats per line to determine the turning point of the line. Some free verse poets think of the line as a unit of breath (think of Ginsberg's opening line in Howl--deep breath and long breath expenditure); some think of the line as a unit of sense (breaking along semantic/syntactical/and or rhetorical fault lines); some think of the line as a way to parcel out sensory perceptions. For me, the interesting thing about the line unit in free verse is the tension it can build between partiality and entirety. When a line is not end-stopped, it is enjambed, which means we must keep turning downward to reach the completion of the sentence. The sentence drives horizontally, but the poem breaks its progress and defers its ending. With a poet like Milton, it make take you twenty some lines to reach a sentence's completion. This plotting of sense, sound, rhythm along two axes--the horizontal and vertical--is what makes a well lineated poem so arresting (and momentous). There can be an exquisite tension there--the sentence must submit itself to the line unit, with which it is not always--not usually--isometric, and it must lose itself momentarily to the interceding silence or white space before it can resume "voicing" again. Many poets experience the line break as something, I don't know, existential, spooky, weird. Which is why they are so protective of the formatting when it comes to publication. I think you can't think about the poetic line without thinking about its relationship to the unsaid and the unsayable. The "sculptural integrity" of a poem emerges in the relationship between speake

do we think digital readers, which allow readers to adjust the page and font size and color, etc. will change the way poets and other writers imagine the spatiality of what they write?

yes. i think a digital readership has changed the way (some) poets re-imagine the spatiality of what they write. See for examples "The Mandrake Vehicles" by poet (and pianist) Oni Buchanan: http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/buchanan_mandrake_vehicles.html i find these spaces interesting, but not always 'binding.' i rarely feel the need to return to these spaces once i've gotten the concept of them. but i am grumpy like tacita dean. i do find it interesting that a reader might participate in re-lineating the poem--that is, in re-imagining, by re-ordering, a text's relationship to surrounding space. i am going to try and upload jorie graham's beautiful essay, "some notes on silence" in google+

testing group note on a google drive pdf. annotating the web together is easy, but getting files uploaded and annotated together is turning out to be less than trivial.

now we can have a conversation here.