By Jamie Bennett (Brooklyn, NY United States)

This review is from: Poegles: A Short History and Collection (Paperback)

There’s a meme floating around that Google is making us stupid. My first reply to this meme is, sounds like a good title for a poegle. My second reply is, only if we let it. In fact, Google probably makes us smarter, and it definitely helps us become more poetic.

Describing exactly how is the idea behind Poegles, first a blog, now a book by Dave Gunton and Justin Hendrix. (Full disclosure: I know both authors and have even written poegles with them.) The concept is simple: poem + Google = poegle. However, I have found that poegling’s results can be profound.

In the accepted scheme, language and poetry originate in a speaker or writer through an act of self-expression. Poegling upends this order, letting you experience language in ways closer to how DNA must feel as it constantly replicates and recombines. Sometimes you get the wisdom of crowds, sometimes the exact opposite. Whatever you think of Google as a tool, constructing a poegle re-imagines the search engine as a digital Ouija board, offering chance, surprises, and maybe even a little mysticism.

Poegles makes learning the process easy. It’s geared, as is the idea of poegles, towards those who don’t consider themselves “poets.” It’s literary Sudoku, so is great for anyone (business people, techies, as well as “creatives”) who wants to prime their own divergent thinking potential.

Step-by-step guides and many examples help get new writers/poeglers started. For those who want a pedigree, a useful brief history places poegles in a tradition that begins with obscure 19th century poetical experiments and extends through Dadaism, Surrealism, Beat writing, the Situationist International, and the development of today’s Internet. The overall spirit of the book recalls the best promises of new technology; it’s democratic, inclusive, and awaiting your own hacks, mods, and inventions.

Google Is Making Us Stupid

I was at a dinner party the other night
When Professor Glushko brought up
Friedrich Nietzsche’s typewriter
And The McGurk Effect,
While I pretended to read
“The Brain that Changes Itself”
by Norman Doidge M.D.

I wasn’t willing to argue over stupid things:
Should women settle? What type of potato are you?
Why does your dog pretend to like you?
Is divorced the same as single?
Does anyone else Plurk?

Instead, an egotistical bastard
Or just an Ubermensch at heart,
I stared at Big G making money,
Drunken Snooki dancing with a plant.
Oh look shiny.

Such as “the last time I saw Beth” 

*****

Step Two:  Copy the interesting search results.

Beth Lochtefeld

The last time I saw Beth was in the Nantucket airport I was engrossed in reading trashy magazines as she bounced into the little shop telling the woman …
www.summerinternships.com/BethLochtefeld/guestbook.php – 47k – Cached – Similar pages

lmharnisch: Blogging the Wolfe Book, The Lady in Red

And I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, and tell my minister, too—that was the last time I saw Beth Short. I did not kill her!’” Herald-Express, Jan. 20, 1947 …
lmharnisch.blogspot.com/2006/03/blogging-wolfe-book-lady-in-red.html – 37k – Cached – Similar pages

harrypotterfanfictioncom 50000 Harry Potter stories and podcasts

… I pushed open my window and just sat there looking out into the summer night Almost two summers ago was the last time I saw Beth July 31st would mark my …
harrypotterfanfiction.com/printerfriendly.php?mode=chapter&object=180048 – 16k – Cached – Similar pages

Etc.

***** 

Step Three:  Paste the interesting results onto a single page.

The last time I saw Beth was in the Nantucket airport I was engrossed in reading trashy magazines as she bounced into the little shop

And I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, and tell my minister, too—that was the last time I saw Beth Short. I did not kill her!’”

July 31st would mark my second year as a known witch.

the last time I saw Beth some people said insensitive things and she got pretty mad

That night was the last time I saw Beth. Of course, I mean alive. I see her everywhere.

The last time I saw Beth . . . she was at the Moulin Rouge.

The last time I saw Beth, it was some night in November.

The last time I saw Beth, she was picking out Christmas cards and I didn’t want to bother her.

The last time I saw Beth, she had just found out that she was pregnant with their first child.

The last time I saw Beth she told me, “What a good feeling it is helping others even in a small way.”

The last time I saw Beth, she didn’t have a blue wig and sunglasses.

The last time I saw Beth, I was about 16 and living in Invercargill.

***** 

Step Four:  Edit the interesting results to make a poegle.

The last time I saw Beth, it was some night in November.

The last time I saw Beth was in the Nantucket airport I was engrossed in reading buried my face in a trashy magazines as she bounced into the little shop

The last time I saw Beth, I wanted to she was picking out up my Christmas cards, but and I didn’t want to bother her talk to Beth.

The last time I saw Beth, she had just found out that she was pregnant with their first child.

The last time I saw Beth she told me spotted me and said, “What a good feeling it is helping others even in a small way.”

The last time I saw Beth, she didn’t have a blue wig and sunglasses.

the last time I saw Beth some other people said some insensitive things and she got pretty mad

The last time I saw Beth, I was about 16 and living in Invercargill.

July 31st would mark my second year as a known witch.

And I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, and tell my minister, too—that was the last time I saw Beth Short. I did not kill her!’”

That night was the last time I saw Beth. Of course, I mean alive. I see her everywhere.

The last time I saw Beth . . . she was at the Moulin Rouge.

*****

Step Five:  Read your poegle.

The Last Time I Saw Beth

It was some night in November, in the Nantucket Airport. I wanted to pick up my Christmas cards, but I didn’t want to talk to Beth. I buried my face in a trashy magazine as she bounced into the little shop. She had just found out that she was pregnant with their first child. She spotted me and said, “What a good feeling it is helping others even in a small way.” She didn’t have a blue wig and sunglasses. Some other people said insensitive things, and she got pretty mad. I was about 16 and living in Invercargill. July 31st would mark my second year as a known witch.

*****

That’s it!  Try it at home.  Or, read more Poegles here.

Stanley Fish on plagiarism in the New York Times

What about questions like, “What’s the meaning of life?” or “Is there a God?” or “Should I kill my dog?”

More

Peter Orlovsky, Poet and Ginsberg Muse, Dies at 76

“Peter Orlovsky, who inspired Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, with whom he had a romantic partnership for decades, and who wrote emotionally naked, loopy and occasionally luminescent poetry of his own, died in Williston, Vt., on Sunday. He was 76, and lived in St. Johnsbury, Vt.”

More in the NY Times

More in the Advocate

Gary Sullivan gets a pointillist portrait in the Wall Street Journal, which featured last week an article on Flarf vs Conceptual poetry.  Quoth the Journal:

Flarf is a creature of the electronic age. The flarf method typically involves using word combinations turned up in Google searches, and poems are often shared via email. When one poet penned a piece after Googling “peace” + “kitty,” another responded with a poem after searching “pizza” + “kitty.” A 2006 reading of it has been viewed more than 6,700 times on YouTube. It starts like this: “Kitty goes Postal/Wants Pizza…”

More

Here are some ideas for finding a focus for your poem:

–A “New York Times found poem” can be composed of words and phrases taken from one Times article, past or present, or several. You can mix and combine these words and phrases into a new piece, or you might simply “find” some Times writing that you feel is already poetic, as Alan Feuer does with “Missed Connections” posts on Craigslist.

–Your poem can be on any topic or theme you like. For instance, it could be about something as broad as politics, music or travel, or it might celebrate something as specific as Lady Gaga, Philadelphia or the iPad.

–Your poem might focus on something currently in the news, whether health care reform, the World Cup, bullying, the Large Hadron Collider or therecession — or you might use the Times archives or our On This Day in History feature to create a poem about an event in the past.

–You could also explore a trend you’ve read about in The Times, such as the local food movement or the effects of technology on contemporary life. Or you might simply collect words and phrases from different articles around a theme, like “identity,” “loss,” or “joy.”

“Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, ‘also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.’ He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.

“‘Who owns the words?’ Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. ‘Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.’”

NYT