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  “The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident.” — William S. Burroughs

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National Poem in a Pocket Day

Women May Be Sniffing Out Biologically-relevant Information From Underarm Sweat

Schmidt Tells Newspaper Execs: I’m From Google, and I’m Here to Help

The End of Philosophy

Google Explains Watery Mystery of Atlantis

Poetry Bench Stolen From Bethesda

Brain Hub Links Music, Memory and Emotion

RIP Christopher Nolan

At Poegles.com we keep a keen eye on Google.  We’re fascinated by an article today on CNET about its sponsorship, along with Facebook, of an event in New York about youth activism, December 3-5.  Other sponsors “include the U.S. Department of State, MTV, Access 360 Media, and start-up Howcast–the event hopes to ‘find (the) best ways to use digital media to promote freedom and justice, and counter violence, extremism, and oppression.’”  We’d love to turn poegles into a movement, or make it part of a movement.  Perhaps the nascent movement to reconsider the idea of ownership of creative materials.

The New York Times reports that Google has launched a voice recognition application for the iPhone that allows users to call Google and conduct a search verbally.  Users “can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like ‘Where’s the nearest Starbucks?’ or ‘How tall is Mount Everest?’ The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.”

So, poegling can now arguably join the oral poetry tradition that produced works of anonymous authorship like Beowulf, the Homeric epics, and much of the world’s folk literature.  The poetics of orality- brought to you by Google.

Related: see Mary Karr’s Poet’s Choice column in the Washington Post today.  “Poetry’s roots in sacred song are undeniable. Native American hunters around a fire praised the Great Spirit for sending buffalo. In other cultures, tillers of the soil begged a cloudless sky to split open and loose down rain. I would rank Robert Bly’s translations of Kabir — a 15th-century Indian ecstatic poet raised Muslim and infused with wisdom from both the Sufis and Hindus — up there with the Hebrew Psalms and the Song of Solomon.”

Today the New York Times reports that Google’s philanthropic arm has put together a fascinating new way to predict the outbreak of influenza. By tracking searches for phrases like “flu symptoms”, Google is able to tell when people are likely to be suffering from the virus. Reports the Times: “Its news service at google.org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading.”

We here at Poegles.com have long been interested in how the collective suffering of humanity is recorded on the Internet in the various scraps of text that are left by those publishing to the web. Some of the poegles in our current collection attempt to illustrate collective experiences, such as Before the War and At the Scene of the Accident (below). Before the War paints a picture of how war changes society by aggregating a variety of phrases returned by searching for that phrase. At the Scene of the Accident takes an all too common moment in modern society- a car crash- and conflates the results in an eerie pantoum.

We wonder whether in future the predictive qualities of internet search technology will give us insight into things beyond epidemics. Could some algorithm be arrived at that could scour news, blog postings and other types of media for the kind of incendiary language that is the prelude to war? Could an analysis of search results predict other kinds of societal developments, like changes over time on a political issue? Poeglers, like poets across time, are at the fore of these questions, inspecting the raw results one by one, looking for truths in the sea of human experience returned by a simple search.

At the Scene of the Accident

Immediately stop the vehicle
Check to see is anyone is injured
Never admit fault
Always cooperate with law enforcement

Check to see if anyone is injured
Notify your insurance agent
Always cooperate with the law enforcement
The evidence proved Morris complained of pain

Notify your insurance agent
No final casualty figure was available
The evidence proved Morris complained of pain
Roscoe observed a vehicle overturned in a ditch

No final casualty figure was available
Even casual remarks may be used in court
Roscoe observed a vehicle overturned in a ditch
By this time Mike had already died

Even casual remarks may be used in court
Memories quickly fade
By this time Mike had already died
The cause of death was delayed resuscitation

Memories quickly fade
Never admit fault
The cause of death was delayed resuscitation
Immediately stop the vehicle