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From today’s New York Times:

March 4, 2009

Fisher Poets Celebrate an Industry in Decline

Work, sometimes just the memory of it, brings the fisher poets to Astoria, Ore., for a weekend each year.

The Times invites readers to submit original verse that addresses the current economic downturn, exploring the relationship of work to a way of life and a geographical place. We welcome sonnet or song, quick couplets or a haiku. (Audio and video links welcome.)  Submit a Song or Poem | Related Article

More, and an interactive feature with the fisher poets, here.

“How far back can the history of art go? The Lascaux cave paintings in southwestern France are thought to be some 16,000 years old. The Venus of Willendorf, a plump and bosomy statuette from lower Austria, may be about 9,000 years older. A few coarse figurines — found in Morocco, the Golan Heights and other places — may be several dozen millenniums more ancient still.But some psychologists argue that the origins of art should be sought much further back. They look to the Pleistocene epoch, which began about 1.6 million years ago, when — in the course of some 80,000 generations of surviving and mating — our ancestors may have evolved the instincts that led eventually to the works of Bach, Rembrandt and Proust. ‘Darwinian aesthetics’ is what Denis Dutton, the author of ‘The Art Instinct,’ calls this idea, and he thinks its time has come.”

Sounds like a fascinating book- interesting “that the sorts of landscape pictures preferred by 8-year-olds around the world seem to mirror the types of flat, savannah-like vistas in which their distant ancestors may well have thrived.”

More of Anthony Gottlieb’s excellent NY Times review.  Also, briefly noted in The New Yorker.

As Gottlieb points out, Dutton spends some time on forgery and plagiarism (see earlier essay on the subject).  We’ll post more on his thoughts here- especially around found art.  In an essay on his website he writes:

“But by now it should be obvious that the strict demarcation between art and craft as I’ve begun to explain it exists only in the philosopher’s imagination.  In the first place, almost all traditionally acknowledged art involves, indeed, requires craft, requires the application of technique.  At least it has historically, and the training for practitioners in all of the arts has involved the mastery of techniques (though this differs among the arts: training as a musician requires a more rigourous and structured course of technical preparation than training as a novelist — writing good novels isn’t any easier than playing the piano well, but the training for it is less routinised).  Thus for the last 2500 years it might be said at least that craft of some sort has been considered a necessary condition for artistic practice — a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition.  And in this respect, one way to understand the appearance of Found Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art on the modern scene. All of these movements are in part attacks on the very place of craft in art — attempts to produce art without craft.  (For that very reason, among others, I believe these schools of art do not have a vital future ahead of them. )”

I wonder- is there not craft in Duchamp’s selection of an item, for instance, or in other forms of found art?  Not going indict Dutton on this point without reading his book, but seems he’s less than charitable on this subject.

Dutton on Brian Lehrer Show:

Via the New York Times:  “‘He always said he got the job because he fit in the robot suit,’ said the actress June Lockhart, who played the marooned family’s matriarch, Maureen Robinson.”

In honor of Mr May, we re-publish an occasional poegle from the Collection.

My First Telescope

I used a little eyepiece
And a pair of my father’s optical glasses,

A cereal box, a drainpipe,
Cedar roofing shingles, a record,
And a huge cardboard tube.

You could see a lot from a backyard
In Ohio, but I was living
In a mid-floor apartment
In Brooklyn. I made basic drawings

Of sunspots. I managed to observe
A few double stars
And the Great Nebula of Orion.
Stargazers, like musicians,
Typically learn
On inferior instruments.

Small wonder, then,
That it is the telescope
That has seen more changes
Than anything else
In my life.

-Editor (search phrase “my first telescope”)

From the New York Times:  “Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series ‘Conversations With God,’ recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com about his son’s kindergarten winter pageant.

“During a dress rehearsal, he wrote, a group of children spelled out the title of a song, ‘Christmas Love,’ with each child holding up a letter. One girl held the ‘m’ upside down, so that it appeared as a ‘w,’ and it looked as if the group was spelling ‘Christ Was Love.’ It was a heartwarming Christmas story from a writer known for his spiritual teachings.

“Except it never happened — to him.”

At Poegles.com, we’re fans of plagiarism- of the sort where scraps of text are repurposed in the body of a different work.  But stealing an entire narrative?  Boo!

From the New York Times- More news on Elizabeth Alexander, the nation’s next inaugural poet.

“After eight years of mangled and manipulated language, and the palpable effects of that in the real world, it seems like any gesture toward clarity of expression and dignity of life is welcome,” Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine, said in an e-mail message.

More

Today the New York Times reports that “a concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now. ”

At Poegles.com, when we read phrases like “anomalies in the sky tell you what to look for”, and ”the stakes for dark matter go beyond cosmology”, we get excited.  Even better are sentences like ”you could think of it as a hamster running around on a wheel in its cage. We cannot see the hamster or the cage, but we can sort of feel the impact of the hamster running.” 

We hope you’ll take some inspiration, too, and write a poegle that addresses this week’s contest theme- ‘lost in space’.  Who knows what you might turn up?  Maybe even some exotic dark matter.  Visit the contest here.

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

Make sure you get a chance to read John Ashbery’s election day poem in the New York Times, Informercial 2.

There were five other poems in the paper on the Op-Ed page.  Perhaps the New York Times was inspired by the Friday Poegle Contest?