Trial and Error

Trial and error is pretty much the basis for most forms of activity but as this is a site based around poetry let’s stick with the writing of a poem. I don’t know what the ratio of poets starting a new work on a computer screen or with a blank piece of paper, pencil and rubber are, but I’m of the latter persuasion. A4, Lamy mechanical 0.7 mm lead and rubber.

But, obviously, not a choice that could be made a hundred and more years ago, although I’ve just thought of typewriters. Surely not for poems?

Back to the subject. I reckon there are two methods of addressing trial and error. The first is by oneself and the second by an input from another’s perspective. With the presumption that one knows there is an error to be taken care of in the first place. Not necessarily the case.

I’m starting with Walt Whitman, one of my heroes, and his collection entitled ‘Leaves of Grass ’. He self published the first version in 1855 when it contained a mere twelve poems and then spent the rest of his life altering and expanding the collection until he died in 1892, when the collection contained over four hundred poems.

Among the poems in the early Leaves of Grass editions (albeit sometimes under different titles) were "Song of Myself", "Song of the Open Road", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry". Later editions would contain Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd".

The only known extant manuscript page of the first edition of 'Leaves of Grass ' shows the trial and errors needed to get to this:

The pure contralto sings in the organloft.
The carpenter dresses his plank. . . the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm, . . .

Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass revisions

For someone who looked for advice from someone else then it’s hard to escape from the influence of Ezra Pound on T S Eliot and the writing of The Wasteland.

He advised Eliot to cut the original draft of around eight hundred lines to 433 plus he told him to change the title from ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices ’ which came from a Dickens character in 'Our Mutual Friend ' who was noted for his ability to imitate the voices of the police in crime reports. Eliot thought it was brilliant. Pound insisted it was cut.

Here’s an image showing revisions made by Pound and Vivienne, Eliot’s first wife, to The Wasteland's  "On Margate Sands" stanza.

I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
(ll. 300–02)

revisions to Eliot's On Margate Sands stanza in The Wasteland

And in the note accompanying the information it states that "After straining one of his hands rowing while at graduate school, Eliot preferred to write by using a typewriter where possible".

Pound told him to chuck an entire opening section set in a Boston saloon with stuff like:

First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place,
There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind,

and start with this:

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

TS Eliot and Ezra Pound

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Imprinting

When I glanced at the word imprinting as a topic I was very enthusiastic. I could look into various types of publishing and/or printing and it so happens that yesterday my friend and I were shown how to make a small notebook using paper that had a watermark and finding out about those would be so interesting as well.

Unfortunately, when I started looking into what imprinting is I soon discovered that imprinting is different to an imprint. I’ll take the Chambers definition:

Imprinting: a learning process in young animals in which their social preferences become restricted to their own species or a substitute for this.

‘Imprinting according to the Wildlife Centre of Virginia is a form of learning in which an animal gains its sense of species identification. Birds do not automatically know what they are when they hatch – they imprint on their parents during a critical period of development. After imprinting, they will identify with that species for life. (A bit like football teams?)

imprinting i

Imprinting for wild birds is crucial to their immediate and long-term survival. For example, precocial (word of the week) baby birds (such as ducks, geese, and turkeys) begin the process of imprinting shortly after hatching so that they follow the appropriate adult, providing them with safety.

Imprinting allows baby birds to understand appropriate behaviours and vocalizations for their species, and helps them visually identify with other members of their species so they choose appropriate mates later in life.

The timing of the imprinting stage varies from species to species, and some species of birds are more susceptible to imprinting inappropriately on human caregivers for reasons not fully understood.’

It was first reported in domestic chickens, by Sir Thomas More in 1516 as described in his treatise Utopia, 350 years earlier than by the 19th-century amateur biologist Douglas Spalding. It was rediscovered by ethologist Oskar Heinroth, and studied extensively and popularized by Konrad Lorenz working with greylag geese.

Lorenz demonstrated how incubator-hatched geese would imprint on the first suitable moving stimulus they saw within what he called a "critical period" between 13 and 16 hours shortly after hatching. For example, the goslings would imprint on Lorenz himself (to be more specific, on his wading boots), and he is often depicted being followed by a gaggle of geese who had imprinted on him. Lorenz also found that the geese could imprint on inanimate objects. In one notable experiment, they followed a box placed on a model train in circles around the track.

imprinting ii

In human–computer interaction, baby duck syndrome denotes the tendency for computer users to ‘imprint’ on the first system they learn, then judge other systems by their similarity to that first system. The result is that ‘users generally prefer systems similar to those they learned on and dislike unfamiliar systems’. The issue may present itself relatively early in a computer user's experience, and it has been observed to impede education of students in new software systems or user interfaces.

I love the name of this syndrome.

I can’t find an appropriate poem to fit the bill and I do like the following by one of my heroes Walt Whitman.

ONCE I pass'd through a populous city, imprinting my brain, for

         future use, with its shows, architecture, customs, and

         traditions;

Yet now, of all that city, I remember only a woman I casually met

         there, who detain'd me for love of me;

Day by day and night by night we were together,--All else has long

         been forgotten by me;

I remember, I say, only that woman who passionately clung to me;

Again we wander--we love--we separate again;

Again she holds me by the hand--I must not go!

I see her close beside me, with silent lips, sad and tremulous.

From the 1860 edition of  'Leaves of Grass '.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Hooked

I don’t know where I’ll end up with this because as I’ve been going through various meanings of hooked. I’ve come across a link to an exhibition at the Science Gallery, London. It was entitled ‘HOOKED: WHEN WANT BECOMES NEED’ which had taken place between the 21st Sept 2018 and 27th January 2019.

the Science Gallery, London

It says ‘From gambling to gaming and smartphones to social media, HOOKED invited you to question what makes us as humans vulnerable to addiction and interrogated the underlying factors and routes to recovery. We invited you to challenge the stigmas associated with addiction, consider addiction as a health issue we are all susceptible to, and explore how recovery takes many forms.’

Which didn’t sound that promising until I saw some of the names of the Exhibits. The first one to make me look again was entitled ‘The Curtain of Broken Dreams’ by Natasha Caruana. I mean what a title for a poem.

It actually refers to the collection of pawned, discarded golden rings, which physically enmesh you (in the exhibition presumably), and which represents approximately 1% of divorces in the UK over a typical 12-month period.

The Curtain of Broken Dreams, Natasha Caruana, 2017

Number seven in the list of exhibits (there are twenty four) is an exhibition with the title of ‘Short Periods of Structured Nothingness’. Absolutely brilliant. I know a couple of poets who could really go to town with that.

Apparently it relates how Blast Theory worked with an anonymised group of young women who shared their lives and experiences with the artists over seven days through instant messaging, photos and phone calls.

Katriona Beales exhibit is called Entering the Machine Zone II which I find fascinating as much for the title (it’s the number II that intrigues me) as for the work itself which (from the brief summary) explores the theory that a major driver for gamblers is not money, but the dissociative, trance like state that continual play generates.

Entering the Machine Zone II, Katriona Beales, 2018

Tony Smoking Backwards by Richard Billingham is a title that could be worked on. The summary says: Richard’s subjects reflect his working class roots, but the underlying issues in his work are universal: anyone from any class can get bored or develop dependencies, even if some do so with more material comfort.

And exhibit number 22 is the wonderfully titled Another Day on Earth (Marshmallow Pants) by Olivia Locher. I haven’t read the whole summary as I don’t want to spoil the beginning:

‘Ladies tights stuffed with mouthwatering marshmallows suggest an unwieldy, uncomfortable body, deformed by the fluffy, swollen confections...’

Well all that was unexpected. And I’ve never heard of the Science Gallery London. As I said earlier the above exhibition was from 2018/9. The current one is entitled Quantum Untangled and is on until Feb 28th, 2026.

It can be found here:

King’s College London, Guy’s Campus
Great Maze Pond
London SE1 9GU
Nearest station: London Bridge (use Guy’s Hospital exit).

I’ve been writing about how the titles of the exhibits could be the title of a poem as a hook to read the poem which has got me thinking about a title which has done that for me. After a bit of a think I’m going for ‘Song of Myself’ by Walt Whitman as not only did it attract my attention at the time I first saw it but it also has the best first and hookish lines, in my opinion.

Walt Whitman, Song Of Myself

Song of Myself (1892 version)

1

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

                                                                    Walt Whitman


Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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YAWPING

As many of you know, three months ago I decided to take a break from the blog in order to focus on my MA poetry portfolio. I am pleased to say that said portfolio is now finished, prettily bound and sitting on a desk waiting to be marked. Therefore, with little more than nail biting and worrying to endure over the coming weeks, I’m now in a position to return and start blogging again.

When I discovered the theme for my first week back there was definitely a small sigh of despair. I’ve always been a keen and varied reader but, somehow, comic books have never really made it onto that reading list.

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