This blog appears to have been added to Ron Silliman’s blogroll, whether by accident or design I know not. A hearthy welcome is extended to all weary adventurers descending from Mt Sillimanjaro. Get your burger inna bun and souvenir keyring here. Steam baths are round the back.

I labelled this blog poetix because writing “-ics” words with an “-x” makes them sound simultaneously a bit techno and a bit Goscinny-Uderzo - there’s a gesture of solidarity there with the fractured bard Cacophonix.

Although making computer programs and making poems feel like similar activities to me, I don’t have a theory of either that could articulate their similarities. I can imagine, however, that there might be poets for whom making computer programs feels nothing at all like making poems, perhaps primarily because the focus of their poem-making activity is not on the poem as an object, a structure of interrelated parts.

Nagy Rashwan pointed out the constructedness of the poems in my sequence The Spirit Zone quite a few years back, which seemed odd to me at the time: there was more in those poems that had simply been allowed to happen than in anything I’d written previously. Noble Mice and Half Cocks are still more haphazardly put-together, and take in a field of reference that is increasingly - in my view - a disjointed manifold rather than a stable Gestalt. (I bear a grudge against holism, against the theory that it is the whole that determines the meaning of the parts. The parts can neither be enumerated nor summed. They are greater than any whole that could be made out of them). But they remain constructs, made things, inasmuch as they are stable syntactic arrangements, whatever the craziness (and how lame and embarrassing to be caught overstating this) of their semantic-erotic lives.

Computer programs don’t have semantic-erotic lives in quite the same way as poems do: I/O is strictly controlled, especially in at least one of the programming languages I favour. But they are works of syntax also, and their practical meaning depends finally on the sequencing and interconnection of syntactic elements.

As practical art, as tekhne, the making of poems and of computer programs are both activities in which negotiation with the gods of syntax is a precondition for the production of flashy semantic side-effects. There are programmers for whom the side-effect is all: they are the hackers of the “language is a tool” and “getting the job done” (invariably “under tight deadlines”) school. There are poets, I believe, who think it’s fussy and weird to bother too much about the textuality of their texts, given that the point of writing poems at all is to communicate. But there you go.

I am a fussy and weird poet, and a fussy and weird programmer.