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| Tom Jenks from An Anatomy of Melancholy |
If I get too melancholy you
can spank me with the riding crop.
Hello
darkness. We have our Before Sunrise
every night.
A serious post tonight on feelings and states of mind.
I didn't think I'd ever found
candy creepy.
Why
did the mango go to the therapist?
Guy is player. Guy meets girl. Guy stops being player. Girl
leaves forever.
The sublime melancholy
nonsense of the Porpoise Song.
Slow, sad, dramatic. An absolutely fabulous marathon.
Weekdays are so utterly
mundane. Classic FM.
Paul
McCartney. Banged this in autumn.
Describe your life in one
word. It's an art.
A
droplet of emotion. I dissolve into a puddle.
Can someone tell me if general anaesthetic causes
melancholy?
Is melancholy a price we have
to pay to make people happy?
Is
there a name for this symptom? Have you tried an exterminator?
Turning anger into vengeance will blind even the brightest
of stars.
Missed eagle day. It's all
wolves and dragons.
I want a Wes Anderson kitchen and a Tim Burton
bathroom.
I am listening to some very
deep music right now.
Every
time I think about my ballet girls, I grow all melancholy.
I love my melancholy toast
socks. Girls like talking to me.
Island
of the sequined love nun. This dog is so melancholy.
I dislike these waves of melancholy that randomly wash over
me.
The insufficient things I
sought wet my painful cheeks.
This
is supposed to be relaxing. Can I go back now?
Poetics
My Ph. D.,
which I began at Edge Hill in 2012, is concerned with investigating the ways
that digital technology can be used in the area of innovative poetry in general
and in relation to conceptualism and the Oulipo in particular.
Computers, in
the developed world at least, are so widespread as to be unavoidable. There are
good and bad things about this. One thing is for sure is that whether we like
it or not, computers are not going away. If King Canute were demonstrating the
limits of his power today, he would not order the tide to turn back; he would
try and delete himself from Facebook.
I am not a
year zero zealot and I do not define my practice solely by the use of
technology. In fact, I don’t define in that way at all. I am simply using what
lies to hand. I am not interested in the machine per se, or in its undoubted capacity to produce dazzling artefacts.
Trying to write a program that passes the Turing test by producing output that
is indistinguishable from that of a human is a dead end. Human beings can write
like human beings and there are over 7 billion of us. What I am interested in
is what happens when technology is used as an adjunct to human practice. The
pioneers of computer poetry had to book hours of ruinously expensive processing
time on institutional mainframes. Now, we carry in our pockets devices many
times more powerful than the machines that helped put people on the moon. Using
a computer is no more remarkable than using an iron, a toaster or a lawnmower.
The digital has become everyday. Programs and apps can be thought of as tools
to be picked up and dropped in the way an artist might a tube of paint or a
pair of scissors.
The work
presented here, a selection from a 172 stanza re-imagining of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, was created using Twitter. In other works, I
have used spreadsheets to cut up texts, database programs to re-configure and
transform them and mobile phone technology to generate them. All the software I
use is readily commercially available and whilst my skill level is probably
above average, it is by no means stratospheric.
Many poets use
technology, but more hold it in suspicion. Inherent in this is distrust not
just of technology, but also of the value of procedure and process. Incorporating
non-human elements into the creative process violates the still prevalent
notion of the poet as seer whose proper focus is on the world within. I have no
problem with confessional work or self-expression. Rather, it is my belief that
self-expression is automatic and unavoidable and so need not be actively
pursued like a rare and elusive beast. A musician is not being any less
expressive when using a synthesiser than when using a piano or a lute. A poet
is not being any less expressive when using an Android app than when using a
typewriter or a quill. Poetry must engage with the world as it is in its
totality. Digital technology is part of that world.
'The best link for me,' Tom says, 'is http://zshboo.org, which has links to everywhere else.' And here's an internal link to a piece Tom wrote in 2008, here.
