Rise of the Plagiosphere

A third technology will add yet more capacity to find similarities in writing. Artificial-intelligence researchers at MIT and other universities are developing techniques for identifying nonverbatim similarity between documents to make possible the detection of nonverbatim plagiarism. While the investigators may have in mind only cases of brazen paraphrase, a program of this kind can multiply the number of parallel passages severalfold

Theo Jansen's Animaris Currens Ventosa Walking

click on film and select.

The Newsweek debacle seen by Kung Fu Monkey

Poemanias nominates the 18th May blog 'That Ironic Smell' for a Rantaward...

'This administration -- the guys who threw out the Geneva Convention (fact - and proudly, just ask the AG); sends prisoners to countries so they can be tortured (factitty fact fact); and put into place policies which led to images of Muslim men, 70-90% of whom were innocent according to the Department of Defense, being electroshocked , dog attacked, and bound naked, these images being spread worldwide -- these guys claim Newsweek is damaging America's image abroad? Newsweek?'

Kunitz turns 100

In one passage Mr. Kunitz talks about the relationship between poetry and gardening: "I conceived of the garden as a poem in stanzas. Each terrace contributes to the garden as a whole in the same way each stanza in a poem has a life of its own."

Schmidt wrestles Astley

In the PNR review editorial. More rumblings from up north.

'In the British (Astley) lecture the priorities and strategies of Thatcherite market politics triumphantly displace the traditional disciplines of serious editorial engagement, and the marketplace is given its head in the area of artistic choice'.

Apologies for absense

Its been busy poemanias way. Not to mention the feeds seem to be on holiday...

Larkin as Juvenile Offender

'Even Sidney Keyes and John Heath-Stubbs, the Oxford classmates he envied and mocked, became themselves earlier than Larkin.'

Love the 'became themselves'. It's that odd feeling, every evening: step out of the coffin, remove the stake...

Does Ammons make the reading list?

Not with lines like:

'Nature, you know, is not a one-way street:
its most consistent figure is turning -- '

Rilke's rejection slips make bestseller list

His 'Letters to a Young Poet' is the 13th most popular book sold to university students in Massachusetts. Daniel Bosch worries they are missing the point.

The incredible disappearing Kleinzahler

Wow, you can write a whole piece about SF bay area poets and completely forget to mention August, who btw has had at least one poem and usually more in the poemanias top ten for years... here's an oldy from the 'major moments in reality' playlist:


Where Souls Go

Not telling where: down the hill
and out of sight -
soapbox derby heroes in a new dimension.
Don't bother to resurrect them
unless some old newsreel clip
catches them shocked
with a butter knife in the toaster.
Countless snaps and episodes in space
once you hit the viewfinder that fits.
It's a lie anyway, all Hollywood -
the Mind is a too much thing
cleansing itself like a great salt sea.
Rather, imagine them in the eaves

among pidgeons
or clustered round the D train's fan
as we cross the bridge to Brooklyn.
And make that a Friday night
Julay say. We are walking past
the liquor store to visit our love.
Two black boys are eating Corn Doodles
in the most flamboyant manner possibe.
She waits, trying
to have the best song on as we arrive.
The moon is blurred.
Our helicopters are shooting at fieldworkers.
The Mets are down 3-1 in the 6th.

August Kleinzahler

Donne was early Kylie

Another(Donne) love poem, Break of Day, was set and printed simultaneously by three composers — John Dowland, Orlando Gibbons and William Corkine. “That would only have been possible if the songs themselves were popular enough to sell well,” Dr Holmes said.

When you need a good name fast

According to George Miller, Language is incorrigibly vague

by the time the computer finishes looking up all 13 of the words in this couplet(but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep), the product is 3,616,013,016,000 (three trillion six hundred sixteen billion thirteen million and sixteen thousand) possible compound meanings.

Armitage's VE View

The curtains drawn.
A black, underground war.
We kept it dark.
We dug deep,
moved through tunnels and tubes.
We slept in a midnight garden,
in tin sheds
or crypts or bunkers
of railway sleepers and piled earth.

We dreamed with the worms
under a Braille of stars,
under the ploughed lawn ...

Martin Seligman's Eudaemonia

'The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is about'.

Pinker on Language

Language comes so naturally to us that we are apt to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is.

Education 2020

Students in the 2020s will explore knowledge in customized, full-immersive, 3-D learning environments, able to see, hear, smell, and touch simulated objects and interact with synthespians to foster a heightened sense of curiosity, says Diana Walczak, Artistic Director and Cofounder, Kleiser-Walczak.

Are we thinking what he's thinking?

In a recent conference webcast, Tyler Cowen of the Marginal Revolution blog discusses blogs, the internet and what people want to read these days which was something along the lines of: short, digestible, preferably one page and then move on to the next. I'll add vivid, arresting,with a few choice metaphors to reveal something novel...and we might just come up with a completely new and fresh literary form: the uhhhh, the pemo, no, the moep?

Olivia reviews Alan Jenkins

for the tower poetry site. Good to see the tower poetry anonymous review thing is of the past, and gone too the vials of venom.

'"Galatea" sees the speaker cursed by a lover, casting him off, in his little boat, "in your little craft of wood,/Your little craft of words."

Where is Nemo?

Pinsky argues persuasively that poets must both register the strong but shifting currents of the moment and swim in opposition to them...

Campell-Johnson on Alice Oswald

At last: a use for the mobile phone

Paul Farley's

The Front

It stood firm for a fortnight, a cloud coast
that marked the front. All along the west
it towered; a full pan from north to south
held it in view. We watched it from the beach...

The Locust in Winter

from vitamin q:

Some more animal proverbs, this time translated from Ndebele (a language of Southern Africa):

1 Baboons laugh at one another's foreheads.
2 The leopard licks all its spots, black and white.
3 The mamba is out grazing, so the weasel is happy.
4 You cannot go chasing after two gazelles.
5 He is a piece of firewood with a scorpion.
6 A rat is not to be put with pumpkin seeds.
7 The thing that belongs to someone else is the gravy of the jackal.
8 He is as wise as the locust of winter.
9 The little crab is like its mother.
10 The civet is caught even though the ropes have rotted.
11 The elephant is not burdened by its trunk.
12 A polecat is not to be skinned in public.
13 He was looked at by an ant-bear.*
14 He was struck by a dung beetle.

**Said of someone suffering from stress or depression.Source: Ndebele Proverbs (Mambo Press 1977

Not to mention, she works tugboats...

Shaughnessy: Most of my students are attracted to poetry because they think it’s a way to get famous...

Bookslut reviews Heaney's Burial at Thebes

Ismene, quick, come here!
What’s to become of us?
Why are we always the ones?

Maurice enthroned at PL...

All Riordan fans (and that includes poemanias) celebrating today