Chrisonomicon

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

I was recovering some old homework files I'd stored from my junior year in high school and came across an old poem I wrote over seven years ago, along with some commentary:

definition
by Chris Paul

i am a composition,
usu. in verse,
marked by language
chosen esp. for its
sound,
beauty,
evocative power.
esp. lyrical expression,
paper façade,
ideal,
metrical verse.

to have a destructive influence on:
corrupt.

to deliver from sin:
redeem.

to fascinate:
enrapture.

to bewilder:
mislead.

belonging to, derived from, or associated with a divine power:
sacred.

a quality or
a combination of qualities
that delights the
senses
or appeals to the mind.

an object,
gen. composed by one of the profession,
esp. poets.

hard to do, achieve, understand, or master.

i am a poem ('pO-&m):
a pale shelter,
esp. for foolish.

And from my required follow-up commentary: "This is a self-conscious poem. The word 'definition,' per se, is '1. The statement of the specific meaning of (a word). 2. The description of the nature of: explanation. 3. The delineation: specification.' Am I able to define the "poetry" using this poem? My feelings towards poetry are illustrated in the choice of words that are defined, beginning with the word "poem"; what better way to find out what a word means, than look it up in the dictionary? Of course, personal opinion is important, but there always will be certain concrete axioms that we can depend on in our world, and word definitions are not only a way of obtaining consensus on them, but can even be perceived as concrete themselves. The second through sixth stanzas are definitions of words that describe reactions to poetry we have discussed using the studied material. Except for consumable poetry, each is represented and can be found within most of the poems. The seventh and ninth stanzas are definitions that illustrate my feelings towards poetry after documenting each of the previous reactions. . . ."

I love the systematic approach I took for this assignment — a little bit of would-be foreshadowing into my present occupation — and the attempt I made at sounding artsy and official with abbreviations of "especially" and "usually." Also, the last definition was culled from/inspired by a Tears for Fears song, although I can't remember the exact one. This, along with the swiped dictionary bits, seems to lend a sense of plagiarism similar — but by no means comparable — to Eddan Katz's use of a former framework in Revolution Is Not an AOL Keyword.

Mary Hodder, who writes for bIPlog in connection with Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, has also experimented with what she calls "cross-pollination," or the creation of films and poetry out of previously published images and words. This brings on a whole slew of copyright and fair-use issues, particularly in regards to information available on the internet. Hodder's explanation:

About six years ago I started sampling and remixing words, similar to audio sampling, I found on the Internet. This has brought about the most interesting works I’ve made, and I still find things that are several years old exciting. Maybe it’s because it feels like a conversation between me and the other writers, or that I feel inspired by the original purpose and intent of the words before changing them.

Perhaps this poem was a way of getting in touch with those "concrete axioms" of society or the writers of which I admire and seek to emulate in my pursuit of boiling experience down to words.