Auto-generated text as life coach, fortune teller, and poetry tool.

By Saara Raappana, Cellpoems Co-Editor

I didn’t realize what happened until it was too late—I’d already hit send. My text message was zooming down an invisible track across town to my roommate’s phone. I’d meant to tell him that I’d gotten caught in an early afternoon thunderstorm, that I wouldn’t be home for another 20 minutes. Instead, texting blind as I tried to open my umbrella while squeezing myself under the heftiest limb of a spindly tree, I hadn’t paid attention to which words the predictive text was inserting under my frantic thumb strokes. I’d sent this:

Stuck in the pain. Good soon, though.

This was a few years ago—I was tunnel-visioning through my second semester of grad school: I’d gone overly pale and skinny from staying up all night rejecting half-finished paper ideas and obsessing over my non-existent thesis while living on coffee, cigarettes, and bags of mini chocolate bars. I’d forgotten all about full nights of sleep or buying—much less eating—vegetables, and I was too entrenched to notice. I’d let myself get so out of control that my T9 was staging an intervention. Holding my half-open umbrella as the rain filtered through the tree and trickled through my hair, I was struck by both the bathetic truth of the text and by the temporality it expressed: Good soon. I didn’t bother correcting it. Tellingly, my roommate didn’t notice the text was a mix-up.

I loved the M.A.S.H. game when I was a kid, the one where you chose five possibilities in several categories to predict your future: spouse, job, car, car color, number of kids, and the color of the Mansion, Apartment, Shack, or House where your future would unfold. After generating a random number, the fortune teller counted through, scratching out option after option until you were down to one prediction in each category. I loved choosing the names and colors that would make two narrow rows of potential futures snake up and down the notepaper, loved the ritualized secrecy of the practitioner hiding her pencil to draw concentric circles until the I called “stop,” hoping to catch the perfect moment that would count right up to marriage to Johnny Depp, a reasonable number of kids, a Ferrari and a purple mansion—all that, plus a glamorous career as a celebrity veterinarian or a foreign correspondent.

But where’s the fun in perfect futures? Per the rules, you had to add some hateful possibilities to the mix. The most giggle-worthy prognostications came from the most wildly inconvenient or incongruous possibilities, when the numbers declared you’d be ball-and-chaining it with Rodney Dangerfield and 268 screaming children crammed into a puce shack while you drove your dump truck to a day job at the Pick-n-Roll. From that limited set of variables you could end up with an infinitely shiftable spread of futures.

The ultimate pleasure of the M.A.S.H. game wasn’t those lists of blurted possibilities or the random number generated by the concentric circle—those were great, as was the suspense that built as each line was deleted. But the ultimate goal came after the final variables were chosen—the technicolor strip that flickered before my eyes where a grown-up version of me tied my apron and got into the passenger seat of a plaid dump truck. Johnny Depp, in the driver seat, lit his cigarillo before driving me to my shift at the Pick-N-Roll. Two-hundred sixty-six of my 268 children dangled out of the mansion windows or held matches against the dry hedges,  screaming goodbye. The delight was in the surprise of the final product, nothing like I’d originally pictured it.

All these years later, I get the limited-but-infinite possibilities of predictive text. I’m fast on my thumbs, but with three-to-four possible letters per key, my text messages still occasionally surprise me. I try to say I’ll be there later but end up demanding to be lauded. I think I’m describing my new lipstick but end up with the clearly aloe-fortified kissstick. Money shifts to moody (predictive text can be both topical and maudlin) and a late-night weekend text about “the condition of the roads” turns to “the condition of the sober” (Public service message: Don’t text while on the sober no matter how roads you are.). I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about the ramifications of shit turning into shiv or “zombie attack” going into the cellular ether as “womb attack.”

M.A.S.H., predictive text, and the discipline of reading and writing poetry have conspired together to teach me that it’s my job to turn accidents and inconveniences into tiny blasts of generativity. Mind you, botched texts are not, themselves, poetry. I’m so far unaware of a single poem that’s even been inspired by a T9 glitch (though I may have written something close to “caught in the pain” during my 14 year-old, black-nail-polish phase). But humor me: picture Frost thumbing out the first incarnation of “no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader” as an explanation for a flubbed text.

Aside from flexing one’s metrical chops, the restrictions poets place on ourselves serve to distract the conscious, calculating—often disappointingly predictable—mind, using inconvenience and accident to push the writer toward those head-popping surprises that will bump a well-wrought poem over the edge to greatness. They take the idea or plan of the poem and shake it up, and we keep coming up with new techniques to achieve this: Everything from the surrealists’ automatic writing trances to the Beats’ “first thought, best thought” (even if it was performative), to the intricate lattices that we have to climb to achieve the rigid requirements of a sestina or a villanelle all serve to distract us into forgetting to drive the poem in its original direction; and the delight is in the surprise of the final product, nothing like we’d pictured it. Under the best circumstances, when I think I’m letting someone know a storm will make me late, what I get instead is a description of my secret self, so shockingly accurate that I just stand there and let the rain wash over me.

Much nearer to The Beginning than The Now, shortly after He created everything, God created Girl Poet, in His image, to help Him remember and describe what He’d created.

Girl Poet did a swell job and, as specified under God’s list of REASONS FOR CREATING GIRL POET,  she did it in such a way that made God feel exclusively awesome about His creation.  Girl Poet was awesome in word and deed, and she was permitted to be aware of and enjoy her awesomeness, as long as she used her work to make others feel like they were awesome, too.

Everything was cool, because Girl Poet enjoyed creating awesome songs, and felt content in all the groovy characteristics God allowed her.  Her only problem with the contract was her obligation to make everyone else believe they were awesome.  Girl Poet, poet that she was, was an observer by nature.  She paid attention to the folks around the camp, and not everyone was even sorta cool, let alone awesome.

Girl Poet looked around and said to herself, “What is UP?  I am supposed to write beautiful songs that reflect the unconditional awesomeness of all God’s creation.  But that is effing difficult sometimes!”

There came a day when some guy got stoned to death for accidentally getting a little pee on his tunic, then making the mistake of getting within 100 yards of the tabernacle.  He got the crap stoned out of him and this was a turning point for Girl Poet, or so goes the story coming down.

Girl Poet saw the Anti-Awesome violent episode and was perturbed.  And she could not help but write a song about what happened, exactly as it had happened.  And it happened that the song that came from the stoning story was a little sad, and contained some fury from deep inside Girl Poet, and when The G heard it He wasn’t jazzed, because the song did not make Him or The Nation look that awesome.  He came looking for Girl Poet, and she hid from Him, but as you can probably guess, He figured out where she was (He really is awesome).

Girl Poet said, “Lord, somebody got stoned for getting a little piss on his pants.  What should I do?”

And God said, “You do your duty as outlined in the agreement GOD’S REASONS FOR CREATING GIRL POET.  You tell the story and make it look awesome.”

That’s when Girl Poet said, “But I don’t want to make it look awesome. I want to TELL IT LIKE IT IS.”

God looked at Girl Poet.  He didn’t know what to do.   She had tiny fangs, and hair the color of mashed carrots.  She was cute as a kitten on a Camaro.  But she was getting on his nerves.  He decided:

It is not good for Girl Poet to be alone, so concerned about telling it like it is.  I will make her a partner to help her.

So God put Girl Poet in a deep sleep, and from one of her ribs he created Boy Poet.

God really liked Boy Poet immediately.  God realized, Now the Boy Poet can make everything look awesome!  He shall not care about telling it like it is; rather he will be preoccupied with making even his own asshole characteristics seem awesomely charming in their backward-ness!  And the Girl Poet– well, who really cares what she does, cause now there’s the Boy!

And so Girl Poet was free to tell it like it is.

Boy Poet looked at Girl Poet and was in love with her.  Girl Poet woke up and looked at Boy Poet and was vaguely amused.  “Neat,” Girl Poet said, “he can write in the sand with his pee, whereas I cannot.”

*  *  * *  *  *  *  *  *

Beth Ferda is a Cellpoems editor and blog contributor.

My aim is to sound so pure and so liquid that travelers will take me across the desert with them, or to the North Pole, or wherever I am going.¹
Louise Bogan, in a letter to Theodore Roethke, September 1937

In this letter, Louise Bogan goes on to say that D.H. Lawrence took “the Oxford Book of English Verse with him through Arabia. What more could poets ask than that?” (this)

But on a smaller scale, what sentences burned their way into Lawrence’s consciousness? Flashing forward, what tumbles through the intellect as you, say, queue up for the bathroom in the back of a Lower East Side bar you didn’t want to go to in the first place? Or in the styrofoam-cupped waiting room of a JiffyLube where the magazines still have Kelly Clarkson on their covers?

What, when we are severed from our dog-eared copies of Bishop or Chaucer, Lowell and Frost, do we remember of those books?

Quiz

Instructions: 1) Read the following poets’ names. 2) In the space provided, write down the first direct quote that you associate with those poets. 3) If nothing comes to mind, move on to the next poet and repeat from number 1.

1. Robert Frost

_____________________________________________

2. William Shakespeare

_____________________________________________

3. Geoffrey Chaucer

_____________________________________________

4. William Carlos Williams

_____________________________________________

5. Sylvia Plath

_____________________________________________

6. John Ashbery

_____________________________________________

7. Kanye West

_____________________________________________

8. Robert Lowell

_____________________________________________

For each of the above, your answers probably boiled down to a few lines of poetry, which you remembered not by chance, but because of just how keenly those lines affected you, or at least for how well they seemed to alter the way you interacted with the world.

And that’s what, we hope, we’ll do through Cellpoems. While one-hundred-forty characters provides little room for elaboration, scant breath to establish any sense of momentum, and no ground to stand on for, say, a narrative, they gave enough space for Lorine Niedecker to include an entire transformation of winter to spring–including an appeal to the sense of sound, vision, sadness–when she wrote:

How the white gulls
in grey weather
Soon April
the little
yellows ²

One-hundred-forty characters gave A.R. Ammons enough space to establish (and critique) a one-dimensional persona in his poem,

Old Geezer

The quickest
way
to change

the
world is
to

like it
the
way it

is.³

And there is another sort of short poem, one which evokes Descarte’s definition of wonder:

A sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.” (from The Passions of the Soul, published 1642) ⁴

***

Specifically, a poem that deranges what I thought I already knew, or allies recondite tropes in an illuminating way:

Poem to Poetry

Poetry,
you are an electric,
a magic, a field — like the space
between a sleepwalker’s outheld arms…⁵

Somewhat similar to Ezra Pound’s “In the Station of the Metro,” Bill Knott’s short poems almost seem like tanka, which typically have built in leaps similar to voltas in sonnets. Here’s a link to Bill Knott’s blog, where he constantly publishes work in progress.

What are your favorite short poems, and how do they manage to do so much with so little?

________________________
1. Louise Bogan, A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, edited by Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press, 2005.

2. Rene Descartes, The Passions of the Soul [1642], trans. Stephen H. Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), p 56.

3. Lorine Niedecker, The Selected Poems of. Edited by Cid Corman. Gnomon Press: Kentucky, 1996.

4. A.R. Ammons, Selected Poems. Library of America, 2006.

5. Bill Knott, Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969-1999.

Hi. My name is Chris, and I’m working with writer and editor friends on this–a text message lit journal. This may disgust you as a reader and a thinker. Enough dumbing down of literature, you may think, and frankly, in this project’s nascent stages, I thought the same thing, and pondered the inevitable critical questions: Wouldn’t reducing poems to 140 characters be a pity, and not necessarily pithy? Wouldn’t such an endeavor serve to further shorten contemporary attention spans, thus adding another layer of dust to the work of Dante, Milton and Pope? And, furthermore, wouldn’t such an endeavor eventually work to destroy its own art form?

But I rejiggered things, confounded myself, and roiled. Could it be possible that all these people I see wandering around lower Manhattan, nose pointed to their cell, are engaging with text in a very meaningful and accessible way? Wouldn’t it be a shame if this addictive textual intercourse were not peppered by well-wrought language? And wouldn’t it be something if such patches of verse referred the reader back to the entire garment?

With this hope, we will launch the first issue of Cellpoems on September 15. Until then, we are looking for your best short works of verse and criticism, as well as your feedback.

In the future

While Cellpoems will be distributed via text message, we will publish a new “issue” of the journal four times a year, here at www.cellpoems.org. The opening issue will be of general interest, with the following issues to focus on topics as specific as sneakers, specific poets, collaged versions of canonical or well-known works, and as general as travel, fear, and sex.

So, for now, please submit your poetry and criticism (of books, films, or even live performances) via this website or via text message at (317) 426-POEM.

Thanks for stopping by. We’ll regularly update this blog with posts that ideally more resemble essays than announcements.