Say it in a Shade of Succint: Cell Poems

You can buck the system and resist the un-filtered verbal onslaught of a new and frighteningly social world, or you can embrace the fascinating and fantastic possibilities it may create.

Take for example a site I heard mentioned in a recent Poetry.com podcast: Cellpoems.org

I love the idea of super-condensed poetic license  where the poet is constrained by but flourishes within 160 characters.  Also adding to the appeal is the amusing addition of poem notes and author bios that far, far exceed the length of any of the works themselves.

Below are the two most recent submissions to the site:

DIY FML Daymare Mnemonic

Dora Malech

I do it the old-fashioned way tie string around the finger except instead try rope-to-throat though the last word’s still “remember.”

 

And the moon

Erika Meitner

shut in cold blue light, in blown snow, my son’s breath a forgiveness a road- side x a windshield a tunnel a handful of pebbles.

 

Sign up for the poems as an RSS feed or to of course receive via your cell phone…

 

Reposted From Wired.com: “Recombinant Rhymer Encodes Poetry in DNA”

The below posted is content copied directly from this recent and fasincating post on wired.com that was too fascinating not to share:

By Bryan Gardiner March 22, 2010  |12:00 pm  |Wired April 2010

Illustration: Nishant Choksi

Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem. Here’s a peek at the hellish task this DNA Dante has condemned himself to.

Devise a cipher
Bök will create a code that links letters of the alphabet with genetic nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, aka ACGT). Each triplet of nucleotides will correspond to a letter so that, say, ACT represents the letter a, AGT represents the letter b, and so on.

Foresee the reply
Bök will have to choose his ciphers carefully, as his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response. There are 8 trillion possible combinations, but depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies.

Write the poem
After using hand-coded software to determine which ciphers will give him the maximum two-way potential, Bök will finally start composing. He says his poem will probably need to have a “repetitive, incantatory quality.” We can imagine.

Insert the DNA
Once the poem is complete, lab technicians will string together the nucleotide polymers, creating a DNA fragment to insert into D. radiodurans. It’ll probably take several attempts to get the bacteria to accept the genetic info. Talk about publish or perish.

My New Favorite Poetry Anthology – From the Fishouse

Firstly the word “fishouse” didn’t seem strange to me until I tried to type it and realized I would have assumed it was spelled “fishhouse”.  I digress…

At any rate, this book was purchased w/ a Barnes and Noble gift card, part of my holiday “loot”. First off,  I was already in a small sort of ecstasy when found that the poetry section had not just one short set of paltry shelves, but four.  But I saw this book – it’s full title being “From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great” (Fiona, put that title in your pipe and smoke it) – and everything just clicked.

The book is divided into 10 sections with alluring titles like “To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire: Poems that Make Various Sorts of Address” and “Spangling the Sea: Poems with Convincing Consonance and Chimes of Internal Rhyme.”

The book plays to the truth of its title and comes with a cd containing author readings of many of the poems. Also, I really enjoy the addition of author’s comments on different aspects of the writing process that are provided at the end of some poems.

The book is borne out of a non-profit foundation called From the Fishouse (their about section actually comments on the spelling as well), dedicated to the oral tradition of poetry. They host a website with an audio archive of work from up and coming poets. They also host a youtube channel, a facebook page, and an i-tunes podcast (these folks really know how to exploit the social media!).

There’s so many I’d like to share, but I chose to include two short poems from the anthology, to give a taste of the book’s invigorating content:

Christian Barter
The Phoenix

Being ash, being dust,
being what’s left on the plate
being the bungalow with a moss eaten roof
a stone’s throw off from the new glass house,

being bone and gristle,
being biomass,
being something stuck to the fridge floor
whiffing of a long-turned tide,
being shredded, un-sought secrets,
being car exhaust,
being half-buried rusted-out bed springs,
sleeping it off in the woods,

being what was washed from the photo by the years,
being what will never wash,
being what’s in the storm drain hurrying off,

the dust flaring up in the comet’s tail,
the toe-nail clippings feeling around under the rug,
the sticks laid out on the highway after a storm,
the pennies on the dashboard short of a dollar,
the hollow core of an old swamp cedar,
the crumpled butt of the sweetest cigarette
you ever had, I am

everywhere and demand my wings.

Mark Conway
The Past Described, As A Figure

What were those days like? Remembering
is like remembering

white, or water. It’s another resemblance,
the libraries packed

with broken metaphors, book after book filled
with “water is like …,”

“white as…” When Alexandria caught fire,
the librarians burned like candels,

like suet. As for the manuscripts and their similes,
nothing was lost – it was like a fire.