In conversation, Glen Armstrong sometimes refers to this or
that poem as a “strange little machine” and, among others, I think of Dickinson. Some poets protest against the idea of
their efforts being algorithms at work but it needn’t be an insult to attribute
creativity to machinations. With
the right sort of machine and program running, one’ll have practically infinite
variability in outcome. “Nature”
in: odd, lovely, machination out.
That’s how Dickinson works. One could almost call it an “empirical” activity. Nature, plus an awareness of “the”
literature, in: riffs and variations from there. I think of Whitman in this context, too, where the riffs
become waves and the variations attempt to set us off into new territory. Nature and literature get run through
their minds and we end up with some fortunate inventions.
And by invention here I like to go back to what’s summed up
in the old rhetorical word “inventio”, which people tell me can be translated
from the Latin to English as either “invention” or “discovery”. The ambiguity is an advantage here because
it points to something that’s neither fabricated out of nothing nor completely
given. Rather, the result of
inventio is partially constructed, not unlike they way we’ve found out memory
works. Our brains too are strange
little machines. -bbc
