Friday, September 15, 2006
Pink paragraphs
Last night I attended a reading by Elizabeth Willis, this year's inaugural reading in Temple University's Poets and Writers Series--part of its Creative Writing Program. A phrase from one of Willis's poems has been rolling around in my head ever since (even dreamed about it): "Pink paragraph."
The questions are obvious: How is a pink paragraph different from other paragraphs? Is a pink paragraph a feminine paragraph standing in contrast (or resistance) to a male blue paragraph? (Or would a blue paragraph be a vessel of despair or maybe a manifesto of prudery?) Is a pink paragraph a diminution of a red paragraph, sublimating that red paragraph's torridity and lust into a secret, sedate desire? Is a pink paragraph a liminal stage between black and red? The highlighted word of God?
Less obvious is that language used this way is a step on the stairway of surprise and, for now, out of the reach of computational poetics. We can't model it. What would we look for? Denotations of compositional structure preceded by a color adjective? Any adjective? Or maybe a color preceding a conceptual noun? But isn't a paragraph a concrete thing?
We can't copy it--that's plagiarism. We might use it for inspiration, directing our digital friends to base a work on it. But that's derivative, and what we want is to be original. And that's the ever-present problem we haven't solved: The reduction to code of the features of the creative moment.
# posted by Jim @ 10:49 AM 
