Category Archives: Written Word

John Carroll C’05 created a website that’s been entertaining us for the last few months. Now we’re sharing it with you: Poetry, by Google Voice.

Here’s how it works: People call a Google Voice phone number and read an actual poem. Google Voice transcribes that reading, mishearing much of it and spitting out what is essentially a brand-new poem. Carroll then posts the new Google Voice-ified version of the poem, along with a link to the original work, on his website.

A Penn English major and former assistant director of development at the Kelly Writers House, Carroll answered a few questions for us via email about his site and the poems it’s produced so far.

I love this idea of having Google Voice make its own weird poems out of actual poems. It’s a great twist on the Google-Voice-transcriptions-as-poetry concept. How did you come up with this?

Well, I’ll tell the unnecessarily LONG version so I provide the proper context. I started a Google Voice account when the service started years ago. I didn’t know if it’d be something I used, but it was intriguing enough that I figured I should get a local number and just hold onto it. And I didn’t use it much at all, but it was still linked with my email. So I occasionally got weird messages and voicemails from it — typically spam, trying to tell me I’d won a free iPad or something.

But in December, I received a hilarious voicemail from a couple that had tried to dial 215-821-4761, which I only know because they left a message where they discovered their error, talked about it, tried to figure out how to delete a message, then finally hung up. And the only thing more delightful than the message itself was Google’s attempt at a transcript: “Over. Over. Okay bye. So I just want to put the tanks flooring and I found very racist. 643-4764, that’s 7 network, Okay bye. Not. I need that we do call. We races. Your. Sorry order, Yeah, well at ever. It is proper response option. Yeah.”

I posted it to my Twitter account since I found it so funny, and Lily Applebaum C’12 —who works at Kelly Writers House — sent a reply that said: “That’s the best poem I’ve read all day!” And her reply reminded me that Google Voice “Poetry” is something that exists — so I thought I’d submit it to that site. That’s how it existed in my head: there’s a site out there that posts Google Voice transcripts that are particularly funny. But when I searched for it, I found that there were dozens of sites that did it.

And it’s such a minor thing, but it bothered me!  Poetry can be difficult, but I think it’s too often dismissed as abstract — or weird for the sake of weird — by people who just don’t want to take the time to read it closely. And while I don’t mind people not reading poetry, I guess I did mind all of these sites that were copying one another. So I wanted to try something different.

The site was ultimately born from the idea that poetry is not awful and random, but that I could take this popular idea (bad transcription = poem!) and apply it to poems themselves. It reminded me of something I could have done in a Penn class I took with Kenneth Goldsmith called Uncreative Writing. Let me produce a new piece of writing by using something that already exists.

From there, it just continued to grow. I called to start it. Then I asked friends to call. Then I started using the vast PennSound archives to play readings to Google Voice. And then I started to recall shows and movies that featured poems. It started as something that I thought might be fun for a few days and became something that I’d like to maintain for a while.

Why did you decide to start with Emily Dickinson?

The poem is important to me. You can find it excerpted on the dedication plaque inside the Kelly Writers House, which was an important place for me both as its student, employee and alum. I don’t think I’d be interested in poetry without that place and its people, or without being ushered to Emily and her work. So it just seemed like a natural place to start. Her importance also helped establish that nothing was off-limits. I wasn’t creating this blog to make fun of bad poems. I wanted to feed anything and everything to Google Voice to see what came out on the other side.

Which has been your favorite Google Voice-ified poem so far?

Oof. This was harder to choose than I thought. There are so many good ones. I love the Mad Men reading of Frank O’Hara because it’s opened up some new possibilities in the future. And Tom Devaney called himself after I fed Google Voice a recording of him, so that was a thrill.  But if I’m picking one, it’d have to be “Ontology of Chang and Eng, the Original Siamese Twins” by Cathy Park Hong.

“Ontology” just struck me as both hilarious as a translation and perfect for the goals of the site: its shape and formatting guide your reading, so it’s exactly the type of work someone might dismiss as too abstract for them. And Google Voice just couldn’t make any sense of it, because it’s built to transcribe simple messages between people. So “Eng” becomes “And” and the poem just mutates into this big, indecipherable mess. I was laughing the entire time I was formatting it for the site.

Is there one that you’ve felt turned out better than the original?

Just today I posted a translation of the poem that Julia Stiles reads in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You. The poem is a pretty simple, rhyming piece: the kind of thing you’d expect someone who’s never read much poetry to write. Is the translation better? Maybe, maybe not. But what I like about it is how it gets a lot of the content right, but strips all of the format and musicality. It’s what I’d expect Julia Stiles to read in the movie if she was wearing a beret and didn’t love the guy. So maybe it’s not better, but it equals the trashiness of the original, and that’s probably the best work Google Voice has done so far.

If you want to read a poem for Carroll’s site and see what Google Voice comes up with, here’s the process:

1.  Dial (215) 821-7461.
2.  Leave your full name when prompted.
3.  State the poem’s title and author.
4.  Read the poem. (A note from Carroll: Google Voice has a 3-minute limit on voicemail, so you either have to be brief or call a few times!)

As curator of poetry at Harvard University, Christina Davis C’93 G’93 spends every day surrounded by others’ poems; then she goes home and writes her own.

She’s currently preparing for the publication of her second collection of poems, An Ethic (Nightboat Books, 2013), which is dedicated to her late father — and fellow Penn alum — John H. Davis GrE’70.

“When my father died [in 2006], the only way I knew to encounter his death was to use my poems to ask questions,” Davis says of her new collection. “I did not want to write an elegy. I find elegies troubling because it’s hard to make someone mourn another human being. I decided instead to honor him by being curious, which is what he was. I gathered all of my questions and honed them down to the one thing I knew — that he was in the ground — and then built An Ethic poem by poem based on that.”

Davis describes her poetry as “minimalist and compressed…but it’s simultaneously very lyrical. My interest is in this intense condensery and the ways in which one word catalyzes another,” she adds. “I strive to reduce something down to its raw essence, devoid of any shells or protective layers.”

With Davis’s permission, here is the first poem from her new collection. It originally appeared in Tuesday: An Art Project.

AN ETHIC

There is no this or that world.

One is not more or less
admitted. Into the entirety

one is invited
and to the entirety
one comes.

There is no this or that world,

only the long illusion we are landlord,
the never-ending study
of anotherness, the ark of ilks and kinds.

It is a later wilderness

in which we find ourselves,
it is an Our thought
if we but find our selves,

we will find that we dwell on the one earth.

I hope we are found
to have lived

on no this or that earth.

Davis also sent along this recording of herself reading the poem:

She says her interest in the form arrived early, right around age 5. She wrote poems throughout her childhood and teenage years, but didn’t fully realize her fascination with the written word until enrolling in Rebecca Bushnell’s Shakespeare course at Penn. She recalls: “I was taking it because I wanted to become an actress. Our first assignment was to look at the Oxford English Dictionary — which I’d never heard of before — and follow the life of one word through all of King Lear. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t even known that words evolved. I’d been terrified of the dictionary because I thought it was a law, and something deep in me resisted it. I was in the Rosengarten Library basement reference area and when I opened the OED the word I fell upon was ‘zero.’ The fact that a word could have such dynamism and uncertainty — and that I didn’t have to believe in its law because it changes — was so thrilling to me and so liberating. Shortly thereafter, I changed my major to English with a concentration in creative writing.”

When she’s not writing her own poems, Davis works as curator of poetry at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. She’s been there for nearly five years now, running programs including an oral history series, and says she often looks to Penn for inspiration. “I revere the work that Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein have done at the Kelly Writers House, and that certainly has guided me,” she says. “I have apprenticed myself to their template. It’s such a generous template.” As a result, “I feel like Penn is still guiding me, it’s still very much a part of my life and work.”

Here’s a look at one of those oral history events, as introduced by Davis herself:

Readers, rejoice! The Kelly Writers House will again offer a slew of alumni book groups this academic year, incorporating a wide range of writers and genres. The first group — Memories, Stories, Histories: N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain and contemporary Native American Literatures — begins Oct. 1. Here is a detailed look at it and the other 2012-13 alumni book groups:

Book Group #63: Oct. 1 – Nov. 1, 2012
Memories, Stories, Histories: N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain and contemporary Native American Literatures

Texts: First published in 1969, the main text for this group, The Way to Rainy Mountain, is part poetry, part memoir, part autobiography and part historical narrative. It’s also a central text in the so-called “Native American Renaissance.” This book group will follow N. Scott Momaday’s literary and personal journey and also read short stories, poems, and essays by other contemporary Native American authors including Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich.

Leader: John Pollack, library specialist for public services in Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. His scholarly work focuses on early America, and he has published on authors including Benjamin Franklin and Samuel de Champlain.

Book Group #64: Dec. 3-17, 2012; Jan. 3-17, 2012
The Poetry of John Ashbery

Texts: No preparation is necessary for this month-long examination of the man numerous critics have deemed the greatest living American poet. Copies of poems will be sent to participants via email, though some may wish to buy a copy of Ashbery’s selected or collected poems. (Also, don’t forget that John Ashbery will be a Kelly Writers House Fellow in 2013.)

Leader: Al Filreis, Kelly Professor and Faculty Director of the Writers House, who has led many online book groups and has taught several all-online semester-long courses. He has won numerous teaching awards and was named the Pennsylvania Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation. He has published four books including, most recently, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry.

Book Group #65: Jan. 14-Feb. 12, 2013
Woodie Allen: Annie Hall and Bullets Over Broadway

Texts: Participants will examine two popular films by Woody Allen, a pioneer of the American personal film. Following in Allen’s footsteps, the group will focus on two of our nation’s preoccupations — work and sex — and discuss how these compel us to consider the meaning of love, life and art in Allen’s films.

Leader: Valerie Ross, Director of Critical Writing in the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Ross also teaches courses on American film in Penn’s Cinema Studies Program.

Book Group #66: March 11-22, 2013
Rhetorical Figures: The Many Lives of Metaphor in Nabokov and Beyond

Texts: Through the work of Vladimir Nabokov and others, this group will explore the complex intersections of language and experience. It will focus on Nabokov’s short novel Transparent Things, which weaves, unravels and ultimately reweaves a tangled web of language, history and memory. Other readings will include excerpts from Lakoff and Johnson’s classic study Metaphors We Live By and Paul de Man’s influential essay “The Epistemology of Metaphor.”

Leader: Eric Jarosinski, an assistant professor of German at Penn. His research and teaching focus primarily on 20th-century literature, culture and theory, and he is currently completing a book project, Cellophane Modernity, which examines metaphors of “transparency” in modern German architecture, literature and critical theory. The recipient of the School of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor (2012), he regularly teaches courses on Marx, Nietzsche, and Kafka.

Book Group #67: April 8-19, 2013
Stephen King: Story to Screen

Texts: This group will examine how two Stephen King novellas — The Body and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption — became the films Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption. Starting with the novellas, points of discussion will include how structure and characters are utilized to keep the reader engaged; how these story elements are transformed to serve the screenplay form; how elements of the screenplay change again once the movie is shot and edited; and how structure and character can apply to more than screenplays.

Leader: Rolf Potts, the 2011-12 ArtsEdge Writer-in-Residence at Penn. He has also taught nonfiction and screenwriting at the Paris American Academy creative writing workshop since 2005. His essays and reportage have appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic Traveler, Salon, Slate, the New York Times Magazine, National Public Radio and the Travel Channel. He is the author of two books, Vagabonding and Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, and his essays have been anthologized in more than 20 writing collections, including Best American Travel Writing and Best Creative Nonfiction.

Book Group #68: May 13-23, 2013
What we talk about when we talk about Nathan Englander’s riff on Raymond Carver’s iconic “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”

Texts: Participants will read both the 1970s Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Nathan Englander’s recent “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.” Discussion will focus on the way Englander feeds from — and maybe even surpasses — Carver’s story, creating his own world and work of art in the process. Like the original work, Englander’s centers on two couples and addresses questions about Jewish identity and the Holocaust.

Leaders: Al Filreis, Kelly Professor and faculty director of the Writers House, and David Roberts W’83 — a member of the Kelly Writers House Advisory Board and denizen of the alumni book groups who works in Manhattan in the investment business.

Book Group #69: May 28-June 6, 2013
Beyond Pink Floyd’s The Wall: What’s Out There?

Texts: Using The Wall‘s lyrics as source texts, this group will examine the ways in which Pink Floyd’s iconic album/rock opera still holds significance for listeners today. Indeed, the work includes a number of modern themes — the dangers of ideology as a corrupting force, the terror of a solitary life, and the power of outside events in determining our personal perceptions — and raises questions that are still compelling more than three decades after its conception.

Leader: Patrick Bredehoft, director of the Penn Alumni Interview Program in the Office of Alumni Relations. Before coming to Penn, Patrick was an IB English teacher and college counselor at a small boarding school located outside Istanbul, Turkey, where he also served as the head of foreign languages. From 2010-2012, he worked for Penn’s Undergraduate Admissions Office, where he served as the liaison between the UGAO and the Kelly Writers House. Patrick holds a BA in Literature & Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and a Masters of Arts in Education from Lesley University.

Shortly after June Hersh C’76 and her family decided to sell their multi-generational lighting business in 2004, she and her sister got to talking about what would come next.

“My sister turned to me and said, ‘We did well, now let’s do good,’” Hersh recalls. “That really resonated with me.

She thought about her two passions, writing and cooking; it was obvious how those might come together. As for the “do good” part, she had long admired and supported the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City and chose that as her cause.

In keeping with the museum’s focus on Jewish history, Hersh set out to gather recipes and stories from Holocaust survivors and turn them into a cookbook. “Before I knew it,” she says, “I was speaking to well over 80 people and telling well over 100 stories, each one singular, each one remarkable, each one life-changing.” Published last May, Recipes Remembered: A Celebration of Survival includes more than 170 recipes that Hersh tracked down, recorded and tested in her own kitchen.

“At the end of working on this book, my husband turned to me and said, ‘For a year, we’ve been eating like 85-year-old Polish peasants,’” she says. “I laughed, but he was right. There wasn’t a single night’s dinner in that year that didn’t revolve around an old Eastern-European or Russian recipe, but at the end of the day, it was really good food. It’s hearty and it’s comforting and it’s organic and local because they didn’t know how to cook any other way. It was actually a very nutritious way to eat, and it was incredibly varied because Jewish food doesn’t have a singular country of origin to point to.”

In the 14 months since its publication, the book has sold more than 10,000 copies and made almost $150,000 in profits. Hersh has donated every dollar of those profits directly to the Museum of Jewish Heritage. “I’ve earned nothing from the book,” she adds, “and that’s fine with me.”

Not one to rest between projects, Hersh cooked up a second book while waiting for Recipes to be published. The Kosher Carnivore: The Ultimate Meat and Poultry Cookbook came out on Sept. 15 of last year, just four months after Recipes had hit stores. “It’s a real primer on using Kosher cuts of meat: how to buy them, how to talk to your butcher, what knives to use,” Hersh says. In a further attempt to “eat well; do good,” she is donating a portion of the proceeds from that book to the national nonprofit Mazon.

For those who are getting hungry with all this talk of food, Hersh sent along two summer-friendly recipes from Recipes Remembered to share on the Arts Blog. Let us know if you give them a try!

Hela Fisk’s Plum Cake
Hela’s recipe is the quintessential batter version of Polish plum cake. Serve it hot for a luscious dessert or bake it the night before and enjoy the subtle sweet goodness of the plums with the acidic orange juice for a delicious breakfast. Make this from May to October when plums are at their peak.

Yields: 10-12 servings
Start to Finish: Under 1 ½ hours

For the filling:
2 pounds dark, sweet plums, pit removed, cut into thin slices
¼ cup sugar (increase the sugar to ½ cup if the plums are tart or add a touch of honey)
mixed with 2 teaspoons cinnamon

For the batter:
4 eggs
1 ½ cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
½ cup orange juice
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt

Topping:
2 tablespoons sugar mixed with ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease a 9 x 3–inch spring form or tube pan

To make the filling, toss the plums with the sugar and cinnamon.

Prepare the batter in a large bowl. Beat the eggs, sugar, oil, orange juice and vanilla, several minutes, on medium speed, until light and fluffy. In another bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. On low speed, slowly add it to the egg mixture. Increase the speed to medium and beat for several minutes, until all the ingredients are well combined and the batter is smooth.

Pour a third of the batter (about 1 to 1 ¼ cups) into the prepared pan and top with a third of the plums, Repeat 2 more times, ending with a layer of plums on top. Sprinkle with the sugar & cinnamon topping. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 ¼ hours or until a bamboo skewer inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean. Let the cake cool completely before removing from pan. If the cake does not release easily, loosen it by running a knife around the edges.

Variation:
To use a rectangular 13x9x2-inch baking dish, make only 2 layers and reduce baking time to 45 to 60 minutes

Luna Cohen’s Tourlo (Greek Ratatouille)
This is the perfect dish to make in the summer, fresh in the height of the season when the vegetables are abundant. Soujouk, authentic Mediterranean beef sausage, revs up the colorful and flavorful combination of peppers, zucchini and eggplant. The dried, salted beef is spiced with garlic, pepper, cumin and a Turkish seven-spice mixture. Middle Eastern stores feature this variety, but it might be difficult to find a kosher version. If you cannot, substitute chicken, turkey or veal sausage, and then add a pinch of cumin or red pepper flakes to enliven the dish.

Yields: 4 to 6 Servings
Start to Finish: Under 2 hours

1 eggplant, cut into chunks, salted and drained
3 to 4 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped (about ¾ cup)
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 zucchini, cut into bite-size chunks
2 tomatoes, cut into bite-size chunks
1 green pepper, cored, seeded and cut into chunks
1 red pepper, cored, seeded and cut into chunks
Kosher salt & Pepper
½ teaspoon dried oregano
½ pound beef, turkey, chicken or veal sausage, chunked

Place the chunks of eggplant in a colander and sprinkle liberally with kosher salt. Place a plate on top of the eggplant to help weigh it down. Let the eggplant drain for 30 minutes. Rinse, dry and reserve. While the eggplant drains, prepare the remaining vegetables. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet, cook and stir the onion and garlic, over medium heat, until lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Stir in the zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, green and red pepper. Cover and cook over low heat for 30 minutes. While the vegetables cook, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Spoon the vegetables into a baking dish and season to taste with salt, pepper and oregano. Stir in the sausage and bake at 350 degrees, uncovered, for 30 minutes.

Notes:
Eggplants are 95 percent water and if not handled properly can soak up your sauce or cause it to be watery. Whenever possible, drain the eggplant as described above before adding it to the rest of your ingredients. If roasting the eggplant, this step is not necessary.

Jennifer Egan C’85, the Pulitzer Prize winner profiled in the July|August 2011 Gazette, recently participated in a unique storytelling event. Every evening from May 24-June 2, the New Yorker‘s fiction department (@NYerFiction) tweeted installments from the author’s new story, “Black Box,” which she had written in Twitter-friendly paragraphs of 140 or fewer characters.

On the day of the first installment, the magazine asked Egan what had inspired her new story’s structure. Here is her answer:

Several of my long-standing fictional interests converged in the writing of “Black Box.” One involves fiction that takes the form of lists; stories that appear to be told inadvertently, using a narrator’s notes to him or herself. My working title for this story was “Lessons Learned,” and my hope was to tell a story whose shape would emerge from the lessons the narrator derived from each step in the action, rather than from descriptions of the action itself. Another long-term goal of mine has been to take a character from a naturalistic story and travel with her into a different genre. Jon Scieszka first put this idea into my head with his spectacular meta-fictional picture book, “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs!,” in which the three pigs move through picture books drawn in radically different styles, transforming visually into the style of each world they enter. I wondered whether I could do something analogous with a character from my novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad”: create a cartoon version of that person, for example—or, in this case, a spy-thriller version. I’d also been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea. I wrote these bulletins by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page. The story was originally nearly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material into what is now “Black Box.”

Missed the tweeting event? You can read “Black Box” in full here.

(Photo by Pieter M. Van Hattem/Vistalux)