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Posts Tagged ‘poetry’

“What is a robot?” Pioneering roboticist Rodney Brooks answers with a sonnet

IEEE Spectrum asked pioneering roboticist Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot and former head of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the eternal engineering question: "What is a robot?" Inspired by computational neuroscientist Warren McCulloch who enjoyed writing sonnets, Brooks responded to the query in iambic pentameter. Here's the beginning:

What Is a Robot? By Rodney ...

Ferlinghetti’s prescient poem, “Pity the Nation,” describes actual SOTU, 2020

This Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem crossed my transom yesterday morning. I cannot think of a more fitting encapsulation of where we are, here in our post Rule of Law era.

"PITY THE NATION" (After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep And whose shepherds mislead them Pity the nation whose leaders are liars Whose sages are silenced And whose ...

Watch Leonard Cohen read “The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward” (1965)

“I was in Havana in 1961 during the Bay of Pigs invasion fighting on both sides,” said the great Leonard Cohen in 1965 before reading this fantastic satirical poem he wrote while in Cuba. It's called "The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward."

Cohen's experiences in Havana, including being arrested during the revolution there, ...

Translating Homer’s Odyssey into limericks

Emily Wilson is the author of a new "lean, fleet-footed translation" of Homer's Odyssey that "recaptures Homer's 'nimble gallop.'"

To celebrate the publication, Wilson has converted the Odyssey to an epic series of limericks ("A majestical goddess, Athena/swooped down from the sky -- you'd have seen her") that she's posted to Twitter.

This is ...

Where would you put the word “****” in William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just to Say”?

Your choices:

* This is Just to ******* Say

* I have eaten // the ******* plums

* that were in // the ******* icebox

* you were probably// ******* saving

* for ******* breakfast

* they were ******* delicious

* so ******* sweet

* and so ******* cold

* other

(via Kottke) Read the rest

...

David Silverberg’s “Terms and Conditionals”: the things you just agreed to

[David Silverberg's As Close to the Edge Without Going Over is a new book of genre poetry from Canadian speciality press ChiZine (previously). I was tickled by his poem "Terms and Conditionals" (for reasons that will be immediately obvious) and I asked him if we could reprint it here -- he graciously assented. ...

Video for Patti Smith’s gorgeous tribute to avant-garde poet/dramatist Antonin Artaud

The great Patti Smith collaborated with New York City experimental audio artists Soundwalk Collective on the forthcoming LP "Peyote Dance," a celebration of French avant-garde dramatist and poet Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). I've been fascinated with Artaud's "Theater of Cruelty" since my first exposure to him in my friend Adam Parfrey (RIP) and Bob ...