Nat. Poetry Month Feature: Beard of Bees

s many of you know, April is National Poetry Month. In celebration, Publish Chicago is featuring various publishers who specialize in poetry from the Windy City. Chicago has a fantastic poetry scene, with many publishers focusing purely on publishing books and chapbooks from little-known poets. In short, this is a great place to find undiscovered writers doing fantastic things with language. If you’re interested in poetry publishers, stay tuned throughout the month, or check out our links and resources for a complete listing of publishers specializing in poetry in Chicago. If you’re interested in poetry events, check out Literago, which has a fantastic events calendar for the literary events happening around the city, many of which involve a lot of poetry.

Imagine the feelings of a whole
continent, I said. A sheer blank
space of delightful mystery, its black
thoughts, its body
at rest in the middle of blessings.
If such is the meaning
of a French steamer, and it was, were
we who had pronounced a judgment upon
the whole population cleared into
the heart of an unknown planet? We could for a
while, of massacres, of
craven terror, of burning noble words.
It was very grave, were we
who had gone mad, completely.

-taken from a light heart, its black thoughts, written by Gnoetry and Eric Scovel, published by Beard of Bees

Beard of Bees Press is a small, independently owned Chicago press focusing on experimental poetry. Their publications are all chapbooks that are available online, through their site, in PDF format. Many of their chapbooks are works generated by a poet working with a computer program they have called Gnoetry, which basically takes a text, or many texts, and assembles words from that text into poetry. In their own words, “Gnoetry synthesizes language randomly based on its analysis of existing texts. Any machine-readable text or texts, in any language, can serve as the basis of the Gnoetic process. Gnoetry generates sentences that mimic the local statistical properties of the source texts. This language is filtered subject to additional constraints (syllable counts, rhyming, etc.) to produce a poem.”

You’ll see chapbooks produced with Gnoetry (and a supervising poet) that use all kinds of texts, from out-of-copyright texts on Project Gutenberg to music lyrics to news stories. They also publish chapbooks written by poets without the aid of Gnoetry. In short, you can find a fantastic selection of all kinds of poetry on their site, and it’s all free. They currently have 60 different chapbooks that you can peruse on their site, and they’re publishing more all the time. If you’re a writer, you’ll be happy to know that they accept unsolicited submissions of 8-20 pages of poetry, and you can submit over email.

Of course, all this talk of Gnoetry brings to mind Flarf poetry–which involves using words from Google results to build poems–and other forms of writing in which the words the poet uses are taken from something else. There is certainly the question of whether or not poetry produced this way is as “original” as poetry written entirely in the authors own words. Supporters of flarf and of Gnoetry would argue that all language is publicly owned, even the words that come straight out of a person’s own head, therefore there is nothing less original about this style of poetry. Further, flarf and Gnoetry create something quite unique by grabbing words that have already been used toward a specific purpose and reshaping them into something new. The poem above was created from words taken from Heart of Darkness, and as such is an interesting reflection of the piece. Endless arguments can, and have been waged over these ideas and nobody has come up with any clear answers. What is clear, I think, is that poetry of this kind seems to fascinate people, and is definitely worth a look if you’re at all interested in contemporary poetry.