Tapsalteerie make our first ever appearance at the Stanza poetry festival this year, bringing our stall to the poet's market on Saturday 8th March (which is on between 12 and 4pm). That's the launch day for Calum Rodger's "Know yr Stuff: Poems on Hedonism" too, and we're tremendously excited to have the chance to show it off to the distinguished poetry readers of Stanza. Of course we'll also have "the Quait Chiel" by Bill Thom making its first poetry market appearance, a poem that has proven a great favourite with readers so far. We're currently concocting some special Tapsalteerie cupcakes to give away to the first stall visitors, and are working on a selection of other "enticing" freebies too. So if you're at the stanza festival please pop by the stall for a cake and a chat, we'd love to meet you and hae a news aboot poetry!
See you there!
Friday 14 February 2014
Thursday 6 February 2014
Know yr Stuff: Poems on Hedonism
Excitement is mounting here at Tapsalteerie for the publication of a first collection by the young Scottish poet Calum Rodger. Called "Know yr Stuff: Poems on Hedonism", it's due out on March 8th and will make its first public appearance at the Stanza poet's market in St Andrews.
One thing we particularly love about Calum is his digital poetry, of which "the worst of my faults is a certain impatient gaiety of disposition" is a prime example. This poem will feature in the upcoming pamphlet, alongside poems written in the more traditional (organic?) manner.
"The worst of my faults..." was created by sending pre-existing text through a poetry generator called Gnoetry 0.2 (developed for Linux by Jon Trowbridge and Eric Elshtain). In this case Calum has mashed together Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ with various MDMA experiences as reported on erowid.org.
The basic pattern is that Calum fires the text into Gnoetry, which has a pretty strong grasp of the grammatical structures of the English language, and Gnoetry fires lines of poetry back at him. Calum then puts the text through an editorial process, finally emerging at a completed poem. While it's rare that the generator will produce a perfect stanza, it does often produce some quite exceptional lines. "And I know that this is only a bovine volume" in the above poem is a personal favourite.
Gnoetry 0.2 is free and available for you to play with by the way, as are other excellent programs such as JanusNode (which helped create another poem in "Know yr Stuff").
While the digital poems are excellent, Calum's original poetry is still superior in Tapsalteerie's humble opinion. We'll focus on that in our next brief preview...
One thing we particularly love about Calum is his digital poetry, of which "the worst of my faults is a certain impatient gaiety of disposition" is a prime example. This poem will feature in the upcoming pamphlet, alongside poems written in the more traditional (organic?) manner.
"The worst of my faults..." was created by sending pre-existing text through a poetry generator called Gnoetry 0.2 (developed for Linux by Jon Trowbridge and Eric Elshtain). In this case Calum has mashed together Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ with various MDMA experiences as reported on erowid.org.
The basic pattern is that Calum fires the text into Gnoetry, which has a pretty strong grasp of the grammatical structures of the English language, and Gnoetry fires lines of poetry back at him. Calum then puts the text through an editorial process, finally emerging at a completed poem. While it's rare that the generator will produce a perfect stanza, it does often produce some quite exceptional lines. "And I know that this is only a bovine volume" in the above poem is a personal favourite.
Gnoetry 0.2 is free and available for you to play with by the way, as are other excellent programs such as JanusNode (which helped create another poem in "Know yr Stuff").
While the digital poems are excellent, Calum's original poetry is still superior in Tapsalteerie's humble opinion. We'll focus on that in our next brief preview...
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