Young Writers Society

This is a thread where I collect poetry, musings and notes (maybe short stories and flash fiction as well) that all have to do with things I'm studying. I'm interested in a lot of different topics but can't seem to delve very deep into them some times, so this is how I'm trying to remedy that -- with writing. c:

Editː I'm also including poems that I edited based on advice and pointers from reviewsǃ

General Index

1. Academic Shasei
2. Picture-(original) -- On Locke's Account of Perception
3. Spectrogram -- A Phonetics-inspired Poem
4. Lateral Approximant Acrostic
5. Impersonal Identity -- Thoughts on Power
6. Memes are Like a House of Cards
7. Draft: Text Mining is Alphabet Soup
8. Cognitively Real Categories
9. Revision: [In the Depths]
10. Phonemic Transcription
11. Tanka Sequence: Locke and Parfit on Personal Identity
12. Philosophy Essays
13. Sinn und Bedeutung
14. There is no name for nothingness
15. Verification Principle
16. Text Analytics Abcedarian
17. Spectrogram Worlds
18. Limerick: 'There was a front vowel'
19. Outline: A story about a philosophy student
20. ValueError Mismatch
21. Nominalisation
22. Berkeley's Haiku
23. Remix: A Cup of Them, They Was Not Of (Of)
24. The Tangerines
25. The Linguist Says . . .
26. On Existential Threats to Humanity and Acting Before the Script Says So
27. Grue - A List Poem
28. Between Paradigms: Somonka

By Topic

Phonetics
Spectrogram -- A Phonetics-inspired Poem
Lateral Approximant Acrostic
Phonemic Transcription
Spectrogram Worlds
Limerick: 'There was a front vowel'

General Philosophy
Outline: A story about a philosophy student

Metaphysics
Picture-(original) -- On Locke's Account of Perception
Tanka Sequence: Locke and Parfit on Personal Identity
Philosophy Essays
Sinn und Bedeutung
Verification Principle
Berkeley's Haiku

Epistemology
Nominalisation
Grue - A List Poem
Between Paradigms: Somonka

Ethics
On Existential Threats to Humanity and Acting Before the Script Says So

Poetics
Academic Shasei
Revision: [In the Depths]
Remix: A Cup of Them, They Was Not Of (Of)

Culture and Society
Impersonal Identity -- Thoughts on Power
Memes are Like a House of Cards
There is no name for nothingness

General Linguistics
Nominalisation
The Linguist Says . . .

Text Mining
Draft: Text Mining is Alphabet Soup
Cognitively Real Categories
Text Analytics Abcedarian
ValueError Mismatch

Academic Shasei

I.
Watching a blank notebook become,
filled with black-and-blue scribbles –
diligence.

II.
I can't help but converse with underlines,
consort with someone else’s annotations,
my eyes cavorting, guided by the movements
of a long-ago confident pencil.

III.
Black and grey
sleek – revelation
I found a book
on Internet Archive.

IV.
Busy sentences swam off the page
converging strong-bodied
into a river-bridge that was itself
flowing.
I could walk its winding path
feeling the way beneath my feet
familiar words became these well-worn grooves.

V.
I dropped Keats and picked up Monroe
then dropped Monroe and picked up Basho
then dropped Basho and picked up a cup of coffee
because I realised I never dropped Keats at all –

~
Shasei is a term coined by Japanese painters close to the beginning of the twentieth century, and then borrowed into poetry by the reformer of modern haiku, Masaoka Shiki. It means 'sketching from life'. It covers a set of other ideas Shiki had about good haiku composition (though as you can see here, I didn't really stick to writing 'haiku' at all), including 'makoto', which is a kind of verisimilitude to internal (rather than external) reality. Shasei poems can at times come across as very prosaic and also 'objective' (as many writers from c.20th claim their style strives toward), and while I wouldn't say these particular poems I wrote about my daily study routine between last year and this year exemplify the genre at all, shasei definitely inspired me to write poems about things that were immediate to me, like my own daily routines.

(Most of the info about shasei I take after Ueda, who wrote very instructive books about Masaoka Shiki and also Matsuo Basho, which I might link here when I remember.)

Picture-(original) -- On Locke's Account of Perception

Locke's account of how we perceive things is interesting for poets, especially, I think. I won't go too in-depth into it yet, but one of the proposed implications is that we never directly perceive the objects we think are perceiving. Locke thinks that all of our ideas (a word he uses for 'anything we can think about', such as say, a chair or table, or a sandy beach ) originate in sights, sounds, smells, etc. that we receive by causal interaction with an external world. So when we think of a beach, we are not thinking of a beach, but rather our idea of a beach, which according to him inevitably looks, smells, sounds different than the actual thing -- though he maintains the beach really is there. (This is because of a difference in primary/secondary qualities which I won't go into here either.)

So for poets who try to portray things as they 'are' (like the aforementioned shasei poets) kind of have a huge dead end here in Locke's view, because we cannot perceive external objects the way they really are. Everything is mediated by our senses. That's kind of what I tried to portray in my poem above, with the metaphor of a kaleidoscope that surrounds the speaker, entrapping them in what their sense organs can perceive. When writing, I thought it was a bit of a sad conclusion, maybe, which I tried to put into the mood of the poem (and in imagining Locke 'confessing' that mood to himself). The last few lines reference some other potential implications, like solipsism (the idea that 'I' [as in me writing this, or you reading this] might be the only mind in the universe) as well as the notion that whenever we try to talk about the external world, we're rambling meaningless nonsense (hence we "deceive" ourselves).

Another musing on the same topic:

Spectrogram -- A Phonetics-inspired Poem

On a spectrogram, you tell apart sounds (i.e. where one sound ends and another begins) by looking at patterns of this staticky-looking black ink (not actual ink, though, since it's digital). Among those patterns, there are continuous horizontal lines that are darker than the rest of the lines in that segment, these indicate the formants (or the 'important' tones within a sound). Here I dramatised the moment two formants are approaching each other, almost to the point of converging, because that is a significant phenomenon called 'velar pinch'. It's how the spectrogram looks when you're approaching a sound that is made by raising the back of the tongue to the soft palate. I've been getting really excited when I see velar pinches, because they're kind of obvious to me compared to other formant patterns, and I'm presently really bad at reading spectrograms, so every bit of encouragement counts.

Lateral Approximant Acrostic

Leave no tip nor blade behind
At the center
The lowering of the flanks to anchor
Egressive movements of air.
Running clear forwards the raised
Apex, your cortex is braised
Light lateral leave no vowel unphased.

And
Pray
Plead
Reified the dark
Obstruction before
X-rays showing
Inside
Mouth hollow
A bump
Not
Terse.

A lateral approximant is a sound like the 'l' in 'like'. I based the first half of this acrostic on 'light l' 'clear l' which is a version of the 'l' sound pronounced using the tip and blade of the tongue raised only. The second half is based on 'dark l', which is pronounced with the back of the tongue raised towards the soft palate (as well as the tip and blade towards the front part of the roof of the mouth).

Impersonal Identity

0.

I tried to talk in flowers to blend in
with the people who were themselves.

There were numbers on the wall,
so many numbers.

Underneath the exit sign there were
crushed dandelions.

I.

The thing they said at reception was
mellifluous, reeking of garden soil
and fence posts.

They said they received the 'all'
and the 'selves'.

That there were flowers that weren't recognised
for having crooked petals, or crooks in the folds
of their mint green sepals.
That had to stop. This they knew.

I saw the new forms they had printed,
filled with blanks and lines but still
filled.


II.

I live in a world of not writing these things down.
My ixoras could be roses, or more fancifully, buttercups.
I removed the printer from my house
many years ago.

Because
is it a wildflower if it is still worried
about artifices like paper and pen?
about how it looks in a portrait,
if Emily Dickinson was holding a heart's ease
or . . .

Maybe, maybe. The numbers show it matters,
the frequency of images, of wildflower picking.
Choose us, choose us, they cry.

But as for me, I
am forgetting the act of choosing and not choosing.
Forgetting the forms.
Forgetting the motions, at least
implicitly.
Perhaps you should, as well.
I will wait until you do,
even if it takes imagining impossibilities,
thinking in petals that are cubic,
stems that are soundwaves,
and all of these
ambiguous things.


~

Some personal impersonal thoughts while reading a text by Judith Butler for uni. Butler was making this argument about dominant vs marginalised groups and how the law actually constructs both of them in order to make one legitimate and the other taboo. Then they go on to kind of suggest that the way to subvert this problematic system is to include the tabooed groups in the dominant culture? (Not sure yet, I'm still in the midst of making sense of the text.) And that got me thinking about my own views about representation (specifically, in media), which I discussed before in this poem --> A nighttime blur said 'free us from the writing article'.

I guess now the way I would articulate my thoughts is how I've done it in the above forum poem. To me this jumble of words is asking: if the existence of a dominant group requires that someone be marginalised, then why would we want to be included within the powers of the dominant group? Does it not make 'power' inherently destructive? Should we instead ask the dominant group to relinquish their power and representation and eliminate those things from our society? Sounds very wild and abstract, but hey, that's why I wrote a poem about it, not a thesis. c:

Memes are like a house of cards

We keep sending each other
these card-constructions
wrapped in parcels as though
the pushing wind won't crumple them
and the bicycle ride over
shan't collapse something important,
deep down.
You say, I say, we say, they say, and
somehow it's all the same.
This little house contains so many different things.
How laughable. How strange. Almost as though
it was not meant to be a home, at all.


-
(I'll write the notes and explanation for this one later!)

Draft: Text Mining is Alphabet Soup

Word soup
we find
that presidents and precedents
populate the pores between
anything and everything.

They distort reflections
mirror surfaces that taste
salty, savoury,
a prick on the tongue,
feeding us flavours we
wouldn't have found ourselves.

But the aftertaste
is stringent, some-
-thing seems to be missing.
(Where is
the A for 'Apple'
in 'alphabet soup'?
and the logographs,
the unwritten dialects of taste?)

Making word soup is
cooking within the limits,
a sloshing pot of liquid,
a meal for two or three.



A poem I first wrote when working on an assignment for text mining using AI. I jotted down my thoughts of what might be the advantages and disadvantages of studying documents using an AI rather than a human being. The second stanza reflects the irony I found in how the advantage in AI comes from how it makes the familiar unfamiliar enough that we can see the information we want, i.e. if we want to know how often the topic of 'soup' comes up in the news, we have to break the news articles down into individual words and count up the word frequencies, which isn't how we normally experience these texts as human beings. The third stanza is about the inequalities in data availability. There's more text analytics done in 'big' languages like English and Mandarin. Because of the need of quantity in training a reliable model, minority languages like Navajo miss out.

Notes on a potential second version/ expansion of this poemː

Cognitively Real Categories

Dogs are more real than poodles
how can we believe
a mid-day cloud
could whine and beg for treats?


̃

The difference between 'dog', 'poodle' and 'mammal' is specificity. For us, basic-level categories are more cognitively real. That means words that are of 'medium' specificity like 'dog' are more salient in our perception.

(I really can't remember what the significance of this was off the top of my head, which means I should probably go revise it.)

Edit: Okay, so basic-level categories tend to be the best examples, the centroids in a text similarity model. A similarity model basically uses k-means clustering, a way of grouping together documents that have linguistic similarity to each other (based on vectorised features like key content words that appear in the text, or similar arrangements of function words called bi-grams). The clusters that are produced from this create a continuum. So for example, in Cluster 1, document A might be very close to the centre (meaning the most cluster-y-1 out of all) while document B is further out, so less cluster-y-1, and maybe a little bit cluster-y-2. The centroid is the 'best' example, which is an abstract fiction calculated by averaging the other documents in the cluster. And usually, for a dataset of animal words, Cluster 1 might be something like 'dog', while Cluster 2 will be something like 'fox'. It's much less likely to have a 'best' example be something like 'poodle' or 'mammal', because the basic-level ones are more cognitively real and so are more salient in . . . the texts? The AI we make to replicate our brains? Something like that.

[In the Depths]

Once a shipwreck floated and lifted itself into the peach-coloured sunrise. In the newspaper I read it backwards and assumed that fire had entered the sea, and that bewildered me. I tried only to fish for things that would make a difference. Things that wouldn't make cents. That wouldn’t make dollars, or senseless stocks in air pollution, but rather

reshape
the way I visualise barnacles
clinging to deep sea volcanoes.

I know it meant so much the time their headlines washed into sapphire waters. How I shook the full stops into space-dust and painted the sky bright blue in my ir-revering. Maroon shadow thrown by the flotsams of conjectures sinking deep beneath my bedroom,

vacant but for light
falling through
an empty glass.

The thing was, their breaking news was not designed to break my braindeep raft. Moment to moment, watching sunlight ebb and flow between the window bars, I counted their misreadings of my maps with lost keys; one, imprisoning tragic cliches; two, nostalgia for the gold moon in its younger face; three, the imposed impossibility of floods to nourish tropical soil. And then the cat that was yowling in the night with finality began to quiet down.

Darkness
coming home with the car
exhaust left on.

I have more places to be, in here, in the depths, with the sound of the waves groping blindly at the shore. Red halo round the city, these things eloping silently, with the soul of a siren in the sea.


A rewrite of the original, hereː


The original was written incorporating images from all the poems I'd published in the Lit Centre in 2021, but this version narrows it down a little bit, for instance I changed the cat yowling "in winter" to "in the night" to get rid of the random seasonal image. Other images I removed were the "snapdragon"/"weeds" and the "ants". Instead I tried to focus the imagery around the nautical motif and the coastal city. I also changed the speaker's perspective from plural to singular, to kind of highlight their solitude and how they are living out-of-sync with the rest of the world.

While I enjoy the playfulness of non sequiturs and jumbles of seemingly unrelated images, streamlining it like this definitely gives a more coherent narrative and probably makes it an easier poem to read, too. The central theme and mood of the piece also becomes clearer, especially in the idea that this out-of-syncness is supposed to be positive, because I know that doesn't entirely come through in the original. I think I was more able to incorporate sound devices and build rhythm in the second one, too.

(Though if there are phrases I still love from the original, I'd name "to make a snapdragon throw its long red neck back and laugh" and "-- a red halo breaking -- ". I also still kind of enjoy "And to think we thought this was a shipwreck. Such naivete." Maybe I'll save those for a future poem.)

*Phonemic Transcription

How can you find something you cannot see?
[abstract. mental. categories.]
It starts with listening through your brain.
[oh. you forgot. the basic plane.]

This is nothing exciting,
[something future-ly fascinating]
I told you, nothing is.
[hush, we have the slate grey screen to kiss.]




We weren't explicitly taught broad transcription in my previous uni, I don't think? Or if we were we called it a different name. And in any case, my phonetics notes from previous years look AWFUL, it really was a different time and I can barely decipher what I was writing. So, you know, phonemic transcription is unnatural and strange to me, so I wrote a poem about it.

*Phonemes vs phones

Phonemes are abstract mental categories of sounds in our minds. They're the units that allow us to perceive speech. Phones are the sounds we're actually producing. The thing is you can only see the phones on the spectrograms and waveforms, so if you get a sentence read like [doʊntʃjənoʊ] ("don'cha know?") it's really hard to find where the /tʃ/ ends and the /j/ begins on the fuzzy black lines, even if you feel you can hear the difference.

Tanka Sequence: Locke and Parfit on Personal Identity

1.

All that makes me are
memories of that monsoon
I took you boating
and now the orange sunlight
beats on hot and humid air.

2.

Humid atmosphere
I have breathed all throughout life
air tells me apart
from your light azure breezes,
the swaying willows.

3.

Evening, you tell me
if this willow tree survives
the next thunderstorm
know that I survive this year
we are both watching the skies.

4.

I am not that person
who stargazed with you on grass
I have forgotten
the constellations we saw,
the temperature of dew.

5.

Who survives me now?
I was only a dew drop
at first blood sunrise --
the diver steps on white sands
pearls roll from his hands, children.




The inspiration for 1-4 is Locke's theory of personal identity and persistence of persons through time. The inspiration for 5 is Parfit's theory of persistence of persons. These concepts seem so strange when written declaratively in prose but in poetry it's just normal, just part of "poetic language".

"For, since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being: and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done."

-- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II chapter 27

More notes:
- Tanka 1 shows Locke's theory that consciousness is what constitutes personal identity, from the framework of 'past' and 'present'. What makes me in the present is the experience I am having of remembering a past from my point of view, and also experiencing the sun from my point of view.
- Tanka 2: in Locke's account, these experiences from 'my point of view' differentiate me from another person. i.e. if the 'I' and the 'you' in this poem had the exact same point of view, they would then be the same person. I tried to make that more concrete by using the images of different weather (and also different moods).
- Tanka 3: the 'you' uses the willow tree as the metaphor for their conscious experience. If their conscious experience survives, then they survive.
- Tanka 4: Locke thought that a person who could not remember a period of time in their life was no longer the same person as they were in that period of time. For this reason, he said we should not punish someone who is awake for what they thought or did while asleep, if they cannot remember it.
- Tanka 5: Derek Parfit had an interesting theory that divorced personal identity from persistence of persons through time. Basically his theory boils down to the idea that we can be survived by something that is not technically us 100%. So the dew drop and the pearl are different in characteristics, but this poem implies a kind of ancestral relationship between them, which is the analogy that Parfit also uses in his work 'Personal Identity'.

Philosophy Essays

How do you even write an essay?
You conglomerate a cacophony of other essays
and somehow be caustic enough to dissolve them
into the same alien blue liquid.

Philosophy, Ph, when it flows
must fall in a zig-zagged line.
That's just a characteristic
of this element
when it interacts
with gravity.

You have a great need
of paperweights
to keep the ingredients
from losing their loosely associated
non-chemical structure.

~

Nothing deep here, it's just a poem about writing Philosophy essays.
1. Read a bunch of papers
2. Uhh? Be very critical and such
3. Play table tennis with arguments
4. Edit x1000
5. Profit, maybe?

Sinn und Bedeutung

The meaning of the stars is
many-faced, let us say
that there are stars,
and we mean:

1. star = a bright ball of gas
2. star = parts of constellations
3. There are stars in the night sky
4. a star = a star

1. We might find that
in this universe at least
a star refers to
a bright ball of gas

2. The points that make
up Orion's belt
if we zoom in on them
we will see
and it makes sense
that they are only
several bright balls of gas

3. Stars = bright balls of gas;
night sky = the outer surface of the Earth when it is turned away from the Sun;
There are, in -> to exist in a location that is surrounded by something,
without being that something,
like a speck in a dark cave
(Everything is alchemy. Propositions are compositional.)

4. Sometimes the only certainties
are the ones
that don't tell us anything.




In Frege's theory of language and meaning -
1. The reference of the word star in its usual use is the real object denoted by a "bright ball of gas" in outer space.
2. The sense of the word star can be various. Here I have given the star as understood as part of a constellation.
3. A statement like 3 is what Frege would call a proposition. It has a true-false value, cannot be acted upon by us, and can only be grasped. It is mind-independent. (It would exist even if no one was thinking about it.) The sense and reference of a proposition depend on the sense and reference of its individual components.
4. This one's an identity relation, which is an analytic, as opposed to being a synthetic proposition. It can be proved based on the meanings of its contents. (But is for that reason considered uninformative by some.)

There is no name for nothingness

She hates it when homework
asks her to describe identity
beyond the mathematical/ logical equation.
Because what she puts down will be her
but not her
and it sucks deriving a contradiction
when all your life you've been trying
to stay consistent.
In gel pen, writing words
to pick out things
that other people will see
and make sense of
but not her.
(She does not see herself
in a reflection
not because
she is unhappy with her body
or something sensible-relatable like that,
but rather,
because she
is
nothingness.
zero = zero.)
She's a foreigner but not a foreigner
who has never been to your country
and has never been called a foreigner, though
the dictionary says so.
(How can you be called something
by people who don't know you exist?)
And she prefers
to keep things the way
books say they should be,
but the assignment says implicitly
to focus on people, on people, on people
who are infinitely more variable
and infinitely less solid
than paper.

What's your socially-prescribed 'identity' when you're studying abroad at home? Is it possible to identify as a crypto-foreigner or a byte-visitor? Is that a thing? The more I study about culture, the more I want to hide in metaphysics, because that's the place where I can ask questions that don't need to be answered, and where I know how to express 'I don't know' in my analysis. (But is a person who doesn't know also a kind of identity?)

But anyway, the notes for these are that terms for identity attract controversy. Some people don't like using certain words for themselves, and others do. These are related to bigger issues, like negative connotations being linked to discriminatory attitudes and practices. It can also go the other way around and link to normativity, like a person going 'why am I specific term X, aren't we all general term Y?' (but general term Y is only used to refer to the culture of specific term X, so it is, in effect, a form of specific term X that ignores the existence of any other kind of person)