On Thu, 1 Jan 1998, ARWNY wrote:

> Then again, I'm terribly biased in the belief that poetry generated from
> academia, from creative writing programs, is a terrible, terrible
> cultural fraud. I feel really bad for young students who are encouraged
> to indebt themselves to the banks in order to paste words together in
> especially pretty patterns.

I'm not a poet, haven't written anything that even jocularly claimed to be
poetry in years, and what little I know about poetry is pretty much
self-taught.  I do know that poem about J. Alfred Prufrock word-for-word,
because I memorized it in an unsuccessful attempt to impress a girl, and
never forgot it.

But I *am* a programmer, in a bunch of different computer programming
languages, probably a million lines of code all told, and I never learned
any of those languages or techniques in a classroom.  I'm convinced that
the way to learn how to write code in a new computer language is to have a
project you need to do in it.  Start writing, make your mistakes, and
learn from them.  I advise everyone not to waste their time and money on
programming courses, just as you advise prospective poets away from
English departments.

Programming is not poetry, but there are points of intersection.  I was
startled once when someone admired the aesthetic qualities a program I'd
written -- the indents to signify different layers of if/endif and loops
were stacked in a way she found pleasing.  And I guess I once did write a
program to generate rhyming, metered verses, using word associations
gleaned mechanically from megabytes of text downloaded from online
conferencing.  The results of that experiment were hardly memorable,
though.

> One time I had an opportunity to be thrown in jail for 60 days
> (served 10)

You have an amazing background.  I guess my weak rejoinder would be to
reveal that the girl I didn't impress by reciting from T.S. Eliot (see
above) was a Gambino and a relative of the crime family of the same name.
I went on to become a politician, so perhaps it was for the best that she
chose my housemate instead of me.

Just a few thoughts.

                              Larry Kestenbaum