How to Know Now: "Zen" Poetics in Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems and Water and Light
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Because she engages the presence of the past in the moment of writing, Phyllis Webb’s perspective in her poetry collections Naked Poems (1965) and Water and Light (1984) is analogous to Zen Buddhism, which stresses the complexity of ordinary experience without requiring special, theoretical, or scriptural knowledge. Webb’s “Zen” poetics can be located on a spectrum between haiku and ghazal sensibilities. With these poetics, Webb uncannily anticipates the style of post-1960s Canadian lyrics, including John Thompson’s celebrated Stilt Jack (1978). Webb’s “intra-poetics” (Zen tenets, haiku sensibilities, and a-chronology) and her theory of the “Influence of Anxiety” both concentrate on the present while acknowledging the influence of the past, thereby realizing the Zen goal of impermanence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".