For Godot

Well, everyone’s excited about Issue 1 of an exciting new journal. Three thousand or so poets in it! “Their” work seemingly generated by an algorithm. Real poets with fake poems. A real anthology with fake poems in it. That sounds familiar.

Many poets are very upset, and you can read some of their angry comments at Harriet, where the article title calls this piracy. Others, like Amy King, are amused. I’m one of those. I think pranks like this reveal a lot about what matters to us, and it’s interesting to notice that some are angry because they’re not in it.

Ron Silliman, normally at odds with the so-called School of Quietude, is in seeming agreement with them today when he calls this journal/anthology “vandalism.” It’s even more fun to see him bragging about a large settlement he won when someone else sullied his good name. If only I had such a name, the suits I could file! Furreal.

The post-structuralist critique of the gnome proper goes right out the old window.

This isn’t good art because it’s making people mad. But good art can do that to people. Dada wasn’t good, nor were situationist happenings. Nor, for that matter, was Language Writing. They got to be good. That artist awaits her contemporaries.

So some label this “flarf,” the content-free poetry of the intertubes.

I think Charles Bernstein’s humor is more accurate, and maybe this is the sort of bailout he calls for.

This happened. And the responses to it are part of the project, and they reveal a lot about how we tend to think of poetry and poets. Is this stuff property? Is it property like a painting should be? What happens to the art work in the age of mechanical reproduction? Oops, that’s old news. What happens to the art work in the age of automated production? Are we cyborgs? Is an algorithm as valid an extension of the poet’s powers as a typewriter?

I can’t spend the time on this today that I’d like to. I have a pile of grading and an article to revise. I can’t do it justice. But I think one reason a lot of people are mad is that they do think of a name as a property and poetry as a profitable enterprise. It’s not surprising to me that those with the most to gain are those that are threatening. The threatened threaten. And it’s not surprising to read on the Poetics List that some poets are mad because they’re not there. No one wants to be shut out. If you’re not on that computer-generated list of three thousand poets, some of whom aren’t even poets, many of whom are dead, well, man, what a slap in the face.

Feh. Now I have to go do something about the kazillian times I said “we can see” in this thing I wrote. We can see that it gets annoying after a while. And We are not amused.

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Is it scrupulous guilt or the desire to procrastinate that brings me back to add: I’m in that anthology. The piece might be somehow derived from some of my work online. It’s hard to tell. It seems to pull from my work, but that could just be a similarity resulting from the fact that the work it reminds me of is also mechanically produced.

It’s no sin to have a mechanical muse. Nor is it a sin to be inhabited by the demon-delusion of self-hood. Now, really, I have to fix all this “we” crap.