¹ The verse form may owe something to Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" or, more specifically,"The Triumph of Life" (or a few poems by Stevens, or Omeros), but the form - its three-linedivisions and six-part stanzas - came about after the text had been assembled by the computerinto a prose format. Other computer-poems create the form - stanzas and line-breaks - as thepoem is being constructed (rather than providing a prose original), so that part of the programis the stanza form itself, of which there can be several alternating. An early computer-poemcalled "What I" created three different stanza types, each in the shape of a tear (more or less),inspired by Chinese/Korean scroll poems. These stanzas are generally not metrical in the least,since I haven't yet programmed the computer to recognize the sound of words; they arecompletely determined by number of letters, and never involve making breaks in the word - sothat if the line in the stanza only requires 6 letters, and the n! ext word the computer has "chosen"has 28, the computer won't go ahead to the next line until that 28-letter word has beencompletely represented, which makes for great variations in the meter and stanza-shape. Previous computer-poems have not had as long lines as this because the ur-texts were,themselves, mostly prose and not alliterative; in these cases the line-breaks merely provided arhythmical way to read a rather prose-like poem, like in many of Cage's pieces (for instance,"Where Are We Eating? and What Are We Eating?" in Empty Words). Longer lines weresuccessful here because two of the three main texts are poems and highly alliterative, so that itwas only a matter, unually, of changing punctuation - to create caesurae and quicken rhythms -to make the line carry fully across. Line 10 of section V is right out of an original text (thetranslation by Tennyson), an accident which demonstrates that the line length I used for thepoem corresponds, it seems, to the length of line in! appearance to a poem constructed alongpurely metrical grounds (based on Tennyson's meter, a variable four-beat). As to the degree andnature of the textual interaction: there is a variable in the program of the least amount of wordsthat can be taken from each text (in this case 6), along with a pseudo-random (numbergenerators in computer are not actually "random," but are derived from the square roots ofprimary numbers) of words that can be added to this original group, in this case from 0 to 4. The text the computer chooses from which to take text is also "random."



































² The first draft of this poem was generated from a number of different texts located in threemain files. The primary source is the Old English "Battle of Brunaburh", but there are twoversions of the poem co-existing here. One is by Lord Alfred Tennyson, a version he wrote basedon the prose translation that his son had made. There are enough parallels between his versionand the prose that his son wrote to suggest that Tennyson did not reread the original);Tennyson's version, indeed, does not even retain the same Old English meter throughout, and healters to meter to suit his needs, so the translation is often as free as Pound's "Seafarer," thoughwithout the attention to alliteration that characterizes the latter. His version is also broken upinto numbered stanzas, thus corrupting the single flow of the original (a sort of song-epic) into anumber of short lyrics, in the manner of In Memoriam. Other texts include: a paragraph by thepoet Leonard Schwartz from the introduction! to an anthology of contemporary American poetry,Primary Trouble (New Jersey: Talisman House, 1995, p.3), a paragraph from The Anxiety ofInfluence by Harold Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, pp.19-20), and a paragraph(chosen more or less at random) from The Three Pillars of Zen by Roshi Philip Kapleau (NewYork: Doubleday, 1980, p.116). The text by Tennyson composes one file of source text for thispoem; the three prose excerpts compose another. The third file is a my phonetic translation (inthe manner of, say, Louis Zukofsky) of the same Old English poem, this one trying to maintainmuch more of the alliteration - the specific phonemes - than Tennyson's version did, though atthe same time ignoring, or slanting, the original "meaning" of the work. Since I have translatedthe Old English myself (with a dictionary and grammar), it was inevitable that some commentaryon the nature of the original (which I had read, ironically, during the 1996 World Series, whilethe Yankees ! were in Atlanta and the fans were doing the "Braves" chant) would make itsappearance. It would have been interesting had my version been spliced into the poemline-by-line at the same rate as Tennyson's, so that the cross-pollenating alliteration would bemore striking within each line and the puns more apparent, but this didn't happen; so that"Dreary of derivative loves... Oh, but one thing" from my version (based on l. 53 of the original"dreorig darapa laf, on Dinges mere") comes much later than Tennyson's "The jarring breaker,the deep-sea billow... shamed in their souls." Of course, since Tennyson did not translate thephonemes with any sort of regularity, that wouldn't have happened anyway.



































³ Ian Hamilton Finlay.



































⁴ "The Offa who figures in this sequence might perhaps most usefully be regarded as thepresiding genius of the West Midlands, his dominion enduring from the middle of the eighthcentury until the middle of the twentieth (and possibly beyond). The indication of such atimespan will, I trust, explain and to some extent justify a number of anachronisms." This isGeoffrey Hill's note to his poetic sequence, Mercian Hymns.



































⁵ A poet from New Jersey.



































⁶ The theories associated with "Language poetry" (so called because of the journal known asL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) can obviously play a large role in describing the nature of thecomputer-poem aesthetic, though the real precursors to this systematic cut-and-pastemethodology can be found much earlier in the twentieth century, and in writers like Burroughs. Nonetheless, it is in the theoretical writing and poetry of these poets, most specifically CharlesBernstein and Bruce Andrews, that one finds the most complete synthesis of many of thetendencies (those generally ignored by the literary establishment, who were more interested inthe New Criticism and the poetics of Eliot) of much writing that involved these methods alongwith their political implications - generally "unspoken" or less obvious than the politics of thesocial realists and exerimentalists such as Brecht. There is not enough space, here, to elaborateon the many players in these early rounds that "led" to "language" writing, n! or t o discuss howthe thoroughness of the movement in uncovering these artists has made them (the "language"poets) appear more ubiquitous, and more authoritative and powerful, than they actually are. However, a good place to start for finding this particular "other Modernism" would be theanthology Revolution of the Word, edited by Jerome Rothenberg (New York: The Seabury Press,1974), in which is included some lost American masterpieces (or mess-terpieces) by writers likeWalter Arensberg, Marcel Duchamp, Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, Marsden Hartley, MinaLoy, Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, Jackson Mac Low, some "cubist" work by Kenneth Rexroth,writing by "Objectivists" such as George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, and relevant, highlyexperimental writing by Williams and other more recognized poets - almost all of which isinteresting given the fact that this literature has not "made it" into the larger, later anthologies,nor has it affected the general understanding of early Modernism, which ! had been mired in asort of crypto-Symbolist nostalgia for a lost, mythical and aristocratic past, on the one hand, orin a celebration the poetics of the "local" and daily life on the other. Obviously, the criticalparadigms have change d significantly since the seventies, such that a nostalgia for the oldtheories of Modernism have arisen among poets alienated by, or very skeptical of, "theory" andthe politics of the indeterminate (or quasi-). Nonetheless, that shouldn't hinder anunderstanding of the "language" poets attempts not only to recuperate this "past", but to createa more total poetics out what might seem fragmentary beginnings, thus making room for thecreation of detailed, ambitious works that are not purely Dadaistic - i.e. irreverent, nihilistic or"destructive" - in content, but are rather socially responsible. While it may be just as useful toturn to Bruce Andrews long work I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism)as to any essay to unearth some of the theory of the "language school" (a possibility, since someof his poetry is quite polemic, and his essays are so resonant and intertextual as to be poetry), aquote from his well-known essay "Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxi! s" ( 1988) containsmaterial that can be a useful commentary on the workings of a computer-poem like "Stops andRebels." "The method of writing confronts the scale & method by which established sense &meaning reign: an allegory - (or will we be called 'the Methodist Poets' now?). Form & contentunfold within - that is to say, are choices within - method, on a total scale. And writing's (social)method is its politics, its explanations, since 'the future' is implicated one way or another by howreading reconvenes conventions. By obedience or disobedience to authority. By the way writingmight be prefigurative in its constructedness at different levels, within different arenas: semiosis,dialogue, hegemonic struggles. To widen the realm of social possibility: not just by embodyingdreams but by mapping limits - the possible rerouted through the impossible - by disruptiveness,by restaging the methods of how significance & value in language do rest upon the arbitraryworkin! gs of the sign yet also on the systematic shaping of work of i deology & power. Anencompassing method." [Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis(Illinois: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1996), p.57.] Andrews, at least to my knowledge, hasn't adequately explainedhow system is, itself, critiqued by a confrontation by another system (even if it is in/from thehands of a free agent like a poet), or how the very totality of system itself is to be critiqued byanother totality, which is to say his work is constructed so thoroughly by systematized accidentout of a place of knowledge, that he reinscribes the panopticon effect, such that a sort of closetedmental looseness (blurring), an ethics of ignorance (a more general state that wisdom), or anaesthetic that permits operations outside its boundaries (since ever-expanding boundariesthemselves, invariably, exert control) - i.e. freedom when it is needed or desired, or darknesswhen it is more nutritive than light - are not possible. That is, his poetics ofcounter-socialization, because of! the ir very success (and the necessity behind it), have createdanother kind of socialization - especially for someone who has never had any encounter withacademic historiography or the social sciences, or had a need for the high-decibel ironies thatcreate the necessary alienation - the V-Effekt - in his work. Andrews himself would not perceivethe nature of this imposition on the reader, since this counter-socialization is, for him and manyothers who are in this place of knowledge, a truly liberating experience, in which case impositionis read as intervention, or anarchy.



































⁷ "Hell hear th'insufferable noise, Hell saw
Heav'n running from Heav'n, and would have fled
Affrighted; but strict Fate had cast too deep
Her dark foundations, and too fast had bound.
Nine days they fell; confounded Chaos roar'd,
And felt tenfold confusion in their fall
Through his wild Anarchy, so huge a rout
Incumber'd him with ruin: Hell at last
Yawning receiv'd them whole, and on them clos'd,
Hell their fit habitation fraught with fire
Unquenchable, the house of woe and pain."
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VI, ll. 867-877



































⁸ Gertrude Stein.



































⁹ There is an element to the computer-poem that owes something to Orientalism itself, at least asdescribed in Edward Said's Orientalism [New York: Vintage Books, 1979]: "In the system ofknowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than topos, a set of references, a congeriesof characteristics, that seem to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or acitation from someone's work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgamof all of these. Direct observation or circumstantial description of the Orient are the fictionspresented by writing on the Orient, yet invariably these are totally secondary to systematic tasksof another sort. In Lamartine, Nerval and Flaubert, the Orient is a re-presentation of canonicalmaterial guided by an aesthetic and executive will capable of producing interest in the reader.Yet in all three writers, Orientalism or some aspect of it is asserted, even though, as I saidearlier, the narrative consciousness is ! given a very large role to play. What we shall see is thatfor all its eccentric individuality, this narrative consciousness will end up by being aware, likeBouvard and Pécuchet, that pilgrimage is after all a form of copying." (p.177) [Italics, except inthe first instance, are mine]. As this passage suggests, Orientalism can be created out of anyarrangement of knowledg e ordered into a narrative or "aesthetic" form that is "capable ofproducing interest in the reader." Where Orientalism and the computer-poem - an amalgam ofcited and original texts, the latter of which provide the signature tone, and is authorial - meet isin the assertion - uncomplicated in Orientalism, but complicated in this type of poem - of anepistemology centered on the fiction of the author's witnessing each "thing" that appears in thework, and that the aura (allusion to Benjamin obvious) of the text is, indeed, the aura of asubject approaching from the "other place," and not merely a product of its own system. Thenotion of endless encyclopedias producing endless works - like something of out Borges - isimplicit in both Orientalism and the computer-poem (which needs only the imposition of editingfor formal completion), works that never touch down in the accident of experience, or, indeed, inthe desire to reach beyond the solipsism of the text, or, most importantly, in t! he r igors anddisputes of anthropological praxis. Of course, it is the project of the poet working withcomputers to supercede these obstacles, and to make language itself the "other place" - not just"language," but an entire closed system of physics, or a park which become a metaphor ordouble-state for the mind. The whole process of constructing such poems can be that ofcolonizing "canonical" texts (when such texts are used), which is how it can be used as a sort ofcounter-colonizing tactic, but also as a way to objectivy canonicity itself, or make it a subject. Consequently, a recurring problem, in my mind, in postcolonial studies is the ignorance on thepart of scholars of the dynamics of field-work - soiled hands, arguments with the locals,insufficent or overabundance of information, and fear in general - which occur prior to thecreation of the literature. Trinh Min-Ha's essays on her film-making process are informative,here.



































¹⁰ The connection of AI with the concept of the computer-poem of this nature is distant, and thelatter meets, in a fantastic way, with some ideas on the relationship of structure to intelligencethat are expressed by Norbert Wiener in The Human Use of Human Beings(New York: AvonBooks, 1950), the popular version of his seminal Cybernetics. He describes, at one point, thedifference between the physical structure of an ant and that of a human being, contrasting thenature of the circulatory systems in each, which he compares to the difference between theventilation system in a thatch cottage and a skyscraper. After writing that "The physical straitjacket in which an insect grows up is directly responsible for the mental strait jacket whichregulates its pattern of behavior," [my italics] he continues: "Here the reader may say: 'Well, wealready know that the ant as an individual is not very intelligent, so why all this fuss aboutexplaining why it cannot be intelligent?' The answer i! s that Cybernetics takes the view that thestructure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expectedfrom it. The fact that the mechanical rigidity of the insect is such as to limit its intelligencewhile the mechanical fluidity of the human being provides for his almost indefinite intellectualexpansion is highly relevant to the point of view of this book." (p.80) This is, perhaps, ratherobvious in some ways, and yet Wiener is interested in the relationship to structural complexityversus structural efficiency, and the fact that the former leads to intelligence while the latter canbe a quality of the least intelligent. For computers and poems, it means that the moreintrospective, the more self-reflexive and self-responsive (the more heedful of feedback), that aprogram is, the more intelligent the production by this "mechanical bride" or collaborator. Atthis point, my own programs are not self-reflexive (they do not read themselves and ba se activityon these readings) or complicated, but Wiener's writings suggest the reasoning behind makingthem more so, along with possible strategies for expansion, though I don't believe that I canachieve anything like "AI" through these rather basic language-games - however much I maycreate an accidental Turing-esque personality, or a Vauconson duck that eats and sweats. Aftercreating this self-reflexivity, the next priority would be to have the computer "intuit" the bestforms for the construction of a poem as it is being written - when dramatic arcs, or a rise in thevoice, would be pleasing, etc. - which would be absurdly difficult, and would also seem toprivilege the human over the computer, such that the computer must be a vassal to the humanand make works that are interesting to him or her - some theorists are beginning to question thishierarchy. The next step to "intelligence" computer programs would be to hook them up to theInternet or other information systems, such t! hat the computer could be engaged in its own sort ofresponse to the "infinite memory" of the world's media. Noam Chomsky, for example, criticizesin an interview in The Generative Enterprise (Holland: Foris Publications, 1982) - note the yearof publication, at least a decade before the Internet - certain approaches to AI that attempt tocreate intelligence out of finite automata (computers not hooked-up to infinite knowledgesystems), making, thus, useful distinctions on the limits for the computer as "self"-interestedactor (one involved in a struggle for survival, for example) in AI: "It is the wrong approachbecause even though we have a finite brain, that brain is really more like the control system foran infinite computer. That is, a finite automaton is limited strictly to its own memory capacity,and we are not. We are like a Turing machine in the sense that although we have a finite controlunit for a brain, nevertheless we can use indefinite amounts of memory that are given to! usexternally to perform more and more complicated computation s. A finite automaton cannot dothat. So the concept of the finite automaton is OK, as long as we understand it to be organizedin the manner of a control unit for a much bigger, unbounded system." (p.14, italics mine) Asthe passage from Wiener suggests, the "complexity" of computations have as much to do with thesystem handling the information as the information itself; nonetheless, the real issue, as noted byChomsky, seems to be "control", for self-interest has to be included in any computer-intelligencestructure - otherwise it would have no more reason to create thought (or to anticipate the future)than a mathematical equation - which can't die, though it may be forgotten - would have forproving the efficacy of its conclusions. The computer "virus" may cross this boundary, in a way,but the virus, significantly, can only mutate, and doesn't create history for itself, and it is easilydefused once its trick is found out. As this note suggests, my computer-programs are a lo! ng w ayfrom "intelligence."



































¹¹ See The Golden Fruits, by Natalie Sarraute.



































¹² Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Fears in Solitude" (1798).



































¹³ There are many analogies to the way a computer-poem and "pornography" operate, at leastaccording to the definitions of the latter as described by Susan Sontag in her famous essay "ThePornographic Imagination" in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Doubleday, 1969). Forexample, she writes: "The universe proposed by the pornographic imagination is a totaluniverse. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fedinto it, reducing everything into one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative. All action isconceived of as a set of sexual exchanges. Thus, the reason why pornography refuses to makefixed distinctions between the sexes or allow any kind of sexual preference or sexual taboo toendure can be explained 'structurally.' The bisexuality, the disregard for the incest taboo, andother similar features common to pornographic narratives function to multiply the possibilitiesof exchange. Ideally, it should be possible for everyone to have ! a se xual connection witheveryone else." (pp.66-67) The computer-poem (at least as I have made them so far) iscompletely concerned with the variety of connections between things, including the spacesbetweenthe uses of syntax - so that a colon existing within close proximity of an en-dash becomesan aesthetic event. Since there is no real narrative possibility - no chance for a structured depthto the names that appear in it - people, along with the notion of "character" itself, becomecompletely objectified, and are merely displayed interacting with each other, like in Toy Story ora video game. The variety of personages in this poem may not engage in sexual interaction, andyet the presence of a name (especially a famous one) on an equal level with an array ofinanimate objects tends to accent the fetishizability of names along with the thing they signify,unless, of course, these names have heavy political connotations, like that of Saddam Hussein, inwhich case one might struggle for! a little more care. Sontage writes: "Like Bataille, Sade wasnot so much a sensualist as someone with an intellectual project: to explore the scope oftransgression", and continues: "Indeed, one might speculate that the fatiguing repetitiveness ofSade's books is the consequence of his imaginative failure to confront the inevitable goal orhaven of a truly systematic venture of the pornographic imagination. Death is the only end tothe ody ssey of the pornographic imagination when it becomes systematic; that is, when itbecomes focused on the pleasures of transgression rather than mere pleasure itself." (p.62) Thecomputer-poem - concerned with transgression with its use of borrowed literatures entire, aprocess devoid of the normal balm of the ingestive artistic imagination (the sort of borrowingthat Picasso said great artists performed) - becomes a map of minor transgressions as well,though it never, itself, confronts death, since it has no tone, and no narrative arc, hence no"end" (at least the ones I have written so far; I will soon experiment with programs and ur-textsthat will construct this arc). A last remark by Sontag is suggestive of the power that is involvedin computer-poems, and that is when she writes that pornography points "to something moregeneral than even sexual damage. I mean the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society toprovide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-! temp erature visionaryobsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration andseriousness." (p.70, italics mine) Though one is unsure what these "authentic outlets" might be,one immediately thinks of poets like Blake, Rimbaud and Artaud, all of whom were open tovarieties of sexuality, or Carlyle and Pound, who weren't, and the connection between visionaryobsessions - which often result in enormous, detailed works - and the construction ofcomputer-poems, with their built-in utopian element of the possibility of comprehension, and theinevitability of historical progress. However, it is worth noting that the computer-poem has acritique of the massive, masculine prophetic ego implicit in its processes, which are centeredaround accident and collaboration, along with teleological historical schemas, since the poemsinsist on presentness and the arbitrarineess of sequence and response.

Though the authors mentioned here (except for Sontag) are all men, the pornographicimagination along these parameters exists in such practices by women as the K/S "slash" comicsdescribed in "Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics and Technology" by Constance Penley(collected in Technoculture, edited by Penley and Andrew Ross [Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1991]) which themselves are infinitely producable and are, likecomputer-poems, completely derived from a pre-conceived, standing source of texts. The plotsof these fictions are, like the elements in a novel of Sade's, variations on a few motifs thrown intoa blender, so that 79 episodes of the series Star Trek make for countless amateur "slash" videos. Penley writes: "Michel de Certeau uses the term 'Brownian motion' to describe the tacticalmaneuvers of the relatively powerless when attempting to resists, negotiate, or transform thesystem and products of the relatively powerful. He defines tactics as guerrilla actions ! invo lvinghit-and-run acts of apparent randomness. Tactics are not designed primarily to help users takeover the system but to seize every opportunity to turn to their own ends forces that systematicallyexclude or marginalize them. These tactics are also a way of thinking and 'show the extent towhich intelligence is inseparable from the everyday struggles and pleasures that it articulates.' The only 'product' of such tactics is one that takes the results from 'making do' (bricolage) - theprocess of combining already-existing heterogeneous elements. It is not a synthesis that takesthe form of an intellectual discourse about an object; the form of its making is its intelligence." (The italicized passage resonates with something mentioned in another footnote, on cybernetics,regarding the structure of nervous systems and their relationship to intelligence.) "The K/S fans,however, seem to go Certeau's 'ordinary man' one better. They are not just reading, viewing, orconsuming in tac! tical ways that offer fleeting moments of resistance or pleasure while watchingTV, scanning the tabloids, or selecting from the supermarket shelves (to use some of hisexample s). They are producing not just intermittent, cobbled-together acts, but real products(albeit ones taking off from already-existing heterogeneous elements) - zines, novels, artwork,videos - that (admiringly) mimic and mock those of the industry they are 'borrowing' from whileoffering pleasures found lacking in the original products. K/S fandom more than illustratesCerteau's claim that consumption is itself a form of production." (p.139, italics mine) There isno need to state the obvious affinities of "slash" comics and computer-poems. It is worth noting,though, that "Stops and Rebels" mimes the structure of a neo-formalist poem - twelve sectionswith Roman numbers, regularity of stanzas, etc - thus infecting a respected, fetishized form withthe content of the "marginal."



































¹⁴ Central personages introduced earlier in the poem.



































¹⁵ "Brotherly love turns competitive on a pelota court in the Spanish Basque country, where ballcourts often share a wall with the village church. The sport's ecclesiastical connection iscenturies old: An early version so enamored medieval monks that authorities banned it, citingneglect of priestly duties." (National Geographic, July 1996, p. 61)



































¹⁶ This is the third appearance of the word "critic" (whether alone or in adjectival form) in thispoem, and it is useful (especially in this context, when Anlaf is being subjected to their darts) toexplain the use of the computer-poem in creating a "criticism" of the form and subjects ofpoetry, and society itself. Since the process of the computer-poem is entirely solipsistic, it needsto be assured of its "motion outward" (a phrase by Olson), its engagement with practical, dailyextingencies. Jurgen Habermas describes in his essay "The University in a Democracy:Democratization of the University" (in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science andPolitics [Boston: Beacon Press, 1970]), the need for a self-critical element in the teaching of thesciences in the nuclear age, when all knowledge as produced by the university can be exploitedto different ends. He writes: "All of these examples characterize a dimension in which thesciences practice reflection. In this dimensi! on t hey critically account to themselves, in formsoriginally employed by philosophy, both for the most general implications of theirpresuppositions for ways of viewing the world and for their relation to practice. This dimensionmust not be closed off. For only in it is it possible to fulfill in a rational fashion those threefunctions which the university must in some way deal with over and above the production andtransmission of technically exploitable knowledge. Only in this dimension can we promote thereplacement of traditional professional ethics by a reflected relation of university graduates totheir professional practice. Only in it can we bring to consciousness, through reflection, therelation of living generations to active cultural traditions, which otherwise operate dogmatically. Only in it, finally, can we subject to critical discussion both attitudes of political consequenceand motives that form the university as a scientific institution and a social organization." (! p.10,italics mine) The implications of this passage, taken in the context of Habermas's interests indemocracy and ideal communication communities, are many in relation to the computer-poem,for the poem can then become the locus of types of information unadulterated by authorialinterpretive manipulation, placed merely in suggestive contrasts not only to themselves, outsi deof their contexts in the "real" world when framed by their respective discourses. In this way, thecomputer-poem becomes that area of "comprehensive rationality" Habermas describes later,where such strategies as irony and parody, or even tragedy and comedy, can play with thepurportedly "objective" modes that are associated with scientific inquiry, or even literary criticalinquiry. "Cultural traditions, which otherwise operate dogmatically" also becomes the focus ofthis critical act, as this poem demonstrates with its attempt to illuminate the underlyingassumptions of Old English heroic poetry - an earlier poem of mine played a similar sort ofgame with Puritan theology and politics. This is no way suggests that the poem (especially thisone) are out to "change the world" and make determinating effects on political action (or evenliterary action), but it does demonstrate how this solipsistic form of poetical composition - inwhich authorial agency is highly oblique or off-stag! e - can operate in the "real world" ofpolitical and literary action - as a mass of thought that adopts, spins (or perverts) and spits backnormative or dogmatic modes of communication, so that an alienation occurs (the suggestion ofBrecht's, or Piscator's, epic theater is intentional, as well as Andrews' and Bernstein's poetics),creating a distancing space in which critical activity can take place. Such a space is not theinevitable creation of the computer-poem, nor can it not be created otherwise, but when donewell, such a poem can creates this space with an area of massive proportions.



































¹⁷ See Kevin Davies, "COMP (preliminary ambush)", published in Arras (New Jersey, 1996),cover. "Subordination sentence pellet / These grammar storm introductory pet remember /Those your genital in textbook vocabulary suggestion chamber"



































¹⁸ One aspect of the computer-poem is that it offers an analogy to socialization and theresistance to it as it exists in misanthropic, or even schizophrenic, individuals. "Schizophrenia"itself is a much bandied term in literary discourse these days, and it has been applied ininterpretations of postmodern literature for some time (most notably by Jameson, writing on BobPerelman). Nonetheless, a useful description of a "healthy" person - an "ontologically secure"individual, one not afraid of engulfment, implosion, and petrification ("thingification") anddepersonalization - may show where the computer-poem may lie in this dichotomy of health andillness. In The Divided Self [London: Tavistock Publications, 1960], R.D. Laing writes that anontologically secure person "will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual,biological, from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people's reality and identity. It isoften difficult for a person with such a sense of hi! s integral selfhood and personal identity, of thepermanency of things, of the reliability of natural process, of the substantiality of naturalprocesses, of the substantiality of others, to transpose himself into the world of an individualwhose experiences may be utterly lacking in any unquestionable self-validating certainties."(p.40) The computer-poem, like the writing of Kafka (about whom Laing writes), provides awindow to this sort of existence, thus opening some political possibilities for the treatment ofmental illness. Autonomy of any nature is at question in this type of poem, for all original textsare immediately fed into the processes of the computer, so that the spoken "I" that, for example,debates about love and politics, is jammed in its communications to the reader - the exactopposite, one feels, from the elation Charles Olson felt in his essay on "Projective Verse," inwhich he writes of this direct (via the many possibilities open by the page as field of action)transference of experience to the reader. The "Projective Verse" essay is just one example of anexpression of the fear of "engulfment," about which Laing writes: "The individual experienceshimself as a man who is only saving himself from drowning by the most constant, strenuousactivity. Engulfment is felt as a risk in being understood (thus grasped, comprehended), in beingloved, or even simply being seen. To be hated may be feared for other reasons, but to be hatedas such is often less disturbing than to be destroyed, as it is felt, through being engulfed, bylove." (p.46) This implications of this sort of sketch of the early stages of psychosis areinteresting in relation to early proponents of the avant-garde - F.T. Marinetti and WyndhamLewis come to mind - and their use of the concrete, the "hard", and the anti-psychological in art,while at the same time actively pursued misanthropic, often mis! ogyn ist, artistic and politicalprograms (which are reinscribed, in a way, in Olson). The computer-poem, as I have beendescribing it, obviously plays into this psychological scheme, and yet it can't be considered aFuturist form since it is so permeable by tradition, and since it opens itself to psychologicalinterpretation even if - as I have claimed - it has no "interior." Unlike the writing of Kafka,which usually involve a central personage imperfectly completing the "other," and like thewriting of Shakespeare, for instance, it can be stage on which several voices interact as uniqueagents in a discourse that need not be totally alienating or indistinct, but can have room for thefluid processes of interpretation and even inclusion (like in music). Furthermore, though thecomputer-program may be, itself, the flood from which the reader will want to turn for fear ofengulfment, it is also a locus of power, when used well, and can be as signature in its form as alyric or sonnet, and ! a form which acknowledges the permanent "other", though it may not speakto, so much as perform before, this other.



































¹⁹ George P. Landow, in his book Hypertext (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992),describes, in a thorough and "theoretical" though mostly uncritical fashion, the role thatinterlinked texts in computers can play, and are playing, in ways that have changed the generalunderstanding of the autonomy of texts and the closed linearity of the narrative universe, alongwith the role that the visual image adopt presented with text. He links these various newconcepts to much theory by such writers as Derrida and Bakhtin, thus demonstrating thatcomputers have fulfilled many "prophecies" by theorists, offering, thus, the hard evidence of theefficacy of the ideas themselves. His book, much of which is based on his own actual experiencewith hypertext, is interesting but highly problematic, and finally adds up, in my opinion, to manynon-conclusions, Landow having built them upon some poor rationalization. While I can't, here,reiterate all of the arguments in his book, a few are wor! th investigating. Landow's conception ofhypertext, for example, seems to equate the mere juxtaposition of two texts as an act ofcollaboration between the respective authors, something which he feels can only occur in"cyberspace" and not in, say, the well-stocked library of an academician or bibliophile. Hewrites: "By emphasizingthe presence of other texts and their cooperative interaction, networkedhypertext makes all additions to a system simultaneously a matter of versioning and of theassembly-line model. Once ensconced within a network of electronic links, a document nolonger exists by itself. It always exists in relation to other documents in a way that a book orprinted document never does and never can. From this crucial shift in the way texts exist inrelation to others derive two principles that, i n turn, produce this fourth form of collaboration:first, any document placed on any networked system that supports electronically linked materialspotentially exists in collaboration with any and all other documents on that system; second, anydocument electronically linked to any other document collaborates with it." (p.88, italics mine) One is unclear, reading this, of the exact difference between, say, copying several paragraphsfrom a book in a library and taking them home, and cut-and-pasting them from an intermediasystem; he assumes a metaphysic that grants some sort of ubiquity to a computerized text that hedoesn't believe occurs with books, and that texts, once they have entered cyberspace, partake ofthis ubiquity, so that once they meet in an interlinked situation, they have already "scoped eachother out" and need no further introduction. It is worth noting that he switches from terms like"emphasize" (comparative) and "potentially" to terms that suggest total (superlati! ve) andinevitable transformations of understanding. With such logic, a visit to the zoo, with itsjuxtapositions that cannot and never can occur in "nature," permenantly, completely, andinevitably impresses upon the mind the interconnectivity (and chaos) of all animal and vegatablelife, which is usually not the case - one discovers, rather, the sad logic of cages and feedingschedules, not to mention budgets and the fickleness of idle curiousity. Landow also ignores, orfails to bemoan, the decontextualization that occurs when an excerpt is ripped from its originalbinding, as if reading were merely (as many academicians believe) the accumulation of catchphrases and marketable concepts, without the totality of a unifying, signature scheme to resistsuch poor digestion. There may be relevance in Landow's arguments in terms of the use ofvisual images, but photography and film, and before that printing, were the real revolutionaryforces in the use of images to support texts (though I d! o, myself, plan on using images,photographic and kinetic, in c omputerized poems, and possibly on the Internet). The field, orlocus, of intermedia, as Landow notes here but often forgets, is only one of potential; it is not aplace where connections are automatically made (such automation requires biases, anyway, andis not worth lauding), and will not make individuals any better at synthesizinginformation anddrawing conclusions. In fact, it may make them worse, since information is invariably leveledwhen appropriated for the computer, such that a video description of a waterfall, or a walk downJohn Rechy's Broadway, or the sound of William Carlos Williams' voice, are put on an equalplain, with an equal degree of accessibility (to two senses, with a limited range of height andvolume) and vulnerability (the same that any textual sign can suffer, that of disbelief), such thataccidents of persception will occur less frequently than "in the field." In this way, users ofhypertext interlinks may come to not know their own ignorance - the age-o! ld p roblem of bookworms. There is also the assumption that anyone, of any type of psychology and background, canunderstand and appreciate this information, as if the addition of sound and color - but with thenotable absence of a director/ editor, an organizing sensibility - will make the Korean War, or acholera plague, a more "lived" and academically useful category of information. This sort ofleveling could not, for example, lead to a multi-dimensional poetics of understanding like that ofBlake's (to use an odd, but "charged," example), for it short-circuits, in obvious ways, the sort ofcorporeal, visceral understanding necessary for the prophetic works and the fluid psychologicaldynamics inscribed in them. Consequently, hypertext only serves to reinscribe (Lockean)binaries - or a primary binary - that Landow professes to have been dissolved, for the experienceof this information is always along the same axis of I/computer (however fluid this one exchangeis), never exploding in! to "sensurround" atomization that involves different trajector ies ofperceptions (smells, touch, etc.), time, narrative contexts, and psychology (sexuality, forinstance, which is reduced to a voyeurism). In the same way, "collaboration" must be defined intwo different ways, perhaps by the use of two words, rather than by stretching a single definitionto include both the "potential" that is involved in the mere juxtaposition of texts, and the actualday-to-day work in which directors and scientists in a laboratory engage to reach very specificends - the same problem, as noted earlier on anthrolopolgy, of the "soiled hands." Though thisis a cursory treatment of the contexts of Hypertext, I think it points to the main conceptual flaw,which is the failure to define the new metaphysics in a way that theorists have not already donefor non-computerized texts, and to demonstrate how the physical presence of the technology andits operations (beyond the obvious arguments for speed of access).produce manifest alterationsin the nature of human under! stan ding that make it markedly different from that reliant on booklibraries. T.S. Eliot, in "The Function of Criticism," describes the misgivings that one might have tohypertext as a tool for collecting information (it doesn't, indeed, produce information - there isno field work in hypertext that is not already-covered ground), and its need for sensibility:"Comparison and analysis need only the cadavers on the table; but interpretation is alwaysproducing parts of the body from its pockets, and fixing them in place. And any book, any essay,any note in Notes and Queries, which produces a fact even of the lowest order about a work ofart is a better piece of work than nine-tenths of the most pretentious critical journalism, injournals or books. We assume, of course, that we are masters and not servants of facts, and thatwe know that the discovery of Shakespeare's laundry bills would not be of much use to us; but wemust always reserve final judgment as to the futility of such research which has discovered them,in the possibility that some genius will appe! ar w ho will know of a use to which to put them. Scholarship, even in its humblest forms, has its rights; we assume that we know how to use it,and how to neglect it. Of course the multiplication of critical books and essays may create, andI have seen it create, a vicious taste for reading about works of art instead of reading the worksthemselves, it may supply opinion instead of educating taste." (Selected Prose [New York:Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1975] pp. 75-76) Hypertext puts the laundry bill up front with theinformation on demographics and the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and is not very useful tosomeone who wants to meet with a stable, interesting intellect in an informed - but notinformationally saturated - discussion of Shakespeare; in this way, it is useful for one who has ataste for organizing stray facts, but not for one interested in discourse about those facts, which isunfortunate when the facts themselves cease to be provocative, and when they lose the sheen ofbeing secr! et, a unique possession. Finally, hypertext may have a negative effect on prose styleitself, which, when its good, is usually polyphonous and resonant, always pointing to anunderstanding that outside itself. A centripetal prose style is fine when the tensions that existbetween the outward motion of the information is held in a dramatic, tenuous check by the drawtoward a "conclusion". However, the model of the "wheel of information" that Landow drawsfor hypertext does not quite embody this, but is, rather, a simple creation of minor lineations thatrevolve around an axis that, itself, offers no synthesis, since that axis that is the site of the originof the several lineations is the work of literature itself, the as-yet-undisclosed "orphic" utterance.It would be as if In Memoriam were required to explain the information that hypertext hadassembled around it, when the exact opposite was intended. (Landow's book, which he sayswould have been more suitable for hypertext, is itself ! highly repetitive, having reached most ofits c onclusions in the first twenty or so pages. One grows suspicious that his failure to delvedeeper into his topic, rather than the skating through citations, each of which is treated ratheruncritically, were not the result of some misgivings he himself felt.)



































²⁰ The Thérémin, invented around 1926 by Leon Thérémin, did in fact exist, along with the"ondes martenot," invented by Marice Martenot. They were electronic instruments, the first tobe used by composers of orchestral music (Hindemith and Varèse were pioneers).



































²¹ Kenneth Rexroth writes in his essay on Rimbaud in Bird In Bush: Obvious Essays (New York:New Directions, 1947): "He applied to literature, and to litterateurs, the minute he laid eyes onthem, the devastating methods of total exploitation described so graphically in the CommunistManifesto. Some of them were not very applicable. He 'ran' the vowels like he later ran guns tothe Abyssinians, with dubious results. Usually, however, he was very successful - in the sameway his contemporaries Jim Fiske and P.T. Barnum were successful." (p.44)



































²² Based on "This Is Just to Say" (1934) by William Carlos Williams.



































²³ Matthew Arnold, "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse" (1855). This phrase, which thecomputer graciously provided whole from the text on Zen, in which Arnold was quoted, isextraordinarily resonant in the context of the efforts of many recent essayists attempting todescribe the direction and necessity of literary change today, but also as a reminder that theVictorians were already aware of the state of in-betweeness that English and American societyhas adopted again and again since then.



































²⁴ "Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness, defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means by which our society socializes children is by making them feelashamed of behavior or speech that is contrary to society's expectations. If this is overdone, orif a particular child is especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed ofHIMSELF. Moreover the thought and the behavior of the oversocialized person are morerestricted by society's expectations than are those of a lightly socialized person. The majority ofpeople engage in a significant amount of naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty thefts,they break traffic laws, they goof off at work, they hate someone, they say spiteful things or theyuse some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot dothese things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of shame and self-hatred. Theoversocialized person cannot even ! experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that arecontrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think 'unclean' thoughts. And socialization is notjust a matter of morality; we are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do notfall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychologicalleash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him. In manyoversocialized people this results in a sense of constraint and powerlessness that can be a severehard ship. We suggest that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that humanbeings inflict on one another." From "The Unibomber Manifesto: Industrial Society & ItsFuture" by "FC" (no copyright).



































²⁵ Charles O. Hartman. Hartman is a Professor of English and Poet in Residence at ConnecticutCollege, and has recently published an interesting book called Virtual Muse (New England:Wesleyan University Press, 1996), which describes his own experiments in computer-generatedpoetry and includes, in an appendix, several examples of complete works. A complete book ofhis computer poetry, created in collaboration with Hugh Kenner), was published in 1995 by Sun& Moon Press, and is called Sentences. In Virtual Muse, Hartman provides, first, a usefulhistory of work that has been done with computers, including an excerpt from a 1984 work by theprogram "Racter" that runs (it sounds like Stein or early Ashbery): "Bill sings to Sarah. Sarahsings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb orstroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love butthey also have typewriters. That is interesting." (p.2) He ! then goes on to describe his own earlyexperience with computers from the time of punch-cards, some of his ideas on composition andthe poetic image (he contrasts Pound's River Merchant's Wife to a translation from the Chineseby Witter Bynner), and his first experience with one of the first home computers, the SinclairZX81. (I also owned a Sinclair ZX81, before moving on to the Vic 20. My first interest in poetrywas, ironically, sparked by Pound, with similar conclusions drawn regarding the image and thepossibilities of "creative" translation.) Hartman's programs are generally very different thanmine, for while he attempts to "teach" the computer to rep roduce English grammar, I have beeninterested, to this point, only in having them shuffle and create texts, and to translate numbersinto language. Hartman's first effort, for example, was the creation of a "scansion machine"which can actually read, with great accuracy, poems that have been input; the program becomessophisticated enough to scan, for example, Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 in a way that he says isnever "wrong," according to Harman, but occasionally, for reasons of drama, contestable. Hisnext venture, after "Racter," is a program called "Travesty," which he developed with HughKenner. This program takes previously input text and "scrambles it" down to level n, so thatwere n to equal 1 every leter of the text would be scrambled, and if it were 9 the input wouldremain, except for some odd leaps, a generally "normal" text. Some of this work is interesting,but is often flat because of his inattention to the tones of the poem in the final version, which hasmore to do wit! h ar tistry than programming. An n=2 poem runs, "Dengethe pr: o ls thee. wicachYe thur. obbug lesila thicatetonoisthate..." etc, sounding like some bad Joyce; an n=9 poemruns, "Dead flies cause the ointment of the ruler: folly is set in great dignity, and the end of hismouth is foolishness: and the end of his talk is mischievous madness. A fool also is full ofwords: a man cannot tell what shall bite him..." etc. (He uses the tenth chapter of the book ofEcclesiastes for this last one, hence its orphic quality.) Hartman goes on to create something ofan English grammar for the computer, and combines the scansion machine with a dictionary thathe created which has the words coded for their syntactical function. He doesn't consider theearly work using this set-up interesting, and yet I find it, perhaps because of my interest inparody and lack of concern for scansion itself, much more engaging than the light Surrealistwork that he prefers. He quotes one example at length, a poem str! iking because of the use of (inmy phrase) the "metalic I": The garden of steel - place - had figured in
this. When I am every afternoon,
how can't I the last teacher write? But I
was art without my play between a result
and the metabolism, and the night
of language toward a story between the part
and any light (the thin subject) remains.
Unless their jazz among so national
a center burned to practice, history
is a machine's afternoon... (p.71)
I am envious of Hartman's scansion machine, along with his programmed grammar, and sincethis verse reminds me of Coleridge, I find it humorous to consider this "metabolism" in aRomantic pastoral setting. While acknowledging the work of the "language" poets and suchwriters as Cage and Mac Low (he later makes some dance pieces that are reminiscent of thelatter's "Light Poems"), Hartman sense of prosody and linguistic "sense" (which must, to him, betransparent in some way, and not elliptic, ironic considering his earlier point regarding thetranslation techniques of Pound) may be what hinders him, in my opinion, from creating workthat takes full advantage of the splicing possibilities of the computer. He writes, for instance,describing the work of his program "Prose" : "'Prose,' then, could be treated as a first-draftwriter. Many sentences had to be ejected outright. 'How was language under volume of thehotel leaving?' presented no foothold to my imagination. 'I was evening o! f the school' didn't setany bells resonating when I came across it. A few sentences slipped through unaltered: 'Whereis this theory walking?' Others needed only the slightest touch. 'Any spirit near man: a town'became 'Any spirit near man likes a town,' which among other things seems true. (Once again, Iwas changing the sentence only to something the program could have produced.) I found myselfon unexpectedly firm ground. All I had to do as editor was to give the output a good shake untilit settled into place as sense - and keep my ears open for that sense." (pp.83-84) This paragraphaptly shows how the creator of computer-poems is something like a photographer who searches,chooses and rejects from numerous contact sheets, performing two distinct tasks of accumulationand then editing. What he means by "changing the sentence only to something the computercould have produced" implies a loyalty to the limits and creativity of his program, and illustratesanother aspect of the ethos of computer-poems, which is that one wants to spoil as little aspossible the creation of the computer, or to alter, when it is necessary, only in a systematic way. I, for instance, didn't change a word of my Brunaburh output, though I added periods,en-dashes, ellipses, commas and question marks, exclamation points and italics. Hartman'ssense of "sense" is an obvious point of conflict between my poetics and his; also, I don't think hehas a use for such musical composers as Stockhausen, Xenakis or even Glass, all of whomexplore the uses of electronically produced musics, nor for Varèse o! r Me ssiaen, for that matter,who used the Martenot in works that totally disposed of conventional distinctions between noiseand music, and of conventional musical notation. I could be wrong about this, for some poemsof his resemble Williams' work from Kora in Hell, and others resemble Stein, while one that hadnumerology at its base (equating words like "a" with 1, and "z" with 26, so that "consequence"and "thousands" both become 172) resembles a work by Glass, and is quite enjoyable. Onepoem is based on the phrase "That's glory," which he got from Humpty Dumpty, and since theword "that's," in his simple numerological scheme, equaled 68, he only used other words thatequaled this for the text - thus being forced to exclude all articles. The whole poem, which isn'tactually computer-generated but -assisted, is rather funny and resembles an Oulipo work, like AVoid of Perec. It begins: That's acceptable. That's goofy
elating language: gleeful logos
nobly jeering, lauding drily -
that's doings. That's bagsful,
that's unbated beauts. That's
poems readably suave, trued,
pleading diligence, calving jetsam,
dangling acuter Damoclean dangers
safely. That's swank. (p.146) Hartman's book is worth reading, and offers some specific contrasts to the poetic that has beenimplied in the present essay. He asks, for example: "Will certain poetry methods catch on andestablish themselves and evolve in similar ways? Or will we shift the demand for originality inpoems toward meta-originality in method? Another decade or two should tell us." (p.101). I amconfident that such a "meta-originality" is already present in contemporary American poeticsand art, and that the work produced by it need not appear cold, mechanical, or alienating, butcan indeed be "warm," as works by others - such as Cage and Perec - have already shown.



































²⁶ Sadakichi Hartman.



































²⁷ Charles Ives. His father used to place him, as a sort of "ear training," between two marchingbands walking toward each other playing different compositions, so that he would learn toappreciate the countering weaves of melody amid the dissonance and mounting volume.



































²⁸ Erik Davis describes, in "Techgnosis, Magic, Memory and the Angels of Information" (inFlame Wars, edited by Mark Dery [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994],pp.29-59), the history of memory within gnostic traditions (reiterating themes from FrancesYates' Art of Memory) and the ways that culturally sublimated notions of memory will be, orhave been, altered by data-shuffling technology. He writes that, from the beginning, the"hermetically inspired magician was immersed in data," and that part of the inspiration for theobliquity and encyclopedic nature of hermetic works - along with allegorical works such as theFaerie Queen - was to provide the reader with a "mirror... to the immensity of divine wisdom,"along with various nodes of connection that operate along "magical," rather than rational, lines. Davis quotes Angus Fletcher on allegory, and notes that "modern science depends on adisjunction between the synthetic fantasies of the imagination and the rigor of analytic! syst emization, whereas allegory fuses these two modes." (p.40) The computer-poem is, perhaps,the background against which allegory can take place, as such fusions proliferate within it. Davis's paraphrase of Yates' description of one method of the "art of memory" is suggestive ofhow the computer poem serves to create something like a forgetfulness - the lotus/Lotusexchange is relevant, here - not to mention a skepticism about the motion of time, or therelevance of spacial constructs: "[T]he art consisted of mentally creating a series of imaginativespaces, usually a vast building, rigorously constructed down to the right size and even the rightlighting. Within these units were placed images of the things or words to be remembered,ranging from striking figures of bloody gods to simple emblems like anchors or swords. By'walking' through the phantasmic place, one could locate the appropriate icon and then recoverits store of words and information." (p.33) This sounds, perhaps self! -consciously, a lot like aWindows screen, or even the structure of "hypertext," but it is mostly suggestive, in this context,of how the computer-poem - one without any mnemonic devices built into its meter or form, forexample - operates both as a critique of memory and compartmentalized knowledge, and as aplace in which a temporary, or provisional, ordering and synthesis of previously disconnectedinformation can take place. A computer-poem c onstructed by means of a system will not havemarkers denoting the boundaries of unique thought-spaces (or "ideas") unless they are put in -numbers, line breaks, rhyme, etc. It creates, in this way, flat canvases that are charged equallyacross its surface, not unlike the "all-over" painting of Abstract Expressionists, leaving theeditor-poet responsible for drawing out distinctions, creating forms from the chaos. Consequently, since all connections in the computer-poem are "magical" when they work, andsince the poems can be very large, such a "divine mirroring" (if it doesn't create a sort ofnausea) can be transcendental, in a secular way.



































²⁹ Veronica Forrest-Thomson, in her book Poetic Artifice (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978),calls the critical process to which she is opposed "Naturalization," which she describes in theintroduction to her book as "an attempt to reduce the strangeness of poetic language and poeticorganization by making it intelligible, by translating it into a statement about the non-verbalexternal world, by making the Artifice appear natural. Critical reading cannot, of course, avoidNaturalization altogether. Criticism is committed, after all, to helping us to understand bothpoetry as an institution and individual poems as significant utterances. But it must ensure thatin its desire to produce ultimate meaning it does not purchase intelligibility at the cost ofblindness: blindness to the complexity of those non-meaningful features which differentiatepoetry from everyday language and make it something other than an external thematic statementabout an already-known world." (p.xi) The implica! tion is that the critic is attempting a totalstatement about a poem, regardless of those elements of the poem that resist that statement,which are the exceptions (or "anomolies," in Kuhn's term) that argue against the narrativ e thatthe critic is employing. She is describing, in essence, the battle on the part of the poem or poetagainst an overdetermined, "fascist" (my term) interpretation of a poem. She continues: "Therewould be no point in writing poetry unless poetry were different from everyday language, andany attempt to analyze poetry should cherish that difference and seek to remain within its boundsfor as long as possible rather than ignore the difference in an unseemly rush from world toworld. Good naturalization dwells on the non-meaningful levels of poetic language, such asphonetic and prosodic patterns and spatial organization, and tries to state their relation to otherlevels of organization rather than set them aside in an attempt to produce a statement about theworld." The computer-poem, which (like Dada, which Forrest-Thomson equates with her conceptof Artifice) foregrounds its means, which is language, even when in fragmentary or isolatedstate, along with the determinant meaning s! truc tures, whether narrative or philosophical, thusboth expanding and focusing the attention of the reader from or onto the microscopic levels ofthe poem. Only "good naturalization" is possible with the computer poem of the type I havebeen describing, at least when the ur-texts are dominantly "found," for there is simply no way toconstruct what was happening in the author's head when the poem was conceived. In fact, acomputer-poem that uses only canonical literature as its ur-texts - a series of lyric poems, forinstance - will serve, with little instigation, to isolate and highlight certain "micro-gestural"elements of the original poems, along with some underlying aspects of its Artifice, in a way thatsimply dissecting a poem, or giving it a "deep reading," will not (though, of course, one canperform these operations without a computer). Louis Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry, aneducational book that usefully contrasts poems from different historical periods to point outtheir struc! tural and aesthetic characteristics - contrasting three differ ent translations of Homer,for example - is a more ordered version of this.



































³⁰ Donna Haraway writes in the "Cyborg Manifesto" (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women [New York:Routledge, 1991]): "The cyborg is a creature of a post-gender world; it has no truck withbisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholenessthrough a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, thecyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awfulapocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuations, an ultimateself united at last from all dependency, a man in space." (p.150) The entire manifesto issuggestive of the more intricate levels of the politics of the computer-poem, from its role inlate-capitalist economy to its "argument for the pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and forresponsibility in their construction." That the computer-poem (of the type I have beendescribing) is, like the cyborg, "resolutely committed to ! partiality, irony, intimacy, andperversity" goes practically without saying, and it is not, in this way, unlike the material in thefollowing footnote.



































³¹ "sPeech mOve 'em jUst as oNe saiD
'Em to Zenos metevsky bieRs to seel cAnnon
Peace nOt while yew rUssia a New keyboarD
likE siZe ov a pRince An' we sez wud yew like
his Panties fer the cOmpany y hUrbana zeNos' Door
with hEr champZ don't the felleRs At home
uP-Other Upside dowN up to the beD-room"
John Cage, from "Writing through the Cantos"



































³² Thomas Carlyle describes, in a letter to the Reverend Alexander Scott, his method for writinghis history, The French Revolution (the first volume of which was accidentally destroyed by JohnStuart Mill's servant, and which was rewritten from memory): "But as to... taking excerpts, Ithink I universally... avoid writing beyond the very minimum... and on the whole try to keep thewhole matter simmering in the living mind and memory rather than laid up in paper bundles orotherwise laid up in the way... Only what you at last have living in your memory and heart isworth putting down to be printed; this alone has much chance to get into the living heat andmind of other men..." (cited in John D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden ofHistory[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985] p.17 (footnote). That his FrenchRevolution was, itself, a revolution enacted in language is suggested in his own defense of hisstyle: "If one has thoughts not hither to uttered in English Books, I see nothin! g for it but that youmust use words not found there, must make words... [With] the whole structure of ourJohnsonian English breaking up from its foundations, - revolution there is as visible as anywhereelse." (Rosenberg, p.30, italics mine) Carlyle's comments are relevant to the discussion ofcomputer-generated poetry, for though the poems are decidedly not the product of a "living"memory - though the texts have such significance to the programmer - they are "simmering" inthe hard drive, ready to clash with others once the gates of inspiration of opened. That Carlylevalorized the "breaking up" of language that is necessarily produced on such a battle-ground(including the creation of neologisms, which Mayakovsky agreed was a revolutionary act)suggests that he was well aware, that early in the century, that language would be the locus onemust investigate to underwrite truth. Carlyle's own memory cannot be said to have be en "linear"or even spatially consistent; it was an amalgam of all of these elements plus a few othersinvolving both a polyphony of speaking voices along with his "Homeric" one. His writing is, infact, like the voice of the computer-poem in that it appears unstoppable, endless, all-absorbing,forcing punctuation and even vocabulary into situations that are random-seeming andprovisional, yet part of a great prophetic flood. Almost any page from the French Revolutionhas some example of this: "Look also at the Châtelet Prison. The Debtors' Prison of La Forceis broken from without; and they that sat in bondage to Aristocrats go free: hearing of which theFelons at the Châtelet do likewise 'dig up their pavements', and stand on the offensive; with thebest prospects, - had not Patriotism, passing that way, 'fired a volley' into the Felon-world; andcrushed it down again under hatches. Patriotism consorts not with thieving and felony: surelyalso Punishment, this day, hit! ches (if she still hitch) after Crime, with frightfulshoes-of-swiftness!" (The French Revolution [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], p.190) Worth noting is the creation of a "Felon-world" and the anthropomorphization of "Punishment,"which makes the text seem more like science fiction (of Delany, for example) than epic poetry,since the text is atomized under the poetical autonomy of all things and concepts. The speed ofexecution, along with the rush of information, also give an MTV quality to the movement of theimagery (in which the actual symbols of the French Revolution are leveled, often, with thosehighly ironized ones that Carlyle creates), though in a video that, indeed, would be a bitpolitically suspect.



































³³ Nam Jun Paik. Paik said in a recent interview with Art Asia Pacific (Vol. 3 No. 3, 1996) "DidAsia or Korea come up with Nike sneakers? No, you might think this trivial but Koreans havenot invented or developed even trivial products." He ends: "My body is already decaying. I amslowly dying and I will soon be dead. So I advise people to buy my work now. If you buy mywork within the next three years you will be making a good profit. I guarantee this." (pp.54-57) That the computer-poem, at least as described in the present essay, has some relationship toPaik's video imaging is probably obvious.



































³⁴ "It was a liquor / - 'Bergen' - / nursed him back / to health." (BKS)



































³⁵ Homi Bhabha writes in his introduction to The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge,1992): "Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are producedperfomatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection ofpre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation ofdifference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks toauthorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of cultural transformation. The 'right' tosignify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege does not depend on the persistenceof tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions ofcontingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are 'in the minority'" (p.2, italics mine) Like Haraway's writing on cyborgs, Bhabha's iterations describing the"location" of culture as a gathering in the interstic! es, on the borders of "foreign" countries andamid fragments of languages, along with his call for the suspicion of specific ethnic "traditions",are suggestive of the natural political implications of the computer-poem, along with its abilityto enact as gesture rather authority. The computer-poem unsettles tradition scrupulously, withno psychological hang-ups, and has as its primary function the authorization of hybridities,though this only occurs when the "right" form - line length, stanza shape, punctuation, alongwith the right numbers plugged in for splicing - is discovered by the poet. Bhabha's descriptionof the politics of naming later in the book (writing on Derek Walcott, and specificallyappropriate to Omeros) also suggest the ability that a computer-poem might have to alternotions of "Adamic" agency in the appropriation of objects into language, for the computer,which creates the poem of this new interstitial locus, itself has no genesis - it is the ultimateplayer from the margins - and thereby no survival agenda, and it remains rather comfortablyamid the chaos.



































³⁶ These are the actual last verses of Tennyson's translation, the "tail" of that file that didn't getincorporated into the main part of the poem. Normally, I cut the tail off, or strategically end thepoem so that the tail (or tale) is very brief; in this case there was just the right amount left toleave it as narrative closure.