Poeta Doctus

Time constraints and temperament restrict many of my thoughts to remarks. Thus, what follows are emphatically fragments, metonymies (parts) of potentially more-extended discourses and drafts (essays) holding the promise of future elaboration….

“If you want to change your life / burn down your house…” These words, which open Peter Dale Scott’s Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000, strike an uncannily, untimely note in light of this season’s fires in Maui and in Canada’s north and west coast. The first canto of Scott’s long poem describes experiencing one of the no-less devastating wildfires Californians suffered in the closing years of last century. Both the fires in California and Maui left “rivulets of metal // from… melted cars.” From a broader, historical perspective, my German father-in-law, who came of age in the closing years of the Second World War in Germany’s industrial zone, the Ruhrgebeit, when he saw pictures of the devastation in Maui, was reminded of similar pictures he’d seen of a bombed-out Dresden. Such devastation, that stretches back, too, to that of the Great War, prompts Scott to cite Heidegger’s 1929 study, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, concerning “Dasein face to face // with its original nakedness.” Have we here, perhaps, a new literary topos?…

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not write but, more exactly, perhaps, merely generate not even intertext but a permutation of its elements (words). Where intertext, rigorously, is “scraps of text that have existed or exist…the texts of the previous or surrounding culture… a new tissue of past citations…”, the “wake of the already-written”, what LLMs produce is only the most probable order of words. Do such prototexts not, imaginably (if not imaginatively) call forth, then, from poetry a countermeasure, the demand to compose in the least likely syntax? This demand transcends The New Sentence, wherein parataxis occurs only between sentences, urging a rereading of not only those most syntactically centripetal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems, for example, but those explorations in this direction in, among others, the novels and poems of William Burroughs and John Cage, let alone those even older, deeper efforts to evade, avoid, or otherwise complicate the declarative sentence as “a complete(d) thought” in the poetry of Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, among so many others.

Or, from a related angle, chatbot “poems” need be considered in light of earlier modes of aleatoric composition, whether Burroughs’ Third Mind techniques or Cage’s or MacLow’s employment of the I Ching, or, farther back, Surrealism and Dada, or, even more radically, the various forms of divination throughout space and time, such as those collected in Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred and remembered even in the classical heritage of antiquity (the Sybil’s leaves…). Given that the unconscious if not the “mindless” has been overtly and consciously employed in the composition of poetry to a variety of ends, chatbot “poems” or their precursors (which go back decades) are hardly “new.” Indeed, their very place in so-called “Late” Capitalism urges their scrutiny in light of the tradition, especially when they are employed “to write” “poems.” Is it inconsequential that Breton was a communist, that MacLow and, in his own way, Cage were anarchists?…

Perry Anderson, in his Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, sketches the grounds for “The General Crisis” of the Fourteenth Century. On the one hand, agricultural production reached a limit: existing, arable land was becoming degraded, and land that could be reclaimed had been and was of a poor quality. At the same time, silver mining could neither dig deeper nor exploit the relatively poor-quality ore that could be accessed, affecting the amount of coin in circulation. This crisis in the forces of production was aggravated by the Black Death, which killed an estimated net 40% of the population of Europe.

Parallels to our present day are suggestive. The carrying capacity of the earth’s ecology has been breached (however much we do in fact produce enough food to feed the world’s population; the problem is one of distribution), and we cannot in principle exploit existing fossil fuel reserves without burning down our own house. Covid is hardly the Black Plague, but it is only one of the pathogens that have been and will be released by the progressing economic colonialization of what wilderness remains.

Nevertheless, on the other side of the Fourteenth Century and its crises was not total collapse, but the Renaissance….

At a time of deep social fragmentation (Identity politics, ethnonationalisms…) and irrationality (a loss of consensus, determined by so many factors…) and no less in the face of the climate and more general environmental crisis is it not necessary, then, to revive the Universal and the Human?…