So when context becomes the new content,
CONTEXT COLLAPSE cannot be far behind.
And after? What would postcontextual
Poetry even look like? Ask Victor
H. Yngve, professor of linguistics
At MIT, whose 1961
Paper, “Random Generation of English
Sentences,” features Computational
Poetry generated with the help
Of COMIT, his string-processing language,
And the words found in a children’s book about
A tiny steam engine. Ask Bill Chamberlain
And Thomas Etter, who programmed Racter
Using BASIC, which, in 1984,
Wrote The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed,
A book of “machine prose.” Ask Jonathan
Basile, whose Library Of Babel, founded
By algorithm in 2015,
Anagrammatically combines letters
To permutate every book that has
Ever been or could ever be written.
Ask the artist-designer Es Devlin
And her collaborator Ross Goodwin,
Who, working with the resources of
The Google Arts & Culture Lab, are using
A database of twenty-five million
Words of downloaded nineteenth-century
Poetry to train machine intelligence
To write a “personalized” couplet for you,
Superimposed on an image of your face
You provide yourself (and which Google keeps).
Ask, if you must, the latest iteration
Of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write
You a verse essay on the history
Of poetry — from Homer to itself —
In loose pentameter lines, with footnotes.
Better yet, ask Christian Bök. If, that is,
You can pry him away from the Calgary
Laboratory where he is encoding
A Xenotext into the DNA
(Orpheus) and RNA (Eurydice)
Of the bacterium Deinococcus
Radiodurans, which will appear, one day,
Generations from now, as a sonnet,
Giving a new, more literal sense
To the word poesis. Well, Mr. Bök?
“[Computer programs like] Racter demonstrate
The fundamental irrelevance of
The writing subject in the manufacture
Of the written product.” Yes, as we have
Already seen. But what of the audience?
“If poetry already lacks any
Meaningful readership among our
Own anthropoid population, what have
We to lose by writing poetry for
A robotic culture that must . . . succeed
Our own?” Only that portion of our
Gattungswesen, which, for longer than we
Can even remember, has been defined
By our refusal to remain content
With what there is and with the way things are.
Nothing more, nothing less. As Bök is surely
Aware, artificial intelligence
Has already developed to the point
Where human scriptors are not required
To make contributions to robotic
Culture. Bots can transfer data among
Themselves, occupying the positions
Of both sender and receiver, once known
As poet and audience, data which
Represents the mere relay of energy,
Pure negentropic equilibrium,
Afflux and reflux without end or end:
A state not unlike the one that preceded
Sentience: a state — in an irony
Whose pathos cannot but be lost on them —
That is indistinguishable from death.