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Young Poets

Write as you will

In whatever style you like

Too much blood has run under the bridge

To go on believing

That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only one condition, of course:

You have to improve on the blank page.

-nicanor parra

Richard Feynman: Can Machines Think?

here is an entertaining short bit from a lecture given by the great physicist richard feynman re AI from 1985.  i just listened to a podcast this afternoon examining the philosophical & moral complexities of thinking machines.  but one thing i think we all seem to get hung up on regarding AI as akin to human cognition.  here, in this talk, feynman, i think, correctly identifies the fallacy of the comparison.  machines, i think, are beginning to think.  hell, they might even gain consciousness.  the great quantum leaps in Large Language Models released these last few months also exhibit what they might be using arguably imagination.  but they will not be like our human brains.  they are another order of being.  we can fly like birds but our machines built to fly do not flap their wings to do so.  & in the end, AI will, as feynman says in his conclusion, both in our own human brains & in thinking machines, 'show us the necessary weaknesses of intelligence.'

thank god it's friday!

in rainbows

The rainbow never tells me

That gust and storm are by,
Yet is she more convincing
Than Philosophy.

My flowers turn from Forums—
Yet eloquent declare
What Cato couldn’t prove me
Except the birds were here!

--emily dickinson

reflections on post-poetry

today was one of my favorite kind of days.  a day of NOTHING.  nada.  zip.  zilch.  indeed, the rain was welcome.  i spent the morning watching one of the goofiest horror flicks i've seen in a while, Turistas (Paradise Lost) [2006], about gringo tourists who get taken by human organ harvesters in the jungles of brazil.  starring josh duhamel, olivia wilde, melissa george et al.  & directed by john stockwell, it's the standard tourists in peril kind of pap that only kept me interested because i like the principals onscreen.  they weren't given that much to do for the script was threadbare.  but hell, when you are on your second cup of coffee & the weather is telling you to cozy up indoors it could've been worse.

but then, i read a few essays by the french poet jean-marie gleize published here at blackout.  i am still tripping on gleize's definition of 'post-poetry' which he calls his own writing.  indeed, gleize's essays are an exploration of his poetics in our late-capitalist age.  how can poetry engage, deal with, change even, & address this wild world of ours.  for we are not the first generations to cope with uncertainty & the fears that come with a destabilizing civilization.  read or watch any news feed or channel & you sure the hell don't need an advanced degree to understand that we are in some serious shit.

i am not going to extract any deep analyses of gleize's thinking on what makes post-poetry poetry.  i lack the critical apparatuses to do so.  but he does have a duchampian ethos.  poetry is words, or actions, or sounds, or images, set forth in a systematic order either on paper, in pixels, onscreen, or in sounds that is called poetry by the maker of the poem.  poetry is whatever the poet calls it.  if that sounds glib think about antipoetry & its greatest practitioner, nicanor parra, whose poems evolved into visual poems he called artefactos.  the antipoet in the 21st C eschews, i hope, normative practice & expected discourse.  perhaps the antipoet, or post-poet, dismisses traditional publication, such as books, & makes her poems available by other means, whether it be thru social media, videos posted to youtube & vimeo or other video platforms, or from live performance.  

& poetry is the most democratic of all art forms for we all own the language.  the ABCs are all of ours to do with as we wish.  of course, we are swiftly entering a new age.  one that is utterly unique to our civilization with the rise of AI & machine learning.  we've all heard of chatGPT.  we might've played with it even.  that shit is light years more advanced than the crappy bots we've had to put up with.  how will that change our writing?  fuck if i know.  this is a BRAVE NEW WORLD.  if someone tells you, naw man; this ain't unprecedented.  we've lived thru radical changes before.  agree with that person.  cuz we have.  & we do.  the last couple of centuries have been pretty damn far out.  but this time, in our early techno century, is brand fucking new.  our time, now, is way fucking unprecedented.  our civilization never had social media.  never have we had powerful machine learning.  never have corporations & governments had the abilities to use facial recognition software on us.  never fucking never.  

where do we go from here?  listening to a podcast yesterday as i did my weekly chores about the soon-to-be available technology to scan our brainwaves & know what we are thinking i thought of a trope in contemporary sci-fi.  the drunken robot.  the AI who loves shakespeare.  the street poet algorithm that likes to get fucked up on red wine, porn, & compose verses into the ether.

until that happens i will be sitting here in my own scriptorium writing my post-odes on the air.  

happy st. patrick's day

today is the day when my name becomes richard o'lopez.  i've said this before & i'll say it again, i must've been irish in a previous life for i feel such a fellowship with ireland & irish culture.  for whatever that's worth.  i'm not irish by DNA at all.  but there's something about the green isle that appeals to me to my core.  

we have emerged from the last three years of the pandemic.  today was a very lovely sunny spring day.  lots & lots of people are out today & tonight wearing green & celebrating the holiday.  today the weather was lovely.  but we expect another series of storms beginning early next week.  we go from one extreme to another.  that's our world today.

but for a moment, let us slow down & take stock of the good shit in our lives.  i know the era of drive-in movie culture is passed.  & yet, & yet...for me my favorite leprechaun in honor of st. paddy's day is a cartoon who we find at the end of the rainbow with all sorts of yummy treats & who would like a job as a drive-in theater snack bar attendant.   

so instead of centering ourselves in our floating world let us remember to enjoy the fuck out of life when & while we can.  for tomorrow will deliver us unto another world.  

happy st. patrick's day!

this is The End

brilliantly edited video that combines the brutal beauty of The Doors & Apocalypse Now

i want to write a poem that sounds like this

this song fucking rocks

take me to the atmospheric river

again

as i type the wind is really picking up fierce & we are expecting a shitload of precipitation

again

so we are making sure our phones are charged up in case we lose power

& my laptop last week blew a hinge

you know the hinges that connect the screen to the body

one of them popped the plastic & the whole unit looked gutted

i used duct tape to put it back together & so far it seems to be okay

but it is only a matter of time until i may be in the market for a new one

again

fucking hell 

was reading rimbaud this morning & even that most sublime decadent poet

in his season in hell

didn't have to deal with a busted plastic hinge on his laptop!  

horrors!!!