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.