Thursday, November 30, 2006
When the poet disappears
Machine poetry's real threat is that it potentially supplants conventional poets--unlike in the past when regardless of what poetry was trying to become, there were always authors behind it with aesthetic philosophies and intentional writing practices. Will and stance can be discussed, praised, or ridiculed. Poets can be revered or dismissed, even engaged in conversation and dialog. In the past the critic and the poet have always had Williams' "common language to unravel." But not so with the computer, or more precisely, software, which is incapable of responding to Williams admonition to "Invent!" Even Wimsatt and Beardsley, while dismissing the poet's intention as at all relevant, postulate that "a poem does not come into existence by accident"--that there is a "designing intellect" behind it. Up until now no one has really believed that the author is dead. But now the machine jeopardizes the implicit assumption behind every critical thought--that there is a real author with a real intention somewhere in the room. Absent the author, the critic risks losing everything, or worse, looking foolish.
In trying to engage literary scholars in discussions about machine poetry, I have been most surprised with how uncomfortable it makes so many of them. On one occasion I discussed my plan for submitting machine poems to literary journals (as a way of testing their quality) with a major postmodernist scholar and editor of a first-tier journal dedicated to postmodernist thinking. His response was that that was not a valid test, because it's impossible to gauge the quality of an author's work on one or two poems--yet his journal accepts, all the time, work judged on a single submission. A scholar of seventeenth century English literature, in response to my question about how he would feel about a successful poetry machine, simply (and honestly) said, "I wouldn't like it." I discussed with another poet and scholar of contemporary poetry my goal of getting machine poetry to the point where it was indistinguishable from human poetry. His confidence response: I could tell the difference.
Over time I came to understand that these people were wary of being hoaxed. The clear fear is of being fooled--of the embarrassment of reading a machine poem and finding that it takes one's breath away. If all those years of preparation and study hasn't prepared a critic to detect a counterfeit poem, then of what value was it all? And of what value is she? There is a misperception at work in all of this. Machine poetry is not counterfeit--it is as real as any poem any human poet might compose and as deserving of appreciation.
# posted by Jim @ 1:34 PM 
