Poetic Machines 04

Manifestoes generally call for advanced mandates in the arts—so of course, I am going to read the manifesto of the New Athenians with some interest, thinking that I am going to encounter an avant-garde demand for a, heretofore unimagined, revolution in poetry, but I must admit, with some disappointment, that the poetic agenda of the New Athenians seems completely recidivist, underlining the degree to which poetry has already begun to plan for its own obsolescence, doing so by maintaining its "quaintness" in the face of innovation, refusing in effect to engage with the millennial conditions of its own social milieu. I am distressed by the fact that, nowadays, the scientific argots and mechanical agents of our most advanced thinkers (be they physicists or biologists, among other technicians) have all become far more "speculative" and far more "imaginative" in tone than any pronouncements by our lyric poets, who behave like Luddites in the face of change….

The New Athenians express anxiety about the role of information technology in our daily lives—and such poets do so for very good reason, since all these forms of media (be they televisions, smartphones, etc.) still remain far more compelling to us than any poem that the New Athenians (or any other poet) might care to write, and consequently these poets cannot imagine how they might compete for our attention, except by implying that we are lesser humans for using such media. They propose that we abandon our technological communication in favour of a more authentic, more immediate, interchange of "human words," free from the intervention of our machines—and they fear that, lest we give up these teleprompters, "the caveman within us" might die. I cannot help but imagine an abbey of medieval scriptors expressing similar concerns about the invention of lead type, fearing that, when calligraphy loses its prestige, our innermost primitive being must cease to exist—and no doubt the manifesto of such monks must look no less absurd than the manifesto of these poets.
The New Athenians forget that we are human largely because we make machines in order to modulate our humanity, transforming ourselves, through experimentation, into other agencies of experience. The New Athenians complain about unnamed pundits, "the saints on high," who impugn our generation for its electronic apathy and digitized ennui—but rather than express dismay that these "saints" make such pronouncements through our televised newsfeeds, the New Athenians rail against these accusations by demanding that we in turn abandon the very technological communication by which they themselves have chosen to promote their manifesto. I might suggest that they do nothing more than ape these "saints," complaining about our use of such machines, despite the fact that our use of them has granted us exorbitant potentials to "converse" in ways that might add new features to our experience of the poetic moment.
I agree with the New Athenians when they say that we have never been so "apathetic" or so "fractured" as their unnamed pundits might claim, but I doubt that the model of "conversation" proposed by these poets constitutes an idiom capable of addressing the most socially entwined generation of media-savvy humans in the history of the species. I might suggest that, while such poets might rail against the "narcissistic individuality" of (presumably) lyric poets, the "conversation" offered by the New Athenians, as an exemplary, authentic poem, sounds to me like a canned, prefab simulation of dialogue, lacking all the demotic notions of discourse seen, for example, in a work like Soliloquy by Kenneth Goldsmith—a work that does not "pretend" to converse with somebody, but that grows out of actual speech, created during unscripted engagement with others, then recorded in order to reveal a poetics of dialogue itself (a poetics, whose ordinariness seems unbelievably experimental).
I agree with the New Athenians when they say that poetry must do its best to counter the discourse of advertising and propaganda, but I doubt that vaunted slogans of "sincerity" can do so—particularly in the wake of such an opus by Goldsmith, who attacks the literary pretense of common speech, demonstrating that lyric poets who purport to write with authentic sincerity in the vernacular do not in fact do so, because they do not, halfway through a thought, stutter words or corrupt ideas, neither repeating themselves nor redacting themselves, despite extemporizing, nor do such poets typically punctuate their talk with all the dyspraxias of phatic speech, despite the fact that these "banalities" represent the most commonly deployed language in our daily lives. I might suggest that the work of Goldsmith demonstrates the degree to which the most conventional conversation already offers us, readymade, a radical grammar, as asyntactic and as asemantic as any literature by the avant-garde itself—and as a result, Goldsmith has said that he can no longer listen to dialogue in films, plays, or poems, because it sounds completely artificial in the wake of such analysis.
I might suggest that the New Athenians cannot acknowledge that their own idea of "conversation" already partakes of the "banal" long before our computerized interactions—and alas, unplugging ourselves from these machines is not going to redeem the tawdriness of such quotidian discourse. I might argue in fact that by refusing to exploit these technologies for modes of innovative expression, such poets consign themselves to little more than mundane chitchat with each other about the value of buggy whips. I might contend that we have much to learn from our interactions with each other through our technology, and with the future advent of an embryonic sentience in our machines, we may even have at our disposal the means for producing conversations never before imagined. I think that, if poets must compete with other media for our attention, then they must do so by offering a novel genre of poetry in forms that range outside the catechism of their training—but as I have said before, poets have yet to be so ambitious as to imagine writing poems more addictive than any neurotoxin, more seductive than any centerfold, and more infective than any retrovirus….