Aad de Gids

The Meaningless Poem

computers will never,people do,write poems:both meaningless.with this charge i will set some lines of territory,or,lines of deterritorialization,or,flightlines,in the debate of (he has such a funny name i’ll keep forgetting,[searching]christian bok) poetry by humans vs.computers.computers are representations of nothing.they computate irrelevant vouchers and if being tought these are thus,well,those vouchers are accredited with gravitas,accreditation,secrecy,subjectivity,authority,ziplocks,codices,matrices,and these are tokens of nothing.each of these notions will be at all time corroded as soon as they’re identified.all of these notions leak,are subject to slippage,leakage,seepage.this infracomputational emptying of a voucher into grains of fragments and figments gives this machine a shadowy seedy side(sss),to use in performances off off or on second avenue.as such,if this is the poetry,it would be interesting,but not to be to the detriment of the article that generated this whole idea,an entity called “human” had to be brought in,to juxtapose against these supermachines,and then,in an uncoiling sequenced 12steps,a correlation and comparison had to be made,to compare the abilities and,specifically,the “writing”-abilities of these two entities.taking some quintessential(human) writing,”poetry”,bok supposed that in due time computers would be able to also write poetry.and,that isn’t true.a machinic poetry would be interesting as such,juxtaposed next to poetry by people,without validation other then to compare the different oddities and idioms.other measures had to be brought in like “meaning”,a notion so delicate and in the last decades bereft of its attributes and unveiled as a presupposition and antropocentrism,that simply the comparison is being falling apart,an implosion.
the texts of a computer however,now and in the future,will always be accurate and correlating to “the world” it is positioned in and intoxicated by.that’s a similarity between those two writings of computers and people.but it is precisely because of human intervention that this is so,and,not,the processor standing in the mud beneath a bridge also testifies of the world.in certain circles this could stand as poetry.so to implement steps onto an autarkic computer that processes without human ill decision and disinformation,should measure up against the preconditions of such comparison.but,even HALL was human.so there are certainly poetical possibilities,but only if we stretch poetry to what we should do now also,a new kind of writing respecting no boundaries,not respecting its own medium,and,to hell with all meaning.now for the second part of the charged and blunt platitude this texttext opens.people write poems and that’s meaningless.this is actually a compliment.if there are poems around which incorporate,one way or another,an autocritical drive,an incorporated “stepping out” of the poem to place some sides to its content,to keep nightgrown boundaries open and permeable,to function as transitpoints to other thoughts,feelings,words,poems,poetics,texttexts,subsubs,to respect a certain cohesion to at any moment shard these at smithereens,and so,build a fairly accurate and covariant and compassionate correlation with “what it is”,with “the new now”,well then,they mirror the “meaninglessness” of the modern world,in which we are buried in an overabundance of disinformation,a[adorno]”verblendungszusammenhang”(delusional totality),an overflowing of “categories”which werebefore,well,more

“categorial”,cinema,politics,medicality,urbanity,taxes,transitcongestion,arttrade,textual fashions,fashionprofits vs.gross national product of poor countries jacking the scale to the first,neomanagerial clonepolitics,the art of discommunication in broadcasting news”shows”,the raise of anchorship,the blending of cyberspace and schoolecology,with dramatic consequences,a furthering of toxifying and erradicating actions in nature restated as “meeting the international standards of environmental politics”,or whatever,etc.,etc.if poetry,even in an ostensibly nonmentioning of these hardware destroying antics,incorporates such “modern” phenomena of the world as it now is,then,the statement that human poetry is meaningless is twofold: in mirroring these replacements of guirlandes,of the “after the storm”,the shadow in the water,the blushcoloured sunset,”nobodies sleep under so many eyelids”,the drunken boat,the eveningpond,the intimate setting of a gorgeous vase with lathyrus flowers,fragrant as sweet and summery,almost sideways,modern,mirroring,and still speaking with stupefying poetic idiom of these,now interspersed more and more with such proning dirt and debris,then the meaninglessness is of a higher order,and also refers to our inability to alter what is inevitable,and our capacity to put into words,eloquently and elegantly,the vilest and most fragile of emanations naturelle.