Why make a robot whose job is to simulate misremembering?
How is a poet like the survivor of a zombie apocalypse? Let me count the ways:
More than any other kind of artist, poets love to exclaim that their artform is dead. The murderer changes with changing attitudes, but on a given day it might be pop music, "Instagram poets", illiteracy, or even modernity itself. Arguing over the degree and importance of poetry’s deadness is its own cottage industry. "Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?", asks one piece from Newsweek; another asserts "pop music [is] the people’s poetry" (with the implication that "poetry proper" is not). Matthew Walther, writing for the New York Times, decreed on the hundredth birthday of Eliot’s "The Waste Land" that "Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month". If that's not dire enough, he asserts that "in 100 years there will be no poem whose centenary is the object of comparable celebration"! The most recent murder suspect is the LLM-- after all, readers seem unable to tell the classics apart from AI-generated poetry, much less prefer them. The whole process forms an exhausting ouroboros of a genre, so much so that it includes self-referential titles like "The Ultimate and Decisive ‘Is Poetry Dead?’ Article!"
In short: poets and critics alike love asserting that poetry is dead; poets and critics alike love asserting that poetry is alive. With respect to this artistic tradition, I don’t intend to exclaim that poetry is or is not necessary, in a moment of triumph or defeat; my hope is that soon you’ll simply prefer to cut out the middleman and destroy poetry yourself.
On the 18th-century poet John Keats, one letter notes:
"It seemed as if, when his imagination was once relieved… he cared so little about [his poems] that it required a friend at hand to prevent them from being utterly lost."
One anecdote claims that Keats originally wrote the individual stanzas of his “Ode on Indolence” on scratch paper, in a fit of inspiration— but ultimately scattered them, unwilling to decide the order in which they should appear. The authoritative versions of the “Ode to Indolence” that appear in anthologies are in fact an extra-authorial construction— Keats’ scattered stanzas, collapsed into an order posthumously.
Keats is on my mind when I say that, regardless of poetry’s status as “alive” or “dead”, we are living in its aftermath. Of course we might say the stanzas need an order because human perception is fundamentally bound to time; it is impossible for us to read two stanzas simultaneously, to feel that neither precedes the other. Nevertheless, one cannot help but think of computer poetry that displays text in a randomized or arbitrary order, or of visual poetry where the set of characters in the poem is not an orderly sequence, and wonder whether Keats would prefer to “relieve his imagination” with these constructs. At least in my imagination, Keats refused to publish an “unordered” version of his poem, or allow the poem to live orally as a superposition of all its possible orders, for a simple reason: He was a poet. Poets don’t do that. There could be only one "Ode to Indolence", or none at all; any other copies of the poem would be mere distortions.
A while back I did a daily drill: Read a poem, then attempt to rewrite it from memory. This is dishearteningly hard, even if you think you understand the poem you're transcribing quite well-- there are too many micro-choices that are too easy to gloss over (“in” or “into”? comma or no comma?). There’s something delightfully humbling about being able to look back at a printed page you tried in vain to copy down and to see, in print, your own forgetfulness.
This forgetfulness, I think, is an intuition toward a better definition of "voice" qua uniqueness than any other I've heard. When you unwittingly fill in gaps in your memory, your own rhythms, vocabulary, images, and interests are inescapable. The quirks of your history and psychology will inevitably invade the poem in a way they could not have, had you simply read the original from the page.
Nowadays, thanks to consumer LLMs, the dominant metaphor for this pattern-recognition-fueled takeover is “hallucination”. It’s generally said with a scowl-- for example, when a chatbot invents a citation for a text that doesn’t exist, without disclosing that it's doing so. Kenneth Goldsmith claims he used to be an artist, a poet, a writer, but has since evolved into a word processor. I wish I could evolve into something as respectable as a word processor, but truthfully my current artistic condition is closer to a chatbot, or a video game. Often, while telling someone else about a poem, I’ll realize in the cold light of recall that my attachment to it was deeply internal, to the point that I can scarcely state the words I so enjoyed. The poem as I remember it becomes a combination of the artifactual original text and my own hazy memory. This is a feature, not a bug. Or, as Hokushi put it:
書いて見たりけしたり果はけしの花
I write, erase, rewrite, Erase again, and then A poppy blooms.
Even when revising a poem of my own, I often find it easiest to erase the whiteboard and start again. This, I think, feels especially computer-like. For a moment, I am a Platonist who believes in a hyperobject that connects and transcends every draft of the poem, or a video game "rerolling" a randomly generated asset. This toy is the next step in that metaphor: an attempt to catalog, or at least formalize, a collection of “moves” based in this helpful process of forgetting. That is, I hope to identify forgetfulness simultaneously as a failure to “properly” remember, and as a technique of creation and appreciation through distortion.
If the poetry commentariat is right, and there are fewer and fewer poems worth remembering, then one should hope there are more and more poems worth forgetting. If poetry is dead, it is only because poetry is alive, and vice versa. For better or for worse, if we have complaints about the present moment in poetry, they can be resolved by allowing ourselves to forget more. Lucky us, since I can't imagine we'll stop forgetting any time soon.
Of course this has effects on the industry of poetry (i.e. what it means to submit a journal, make a living as a poet, have a favorite poem, &cet.) and for whatever reason we might prefer a different relationship with poetry and act to immanentize it. No matter what, though, we inexorably live in the present, where we must learn to flourish under the reign of forgetfulness. For me, that means not panicking when a poem goes in one ear and out the other, linking the vice "forgettable" and the virtue "able to be forgotten", and creating a website-as-a-toy to model (if not reify) this process of forgetting and hallucinating.
Like the speaker in “Kubla Khan”, we are struck by images, the bearers of visions wonderful and fearful, but cannot “revive within [us] that symphony and song”. If we could, of course, we would consecrate this numinous encounter by remembering the gift we so appreciated from the Other; in the language of Kubla Khan, we would build the pleasure-domes we saw in our dreams. But, of course, we cannot. In Coleridge's case, no faculty of memory could allow him to remember the vision he had before he was interrupted. In ours, no amount of study can allow us to think like Coleridge thought, to escape being a reader who can at best simulate a conversation with him across space-time. The next best thing, then, is to relay what we can, and pad the empty spaces with lamentations, distortions:
Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.