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6| Christian Bök — Poetry, Constraints, DNA & The Xenotext
161 Plays1 year ago
Christian Bök is an award-winning poet pushing the boundaries of the medium and exploring the capabilities of language itself. Rather than focusing on self-expression, Christian uses poetry as a laboratory for understanding language — probing its plasticity and character.
His notable work, the bestseller Eunoia, draws inspiration from the avant-garde rules of Oulipo and takes it a step further by restricting each chapter to only one vowel. This constraint leads to the creation of such singular phrases as "Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script."
For the past two decades, Christian has pursued an even more ambitious project, The Xenotext. This project involves enciphering an "alien text" within the DNA of a resilient bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans. One goal of The Xenotext is to create a text that could outlast human civilization. To add to the genomic challenge Christian has set a remarkable rule: the symbols of the text should be interpretable in two different ways, resulting in two poems that are encoded within the same string.
Christian combines scientific techniques, trial and error, and computer programming to construct his poems, adhering to the rules he has established within his own poetic universe. Furthermore, he transforms art back into science by employing gene-editing to inscribe his poetic creation into the "book of life," the DNA of a living organism.
Instead of looking back and inwards (the ideal of “emotion recollected in tranquility”, Christian looks outwards and to the future, fusing science and art to produce uncanny, unforgettable verse.
References:
- Christian’s website: umlautmachine.net
- His Twitter: @christianbok
- More detailed notes from this episode at: multiverses.xyz
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Transcript
Exploring Language in Poetry
00:00:00
Speaker
When in childhood or in adolescence we're first introduced to poetry, it's often presented to us as a way of expressing our deepest desires or emotions, or perhaps as a bucolic escape from everyday life. But poetry can be much more than this, it can be a way of exploring the capabilities of language itself, of testing its plasticity.
00:00:21
Speaker
Our guest this week is Christian Book, a recipient of the prestigious Griffin Prize for Poetry, and someone who's done that very rare thing of writing a poetry book that went on to be a bestseller.
00:00:33
Speaker
By almost any metric, he is one of the world's most successful poets.
Christian Book's Scientific Approach to Poetry
00:00:38
Speaker
But what's really exciting about him is that he is turning science into poetry and poetry into science. And I don't just mean that figuratively. He is literally writing a poem, encoding a poem into the DNA of a bacterium. He also brings a very scientific approach to his process of composition. There is a staggering amount of trial and error
00:01:00
Speaker
and computational research that goes into meeting the very rigorous constraints that he sets himself in his writing. He's using poetry to run empirical experiments with words. By employing constraints, he's probing the limits of language. And also, for example, by only using the letter A to write certain poems, he's uncovering the hidden character of that vowel.
00:01:28
Speaker
Now you might say, well, that's all well and good, but I'll stick with the romantics. This all sounds a bit cold and soulless. But his poems are full of warmth and wit and life. And I really enjoy his conversation because all of that comes across from him as well. So without further ado, I'm James Robinson and there are many ways of writing verses. This is multiverses. Get it?
00:02:09
Speaker
Christian Burke, thank you for joining me. It's a great pleasure, James, to be here. Thank you for inviting me to address your listeners.
The Role of Constraints in Poetry
00:02:16
Speaker
I'm grateful to be here.
00:02:19
Speaker
One can think of language itself as a series of constraints. There's particular ways in which we can arrange symbols to make words, roughly speaking spelling. And then, of course, there's particular ways that you could arrange words to make valid sentences and phrases, grammar and syntax. It seems that poetry has a long tradition of adding further constraints on top of this.
00:02:46
Speaker
Perhaps you can give us a mini history of this and your thoughts as to why that is. Well, the use of constraints in poetry, of course, is probably as old as poetry itself. I suppose that historically we understand that the need for constraints in the confabulation of poetry depends upon
00:03:09
Speaker
the oral transmission of messages using techniques for easily memorizing cultural information. So being able to phrase language in a manner which makes it memorable, perhaps euphonic or musical, rhythmical and metrical, exploits those aspects of our own cognition in music that make it possible for us to remember lyrics to songs, for example, and long.
00:03:37
Speaker
passages of theatrical expression. So I think that the roots of constraints in poetry have a lot to do with mnemonic aids for speaking in public orally in an era that precedes literacy and writing.
00:03:56
Speaker
In this respect, poetry is very closely aligned with music. I would say that at least through much of the classical period leading up to the modern era, music and poetry have generally been in lockstep competing for cultural dominance. And I would suggest that now music has completely predominated over poetry as a cultural phenomenon. But certainly each one of those genres of the arts, I think, vied for queen of the arts.
00:04:26
Speaker
And just as there are constraints, of course, in the confabulation of music to produce harmony and concordances and melodies, I think there's a similar set of underpinning structures that have characterized poetry for much of its history. OK, interesting. So I guess you'd say the way that poetry uses rhythm and possibly music as well are both about
00:04:54
Speaker
essentially a nonic age to make it catchy, as it were, and ensure that it lives on within the reader or listener. Well, I assume that there is, of course, some mnemonic component to the structural features of poetry. But don't forget, of course, that poetry as a persuasive function constitutes a kind of rhetorical strategy for convincing people to follow you. I don't know, join your civilization.
00:05:24
Speaker
go into battle, join your religion. All of these features of poetry too constitute part of its enchantment, a way of mesmerizing masses of people in order to compel them, at least to maintain their engagement, to continue to entertain them and ensure their, I don't know, capture of attention. These are important features of the structural underpinnings of poetry as well. It's not just simply, I think,
00:05:52
Speaker
you know, an aid to the orator, but provides pleasure to the audience as well. Yeah. It strikes me that, you know, among the classical arts of oration, both memory techniques and rhetoric were, you know, core. And I guess poetry is sort of distilling those and saying, yeah, it must be persuasive, emotive, memorable. And all of those features are things which
00:06:22
Speaker
rhythm and other kind of constraints, rhyming obviously, can aid with. The other thing it recalls just your analogy with music is that lovely line from Louis Zukovsky where he describes poetry as an integral with the lower limit being speech and the upper limit being music.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a great definition of poetry. I might suggest that all definitions of poetry are probably pretty good, but I like this idea that there's a kind of sliding scale that poetry may occupy on this continuum between speech and music. I think that's a really wonderful way of characterizing poetry, is something that constitutes a slider on this disparity, the spectrum that extends from speech to music or from prose to melody.
00:07:10
Speaker
Yeah, I really love that definition too. There's one thing I feel that there's a dimension though that it also lacks, which is maybe one of the characterizing dimensions or the characterizing dimension of your work, which is this sort of non-rhythmic or formal constraints, which aren't to do with the pattern of sound so much, but with the pattern of symbols, I suppose.
00:07:38
Speaker
Well, certainly in my own work, there's a long-term infatuation with the use of constraints as a guiding principle for creativity.
00:07:51
Speaker
well-versed in prosody and do my best to actually exploit. Lots of techniques that make the work that I compose euphonic and pleasing to hear persuasive and pleasurable for all of its auditory characteristics and perhaps even syntactical or grammatical characteristics.
00:08:13
Speaker
But of course, there are other kinds of expressions of virtuosity that a person might exploit in a poem, including some difficult or Herculean constraints that actually really delimit your capacity to express yourself. All constraints are designed, I think, to discipline a speaker in order to
00:08:36
Speaker
extract from language what appears to be a relatively unlabored utterance, but nevertheless conforms to a wide variety of really difficult parameters to fill.
Poetry as a Game and Virtuosity
00:08:53
Speaker
So in this respect, there's a kind of skill testing aptitude in poetry, a kind of athleticism or virtuosity that we also, you know, have to take into account during the oral transmission of work, especially in certain classes of poetry that are spontaneous and improvised, flighting or rap battles, for example, flighting in the medieval era of rap battles in modern era.
00:09:16
Speaker
which require an improvisational performative dimension, and the more qualified your response is, the more disciplined it is, the more constrained it is, generally the more impressive it is, especially when created on the fly.
00:09:34
Speaker
So there's lots of ways to demonstrate virtuosity and aptitude with the language in poetry. And in many respects, poetry attempts to showcase the potential of language when subjected to a whole variety of, I don't know, limit cases or strength tests. We're trying to test language to a certain point of failure.
00:09:57
Speaker
So, at least in the history of poetry, there's a kind of athletic dimension to many of these feats. Again, something that I think poets probably ignore at their peril, that ignore these aspects of the tradition. There's a reason that poetry has prevailed in the past, and among them are these expressions of virtuosity. I think that
00:10:23
Speaker
The key feature of poetry that would be easy to acknowledge is that it doesn't tend to convey information. That its job is not so much to convey information even though it is made of things that are typically used to convey information.
00:10:39
Speaker
poetry seems to suppress perhaps that component feature of language, the social contract to communicate, and instead emphasizes or privileges more other aspects of the language that have gone under acknowledged. And certainly these formal principles are features of communication that get suppressed. They're considered noise, I think, or intrusions of noxiousness, you know, kind of a
00:11:12
Speaker
Yeah, there's some really nice themes in there.
00:11:18
Speaker
One thing for me is this athleticism brings to mind Bernard Suits, the philosopher who came up with, who responded to Wittgenstein's sort of challenge that you can't define a game. You can't give an analytic definition rather of games. You can only talk about family resemblance. And Suits said, well, I just don't think that's the case. You know, I think game playing is where you are voluntarily
00:11:46
Speaker
putting obstacles in your way. So it's that, let me just read the kind of classic definition, the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. That's a great definition of a game, but it's only one definition of one kind of game. I mean, I can understand Wittgenstein's anxiety about that. Yes. And certainly there's a game playing dimension to poetry. Now, there's certain classes of poets who would deny that. I'm not going to impugn the merits of their misgivings, but
00:12:15
Speaker
I will note that I've certainly thought a lot about the ludic character of poetry, a way of playing a game with language that poetry is a kind of language game in the manner described by Wittgenstein. I take some pleasure in noting that my favorite definitions of games are by Roger Calois, who studied games all around the world and tried to classify them anthropologically.
00:12:44
Speaker
because, of course, game-playing is a universal feature of human culture, no matter what culture you're from. And he discovered that there are four ways to play. And I like this very much because these have something to do with the nature of relationship to self-consciousness and self-expressiveness. I would say that if you're a poet, you pick an attitude. Somehow you are adopting an attitude.
00:13:13
Speaker
in relationship to self-consciousness and self-expressiveness.
00:13:17
Speaker
I think if you are willing to say, what does it mean to be a writer, and what it means to be a writer is having something to say and wanting to say something, the willfulness to want to say something, I've got something I want to say, and then saying it. That's the basic features of what it means to be a writer, is that you mean to say something and you seem to say something in the course of writing, that you do these two things.
00:13:46
Speaker
If that's the minimum effort required to understand writing, then there's a set of attitudes you can occupy about self-consciousness, your meaning to say something, and your self-expressiveness, your seeming to say something.
00:14:05
Speaker
say most expressive poetry, lyrical poetry, that amounts to kind of emotion, recollected in tranquility, a meditative, cognitive experience. I think these two values are positive. One is self-expressive.
00:14:19
Speaker
And one is self-conscious, right? So if you're self-conscious and self-expressive, you're playing a kind of game in which those values are lauded. And those kinds of games look like games of mimicry in which you occupy a personality or, you know, you
00:14:35
Speaker
Occupied position of sincerity or authenticity about yourself and you're attempting to speak your mind those kinds of games of course characterize Acting and pageantry the theatrics of the self all of the things that we we associate with and
00:14:52
Speaker
self-expression and self-consciousness in the course of laying claims to winning the game by being the most sincere, the most authentic, the best version of ourselves in the course of playing pretend. Let's pretend.
00:15:08
Speaker
But of course, you can imagine forms of poetry that don't do that, that might, for example, be self-expressive but not self-conscious. And that would be more like Wordsworth's version of emotion as a spontaneous outburst of feeling rather than emotion recollected in tranquility. And that rhapsodic experience of writing is characterized by its delirium. You're no longer self-conscious, but you're being self-expressive.
00:15:35
Speaker
mean to say something, but you still seem to say something, right? You know, you do things inadvertently. And this would characterize the automatic writing of the surrealist tradition or perhaps the beatnik tradition of first thought, best thought, the spontaneous forms of expression that we see in the history of poetry. These are all inadvertent, unintentional forms of confessionalism. So on the one hand, you could have a kind of self-conscious confessionalism that we see most poetry occupying.
00:16:01
Speaker
But you could have also an unselfconscious kind of confessionalism that is characteristic of people who speak in their sleep or write from the position of their dreams, all the surreal, rhapsodic, delirious forms of expression, Walt Whitman-like poetry that we get in the history of literature. And those games are not defined by the quality of their sincerity or authenticity. We evaluate them by the quality of their delirium, their rhapsodic character.
00:16:26
Speaker
the pleasure that they give us from inducing us a sense of vertigo, right? And those are games of vertigo. Now you of course play those games too, right? You know, swinging on the swing set, I don't know, riding a roller coaster, getting drunk. I mean, all of those kinds of games are fun to play too, but how you know you've won is different, right? It's the quality of the vertigo that you admire, not the quality of the sincerity that you admire.
00:16:49
Speaker
And but those two models, both of them are at least self expressive. And I think they characterize most of what constitutes passes for the romantic tradition of poetry. Now the game that you've just described, you know, the rejoinder from an analytical philosopher to Wittgenstein.
00:17:07
Speaker
Those kinds of games are the ones we typically associate with the overcoming of an obstacle. And those kinds of games, of course, are not typically self-expressive, but they are self-conscious. If you have to overcome some sort of constraint or rule or you're in a kind of agonistic relationship with
00:17:29
Speaker
an opponent, then you're in the medium of virtuosity and athleticism and prowess. Those are games of prowess, all of which demonstrate skill and test your talent, your capacity to overcome some constraint upon your aptitudes.
00:17:50
Speaker
And those forms of poetry are characterized, I think, by the long tradition of constrained forms, you know, having to write it in meter or rhyme, you know, conforming to some very Herculean set of rules, whatever they might be.
00:18:05
Speaker
Games like chess or even football, all those kinds of agonistic games in which you have to overcome an obstacle or an opponent, characterize the same kind of relationship you have to your materials when you're trying to overcome a constraint. But of course the constraint doesn't give you much freedom to be self-expressive, but it does give you a lot of opportunity to be self-conscious, you have to be quite willful.
00:18:27
Speaker
in those games. You just can't say anything you want. You have to figure out how to adjust what you want to say to what you can say. And that's totally different. And how do I know I've won? Well, I demonstrated through the transcendence of the rules. I beat the game by overcoming the obstacle or succeeding despite the limitations that have been imposed upon me.
00:18:52
Speaker
To me, that's the typical kind of game that people have in mind when they think of games. And those are pretty common. But I've given you, as I said, three games now that are anthropologically important, games of mimicry, games of delirium, and games of prowess.
00:19:08
Speaker
And I guess the last category, which would fill out this triumvirate of the relationship between, this quadrivium, excuse me, of this relationship between self-conscious and self-expression, is games of chance. And those are games in which you're neither self-expressive nor self-conscious, right? You actually delegate the writing task to forces beyond your control completely. You roll dice, you pull words out of the hat at random. You might delegate the task to a computer. It writes on your behalf.
00:19:38
Speaker
So they're completely unselfconscious and completely unexpressive. And it's the hardest kind of poetry for most poets to appreciate because it doesn't seem to abide by many of the standards we come to associate with effective poetry.
00:19:55
Speaker
And yet it too is a game with its own standards for winning. Because there even we can write great poetry and we understand we've won if the results are oracular, spooky, right? If they feel uncanny.
00:20:13
Speaker
And poets sometimes play these games in order to validate their blessedness. They want to be sure they've been fated to be a poet. The universe is conspiring in their favor. So occasionally, poets will use lottery methods or roll dice or use some sort of random means of writing poetry out of curiosity to see what fate will tell them about their talent. And the pleasure derived from that is equivalent to pulling a lever on a slot machine and getting three cherries.
00:20:42
Speaker
It's the game that gamblers play in the hope that they might read in these tea leaves some oracular or uncanny comment about their worthiness. And that's a different set of parameters by which people win a game.
00:20:56
Speaker
But those are all the four ways in which you can combine self-consciousness and self-expressiveness. And I would say that they amount to the four ways you can be a poet, the four ways you can be a writer. And you can't play more than one game at once, right? You could become good at all of them, I suppose, and you can practice all of them. But I think disputes among poets tend to arise as a side effect of one person playing one kind of game and dismissing the rules or parameters for winning in some other game that they don't value.
00:21:22
Speaker
So if I'm a person who likes playing the pageantry of the game of mimicry, the self-conscious forms of self-expression, and I look at these people over here who are rolling dice, I might dismiss them as crazy and dislike their work and probably not fund it. I'll probably hamper their capacity to succeed at it. And there is, I suppose, some controversies that arise as a side effect of people disagreeing about what constitutes a legitimate game in poetry.
00:21:52
Speaker
and how to recognize what a person's want. Yeah, I think that's a really illuminating way of thinking about things, this quadrant, I guess, between self-expressiveness and self-consciousness. I've heard you talk as well in terms of Keats's egotistical sublime as one corner of that versus the negative capability that he describes as another and kind of tracing on the ones. Yeah.
00:22:21
Speaker
Sure, certainly all self-expressive games, the games of mimicry, games of vertigo, they're expressive and they tend, I think, to fall into the words worthy and camp of the egotistical sublime, the romantic tradition which values the transcendence of the subject speaking. And all the poetry has to be completely aligned with the validity of that self.
00:22:50
Speaker
But the other two categories I've described, those games of prowess or games of chance, they are, I think, more closely aligned with our romantic features of negative capability described by Keats, John Keats. And they constitute the suppression of the self. They're not forms of self-expression. They suppress the expression of the self.
00:23:13
Speaker
So the self can become amenable to forces beyond itself to discover potentials that are not perfectly aligned with the self. And we associate those features with, I think, all of the models of empathic artistry in which somebody can become any like an actor can become somebody else, I suppose, through method acting or
00:23:37
Speaker
an artist is suddenly freed from the necessity to account for themselves but can explore other potentials of artistic material.
00:23:47
Speaker
And there is something, I think, in the history of the egotistical sublime that greets negative capability with much suspicion. And it's best to hamper the validity of those forms of experimentation that we see characterized in those other two kinds of games. Ones that are, I suppose, de-privilege, the validity of the self for other values that are just simply outside that one.
00:24:17
Speaker
set of concerns. And while all poets, I think, do become, you know, they become poets in part because of the romantics at heart. I think I've never met a poet who became a poet for any other reason other than they were fundamentally a romantic at heart. I think that there are, you know, weapons that you pick up, right? You know, you pick up swords, you pick up icosa edrons, I don't know, you pick up a weapon and you align yourself with play of one sword or another. And I think, you know, lots of poets
00:24:47
Speaker
begin with the words worthy and understanding of their of their craft and others perhaps migrate to a more Keatsian understanding of their craft. Now there's nothing wrong with either of these aptitudes in my opinion and I have you know no prejudicial biases about one or the other I think that they're perfectly valid it's just that my own proclivities incline me to
00:25:15
Speaker
I find that more productive for me personally. But I have encountered lots of criticism from other camps. And at times it can be quite hostile. It's very unpleasant to be subject to disapprobation because of your interests, I suppose. One thing that strikes me as one of those
00:25:39
Speaker
presumably in the words Wothian camp, one starts to encounter constraints, but they're not constraints in terms of being obstacles, but they are crutches which, like you commented earlier, help with the power of the poem, help with the expressing the things they want to express. And it's at some point, maybe people decide actually,
00:26:04
Speaker
let's tighten these and tighten these and see, turn them from being crutches into obstacles. Maybe that's one of the ways that people can cross over and see. If there's something to be
00:26:20
Speaker
said, you know, with misgiving about the words worthy in models of poetic expression, it's that they predominate in most of certainly North American creative writing programs. And it's certainly a cliche in those programs to say that the job of the writer is to find their own voice, right, the jobs of writers to find their own voice, to be able to speak uniquely in their own idiom.
00:26:50
Speaker
And we hope that, as teachers, we train students to do so. However, in my experience, I think that this set of principles have become so codified that what ends up happening is that students find their voices homogenized. They all begin to speak alike. They adopt very similar attitudes.
00:27:12
Speaker
stylistic quirks that are features of cultivating self-conscious self-expression. And the irony is that in the effort to find your own voice, you end up sounding like a lot of other people. Your own uniqueness does not really stand out against the backdrop of everybody else's conformity to these norms.
00:27:37
Speaker
And it's just because we've codified how to do this form of poetry very well.
00:27:45
Speaker
And I think we've forgotten the degree to which we're supposed to actually help students transform what would otherwise be regarded as a shortcoming in their self-expression into something that would be a strength, something that becomes idiosyncratic. There's not a great deal of respect, I think, for idiosyncrasies in poetry. There's still a lot of suspicion.
00:28:09
Speaker
People are, I think, more relieved when they recognize the work as conforming to expectations about how to write a perfectly adequate or ordinary poem. Yeah, I want to touch on one more kind of way of thinking about this division. And then I think we should make it a bit less abstract and give some examples because the examples themselves are really joyous. So you mentioned how
00:28:39
Speaker
sort of within the kitsian camp, as it were, of the negative capability, these obstacles can not only showcase the poet's virtuosity, but push the limits of language. And the distinction that I'm thinking of is poetry as thought experiments versus empirical experiments. And at the one hand, you're putting yourselves in the mind of another person. And on the other, you're
00:29:06
Speaker
You're kind of using poems as like particle colliders trying to figure out what is the structure of this thing that we have. It's almost like a Platonist mathematician trying to work out what can we do with these things. Is that a way that you find useful to think about your craft?
Christian Book's Experimental Journey
00:29:25
Speaker
Well, when I was a young man, as an undergraduate, taking courses on writing and teaching myself how to become a poet, I was publishing lyrical poetry, I was respectable at it and could get it published. But I knew at the time that I was unlikely to excel at, become a great poet. I was very worried that I was actually going to become a mediocrity. And all evidence seemed to point in this direction.
00:29:53
Speaker
And by the time I graduated and entered graduate school, I was very concerned about my capacity to distinguish myself. And it was in graduate school, a friend introduced me to the secret tradition of literature that didn't get taught to me, a whole avant-garde, experimental history of the arts. And I was very upset that I had received only half of my education, that I had been immersed in the history of literature through a wide variety of traditions across my language and others.
00:30:22
Speaker
And yet at no time did anybody bother to teach me this other secret tradition of lunatic works and strange experiments and anomalous limit cases in literature. We didn't get any exposure to it and I was thinking I'd felt cheated.
00:30:40
Speaker
Of course, then it required a massive re-education going back and looking through the history twice, once for the official approved versions of literary history and then once for the traditions that had a boatload of really very good ideas. And I discovered at that point that the reason I had so many misgivings about my mediocrity is that I was trying to become the poet I should be rather than the kind of poet I could be.
00:31:09
Speaker
And I think that it's incumbent upon teachers to at least make sure that students are given enough tools to become the kind of poet they might like to be, that they could be, rather than the one they should be. And I understood that I was interested in poetry and language, not because of that I had more important personal stories to tell about my own experience, but in fact, because I loved the material, sensorial experience of language itself.
00:31:39
Speaker
all its structural features, all of its granular textures, its idiosyncrasies. These all seem to me very appealing. And when I leaned into those sets of interests, I discovered that I could actually make meaningful contributions. I was more pleased with the things that I made because they looked
00:32:01
Speaker
They looked like original contributions. They also, to me, felt like they were going to, through growth, become something meaningful and worthwhile to pursue, that I might be able to make a mark.
00:32:12
Speaker
on my literary tradition. And I think it conforms to my own attitudes as a kind of lay scientist. I know that I'm scientifically framed at heart. The sciences were my best subjects in school, but not the ones about which I felt the most passionate. But nevertheless, they were my best performing skill sets. And I've never abandoned my very fundamental interest in a wide variety of sciences.
00:32:42
Speaker
Once I understood that my relationship to language was going to be experimental, that I was going to actually use language as a means of exploring its potential, my productivity became more fruitful. I learned how to be the poet I could be.
00:33:00
Speaker
And again, it's not a trajectory, I think, applies to everyone. I'm not suggesting that this is the only path that a person can take en route to becoming a poet, but it applied to me. And as a consequence, I've benefited from this degree of engagement with languages.
00:33:24
Speaker
as you described, a particle accelerator, a place where these little particulates, I don't know, letters or syllables, word forms get smashed together into unusual combinations in order to create a kind of exotic matter that might not have otherwise existed on the planet. I've joked that as a poet, I feel like some secret scientist working at Area 51 with an alien technology, trying to reverse engineer this thing for human purposes.
00:33:52
Speaker
Because in some respects, language is still a very strange feature of consciousness. It's a very unusual phenomenon that we, I think, only very poorly understand. And we presume that its primary function is to enable communication. Certainly that's its primary function as part of our social contract. But it has all of these other aptitudes, you know, a kind of
00:34:17
Speaker
unacknowledged affordances that we've only had a few thousand years to truly explore, right? And it's only going to get more interesting. You know, as technologies change, as our languages become more robust and universal, the nature of what you can do with a poem will become all the more weird and interesting.
Mathematics and Poetry: Expressing the Indescribable
00:34:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:45
Speaker
It does sort of mixing my metaphors between, is it like doing particle physics or is it like doing pure maths where, and perhaps the reason is physics operates so much with the language of maths, but maths there is being used like that communication aid to describe nature. But of course the pure mathematicians say, no, let's just see what we can do with this structure. And I mean, they're not even sure whether they're discovering something
00:35:15
Speaker
that's out there that's real, I mean, I think most do, or whether it's just some, again, game. But yeah, I really enjoy this idea. There is something uncanny about mathematics and its elegance and mutually reinforcing logistical logical structures. It's too good to be true. And it seems to me that every single mathematical invention, every mathematical discovery
00:35:44
Speaker
even if at first it doesn't seem to apply to a physical phenomenon, we almost always end up discovering some sort of phenomenon to which the mathematical tool could apply. And that seems to me just unreasonable.
00:35:59
Speaker
Why is it that it's so well suited to explaining the universe, even though it seems to be primarily a product of human cognition and intellectual reasoning? And yet, some of these strange, bizarre algorithms or unusual equations or weird formulae that appear to be just beautiful happenstances of reasoning.
00:36:25
Speaker
and don't apply to any phenomenon. And then we discover that, in fact, there is a phenomenon to which they could conceivably apply. And that's very odd. I think that that's truly odd. And it may be that the job of the poet is to replicate that sense of uncanniness through language, to extract a kind of unforeseen potential from the language that seems to be all too adequate for explaining the world.
00:36:54
Speaker
A poem has often an uncanny ability to express something you didn't even know needed to be expressed. There's no phenomenon like that existed, right? You don't know that there's a quality or tenor of emotion that is fundamentally indescribable. And then voila, you get a poem that somehow seems to capture that anomalous, fleeting novel emotion perfectly.
00:37:23
Speaker
And to me, that's a very unusual feature of language that we could alter a state of consciousness by mixing and matching words and unusual combinations. You can create some very unusual emotional resonances that are unexpected. To me, that's a wonderful surprise about the language. I will note that I've tried to do things with language that at first looked very difficult, really impossible to be frank. They're just utterly impossible.
00:37:49
Speaker
And despite moments of real despair, wondering if it was even feasible to fulfill a task, I'm always eventually rewarded by the language itself. It somehow grants me my wish and gives me the means by which to say the thing.
00:38:09
Speaker
that I didn't know I needed to say according to this unusual set of constraints or rules. Somehow the language managed to figure out a means by which to express itself or convey something despite these limitations that are truly intended to hobble it, make the quality of its expression completely hard, if not impossible. Yeah, that's a lovely thought as well that it's not so much
00:38:38
Speaker
consciousness trying to express some pre-existing attitude of the writer, but language creating new attitudes, pushing language through this lab, as it were, discovering a new material or arrangement of it, and finding that it produces a new state in the reader.
00:38:59
Speaker
I've tried to demonstrate the writing process directly to students. I would show them a phraseology and then try to improve it. And what always caused them some wonderment and I think irritation is that I wouldn't care what the phrase was saying. They were always concerned that surely I would be more worried about what it was saying and be trying to
00:39:24
Speaker
condition the writing to actually say it better. And instead, I was attempting to just simply improve the merits of the phrase itself and end up discovering generatively what it might be possible to say rather than trying to say something that already pre-exists. And this is what I like about the perhaps experimental understanding of language is that you're trying to discover what needs to be said.
00:39:47
Speaker
Rather than make the language amenable to what you would prefer to say. And you could of course do that and make the language amenable to what you would prefer to say.
00:39:59
Speaker
But I have a lot of curiosity about the potential language. And in many cases, I start with a principle. I believe I've been traveling in one path or one direction and discover that it's much better to veer off this slight digression and follow this otherwise unexplored path because it takes you to someplace perhaps better or more interesting at the very least.
00:40:22
Speaker
And when seeing that writing process and when applied mechanical processes of editing and using a set of technical aptitudes that don't require a great deal of talent or skill to implement, students would be amazed. The thing would just get increasingly better and improved, but it wouldn't have much to do with something that they might have intentionally wanted to say. It was a way of formulating increasingly
00:40:50
Speaker
app discoveries like improving the quality of what you say so it becomes more magical or enchanting and yet it surprises you the end result surprises you and i was hoping that students would take pleasure in the epiphany right like the surprise i'd look what i said i didn't mean to say it and look look at how beautiful it is right to me that that's something that is a you know a pleasure you might miss out on
00:41:11
Speaker
if you already know what you're going to say in advance and then just try to say it. I think there really is some element of discovery and exploratory character to writing. Writing is the act of figuring out what you want to say without meaning to say it.
00:41:29
Speaker
It would be remiss of me not to ask you for a reading of one of your poems because I think they do just illustrate this element of discovery.
00:41:42
Speaker
surprising. I must have known unprepared, but I can, I can probably read you something from, you know, for sure. That's easy to find. Yeah, that
Unoia: The Exploration of Vowels
00:41:53
Speaker
would be great. I think, you know, I guess, yeah, I was thinking either, you know, or, or crystallography, one of those kind of two, I think, you know, it was a perfect one, actually, because it really, you know, for me just illustrates, yeah, some of the,
00:42:08
Speaker
some of the key themes here. So perhaps you can describe the project for anyone who's not heard of it. Sure, of course. Unoia, spelled E-U-N-O-I-A, is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels.
00:42:24
Speaker
And the word quite literally means beautiful thinking. The word was coined by Aristotle to describe the state of mind that you must occupy if you want to make a friend. You have to be in a state of Unoia, because that word beautiful thinking in Greek also means goodwill. So to be in a state of goodwill, of course, is a friendly feeling, and it just so happens that in Greek goodwill likewise means beautiful thinking. I think it's a marvelous metaphor for poetry.
00:42:54
Speaker
This word is the shortest to contain all the vowels, and it's much like the word para noia, except instead of saying para is a-u, e-u, n-o-i-a. The work is written in five chapters, each of which tells a perfectly coherent, beautiful, euphonic story
00:43:14
Speaker
that sounds unlabored. If I were to read an excerpt to you aloud without informing you about it, I don't think you would notice much wrong with it, although after I think a few minutes you might begin to detect some unusualness in the work, because each of these stories tells a
00:43:32
Speaker
perfectly straightforward narrative, but does so highlighting exclusively the use of a single vowel. So in the first chapter, chapter A, the only vowel that appears in the chapter is the letter A. No other vowel appears in that story at all. So I can only use words that use the vowel A exclusively, words like abracadabra, banana, mat, cat, bat.
00:43:57
Speaker
I can't use the word the, I can't use any other words that break from this constraint.
00:44:04
Speaker
and hence the very limited lexicon with which to work. And I strive to exhaust that lexicon as efficiently as possible. So ideally, each one of the words gets used in the story likely no more than once. And I do this for each of the chapters. So there's an E chapter, an I chapter, an O chapter, a U chapter, each of which exhausts its respective lexicon.
00:44:31
Speaker
and tells a story that incorporates all of those words without apparent labor and effort. It took me seven years to write the book. I had to read through the third Webster's New International Collegiate Dictionary, a three-volume dictionary, five times by hand to generate the appropriate vocabularies for each of these stories.
00:44:53
Speaker
I analyzed that lexicon, sorting it into parts of speech and to topical categories in order to figure out what the vowels could say on their own. I didn't come with prefabricated stories and then attempt to make them to fit. Hence, the exploratory kind of generative feature of this constraint. The vowels in effect are showing what they could say if they could speak for themselves exclusively.
00:45:18
Speaker
And one of the great discoveries I made in the course of this, something that doesn't really conform with my educated understanding of language, is that the vowels seem to have personalities. A and E, for example, are elegiac and courtly in tone, whereas by comparison, O and U are jollier and more ribald, if not obscene in tone.
00:45:40
Speaker
And I think that these personalities of the vowels probably contribute in part to the connotative valences of words. Why some words have particular moods associated with them, it may in fact have something to do with the vowel distributions of these noises across them.
00:45:56
Speaker
It seems to me that words that feature a lot of O's in them tend to be more nonsensical and dumb. Words like lollipop and igloo are funnier than words like abracadabra and beneficence or something. There's something to the distribution of the vowels that adds, I think, an emotional valence to the words themselves.
00:46:19
Speaker
So for your listeners, I can perform perhaps a short excerpt from chapter E. This is the opening paragraph. Most of these chapters have a self-reflexive element to them. They talk about the constraint. And this is an excerpt from chapter E dedicated to René Crevel, a French poet. Infettered these sentences repress free speech.
00:46:46
Speaker
The text deletes selected letters. We see the revered exegete reject metered verse, the sestet, the tercet, even les sans-elire en grèche.
00:47:00
Speaker
He rebels. He sets new precedents. He lets cleverness exceed decent levels. He eschews the esteemed genres, the expected themes, even l'ébelle l'être en verre. He prefers the perverse French estits, vernes, perées, je nez, perèque. Hence, he pens fervent screeds, then enters the street.
00:47:26
Speaker
where he sells these letterpress newsletters, three cents per sheet. He engenders perfect newness wherever we need fresh terms. And each of the chapters proceed in this manner, using this constraint to say something intelligible. I hope, in some cases sublime, if not uncanny, and in other cases, I hope it's witty and pleasant and funny.
00:47:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think those are some of the, you know, for me, some of the really surprising aspects of the book are how this rigorous limitation just produces so much fun. It's like really humorous. And yet it is intriguing, as you say, to see how the vowels do appear to have different characters.
00:48:20
Speaker
One thing, as I was saying recently, there was a study about the rhymes used in rap music and how what vowels with higher frequency second formants, well, basically they have the vowels which have a higher frequency component typically tend to be used on the beat. And in particular, if there's a rhyme, they're used on the beat. And the thinking is, well,
00:48:51
Speaker
just as in orchestras where the singers tend to use a range around three kilohertz to be heard over the base of the orchestra. These
00:49:04
Speaker
higher frequency vowels will be better communicated, better, more likely to be to be heard. And so, you know, one already sees there, there could be an entry point into, you know, just with music, why particular vowels and, you know, are used in certain ways.
00:49:27
Speaker
But it is, yeah, it's completely fascinating. And I must wonder at all the things that you learned from writing that that don't appear in the book. Oh, well, I certainly just made all kinds of bizarre discoveries.
00:49:44
Speaker
I mean, it's probably wise to note that the primary constraint, this what we would call a univocal Libogram, the exclusive use of the vowel to the exclusion of all other letters, constitutes a primary constraint. But what makes the work, I think, meaningful and grants it some literary value is that there's other subsidiary constraints. You might have detected Euphony's around rhythm, meter, internal rhyme.
00:50:13
Speaker
features of prosody that would make the work appealing to the ear. There is an obsessive use of syntactic parallelism that is so rigorous it actually conforms right down to the letter counts in phrases and meter in syllables. There's a certain mania, an obsessive compulsive desire to amplify the
00:50:39
Speaker
syntactical and grammatical features of the work. Their musicality, their repetitive riffs, rhyme schemes, all kinds of things are going on in the work in addition to attempting to say something intelligible and coherent using only one of the five vowels. Very difficult.
00:51:03
Speaker
I ended up discovering that I might have missed a word or I would need some particular word that wasn't immediately evident in my repertoire and I'd have to go looking to make sure that I hadn't missed it.
00:51:16
Speaker
I would be sitting there thinking, there's got to be a two syllable word that has only O's in it that represents a name for a cheese. There has to be, and I have to go looking. Because I needed that. I just knew that was the constraint. In order for this sentence to end, I need a word that fits this bit of prosody. It has to rhyme like this. It has to look like this. I don't know what that word is. The language would reward me with options. It would show me that there was, in fact,
00:51:47
Speaker
some potential way to actually fill that gap musically in a text. I don't know. I think that what I discovered is that the language is pretty resilient, that it might be uncensorable, that
00:52:05
Speaker
It's a reassuring thing to note, you know, in eras of censoriousness and I don't know, autocratic control of speech, you know, across the political spectrum, that language actually seems to find all kinds of inventive ways to
00:52:22
Speaker
around these obstacles that would prevent it from finding forms of self-expression. No matter how delirious my constraints were here, the language seemed to figure out there were opportunities for me to say something that wasn't simply nonsensical or ridiculous, but actually meaningful and perhaps thematically substantive. It was possible to say something really significant under the duresses of these constraints.
00:52:52
Speaker
I would say that's the biggest thing I've learned, is that I have a great deal of faith now in the power of language to transcend all of these efforts to curtail its potential. It strikes me that you're probably the best person prepared if there was a semiotic apocalypse and we dropped one of the vowels or even all but one of the vowels.
00:53:16
Speaker
You'd still have a voice while we'd be figuring it out, but it is an incredible demonstration. We might all have a voice despite that. I guess one role of poetry is to rejuvenate the language when the language finds itself.
00:53:37
Speaker
degraded and debased when it becomes incapable of serving the interests of our expression. It becomes counterfeit or cliche, hackneyed, autocratic perhaps. Poetry stands in and introduces new noise, new information, new qualities or models of expression that offer alternatives, subvert those notions. I think that's an important job of poetry. One, it's becoming increasingly its purpose. Before it might have been
00:54:07
Speaker
used to found a civilization, found a religion. Perhaps today it constitutes a way of reinventing and reinvigorating an otherwise dilapidated language, re-injecting it with new genetic diversity or new models of expression that might rescue us from an exhausted set of idioms.
00:54:31
Speaker
And it's interesting that one of the ways of doing that is to sort of apparently remove some of the capability by, as you say, or in this case, in each chapter. There's lots of technical strategies that you could deploy. I mean, I'm not suggesting that playing this one kind of game is the only thing to do, but it's proven fruitful for me to attempt to do things that are impossible. I would say that that's probably
00:55:00
Speaker
A large part of my reputational economy is to be the guy who does things that are just really, really hard, very, very difficult, that first look quite impossible. And even now, the projects I work on, I can't be sure are completable. It's very worrying sometimes that I may have done something that is truly too difficult for me to fulfill.
00:55:25
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that's the character of empirical experiments, right? It is. I mean, there's a lot of scientific projects that, of course, have taken decades to invalidate or prove.
00:55:40
Speaker
And I would just dislike being the kind of scientist who has invested an entire career in one attempt to validate a theorem, only to have it experimentally disproved. I think that would be a really disgruntled thing to happen. If I spent my entire career trying to validate loop quantum gravity or string theory, only to discover that despite their mathematical beauty, they're in fact wrong.
00:56:06
Speaker
I think that would be a disheartening thing to occur and would be ruinous. But it's part of the risk of trying to make a discovery. I'd like to be the kind of poet who continues to make discoveries about language. They're truly experimental. I mean, they're quite literally dimension to the work. I'd like to have a laboratory. I'd like to be the kind of guy who really would be conducting experiments in something like a white room in a white lab coat with a clipboard.
00:56:37
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think, as you say, this is what can prevent language from being moribund is by putting some constraints in. It's not so much the constraint. It's a way of moving us out of the normal space that language is occupying or our language is occupying to explore the wider space that it could be.
00:57:02
Speaker
So on this topic of wanting to be a scientist, you seem to have gone some way down that route, right? And perhaps you can describe the Zenitex project, which just takes constraint to yet another level and is, I think, extremely, well, I must say, objectively extremely ambitious.
00:57:31
Speaker
Yeah, so could you, yeah, could you describe how you got started on this?
Encoding Poetry into Bacteria
00:57:38
Speaker
Well, in the wake of the completing, you know, almost 22 years ago, the book went on to become an international bestseller. It became the touchstone of my career, went on to win the biggest prize you can win for a single book of poetry in the world, the Griffin Prize,
00:57:59
Speaker
And in the wake of that success, success that didn't feel very guaranteed when I was working on the work, I wanted to do something even more ambitious. And for the last 22 years, it's going to be, you know, 23 years, I think, I've been working on a project that's proven to be very difficult.
00:58:19
Speaker
Possibly impossible might be, you know, impossible. I'm trying to write a very small poem and then through a process of incipherment, translate it into a sequence of genetic nucleotides to create a gene out of this poem. And then with the assistance of a laboratory, implant this poem into the genome of a bacterium, replacing part of its genetic code with my text so the organism would now become the living embodiment of that poem.
00:58:48
Speaker
And lots of artists and scientists have enciphered information into the genomes of organisms. It would be relatively straightforward to do so. And if that's all I wanted to do, I could have had this project finished 20 years ago. But the project is more ambitious than simply preserving a poem in an organism. Unlike all of these other prior precedent works, the organism can actually read my poem. It's written according to a series of constraints.
00:59:17
Speaker
that make it possible for this genetic incipherment to be interpretable by the organism. It would understand the poem as a set of instructions for building in response a protein. A protein just consists of a long sequence of amino acids sequentially arranged
00:59:33
Speaker
And it just so happens that my poem is written in such a way that when the organism produces this sequence of amino acids, that chemical sequence is likewise an incitement for a totally different poem that also makes sense and answers mine in dialogue with the poem that I've implanted into the organism. So in effect, I've tried to genetically engineer a bacterium so that it becomes not only an archive for storing my poem, it becomes a machine for writing a poem in response.
01:00:03
Speaker
And I managed to demonstrate that it's possible to do this. In 2015, I was capable of showing to the world that it's possible to fulfill this bizarre biochemical constraint, to enter into this kind of dialogue between the English language and the genetic code.
01:00:22
Speaker
And even these two little poems, they took about four years to write. I worked on nothing else for four years except these two little poems to see if it was possible to write them according to these immense battery of constraints.
01:00:34
Speaker
But the ultimate outcome is not simply to demonstrate the viability of such an exercise, but to actually implant the poem into the genome of a very surreal organism, a very old bacterium called Dinococcus radiodurans, an extremophile capable of surviving in almost any hostile environment imaginable.
01:00:58
Speaker
This organism is a kind of evolutionary dead end because it doesn't change or mutate very easily. When its DNA is damaged or mutated, it fixes it, repairs it almost immediately. And as a consequence, it resists adaptive change. And for this reason, it's not an evolutionary resilient organism.
01:01:24
Speaker
Strangely enough, it's already so well adapted to the utter lethality of the universe that it doesn't need to change very much at all. You can scorch it, freeze it, wither it, and it won't die. It can survive a thousand times the dosage of gamma radiation that would instantly kill a human being.
01:01:43
Speaker
It can even survive in the open vacuum of outer space. We don't know really what its native environment might have been when it first appeared on the planet, because there are no environments that have such extremes of tolerance across such a wide spectrum of lethality. So what would drive the evolution of this organism into these various niches that it seems to universally occupy?
01:02:09
Speaker
Some scientists have gone so far as to speculate, I think extravagantly, that the organism might have spent at least part of its evolutionary history off the planet Earth in an extraterrestrial environment before being returned to the Earth even more adapted than before.
01:02:25
Speaker
All of these scenarios are pretty interesting. It's a very strange organism. And by putting my poem into this particular host, I'd be effectively writing a book that could conceivably outlast terrestrial civilization. And it might be on the planet Earth when the sun explodes. I'm, in effect, trying to write a book that lasts forever. That's the nature of the project. And I think I'm about on the verge of stating maybe about this time next year
01:02:52
Speaker
that I'm going to succeed at this project. Up until now, it's been very worrying. I haven't been able to validate any of my results, my efforts to design this genetic sequence and the resulting protein in a manner which would make it viable to persist in this organism. But I think I'm pretty much now on the threshold of success, and I'm likely to be able to say that I think by this time next year that I've succeeded.
01:03:21
Speaker
I'm hoping that that transpires. I would admit that up until now I have been unsure that I'm smart enough to actually figure out how to do this. I've been worried my IQ might be too low to acquire the aptitudes needed to solve these problems. Certainly I collaborate with lots of scientists, but they're just as mystified by the
01:03:43
Speaker
Project as I am because it's really the cutting edge of what we know about genetics and proteomics and while they can help me build things and test things They can't help me troubleshoot or solve problems. I have to do all of that myself. They won't help me with design I have to do all of that myself
01:04:00
Speaker
So I'm an autodidact in one small corner of genetic engineering and one small corner of proteomic engineering. When I first started this project 20 years ago, even sequencing a bacterium of this sort would have cost me tens and tens of thousands of dollars. And I asked for that money in grants, whereas now it would cost only a few thousand dollars and I could probably get it done in a few days, just like ordering a pizza and having it delivered. The change in technology over the course of
01:04:28
Speaker
work on this project is immense and remarkable, miraculous even. So I started doing this project early in the 21st century at the dawn of current bioinformatics. I had to teach myself a whole set of new skills and apply them poetically. At every step there's been numerous hurdles to overcome, many of which constitute cutting edge challenges that
01:04:57
Speaker
are mystifying, not just to me, but to scientific advisors. And as a consequence, it's taken a very long time to figure out how to get to the point where I am now, where I think I can begin now safely to say that I'm going to succeed at this project.
01:05:12
Speaker
Fantastic. I love the ambition of not only doing something really hard, but making it live forever. I knew how hard it was when I first started. I might not have been quite so cavalier about embarking on this task.
01:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's also wonderful to see someone moving from poetry into the world of science, which I think there's lots of examples where people go the other way, or at least scientists who have poetry as a sideline or a hobby, or sometimes, in the case of Miroslav Holub, who I was talking to, I had a chat called Sam Ellingworth on the podcast.
01:06:01
Speaker
Holub thought of himself as a scientist, although he's much better known for his poetry. But yeah, it's great to see movement in the opposite direction. And not just doing something sort of fiddling around with some knobs in silence, but doing something really, as you say, really difficult, which is baffling even to people who were, you know, for whom this is their bread and mother. And adds that extra layer of constraint as well. You not only have these very challenging linguistic constraints, but
01:06:30
Speaker
this bacterium can't reject the code that you put into it. It needs to propagate. I want to talk about, though, the linguistic constraints first because you sort of brushed over the fact that, oh, yes, this was hard. It took me four years. But I mean, it was super hard, this project of
01:06:54
Speaker
basically having a single set of symbols interpretable in two different ways. I just love this idea of a code that is hiding in plain sight. You know, codes that are just jumbled sets of letters.
01:07:15
Speaker
one has to think, well, this is just asking for attention, right? People are going to see that this is some encrypted text. What if you could put codes in some language that just looks completely readable, but one reads it the wrong way? And when you know the secret, it reveals an entirely different text.
01:07:42
Speaker
How did you come up with that idea? And yeah, how difficult was it to implement?
01:07:49
Speaker
Well, in the course of doing the required research to figure out how to produce two texts that would be mutually enciphered at the genetic level, one incipherable as a DNA sequence and one that would result in an equally enciphered, effectively RNA sequence, a complementary sequence of an incipherment,
01:08:16
Speaker
I knew that I would have to write the poem according to this kind of constraint. People have asked me what it was like to imagine writing this work. And I would say, if you've played, I don't know, one of the logic games you might see in a Sunday newspaper where they give you a coded message that looks like nonsense, but through an analysis of letter frequencies and letter patterns, you might begin to substitute letters for the code text
01:08:45
Speaker
and proceed through some logic and trial and error, decrypt the message. And those games were fun to play when I was a kid. But I did wonder when I was a child why we weren't given a plain text message. We were given a message that made sense, but we're then given to understand it actually contained a coded message. And again, if we analyzed its letter patterns and letter frequencies, we'd be able to
01:09:11
Speaker
translated into a decrypted text using the same principles that we would use in any other kind of cipher. And now I understand why no game designers did this. It's actually an exceptionally difficult constraint and made all the harder
01:09:30
Speaker
Because in my case, I had to produce these two texts so they would be mutually enciphering each other. And as a consequence, the letters of the alphabet would have to be mutually transposable with their cognates.
01:09:43
Speaker
So imagine enciphering the alphabet such that you pair off letters with each other, and they're mutually paired off. So if I sign A to E, I have to sign E to A. If I sign T to H, I have to sign H to T, whatever I might do. And imagine just doing this one kind of constraint for the assignation of letters to the alphabet, so they're mutually correlated. They're just shy of 8 trillion different ways of enciphering the alphabet according to that constraint. There's about 8 trillion.
01:10:14
Speaker
Now imagine using some rule of thumb, a heuristic, for picking one of those ciphers that you hope might produce a rich and interesting vocabulary that's resilient enough to make messages out of it. Pick one of those ciphers out of the eight trillion and then write a beautiful poem that makes sense in such a way that if you were to swap out every letter in that poem and replace it with its cognate from the cipher, you get a new poem that also makes sense and is just as beautiful.
01:10:41
Speaker
So in effect, you're attempting to find a plain text that can be deciphered into a totally different cipher text.
01:10:51
Speaker
As it turns out, it's very, very hard to do this. I taught myself enough computer programming skills to build a tool that would permit me to explore these ciphers, to find the vocabularies, to study them and test their ability to be used as viable modes of expression. And the largest vocabulary I could generate was a
01:11:13
Speaker
A little shy of 700 words. And I explored these options in descending order of vocabulary size. And even large vocabulary proved to be impossible. It was not possible to say two sentences, even two phrases that were mutually meaningful.
01:11:34
Speaker
I spent, I wasted a year trying to encipher the two words language and virus. I wanted those two words to be in the poem if possible. And as it turns out, it's possible to, there's a handful of ciphers that translate language into another word and they're limited.
01:11:57
Speaker
The first of which is I could translate the word language into the word toxicoid, meaning poisonous. I could translate the word language into foxtrotts. Every time I use the word language in one poem, I'd have to use the word foxtrotts in the other and vice versa. The third one was copy boys. Copy boys looked useful because if I could translate the word language into copy boys, I could translate the word virus into tribe.
01:12:25
Speaker
And that looked plausible to me. And I spent a year exploring the entire repertoire of available ciphers that would permit me to mutually encode these words with each other, and I could not find a poem anywhere in their midst, nothing. I wasted a whole year on just those options, thinking that that was going to prove viable.
01:12:46
Speaker
I whittled down these options over many years until I was now scraping the bottom of the barrels, getting down to vocabularies that were less than 150 words. And this means that the letters are now being mutually correlated with letters that are a little further away on the frequency table from their proximate neighbors. Obviously, I'm not going to typically pick a cipher that assigns the letter A to letter Z because there I'm going to be swapping out a relatively common letter with a very uncommon letter. Chances are there are not many
01:13:15
Speaker
words in the language that will do that. And in this case, I got down to a vocabulary of about 120 words and found the only cipher that actually permits me to say anything poetic and meaningful. And as it turns out, the two poems that I ended up discovering, I would say that I really didn't write them. I found the vocabulary and probably found the only statements that are possible to say with this limited lexicon.
01:13:41
Speaker
And it just so happens that the poem I've written seems to be written in the voice of Orpheus and as a kind of claim made about the creativeness of language. And in response, the organism writes a poem that seems to be written in the voice of Eurydice about the morbidness, the de-creativeness of language.
01:14:07
Speaker
one poem refuting the merits of the other, a kind of dialogue that conforms to a pastoral tradition of poetry in which a herd boy attempts to seduce an infat and the infat says no. And given the hellish nature of the organism into which I was hoping to put these poems, these two voices of Orpheus and Eurydice appearing out of the blue
01:14:31
Speaker
out of 8 trillion ciphers by accident, by happenstance, seemed to be uncanny, spooky.
01:14:39
Speaker
They're not exactly the poems I would typically write, but in their fragility, in their tentativeness, I think they reflect something about the nature of life and the cosmos itself. I mean, there are probably eight trillion worlds alone in the galaxy, the Milky Way, most of which, so far as we might tell, appear barren, and it's all deserts out there. There's not much evidence that there's sentience or
01:15:05
Speaker
grandiose imperial civilizations ruling over the galaxy. So we don't see much evidence of sentience and intelligence, i.e., not much evidence of poetry anywhere in the cosmos. And there's only one planet. There's only one spot where there's poetry, and it just happens to be one out of eight trillion.
01:15:28
Speaker
And to me, that's what makes these poems valuable to me is that they're the only ones that could be derived from this bizarre constraint. They seem to speak meaningfully to an important story in the history of poetry, and they seem like an appropriate fit for this project. And they've taken on a kind of talismanic value for that reason.
01:15:51
Speaker
Yeah, it is completely mind-boggling, the uncanniness, I guess, that the words coming out of, you know, the usable vocabulary that you should have is very much in this pastoral tradition as woe and lyre and things. It reminds me as well of coming back to this idea of language as a, or poetry as empirical experiments,
01:16:21
Speaker
one of the other things that it one of the things that seems to prove to me is it's almost a response to Wittgenstein's indeterminacy of translation, where not it doesn't hit it obliquely sorry, it doesn't hit it squarely on the head, but certainly an oblique sort of response to that where I remember having a discussion with someone about this saying, well, of course, yeah, Wittgenstein's chose for a single word that
01:16:50
Speaker
famous example being Gavagai, where an anthropologist is parachuted into some distant tribe and is trying to figure out what they're talking about when they point to this, in his mind, rabbit-shaped thing that keeps moving around. And Wittgenstein keeps on pointing out, well, all he's going to learn is the instances by which you make that utterance, Gavagai. But that's not going to tell him what
01:17:17
Speaker
it is, right? He's not going to be able to step inside. And, you know, carried even further, Wittgenstein's, you know, thesis is something like, well, we don't even know the meaning of our own words, right? How do we understand how we're employing language? But then
01:17:34
Speaker
the thought goes, well, actually, you know, it's a very, looking at a single word in isolation, that's one thing, but when you look at the way that things have to be combined, you know, how possible is it that we could be completely talking at cross purposes, and that all the words that I say could be mapped to you in a completely different way, just as, you know, one way of understanding Orpheus and Eurydice is that the organism,
01:18:03
Speaker
there is a complete breakdown of understanding. And one text is completely misinterpreted, but in a perfectly sensible or sense-making fashion by the organism. And that seems just incredibly difficult to do. So that's, in some ways, an encouraging result. We are talking, we think, a common language.
01:18:30
Speaker
Well, to me, the point of the exercise, the outcome of it is to induce in you the sense of uncanniness or spookiness, the surprise. I mean, I've said before that there's occasions when the language seems to reward me for a certain faith in it. I've burned up a lot of treasure and effort and blood and toil on the altar of this little organism, which finally seems to say yes to what I've given it.
01:18:59
Speaker
And there's occasions when some boats say I'm forcing this organism to do something that it's not capable of doing. And I'm a tyrannical figure for impinging upon its capacity to do things. And I have to keep correcting people and say, no, it's the other way around.
01:19:17
Speaker
I mean, I can't make it do anything I want. I have to actually comply entirely with its impositions upon me. It tells me what to do and how to appease it and make it possible for this thing to work. I don't get to do anything without its permission.
01:19:36
Speaker
in some sense. And that's always what it's been a challenge for, certainly in the last 10 years at least, is trying to figure out how to make myself acceptable to it, right? Like what constitutes an adequate intervention in its own style of living? Like what would it say if it would permit me to participate in a dialogue with it?
01:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, it reminds me, I should first say, I think I said Wittgenstein when I meant Quine, but nevermind. But it reminds me of your comments right at the beginning where you say, well, constraint, part of the use of constraint has been to aid the propagation, I guess, of poetry in terms of making it
01:20:23
Speaker
memorable. And of course, well, the poet is forced to, in feta, to use a beautiful word, which I discovered via, you know, to in feta his, his, his thoughts into particular structures. So, so as to guarantee their chances of propagation.
01:20:42
Speaker
and you have an even more rigorous set of constraints. But the end goal is rather similar to make, to encipher your poem into de-radiodorins. You have to abide by what that organism permits you to do. And if you manage to get that right, then there is the chance that this is, you know, the last poem on Earth.
01:21:10
Speaker
something like that. Poets, of course, pay lip service to the immortality of their art form, but I don't think they believe it. Of course, I'm trying, I think, to make a literal this metaphor, at least in some conceptual or aesthetic framework to
01:21:27
Speaker
show that it's possible to imagine that we might be able to protect our cultural legacy against disasters. I mean, there's a lot of cosmic disasters that await sentient life so far, and we're not protected very well against them.
01:21:45
Speaker
And I think there's some ethical demand that we try to preserve the best of our culture against disaster in order to ensure its ongoing transmission through time in the hope that, of course, it testifies well to our existence and allows us to continue to evolve into an even more resilient, more robust civilization. And the techniques I'm deploying here
01:22:13
Speaker
are potentially exploitable in the future to protect cultural information against planetary disasters, astrophysical barrage, thermonuclear warfare. They're intended, I think, to extend the scale of our horizons for cultural contribution beyond perhaps our own immediate mortality and perhaps the extinction of the species.
01:22:37
Speaker
a kind of cosmic address in the way that, for example, the Voyager probes or the Pioneer probes attempt very fleetingly to address perhaps some civilization that's higher up on the Kardashev scale than us. We're trying to address a kind of votive audience that's bigger than ourselves that we hope might exist. We don't know if it's out there, but we plan accordingly as though it were.
01:23:02
Speaker
And I think that that's a kind of poetic attitude. Most poets, I think, are writing for themselves in whatever strangers might be out there willing to listen. And you don't know who they are. No clue. And they haven't introduced themselves. Usually they never do. You know, you speak into a void and it's gone, right? These two poems, you know, testify to that theme a little bit. You know, to me, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is probably the most important story that poets tell themselves.
01:23:28
Speaker
And it's a story of poetic failure. And poets, I think, have taken pride in their various failures over the last few hundred years. They regard it as badges of honor to be perfect failures, martyrs to their cause.
01:23:44
Speaker
But in this occasion, I would like poets to succeed. I'd kind of like Orpheus at some point in the cycles of this legend to actually step into the sunlight and drag the bride with him into life again without having looked back in regret or looked back in dismay, made sure that he brings his lover back to life with the power of poetry. I hope that this poem kind of offers
01:24:13
Speaker
you know, some kind of conceptual alternative to that storytelling, that it constitutes an exception, an anomaly that where Orpheus in fact succeeds, you know, manages to go and go to hell and back. That would be the desiccated de-radiodorans flying through the wilds of space and discovered by an alien civilization
01:24:39
Speaker
Well, again, a lot of people will ask me, can an alien civilization really decipher this? Would it really address the intelligent raccoons of the future? I don't know. But I say probably not in the manner in which you imagine. Really, what I've done is I've spray painted some graffiti on an obelisk in the desert in the hope that the obelisk will testify to our intelligence itself.
01:25:07
Speaker
I don't know if the aliens who pick up the Voyager probe will listen fondly to Bach on the Golden Record and understand it, but they might learn a lot right from the antenna array, right from the technology aboard the spacecraft itself.
01:25:27
Speaker
The purpose of the exercise, I think, is conceptual. It's intended to scare my friends and rivals. It's intended to provide a limit case for poetry in the 21st century. I'm trying to respond to the technological circumstances of this moment in history at a time when there's a great deal of anxiety about our future as a species, dealing with emergencies around climate, if not
01:25:49
Speaker
technological advancement. Certainly there are lots of opportunities for prosperity in the future, which I'm optimistic about. I would say that it seems to me that we're very likely to enjoy a very prosperous future, but the future is also fraught with lots of peril and we can't be complacent about it. And this century is a little more unusual than the last century. Right now, at this point,
01:26:13
Speaker
100 years ago, there would be talk of the 21st century and what life will be like in the 21st century. At this point, analogously in the 21st century, we don't have talk like, what will life be like in the 22nd century? There's no kind of book Rogers imagining of the future with an optimistic outlook and utopian set of ideals. There's a great deal of anxiety and concern. The horizons for our investment and
01:26:40
Speaker
And futures seem to have gotten foreshortened just to the next 30 or 40 years, if not next decade or two. The horizons have gone shorter. There's a great deal of morbid concern about our mortality.
01:26:56
Speaker
This work, I hope, answers that somehow in response to it with substantive thematic sets of concerns. And I hope is optimistic. It suggests the degree to which poetry might contribute something to the deep time of our legacy, that poetry can address a future that's very far off, well beyond the foreseeable parameters of our existence as a civilization.
01:27:23
Speaker
I'd like to think that poetry has a pretty important role to play in our understanding of the cosmos and probably testifying to our existence. It's probably a big thing. Yeah. A couple of final questions. On that theme, do you think in the final chapters of the cosmos, let's suppose that we've figured out all of physics.
01:27:49
Speaker
there still be poetry? Would there still be constraints based poetry as well? Well, we don't really know what the cosmos is about, right? I mean, it seems to be, you know, a big waste of time, right, on the face of it. I mean, there's a lot of time and, you know, for much of it, you know, it's not that interesting. Like, you know, for
01:28:12
Speaker
You know, from the perspective of sentient creatures, it's actually kind of a concentration camp, right? It's a terrible prison, mostly inhospitable to life. But I suspect that given timescales and the presence of intelligence, at least on one planet in one small corner of it all.
01:28:30
Speaker
that uh... life is important uh... perhaps because it might actually play a role in the ultimate evolution of the cosmos that you know uh... that intelligence may have some you know significant role to play in rescuing the cosmos perhaps from its uh... thermodynamic outcome uh... you know perhaps you know life has some role to play in exploring you know corners of the universe that
01:28:59
Speaker
perhaps give exit ways to other futures, other cosmic opportunities that would otherwise be undiscovered if consciousness did not exist.
01:29:14
Speaker
what role poetry might play in the very deep time of what a cosmos that consists of nothing but black holes orbiting each other and decaying into nothing. I mean, that seems to me like a rather unpleasant outcome for everybody. It's not a great way to go out. And yet, we just don't know what role life has to play in all of it. It, to me, seems kind of wildcard.
01:29:39
Speaker
in the whole game. We tamper with everything. And it could be that we don't just tamper with the forces of nature on a single planet. We might tamper with the forces of nature.
01:29:53
Speaker
around stars or in space-time itself, who knows? We might find ourselves smart enough to begin to influence, I don't know, the evolution of the cosmos itself. Perhaps that's what life is for. But I don't know. And to me, the important thing is to ensure that poetry has a role to play in each moment of human cognition, that poetry is there.
01:30:23
Speaker
I didn't want the first messages to be enciphered into bacteria. The earliest messages, do you want them to be ads for Microsoft?
01:30:33
Speaker
barcodes for patent infringement. I don't know. What do you want those messages to be that might be preserved for all time? I think I'd like them to be at least demotic, that there would be the opportunity for people to preserve photos of their grandmother or messages to their loved ones. There is some poetry in all of that, the effort to
01:30:57
Speaker
provide memorials and testament to our existence. This work, as I said, it just constitutes a limit case of that activity, an attempt to show what poetry could do when it confronts the technological affordances of our moment in time in the 21st century. I think life might guide the development of the universe and poetry might guide the development of life.
01:31:27
Speaker
My last question is, what's next? Let's say that, and I really hope this happens, that you can announce next year the Xanatext. It's happened. What is the next boundary that you'll push on? Well, you know, I think I probably have to take a break from doing impossible projects. I have to do something. It's a little more easily completable.
01:31:55
Speaker
There's lots of other projects that I have promised I would do, lots of unbuilt Chevy sitting on concrete blocks in my backyard, I think, that I would probably have to fix up and make road worthy. I would love to make a long musically inflected sound poem that would be epic in scale, a wonderful testament to the history of performance and poetry.
01:32:20
Speaker
Just a beautiful, lengthy score that would be primarily nonsensical, but euphonically beautiful and wonderful to listen to.
01:32:31
Speaker
That would be a great ambition for me afterwards because it would be pleasant and fun to do it. I have a long ongoing narrative suite of poetry that are responsive to the history of gemology, reverting again to my interest in crystallography. I have, you know, a lot of projects that are likewise informed by those sets of obsessions around crystals and neurology.
01:33:01
Speaker
I probably am overdue to publish a collection of essays or manifestos or statements of poetics, something of that sort. I know there's always lots to do and I am not wanting for ideas, but I think I probably have to avoid
01:33:18
Speaker
attempting to upscale my ambition. My publication record is on some sort of bizarre logarithmic curve. It took me four years to write my first book and then seven years to write my second book. It took 15 years to write my third book. And if this fourth book finally does come to fruition, it will have been 23 years. It's not a great path to completion of work. I wouldn't recommend it to sustain a career. I would like to be the kind of poet who publishes a book every
01:33:48
Speaker
year and a half. That would be better for the pocketbook and easier to accomplish. I'm hoping that my contribution to literature up to this point will be meaningful enough that people will still continue to be engaged with what I attempt to do for the remainder of my career.
01:34:12
Speaker
The biggest opponent right now is capital H history. We're trying to, in Scots, place find a foothold within the pantheon of great poets from the past and ensure that you make a contribution that's worthy of being remembered 100 years from now. So I'd like to think that I'm en route to being able to do that. I hope you get to build your Chevys though as well.
01:34:39
Speaker
Well, thank you so much. I mean, I have just a million other questions I could ask as ever. You're going to end up editing this into something that fits the box. I'm such a lazy editor that I really don't cut out much. And also because, I mean, I think you've said so many things that are all worth listening to. But yeah, maybe a final question.
01:35:04
Speaker
I have been playing around as one is obliged to do before almost any activity with large language models. And just saying, you know, I'm sure you've tried as well to see if you could produce a univocalic lipogram, for example, with chat GBT and
01:35:23
Speaker
sort of reassuringly, it's very bad at this. So this is maybe the new Turing test. Can your LLM produce a univocal lipogram? I'll just read you one for fun. Let me see. I would be curious to know how chat GPT-4, you know, tackles a task like that.
01:35:46
Speaker
Yes, I tried with both chat PBT 3 and 4, and I didn't see much in advance between the two. And I have to say, Google's bard was a complete failure at this. But this is one where I asked, so my prompt was, write a poem referencing the avant-garde discussing the glyph A using the univocal libogrammatic constraints, such that A is also the only vowel.
01:36:15
Speaker
And it doesn't start very well because it starts an avant-garde art. So it's already got an ian, the guard there, that casts a dark path, stands apart as a stark avant-garde craft. Okay, so it's got it. But I did then ask it, I mean, I kept on prompting it, but it just was incapable of producing something lacking other fowls.
01:36:39
Speaker
But nonetheless, it had some pretty good lines. A dark mark. Yeah, all of that statement you said sounds familiar to me. Yeah. Let me suggest to you that chat GPD is not going to surprise me. I actually found all these sentences. People show me their variations. Oh, yeah, I saw those sentences. I crafted things like that and then abandoned them. It's not going to say something I don't think I've already seen. Yes. But I use these things.
01:37:09
Speaker
Yeah. I've certainly used a chat GPT and other variations of it to write poetry, certainly lately. There's been opportunities for me to exploit the tools. There's lots of poets who are very suspicious of the merits of computer-generated writing. And again, it's because they're assessing a game they don't understand according to the rules of the game they typically play.
01:37:36
Speaker
And certainly delegating some of your authority for writing to a machine is an aleatoric chance-based method of writing. Fundamentally, it's a probabilistic form of expression. And as a consequence, you're doing it in order to see what kind of uncanny, spooky, oracular result you might get. There's a prophetic quality to the outcomes if you're lucky. And it's a game of chance, so fine. I would say if you succeed at that, it validates your luckiness as a poet.
01:38:07
Speaker
And there's lots of peers who are suspicious of it. They dismiss it. And they claim, of course, that these machines don't know the first thing about poetry. And they write. They'll never be able to write a poem that is equivalent to the merits of a Shakespeare or a Milton or something of that sort.
01:38:22
Speaker
And I look and say, well, sure, but even though these machines know nothing about how to write poetry, they still write poetry better than human beings who know nothing about poetry. And to me, if I had my choice, if I'd rather, you know, if I want to read Dog Roll by poets, I think I'm going to want to read the Dog Roll by the machines first.
01:38:43
Speaker
more than the dog row by the humans, because the humans are even worse at it. So in this respect, the machines do write bad poetry better than bad poets. I think that's an important thing to note. That's already, it strikes me as a little benchmark that gets passed, right? That they're beating the bad poets at writing bad poetry, they're a little better than that.
01:39:07
Speaker
And I have to remind poets that, you know, unlike us, unlike the poets, right, the machines aren't getting stupider, okay? The machines are only getting smarter. And, you know, wherever you think that curve might be that where they cross, you know, your goalpost of Shakespeare Milton, it's probably not as far in the future as you think. And it's certainly going to happen, because these machines aren't are not getting dumber.
01:39:31
Speaker
They're only getting smarter and they're getting smarter faster than us. So I'm not too concerned about that because the machines actually have great tool sets that actually enhance the capacity of human beings to express themselves and surprise themselves.
01:39:49
Speaker
But I think there is some concern that we're going to be competing with a machinic culture for the attention of people.
The Rise of Machinic Culture
01:39:57
Speaker
And it's probably already true. Most traffic on the internet is between machines. Certainly more than 50% of traffic is now between machines without human intervention. And that would seem to me that you're already participating in an ostensible machinic culture online.
01:40:14
Speaker
We just don't know it yet. We haven't seen the full fruits of that competition come to fruition.
01:40:21
Speaker
Obviously, it seems to be the case that potentially lawyers will be replaced. Artists and illustrators and conventional forms of artistic practice that we might do for money might be replaced. Machines will be after at it, faster at it, more entertaining at it.
The Intersection of Poetry and Technology
01:40:41
Speaker
Of course, whatever we find wanting in it right now, it doesn't seem to me that those shortcomings are going to persist for very long.
01:40:52
Speaker
I'm obviously really interested in these innovations. I've certainly used the tools because I'm an experimental poet. I go where the experiments are. There's lots of wonderful younger poets who have done amazing things with these kinds of technologies. And I look at them with much optimism. Like I just say, good work.
01:41:15
Speaker
I am concerned, though, that poets are at heart very lunatic and conservative. I would have liked my peers to be more imaginative about their relationship to the 21st century and its technologies and its affordances. Poets, for whatever reason, right now seem to me to be collectively suspicious of the future, less optimistic about the future than, say, poets even 100 years ago. At this point, 100 years ago,
01:41:43
Speaker
five or six globally renowned avant-garde movements, imaginative utopian visions of poetry, working together in the global culture. And right now, there's at best only one or two, maybe two.
01:42:01
Speaker
And that by comparison seems to me a paucity of interest in the future. I would prefer that there were more kind of alternatives in the avant-garde in literature that you had a wider variety of choices to explore. I think for many, poetry has become a refuge from modernity instead of trying to legislate for it and alter the
01:42:31
Speaker
I like this idea that poetry is a refuge from modernity. Of course, it was one of the engines of modernity for a little while.
01:42:42
Speaker
I like the fact that in the early 20th century, art forms, artistic movements had their poetic contingent, that poets would always be in collaboration with visual artists, that if you referred to surrealism, you're referring, of course, not just to a movement in fine art and painting, but also to a movement in poetry, and that there was collaboration and conversation amongst artists across different pedigrees.
01:43:08
Speaker
But after the 1950s, somehow all of these art schools of the arts become detached from their literary bastions and poets go their own way. There's probably no
01:43:23
Speaker
I mean, there's very few who shouldn't say there's no, but there's fewer occasions after the 1950s where there's a great deal of conversation between one school of visual art and an analogous school in poetry that they're collaborating with each other.
01:43:40
Speaker
become more detached from each other now. And it made possible claims made by the likes of Brian Gyson, who notes that poetry is 50 years behind painting. A claim that feels true, certainly in
01:43:55
Speaker
creative writing departments in North America, many programs teach poetry, teach you how to write poetry as though the internet was never invented, as though computer programming never happened. You're not given much access to the tools that you might require to know how to use it now in the 21st century. There's not a great deal of effort to
01:44:20
Speaker
to make it possible for you to become a 21st century poet in those programs. I think that will change. There will be a need for it to change, but right now it's still possible for people to learn how to be poets without knowing the first thing about how to program a computer, for example, or respond to the affordances of something like the internet. It's just very strange. Yeah. Yeah, I see certainly very good near-time possibilities that this
01:44:51
Speaker
the self-expression component for, say, lyric poetry could be provided by prompts and come from people, but the self-conscious part could be applied by machines and doing the ordering, finding the best way of fitting that sentiment into the appropriate structure. But I think some of the
01:45:17
Speaker
The quality of the results will depend strongly on the quality of the prompt. I gave a pretty poor prompt earlier where I asked for a poignant poem about a Christian book and the entrepreneur James Robinson having a video chat about constraints-based literature. And it wasn't very promising.
Accessibility and Diversity in Art through Technology
01:45:33
Speaker
It studied, in a digital world, a meeting is set. A poet and an entrepreneur in pixels they met.
01:45:39
Speaker
Christian Book of an Alinguistic Craft so deft, James Robinson in Realms of Business Adept, which, and it goes on, it's pretty lengthy.
01:45:51
Speaker
But yeah. But you're right. It doesn't sound very promising. And of course, it sounds like dog roll. But here's the thing. It's not irretrievable. You probably could use that as, I don't know, it's a car wreck. And your job is now to be a really good automatic and fix it, right? Like it could go in and intervene, you know, actually apply some good principles of prosody and revise it. Like it's always easier to revise something than it is to actually generate it out of whole cloth.
01:46:19
Speaker
And it could be that the machine at this point would give you something to work with. It hands you a lump of clay. That's a terrible facsimile of a horse and your job is to sculpt it into something more appropriate to the genius of a horse.
01:46:35
Speaker
I don't know. The tools have their capabilities. There's lots of poets who can exploit them for merit. I think they are very talented.
01:46:51
Speaker
Obviously, if a prompt will grant you a really good outcome, then understanding the poetics of crafting a good prompt that produces an anomalous result with reliability constitutes a new skill set, perhaps even something you might want to teach somebody else how to do. But we haven't figured out how to break the tools properly yet. People are simply goofing around with them and playing with them and experimenting with them.
01:47:18
Speaker
What I do like about the tools is that they make access to the art world a little more demotic. The cost of failure is lower. It's therefore easier to take risk and try things out experimentally. Probably makes access to these forms of expression more amenable to a wider variety of people.
01:47:37
Speaker
And all of that seems to me, at least on the face of it, a good thing. I mean, I don't know what the long-term, you know, it might be a bad thing. But I don't know.
01:47:51
Speaker
some demotic forms of art like becoming a YouTube video entrepreneur, it's impossible to have done that and now ordinary people can have audiences in the millions. And to me, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It does mean that new kinds of talent are going to be found. And certainly with the advent of generative algorithms,
01:48:12
Speaker
computer-assisted writing with all of these large language models with the advent of the blockchain, even on cryptocurrencies. Lots of otherwise excluded members of artistic activity now find opportunities to express themselves. Certainly marginal communities, there's now more women, more
01:48:34
Speaker
people from the global south participating in the art world than ever before. And to me, that's got to be a net good for the time being. It seems to me that that's a good thing that you involve more people in the art forms. I mean, it means probably there will be a lot more junk being made, but it also means that a lot more risk will occur, that people will try things out. There will be more diversity of voices, I suppose. And
01:49:01
Speaker
I think that's okay. I look upon the demotic nature of these advances with some approval. Even if my peers are worried about it or suspicious about it, I think that's the feature that I admire most about it. It just grants
Future of Experimental Literature and Art
01:49:14
Speaker
people greater access to something from which they might have been felt otherwise excluded.
01:49:20
Speaker
I think that's a lovely optimistic point to end on that we may see a flourishing of experimentation literature before the machines take over. I would like the future to flourish with more experimentation, with people finding great outlets for their imagination and benefiting from it, that there's opportunities, greater opportunities even now for people's talent to flourish. I think it's harder to blame others for your lack of success now with these kinds of tools at your disposal.
01:49:49
Speaker
becomes easier to plot how you might be able to manage the success of your own career as an artist and figure out how to do something that will please others and yourself. I think the future looks bright to me for the most part.
01:50:08
Speaker
Well, Christian, I won't keep you any longer from turning your Chevy's probably into something that's not a Chevy. Well, James, you've been from company. I appreciate your indulgences in allowing me to be very verbose in products in my answers. Thank you. And I would like, of course, to extend my gratitude to your listeners for spending time with me. Thank you, one and all. Thank you, James, for inviting me onto your show. Cheers.
01:50:34
Speaker
Congratulations, you made it to the end of the episode. This could just be because there was some kind of breakdown and an electronic or physiological failure meant that you simply couldn't cut short the sound of my droning voice. But perhaps you just really liked this episode. And if that's the case, please do leave a five-star review in your favoured podcast directory.
01:50:57
Speaker
Leave 5 star reviews, in fact, in all the podcast directories, even the ones you hate. Remember, the first rule of multiverses is please do talk about multiverses on social media and in all public forums and tell your friends and so forth.