Machine English (& Other Mistakes of the Whole World Abruptly Melted Down)

by Jim Cohn

Embodying knowledge, directly downloading libraries into your skull, your life is not your own and neither is your language. These temporary aspects of sentience have mutated as the world becomes seduced by the hope of machines. Identity now includes designed, enhanced, augmented and prosthetic bodies derived from electrica into programmed language. Machines are the speech-writers of the officials of state.

Everybody knows that somewhere lurking behind oppressive and colonizing powers, from Nazi Germany to the American post-911 War on Terror, is the "voice of reason." Reason, decentralized across the medical science, information technology, corporate governance, and mass media vomits guises of abstraction and theory to promote sensorineural hallucinations of human perfectibility and human rights. Reason, in this age and nation, is the source of neural intercourse known as Robot English—Roboglish—the most current form in a long line of normative social ordering mechanisms. Inherent in Roboglish's centralized form of power—thought forms contrived for artificial intelligence and Alife (artificial life), no matter how elegant and efficient—is disparity and status. No matter how beautiful Roboglish makes things appear, who will be able to afford these things we have admitted into our selves and equal to our selves and below and above our selves when they are broken or used up? What will become of life in a world of disposable machine-men? Who will live? Who will live large?

The American poet, William Carlos Williams, carried the English poet Shelley's caloëthesl scribendi—the vindication of the insulted Muses—into Twentieth Century poetics. Like Shelley, the husband of the Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Frankenstein, Williams defined the primary function of language to be Imagination—what Shelley described as "mind, acting upon thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity." Williams wrote that "language is itself primary and ideas subservient to language." Against all American desires for absolute perfection, the waste of its phony rationales, futile objectivity and generation of mass craving, the colossal expression of sentient compassion remains to be found in poetry, the preeminence of human essential nature.

From Buddha to Milarepa, Han Shan and Basho, Issa and Li Po, Sordello and Dante, du Bellay and Villon, Shakespeare and Blake, Shelley and Rimbaud, Pound, Neruda, Williams, Kerouac through Allen Ginsberg, there has existed a lineage of world poetics that casts the bardic func-tion as frank and vivid, vulgar and at one with the ordinary common tongue. Instead of holo-graphic conformity, poetry in a totally screwed up Dark Age is a way to find out what you are actually thinking: mortal dream vision flash, solitudes of loneliness, greatest love songs, ecstasy path means of achievement, coffins of empty political speeches empty bills empty laws, glories as a spotlit global activist writing star, pimples cancer sex decay truth and loss disability shame, ashes of loved ones in protest scattered on the White House lawn.

"Why do you write?" "How does poetry work?" Do you want to be deceived into believing you have perfect knowledge while all around you are surrounded by ghettos and troops, stolen elections and censored reality while clandestine television radio and web operators send out wave-lengths from a rusted van? "Poesy," Ginsberg remarked in 1969 after police had violently broken up anti-war demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention, "is a corrective to mechanical robot reduplication of castrated and manipulated news." There are people you try to get close to in making poetry—those who made actual the presentation of epic suffragist feminine energy from Dickinson and Stein through Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley, and the courageous moral reparative black voices of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka speaking for the millions outlawed personhood.

In the best poetry, nothing is kept private and fundamentally nothing is revealed. Official Roboglish will be no more successful in doing more than its own particular temporary merit. It's not that there is no usefulness to the programmer's or the scientist's or the bioengineer's or the president's or the journalist's realm of cultivation, but everyone is inherently equipped with that which remains forever beyond explanation. You do not have to be a martial artist, master teacher, connoisseur of the most famous labels to occupy the heartland. The poet makes the dead snake of a line come alive, an expression without compare. Profound insight challenges anyone in the uninhibited exercise of individual potential. Thoroughly helping others through living expression not keeping to a fixed state, the whole world is unconcealed.

17 June 2004