Postreality Poetics
Postreality Poetics
A philosophical approach to poetry and technology; musings from the 'POÈME OBJKT/POÈME SBJKT' exhibition
I recently contributed an essay to the catalog for POÈME OBJKT/POÈME SBJKT, a two-part exhibition curated by theVERSEverse, L’Avant Galerie Vossen and Librairie Métamorphoses.
An electronic copy of the book is available in full here, and I encourage you to take a look at all the wonderful artworks and texts you’ll find there. My essay “Postreality Poetics” is included below.
“In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.” —Alfred North Whitehead
Reality blurs. More than any time since the advent of modernity, we encounter the blur—the processual flows of Postreality more legible than any presumed fixity of subjects, objects, or subject-objects.
When I enrolled in my first college poetry course, I did so to fulfill a major requirement; I had no idea how thoroughly that class would change my life. My professor, Dr. Cynie Cory, embodied experiment—how might we ditch our normative relationship with language and apply our own conventions, invent our own languages? She invited us to perceive the world with wonder, scrutiny, and play, and apply these perceptions idiosyncratically. For all the various definitions and supposed “purposes” of poetry that exist, this remains my visceral impression of what it means to be a poet: the practice of fostering renegade perceptions of reality, and constructing discrete systems of language to reveal them in ways that straightforward communication could not.
Over time, I came to recognize two prevailing approaches to poetry: experimentation and refinement. Experimentation—my gateway—seeks to break open, to discover some form of linguistic novelty (however foolish that may be). In refinement, the poet seeks to contribute to an existing lineage, and draw attention to the subtle interpretations a given poem manifests (i.e., the specific way a poet writes their sonnet). Both are in conversation with history; one attempts continuity, the other to fork timelines. In the ideal, these binaries operate in harmony with each other; poetic invention thrives when experimentation and refinement are held in balance by the community of working poets.
But these identifications are medium-specific, and forms of knowledge situated in contemporary materials. Written poetry is known to be at least 4,000 years old, but the tradition of oral poetry is likely much older. For the vast majority of its history, poetry was not just creative expression but a mnemonic device, an encoding of meaning into a format (stanzas, rhyme, etc.) that streamlined the transmission of information. For this reason, poet Sasha Stiles calls poetry the “original blockchain.” As poetry made its way onto stone and then clay tablets, to papyrus and then parchment scrolls, ultimately printed on paper with presses, its modes of distribution changed, and with it, the audiences it could reach and its “purpose.” Each of these historical moments merits volumes of scholarship; the point here is to identify that the evolution of poetry is inextricably mediated by technology—through which it is then able to offer unique creative reflections on and interactions with society. As such, it is a liquid form—its own sort of blur—whose purpose can shift so dramatically it eludes boundaries. Poetry may have once been “just” a genre of writing, but now it is more accurately a metagenre, a way of relating to reality through language. This is key to its magic.
And this is also why blockchain poetics and algorithmic poetics are absolutely continuous with the evolution of capital-‘P’ poetry. Blockchain and machine learning, along with their many subtechnologies and fields, extend humanity’s reality-making and -breaking capabilities; poetry is a necessary intervener and interlocutor. These technologies extend the possibilities for both experimentation and refinement, especially in tandem; so-called “generative AI” opens the spigot of possibility and latent patterning in the human collective, blockchain affords provenance, cryptographic assertions of who did what when—and moreover opens to new modes of value. Poets incorporating these technologies into their practices participate in the simultaneous formation of new conventions and new experiments.
Postreality supposes a liquid reality marked by multiplicity—a simultaneous acclimation to perpetual blur and a desire to rescue precious moments of solidity. In this paradigm, poets assume their age-old roles as storytellers, guides, and translators by embracing contemporary modes. The artworks presented in POÈME OBJKT/POÈME SBJKT are testament to these poetic possibilities—the poetry of realities ever-emerging.