Personal greatness was never more than a trick of the light, a halo of illusion--but who are these little smiling attendants? - Robinson Jeffers

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The project of which this Web site is a part exists (in part as well) to challenge the hegemonic ruthlessness of the humanties as they now present themselves in the academy. To challenge their superciliousness, their exclusivity, their claims to quality. And yes, these are judgemental assertions. If they offend you (and BTW, there is no right, either constitutional or moral, to be unoffended, but the PC police have made offense the most heinous of all crimes and so some of you may have been led to believe that offensivenes is actually illegal), just think back a bit about your experience with the various humanities departments in your institution. Do your teachers have a common reaction to the NASCAR nation? You know, that ever-so-slight rolling of the eyes and the tone, ever-so-lightly cynical, that suggests the moronic and hopelessly bound myopia of the NASCAR nation's socially constructed value systems? The look that says We are so much smarter than they? And what makes you think they don't think they are as much smarter than you as they are of them? Kind of defines supercilousness, don't it? But they aren't exclusive, at all, you protest--they are all for diversity! Take a look around, boys and girls. Just how many Black faces to you see in your 300-level English classes? Your grad classes? And how about the less important issue of access to publication space in academic literary magazines? Does that business student across campus have the same chance of being published as the student of literary theory? We could go on, but you get the idea. If you have found your way here, there's a pretty good chance it's because your teacher has assigned you this site, perhaps to write a paper criticizing it. If so, you have a big problem. If you agree with your teacher that you are a member of the elect, then there's really nothing I can help you with here. They've got you and your problem is that you will probably never really enjoy reading ever again. You already know what to say, just grab up one of the cliches lying at the bottom of your bookbag and tweak it a bit for this particular paper. But just a little suggestion: Mention my Wharton affiliation and how that is in itself evidence of my insensitivity to humanistic traditions and my unbreakable attachment to capitalism. Extend that line of reasoning to a discussion of the class struggle, maybe how it is finally starting to work, that rich, white guys like me are panicking at the possibility of losing the means of production (here, the means of producing literary texts) and that we have a lot of nerve being upset over being excluded, based on our record of economic oppression. That way you don't have to talk about the texts at all. A guaranteed A. (But then again, when was the last time your teacher gave any paper of the right length and tone anything other than an A?) You'll do just fine. But if you don't agree, what on earth do you do? Well, first off, don't worry about whether your teacher has read this page of the site. It's gone up after the semester began, and like most students, he/she won't return here until the night before the class during which you discuss the site. And isn't going to wade through this rant at the last minute. So you know something he/she doesn't. So here's what you do: A. Find a poem by an established poet you are pretty sure your teacher wouldn't know about. It's pretty easy to do that. Visit some literary journals' Web sites and pick off a piece by some academic at another institution. Literary circles are so small and so varied and so numerous (they pretty much write for themselves) that no one can read even a little bit of it all. B. Start your paper by saying that I claim that Erica's poems are indistinguishable from "real" poems (BTW: Erica's poems are real.) Then quote a decent chunk of the poem you found in Step A and say that it is a fragment of a poem generated here. (This has the added benefit of padding the paper a half-page or so.) Don't worry that your teacher will try to find the poem here. First of all he/she won't, but even if he/she does, I trash all the poems made here from time to time and the one you picked is logically one of these discarded friends. C. Explicate a close reading of the quotatation and show how the language is awkward, how though there appears within it an immature imitation of poetic diction, the text lacks cohesion, that it doesn't develop an idea and so is obviously mechanically produced. (Actually, this can be pretty funny, since a lot of post-modern poets, even Language poets, proffer that the idea is irrelevant, that the language of the text is what the text is about--ah, the hypocrsies abound!) Say that even here, in machine-generated texts, the text deconstructs itself, that my project's hypothesis refutes itself in the inadequacy of its design. (I'm sure you don't need help with the deconstruction part, but just in case, say that the project purports to privilege machine poetry, but in using living authors' texts as models, actually privileges living writing.) Imply that I'm a complete asshole (and even though we all know that's irrelevant, it always helps these days). D. Finally close your paper with an Eliot reference: "The Hollow Men". Your teacher won't have a clue that you mean he/she is a stuffed man/woman. She/he'll think you mean me. How cool will that be! Or... ...if you feel like taking a chance, start with the epigraph Eliot uses from Joseph Conrad. (If you haven't gotten to Conrad in your studies, here's a quick start: Wikepedia on Heart of Darkness. When Marlow finally finds Kurtz, he's died and the epigrapm is an African's announcement of such. But the quote has come to represent the Modernists' refutation of the state of art in the late 19th and eary 20th century as dead.) Say that this project takes the same view, that the arts as they are practiced and promoted in the Academy today are dead as well. And that includes not just what Academics think is their own radicalism, but the standard verse one fines in places like Ploughshares. (BTW: If you have tenure and are making decisions about who else gets tenure and so admission to the castle, you are by definition no longer radical (if you ever were). You are established and invested in the status quo, not change.) Then quote two passages, one from a poem generated here and one from a "real" poet and show how it is impossible to determine from the texts themselves which is warm and which cold as death (whether cold connotes machine and warmth human or the other way around would make for an interesting subtext). Here's an example of how to do that: The Lady or the Machine. Then close with a conclusion, something like: If human poets are to distinguish themselves from the machine, then they need to find new ways of expressing themselves that appeal to their audiences. Or that the best human writing will, in the future, be a synthesis of the human and mechanical. Or that soon, successful poets (those that get published) will no longer rely on their own inspiration, but will use text generators as tools for the initiation and emendation of their texts. You might not get an A, but you will know the satisfaction of defiance!