Say What?

How to describe “my” style?  Not tweet, not meme, not text message.  Somewhere I read a poet’s work described as “epigrammatic and compressed” I like that.  Somewhere else, somebody else, “conceptual, minimalist.” 

Craig Dworkin wrote about Kenneth Goldsmith's “phatic back-channel fillers and voiced pauses that punctuate messages (all the ums and ahs and uh-huhs)” and Christian Bok described a robot’s poetry as “syntactically orthodox, but semantically aberrant.”  I go there sometimes, too.  

In fact, Christian Bok was reviewing something called RACTER, an automated algorithm that “gives voice to its own electric delirium.” The robot’s poem quoted below is hard to beat, robot or human being: 

“This dissertation will show that the love

of a man and a woman is not the love

of steak and lettuce.” 

So is this one: 

“A tree or shrub can grow and bloom.

I am always the same.

But I am clever.”

However, in the course of the review, there are 15 other examples, none of which rise above the level of a journeyman enjamber.  So, I don’t fear automation.