We Enthroned

Karen Randall, "Pet Ultimate" (2007)





As a child, and for obvious reasons, I believed that human beings were special types of machines. This belief was never fully formed, and if I’d ever been called on it I don’t know how I’d explain myself. I now believe that two explanations support my childish conclusion. First, humans were obviously not animals. We could conduct too many activities that were truly beyond the realm of animals, primarily activities relating to communicating with one another. Second, since types of creatures reproduced themselves, I might have assumed that humans had to be machines since they produced the lesser machines that we ran in our daily lives. All fine logic for a child—and just about as good as believing that the smeared examples of the spectrum I had found running along the edge of my street after a rainstorm were merely the remnants of a rainbow washed out of the sky.

My belief in the machinehood of humans ended suddenly in an event I recall clearly even thirty-seven years later. Standing in the field of Mapps College* on Barbados on a cloudy day, I saw two toads mating in the grass. As a fairly avid young naturalist, I immediately realized what the animals were doing and why. Inexplicably and without ever having been told anything about human reproduction, I realized that that same act must be the method of human reproduction and, sadly, that humans must be animals.

It took a while for me to get used to that idea. But, luckily, I didn’t need to get too accustomed to it. As the world has changed around me, humans have become more and more integrated with machines. We wear them on our bodies, we carry them with us wherever we go, we make them transport our dreams and desires and other creations to places we will never visit. Our lives are simply not possible without these machines. They are us as much as we made them.

We create machines that make and propel the magazines that present our artworks. We make the machines that allow us to read our artworks. And the sudden and unexpected rebirth of We is one of the results.

We was a zine during the zine revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. It presented a range of general experimental works and allowed itself to range widely in formats. We appeared not only as a traditional saddle-stapled zine, but also as a videotape, a compact disc, an audiotape, and even as a webzine. Now, after I’m not sure how many years, issue 19 of We appears as a web-based publication that includes separate PDF (for image and text), video and animation, and audio sections. The PDF section, which most resembles the paper world, opens the zine with a large tree-like glyph, followed almost immediately by an engaging essay by Kenny Goldsmith, “Writing’s Crisis v.1.0,” which is intriguing piece, though it seems incompletely developed to me. It ends,

The machines indeed will jump -- there are teams of programmers working on that now -- and soon enough, poetry will be the complete province on machines ("Writing poetry for inhuman readers, who do not yet exist, because such aliens, clones, or robots have not yet evolved to read it." – Christian Bök) -- but until then, what's new is old.

ensuring that we keep thinking of machines.

The PDF section contains all manner of visual poetry: cancellation poems (which block some text to allow the remaining text to become the poem), shaped poems (particularly Murat Nemet-Nejat’s “Io’s Song,” which plays with shaping the text as much as it can), landscape poems (a piece by Peter Ciccariello), calligraphic poems, and even concrete poems (Samuel Knight does a number of simple and beautiful “transcreations” of classic concrete poems of Augusto de Campos). Most impressive from my point of view was Brandon Arthur’s “Urbi et Orbi,” a visual and symbolic expansion of the work Armand Schwerner did with the poems he created under the rubric, The Tablets. Here, visual symbols, complex textual structures, and extensive footnotes converge in a complex reading experience that merges myths from cultures around the world. A few of the visual poems in this issue have a visually ungelled quality to them, providing visual cotext that is maybe interesting but ultimately jarring or insignificant to the meaning of the poems. The issue also contains a couple more essays and some other works to entice the senses.

The video/animation section includes a range of works, most working with the concept of dissonance. A few of these (including Clemente Padín’s simple digital pieces and the reworking of Augusto de Campos’ “LIFE”) are clearly digital poems. Others live in a foggier borderland (like Jeremy Hight’s “error image” blog), and others are simply videos, which is all fine in a magazine made for the web. The simple shudder and humming of mIEKAL aND’s “Moundsville-code-curtain” produce one of the more successful pieces in the selection—all by simply filming, editing, and giving sound to a shower curtain.

The sound section I spent the least time on, but it was among the most enjoyable. Opening with a simple guitar-based song by Joseph Richey that resembled the word of Dire Straits, it ended with a simple half-chanted drumbeat of a song by Katie Yates.

The teacher-editor for this issue was Chris Funkhouser, who once lived around these parts. He explained within the publication that this entire issue was put together in 48 hours at “a summer course in Writing and Poetics at Naropa University” in July 2007. He noted that he had the idea of reviving We Magazine, because he had originally started it as a direct result of encouragement from Anne Waldman while he was a student at Naropa in 1986. So twenty-one years later, enough time to grow old enough to drink alcohol in this country, We was born again as part of Chris’ course, “Creative Cannibalism and Prehistoric Digital Poetry” Three students (James Kerley, Sam Knights, and Mittie Roger) worked with Chris Funkhouser to put the collection together. The results are quite an accomplishment, with quite a bit of range, to show for such a short period of time.

Of course, after thinking about the machineworks of contemporary art for a little bit tonight, I am starkly reminded about why I probably wanted human beings to be machines in the first place. These beasts of our creation might carry out the conclusions of our emotions, but they have none themselves. They are not burdened by the fruits of intellect (not yet, at least) that lead strangely back to emotion. And their physical selves can always persist longer than ours. After a strangely draining day at work—emotionally draining—I can appreciate the comforts of being a machine. In my work world, I often have to deal with the emotional issues of people around me, and they were all around me today. Stories sad enough to make us cry, stories of the small heartbreaks of everyday life, stories of our inability to find our way through the world—and so many of them. A couple were significant, most were small, but together they left me at the end of the day knowing that I had three days on the road on Long Island ahead of me this week and that I was almost too tired to mix a batch of joint compound and fill a few imperfections on the ceiling of our family room.

So a little We is what I needed, a little bit of entertainment and thinking, a little bit of all of us together controlling the beasts that we are and the beasts that we build simply so we can control them.
_____

* NB, Americans. In this case, “College” means “School.” Mapps went through probably the equivalent of our twelfth grade, after starting somewhere in the lower grades (which were, of course, actually forms).

ecr. l’inf.