Poetry is Cosmic War Interview

An lntroduction to AvrY InpLAND by o.i.corruthers I wanted to inter:'iew the Australian experimental writer Amy Ireland to get a sense of what now, what next, and to g"i, clearer sense of what contemporary through procedure. These are unfinished questions. stances and approaches. Among other things, in this interview readers s,ill gain insight into the sometimes secretive moves and motives of the Xenofeminist collective Laboria Cubonihs (of which she is a part), a feminist insurrectionary force dedicated to overthrowing capitalo-patriarchy (or at least hacking/accelerating it to its own destruction). 'We'talk Twitter, an With Amy Ireland, the opposite is true. Each question was fired back with 'excellent' space that she says is defined by horror, and she speals about an ongoing project involving 3D-poetry,: Bouequet. " Australian experimental writers are actuallydoing. Oftentimes it is not so clear what is happening (in youth, we are still inventing, testing), and this uncertainty allows some on the so-called'other side' (conventional verse culture) to assume there's a 'lack of clariqy' in experimental astonishing aplomb, assurance, and a rare boldness in her statement of poetics Our politics will diverge: where I would such that it r's clear where she stands, what advocate a risky chorality, an axial logic of she wants to do and (though I sometimes the choir, Ireland heads down deep into the apocalyptic abyss, aworld of machines and viruses, to forge possible futures. Either way, we both want revolution. For good parents an advisable rating here is PG13+. disagreed), where we're all headed. 'We both agree that there is a need for something else, something bigger than the naffow conservatism of the I-poem. We both agree that there is a need for a greater range of compositional processes and procedures, wider and sttanger geometries of attention for reading and writing.With this, I would ally myself more with Joan 'Experimental writing hacks the control code.' 'Poetic production is cosmic war.' 'There is nowhere to go but further into Retdlack's practice of 'poethics' than the abyss.' Vhatever readers might Ireland's thrilling, occultist inhumanism: Ireland posits a choice betuteen subject of badass Australian writers who have and process, whereas poethics wagers that collective subjectivity can occur nothing to lose and everything to destroy. Welcome to the New Frontier. think, Ireland is part of a new generation

o.i.corruthers interviews Avrv InpLAND this notion of the outside a.Xtir., its area of concern "rra tactics for the cultivation of traffic between this space and the restricted economy of humanconditioned representation, which, aj.carruthers: You work on what is called'Xenopoetics' which links to (xeno)feminist practice. What is it and how is this'developing' (or otherwise declining, entropically,. &c.)? signifi cantly, includes language. Technological excruciation, structural porosity, corrupted authorship, numerical incursion, Amy Ireland: Xenopoetics indexes a host of practices that grasp literary history as a representational problem- i nauthenticity, encryption, temporal leakage, formal horrot one explored across a variety of cultures in different ways perverse topologies... these things all have their place in a xenopoetic (mysticism and demonology are key examples)-but most arsenal. pedantically systematised by Immanuel Kant in his delineation of the transcendental human It is important to note that no one can be a xenopoet. Attached subject. Very crudely stated, there is an outside to experience that informs it, yet cannot be known by experience. Xenopoetics takes to a human individual, the term would lose all coherence (or, rather, gain too much). Anyone who nominates themselves as 94

such is scratched from the field of xenopoetic potential by default, for in xenopoetics, the more a subject produces, the more it necessarily recedes. Reading and writing are commensurate with reformatting. Xenopoetics is in effect when something exceeds the aqthropomorphic systems in place for grasping it as experience; it puts a certain pressure on human perceptual or cognitive equipment-ruins it or extends it beyond its ordinary functioning, annihilating it, or demanding an upgrade. One could think of it, perhaps, as a technopoetics of the general economy (in the Bataillean sense) or as an aesthetic program for anthropocenic conditioning. Either way, xenopoetics puts the status ofthe human rigorously into question. It disperses the ego, opens occulted lines of communication, and scans for alien signal. It is the black market of contemporary poetics. Its enemy is the lyric, and its driving problematic could be aphorised as follows: 'Is there a Poem the human cannot afford to make?' There are explicit ontological and methodological connections between xenopoetics and the feminist practice of Laboria Cuboniks-an international transfeminist collective that I have been working with since 2014. Both see human experience as an open system in a meta- system of cosmic becoming; both affirm anti-identity politics

of late-twentieth century feminist thought, such as the queer/cyborg politics of cyberfeminism or the work of Luce higaray (in certain texts)-lines of thinking invested in the nullification of inherited identities and the afErmation of ontological fluidity. Irigaray's criticism of woman's enablingyet-excluded position with regard to the regulated circuitry of (Laboria writes of 'the right to speak as no one in particular' h Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation and uses this as a basis from which to advocate for gender fluidity and reject biological determinism); both employ a rechnologicallyinformed methodology of hacking, and both are attentive to the complex feedback loops that abide between conceptuality and matter. Some of the work I do with transcoding and 3D printing reflects the xenofeminist principle of the ultimate hackability of both nature (bodies and their material environments) and social-d iscursive constructions alike, whilst exploring the wider valences of trans- apparent in the logic of rransit underwriring what Rosa Maria Rodriguez Magda and Fernando Zalamea 'human' (read'male') exchange potentiates a conception of this circuit's outside as a space of alien communication and feminist insurrection, while Sadie Plant, using the metaphor of binary code in compuration, gives the following description of unrepresentable woman (= 0):'lZerol neither counts nor represents, but wirh digitisation it proliferates, replicates and undermines the privilege of one. Zero is not an absence, but a zone of multiplicity which cannot be perceived by the one who sees.' Understood in this context, have termed'tansmodernism' (a mediating concept between the worst excesses of postmodernist relativism and the modernist grand narrative). xenopoetic insurgency (the outside coming in) is always an act of feminist subversion. Xenopoetics intersects more informally with certain strands 96

Nevertheless, the two practices human carriers. are not interchangeable and I would add that there are irresolvable discrepancies between xenofemi nism and xenopoerics in terms of their conception of agerrcy. Xenofemi nism displays an unshakeable confidence in the amount of purchase human systems of knowledge can gain on material systems, the plasticity of those systems, and the effective intervention of social organisation to implement such changes for the better. As an aesrhetic, xenopoerics allows itself to range far darker terrains. It is less concerned with nuances between different modes of ego dissolution as long as a channel between the outside and the inside can be secured. Notions of human exception or anrhropomorphic hubris simply constitute impractical barriers to ingress and should be eliminated as quickly as possible. It is here, at the darker pole ofthe xenopoecic spectrum, that literature threatens ro develop an agency of its own, and to operate through-or despite the protestations of-its ajc: You seem to be a proponent, or denizen, or practitioner, of a kind ofdark, Lovecraftian, accelerationist poetics. You say in tThe Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology' that 'accelerationists privilege formal experimentation over human preservation.'Very dark. I like it, even though I'm probably more of a day creature. Does this generate your structures of making? Does a Landian sensibility (cf. Nick Land) rive your work? AI: I see writing as a nihilistic enterprise, and am genuinely interested in the processes of poetic de-subjectification that seem to be very much underway in our contemporary poeric moment. The opening decades of the millennium, for instance, betray two complementary tendencies in formal poetic experi mentation: t he eli mi narion of the author and the elimination of the reader-as both are traditionally understood. Both

are occurrlng ln tnverse ratro to the increasing automation of compositional processes. I am thinking particularly here of those deployed under the banner of conceptual writing, with their modest reconfiguration of the author as 'just another content provider,' carrying out repetitive, alienating tasks like transcription, copying, OCRing, plagiarism, coding-and very deliberately so. The best algorithmically generated texts are often realising a refined strategy of iutoexcision, calculated to minimise the intentionality of the poet in order to grant access to an abyss ofpreviously unavailable formal potential in terms of Permutational extravagance, intricacy and evolution, the ability to rapidly and efFortlessly produce unprecedented magnitudes of textual material, and so on. The level of sophistication achieved by some of these projects has already created situations in which the line dividing human from inhuman production genuinely evades clear delineation. All these tendencies work together to dehumanise and deemphasise authorship, blurring human/ nonhuman distinctions, whilst simultaneously shifting readers away from habits of close reading towards 2l1s1n21iy6-one could say'mutant'-tactics. Most alarmingly, the diminishment of human authorship plunges the human reader into a problematics ofscale. The sheer length and disconcerting complexity of combinatorial pieces, like the tedious repetition ofcopied and transcribed texts (both modes of enacting non-narrative violence as a problematisation of chronology) renders them either impossible, or entirely unpleasurable, to consume in any ordinary manner. In response, less linear and sedentary methods of reading start to take precedence-techniques more akin to scanning, scrolling, and-for the unashamedly hyperstimulated-spritzing. From Gutenberg onwards, the tendency of innovative poetics in the'West has been one of deterritorialisation. A persistent dethroning of Eurocentric cultural ideals (the white,

male genius; the canon; the author, then authenricity in general); a horizontalisarion of the hierarchical structures embedded in the highly coded deployment of inherited forms, metrical regimentation, the use of particular registers of language, etc.; and a general destratification of writing practices and methods of reading, lie behind the seminal literary upheavals of the last few centuries. These shifts rapidly intensify in the late twentieth century with the advent of writingt photography: the rise of the Net. Broadly speaking (although Iiterature has rightly been accused ofa recalcitrance unattributable to other cultural domains) this trajectory has progressed unhindered, championed by the iconoclasts of each successive generation. So-in a gesture not bereft of gleeful perversity-one has to ask'why hesitate now?' ls it not utterly disingenuous to revoke the destructive licence ofpoetic innovation at the very moment it begins to threaten our own inflated sense of productive agency and all those convenient mythemes of human creative sovereignty that we have, in their softer versions, happily institutionalised as literary history? Turning back to the familiar safe house of various humanisms (epiromised in aesthetic tendencies like the New Sincerity) is clearly the most naff (at best) and reactionary (at worst) response an experimental poet can have. Something really weird is about to happen to writing... and the fact that it might not involve 'you' (at least as you know yourselfl) is no good reason to campaign against it. This is what I mean when I talk about a poetics that 'privileges formal experimentation over human preservation.' I can't say I don't enjoy the idea that Christian B'6k's deino co c c us radiodurant mighr eventually murate into a highly inFecrious, radioacrive virus, or that poetry hoods out for extreme kicks might start'using' poetry-i mpregnated bacterium like recreational drugs. Land, an expert meme generator in his own 99

right, perhaps put it best when he wrote 'poetry is invasion and not expression.' Or, to twist the words of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, 'chaos reminds us that identity is a mortal transaction, and that we should not deprive literature of the pleasure of watching us die.' The approach I take when making poetry is influenced by a combination of these maxims and a determination ro grasp and interact with the conditioni of production affecting contemporary poetry as they unfold in real time. At present, the cutting edge ofego ablation lies somewhere between technology and neuroscience and there is a lot going on there that poetry would do well to pay attention to. contemporary artifi cial intelligence research is another rich field of enquiry, particularly where it is invested in problems pertaining to natural language processing in machine learning. There are other, less orthodox traditions, however, that fall within xenopoetic remit, and whose roots run further back into the wilds of human history 'S7'estern scientific than those of mysticism, sorcery, method: shamanism, programmatic occultism... I pursue these with equal seriousness as valid vehicles ofxenopoetic activity (or rather, they pursue me). ajc: Let's squabble over terms. (Avant-garde'-is this a term to retain? I'm happywith the moniker'experimental poet,' not too pretentious, not too quietist. Are you? AI: The less a term consolidates an identity, the better. In my opinion, the definition of what kind ofpoet you are should collapse entirely into what kind of poetry you do-function over essence. 'Carrier of cosmopoetic momentum,' perhaps? George and \7illiam Butler Yeats knew all about this. 'The Second Coming' is basically demon intel. Avant-garde' is a term I have deliberately enlisted in Tbe Poememenon-a poetics project I'm currently working r00

is the revolutionary path?' Do we avow the sub.iect and repress the process? Or do we avow the on that pursues the modernist logic of novelty to its ultimate conclusion... Let us say that, process and watch it destroy the subject? Viewed with utter to the extent ?oetryt traces an apocalypric trajeaory, it fulf.lling the telos of the modernist auantis indifference, catastrophe is .iust another word for novelty. garde. It has been declared that this kind of artistic vanguardism This is the deep perversity of the modernist avant-garde. To commit to the project of modernism is to commit to the future. To commit to the future is to commit to the inhuman. From here on in, anyvestigial humanism translates to nostalgia, sentimentality, and poetic conservatism. Poetry needs to drop its pretensions and admit that it is out to destroy us all. is an extinguished possibility, but what if it is simply an occulted one?'What would it mean to Pufsue the modernist demand to 'make it new' to its ultimate horizon-recklessly, uncompromisingly, and with irresponsible tenacity? The poememenon tells us that we have only discounted the perperuation of the modernist avant-garde because we have refused to accept the possibility of its inhumanity. For, what is modernity but a transcendental system for the generation of conditions of novelty and creativity that ends up with the machines?'We've destroyed the old forms, we've burned down the museums, we ve strangled 'meaning' and 'beauty' and 'truth', now we need to seriously ask ourselves what ajc: You have a peculiar Twitter presence. An avatar? Let's talk about Twitter. AI: Uh, I can't let you in on all the secrets, but there is an ongoing performance of poememenoumenal insight taking place on my Twitter TL, that's for sure. Laboria Cuboniks has also manifested on Twitter as a swarm is left to be torn down. 'Which r01

intelligence (the 0.9 in my handle is a remnant of this), and we originally released our manifesto there-stegano graphically encrypted in a series ofjpegs. Twitter is excellent. The botlife runs wild and free, swerving i nto sheer paranoia-i nducing bizarreness at times (\7eird Sun Twitter) and there are writers doing really innovative work that engages directly with the unique formal possibilities of the medium (Uel Aramchek's 'This Could Be Your Past' is ohe of my favourite recent examples). It's the Arcadia of human/bot collaboration. And yet, the way the platform constrains and disseminates text holds certain darker consequences for its human users that I find especially irresistible. 'With Twitter, textual form arrives at an unprecedented condition offlux. The radicalism ofthe scroll (whether revolutionising textual transmission in ancient Egypt or threaded through an Underwood carriage in a Manhattan apartment in 1951) is transferred seamlessly into the digital interface. Only here we have a scroll updated to capitalise on the possibilities of hypertextuality: it is effectively nonlinear yet accommodates series of interlinked tweets, its citation system harbours abyssal Potential for embedded referencing, its search function and the public nature of its contents make for a vast and bizarre dataset (expertly manipulated by bots \ke @anagramatron and 6 pentametron, for instance), and it forces the honing of expression to a comPact 140 characters Per unit of information. Twitter also completely short-circuits the delay between composition and publication. Tweeting is thinking. During its first exciting moments, Twitter appears as an open horizon for the accumulation of all sorts of gratifying information, from breaking news to earthquake alerts, the latest cryptocurrency investment advice, academic papers, political discussion, fashion tips, celebrity babble, text and glitch art, social parody, activism, food photography, the 102

list-and this is the point- ourcome in which the relentless numerical insistence of machinic is seemingly interminable. Nevertheless, the illusion of accumulation inevitably breaks down and it does so in perfect correspondence with the intensity of onet Twitter habit. Accumulation cycles pathologically into dispersion, and before you recognise what is occurring, the mesmeric infinity ofthe digital scroll has entirely voided your capacity to focus or reflect. There is nowhere to go but further into the abyss. agency ultimately succeeds in eradicating the latter. The organic body laid across the mechanical structure of the writing apparatus progressively disi ntegrates under the repetitive and unforgiving blows of its mechanised needle. But there is yet another, more horrific prototype for Twitter which, given the stripJike dispensation of information Twitter users have grown accustomed to, is even more suggestive: leng tch'e-the Chinese technique of execution by 'slow slicing.'Just as it is possible If one could allot a genre to the platform as a whole, Twitter would be horror. The interface manifests visually and cognitively as a series ofincisions. \[hat to recognise in leng-tcht a state of unimaginable rapture as the body experiences itself coming to pieces whllst stillfunctioning begins as a benign mode of textual organisation quickly becomes applicable to human concentration. Its twentieth century prototype can perhaps be found in the mechanical (as did Bataille), Twitter can be grasped as initiating a comparable cognitive vertigo, dismantling one's attention while the mind is still conscious... and better, writing/torture machine of Kafkak In the Penal Colony. Both oversee the virulent machining complicit. ajc: Some of your work I've seen involves 3D Printing and procedure. Jettisoning the of the human through text, and both tend towards a similar t03

just-page? What is your precise procedaral practice? poets-consume poetry. This got us trying to figure out what it would take to create a'stealth AI: My 3D printed work is part poem'-a means for sneaking ofa large, ongoing project called poetry into people's most intimate environments. What if, we surmised, poems could be disguised as 'art objects'-sleek, Bouequet. It uses transcoding and homophony as a form of encryption and speculates on ways in which poetry might be transmitted after the death of the book. Additive manufacturing processes, like the technology that made the newspaper possible, allow for mass distribution, yet, unlike the new'spaper, they are not centralised and (for the moment) retain their open-source ethos. 'My'poems are available online in an independent database and anyone can download them, modify them, and reprint them for themselves. There are people who have already done this, probably without having any idea that these objects are readable... which is all part of the plan. The idea initially arose From a drunken discussion I was having with my partner. \7e were lamenting the fact that very few people-especially non- decorative, vapid... something that looks cool on your shelf? This flippant line of questioning eventually morphed into a serious enterprise, and the need to find a way to move from text to physical material became a prolonged interrogation into poetic theories of abstraction. This brought in the consideration of the flower (as the ur-symbol of idealism in metapoetic thought) and problems to do with the synthesis of new information as formal borders are traversed. \7ith all that hanging around in the background I started to devise and hone the procedure that would eventually lead to the objects that now comprise the work. First, I write the poem. It's usually quite short (to keep the final objects at the scale and 104

size of a fower). All of them examine abstraction, idealism, or materiality in some way. They all also contain ar leasr one key homophone and are constructed 56 tha1-upsn completion of the next step-they can be parsed in multiple ways. The minimum at the momenr is eight different ways of parsing one poem. Second, I transcribe the text into phonemes using IPA notation, effecdvely removing all punctuation and spaces. This makes it possible to read the poem as a single sound, or a concatenation ofsounds, enabling new words to be formed by, for example, connecting the final phoneme(s) of one word to the opening phoneme(s) of the following word. Along with rendering the homophones entirely ambiguous, this is what allows for multitudinous readings of the initial rext. Third, I transpose each phoneme into a roughly synaesthetic, rhreedimensional representation of its sound. This is a consistenr alphabet I created for the work and use for all of the poems rhar make up Bouequet. The phonemes t05 are assembled in a line from left to right, following occidental conventions, and this 'line' is then folded across the surface of a sphere, rhe end meering up with the beginning, so rhe texr now no longer has a definitive starting point. This further adds to possible sonic parsings. Usually, I'll tighten up the sphere by pulling the phonemes inwards to ensure rhat the object is solid and finally-I'll print it. The resulting objects look something like a cross between a mutant tennis ball, a flower, and intensely magnified virion. Once you've printed the poem, there are multiple ways to read it. Generally, I provide a cipher for the three-dimensional sound alphabet when I'm presenting or performing the works so that it is clear that there is a logic to reading them. Once you correlate phonemes with shapes, you can read the poems by sight or touch (usually I do both simultaneously). It is possible to decipher the original poem (or one of its parsings) heuristically,

lrt moving through different phonic in'Western history. Centuries combinations until you have exhumed a word or string of words. However, it is impossible to determine which version is the 'true'version. The origin has been excised. Of course, it is equally desirable to ignore the poetic line altogether and read across the object, or chose discrete phonemes stochastically. The permutational possibilities are quite large, and even greater if you are willing to discard any fidelity to sense. ofcultural heritage have been founded upon the mindless idolatry of the corolla, whilst the black roots seething underneath are routinely excised for the sake of every lyric, sonnet, and serenade written in the name of beauty, clarity, and significance. Poets are way too obsessed with fowers for their own good. ajc Time travel? AI:'Well, yeah. Don't you think I have yet to explore the full spectrum of possibilities afforded by the poems for heterodox forms of reading and transmission. Although, their fist-sized dimensionality tempts me to imagine them being used as carriers of some cryptic message in a future riot, printed in a heavy metal, raised in the air, hurled through windows, bringing down drones, etc. ajc Do you enioy fowers? AI: The flower is the tyrannical form of communicative ideality itt suspicious that time always has to be so straight? Time anornaly would be a better way of putting this though, since time travel still suggests linearity of experience, and therefore narrative. Narative is a control program. Temporal anomaly is an agent of narrative ruin. Gysin and Burroughs knew this-the cut-up was their weapon against'control.' A tactic designed to intercept the transmission of occult information and a means of exposing the 'grey veil between you and what you saw or more often did 1s1 5ss'-16 understand that 'the grey veil was the pre-

recorded words of a control machine,' and that'you don't have to listen to that sound you can program your own playback you cdn ?rerecord your future.' Similarly, Rasheedah Phillips and the Black Quantum Fururism Collective in Philadelphia deploy text as a tool oFresistance against the'linear mode of time that dominares time consciousness in 'Western society.' Equipped with the circularity and retrocausality of African tradirions of rime, in which 'time flows backwards towards you from the future,' BQM works with a series of practices for 'discovering hidden information in the present' and for editing the present by way of the past. Like Gysin, Burroughs, Phillips, and her crew, I consider writing to be a sorcerous operation. If words institute control, they can also be used to subvert it. All species of literary realism implicitly collaborate with the dominant reality program. Experimental poetry hacks the control code. Cut directly into reality, don't refect it. Produce it, don't represent it. Time anomaly functions as conceptual shorthand for all of the above in my work. That, and it's a really satisfying way of trolling Kant. ajc: For me, poetry is a kind of self-punishment. It's an extreme difficulry a devotion or duty. I am conducting some of 'W'hen my strictest procedures I very often feel a sense ofphysical and mental exhaustion. The pleasure comes afterwards. Do you feel the same way? AI: Oh yes-and it's even more sublime when it's the kind of excruciation you don't (willingly) impose upon yourself: less the asceticism of the monk than the auto-de-fe ofthe heretic. In xenopoetic terms, the former would equate to making a bad meal of oneself. Extreme experimentalism confronts the productivity of the auto-fl agellant with a bored disregard for their desire to be punished. The pursuit ofreal novelty cannot be qualified by the affordability of the individual human poet. How to make of oneself a good meal,

then? How to be devoured by a million centuries). There is a the experiment? The difference between a good meal and a bad meal is the difference between being opened by and being open to. Michel Serres, who was also obsessed with good meals, would perhaps rephrase this as the question: Are you the host or the parasite of your poem?' thread of pure-formal-horror to be pursued here, with scalar mortification as its principal thrill. For connoisseurs of thanatonic reading, anything above 140 characters and below the duration of a human'life span is suspect. Only extreme poetic experience-that which disturbs our spontaneous sense ofscale, chronology, complexity, and the desire to be entertained, replacing it with the vertigo of personal cosm ic i nappropriatens55-i5 The ecstasy of dismemberment at the hands of the work should not be reserved for the compositional process alone. The experience of reading poetry is most pleasurable when it is most devastating. Only read works you know you cannot read. Contemporary modes of poetic production (of which algorithmic poetry is exemplary) routinely produce work of terrifying scale and complexity. Raymond Queneau's 'One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems,'one of the great original algorithmic works (consisting of 10^14 unique sonnets), ifread in its entirety, would far exceed the temporal resources of a single human lifespan dedicated solely to this task (more than capable of delivering true exhilaration. ajc: If I may be a little polemical here. There is a kind of Australian poet-critic who can say very edgy and experimental things in their criticism, and then for their poetrl5 write completely conventional verse. It's really, really strange, but it's a common phenomenon. With you it seems different. Your critical practice seems lived. Poetics and poetry seem conjoined rather than alien to each other. How important

is it to have some kind of interanimation between one's creative and critical practices? AI: The immanentisation of critique is central to what I do. Perhaps this concern is motivated by the academic spaces I spend a lot of time in and my disenchantment with the separation of thought and practice in that milieu. The academy has formalised a perfectly inert, codified way ro defuse radical material and this relies on maintaining the critical gap between subject and object. The (criticising) subject never has to get its hands dirty, never has to become its object. All dangerous statements are quarantined in advance by dint oftaking place within this 'privileged space of human thought and judgement'which makes it easy for the critic to (pretend to) risk more. The disjunction you point to demonstrates a predictably human resistance to the cybernetic undermining of subject/object dualities that marks our era. This harks back to the idea that identity is coincident with function: what something is, is what it does. Poetics decoupled from the transcendence of representation (and equivalently, judgement) is nothing but pure function. Poems are systems. More-or-less stable data packets in a turbulent field of wordsi objects of which we are also a part. Sometimes we are their material. There is no longer any such thing as a 'critic' outside ofthe space ofpoetry. The de-signifying arc historically traced by experimental poetics is exemplary in its decision to take the progressive functionalisation o[writing as its object-cutring directly into the material substrate of representation, folding rePresentation into production. This edges us ever closer to a regime where (aesthetic) judgement becomes irrelevant. As Chris Sylvester tells Tan Lin in an interview with Troll Thread: 'In order for us to be users we have to be used.' Different kinds of libidinal experience will come to characterise our entanglement

with the poerns of the future. W'e will be involved with thenr*for better or for.rivorse-but there will be no on€ outside calling them'beautiful;'There is no way back from here. The ablation of .iudgenrent is the poetis equivalent of removing atur{our. Poetic production is cosmic war.

lmoge of poem'll'from Amy lrelond's Bouequet, o 3D poem, block nylon polyomide. See http:,/hts.iol3NpCl