“Appropriation […is] the incorporation of a given form […] by an individual who will then deliver it in their own language, their singular idiom”
— Agnes Gayraud, Dialectic of Pop, p. 339
�“queerness is too complicated to be told what to do”
— Jamie Stewart, Dancing About Architecture p. 11
Think of how algorithms and AI often generate output or results which are impossible to trace, in terms of how those conclusions were reached. Is there a parallel with queerness, there, and queer literature? The ‘difficulty’ queer literature can provide? E.g. Jay Gao’s TRAVESTY58
Lot of examples from ‘homosexual’/cis white male perspective – specific register, un-universal - get gender-fucky!!!!!
Re: re
Re- as potent prefix with digital context (email)
Re-Analogue: attempt for geography-specific cultural activity glanced back via digital means,
Response as tied-to/invested-in whatever prompts it, speaking back versus an ”original speaking” of its own; tension
I.e. traces of the source remain
“Re-`’ versus “Post-”, doing different things; latter speaks to a reversibility, futures (reconstruction versus deconstruction &c.)
READING EXERCISE I
Edwin Morgan, New Selected Poems, “Opening the Cage”
(p. 17)�
“14 variations on 14 words” – echo of sonnet form, in poem also comprised of echo; in remaking a John Cage quote. What does poetic constraint here, in terms of working only with another’s words, do? What speaker is created? What is the voice of the poem like?
�Source already resonant (if you will), John Cage known for experiments with absence, 4’33 as most famous, and quote itself also about silences/nothingness in terms of creation: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry”. Aphoristic quality. What role does silence play in a poem this ‘packed’, the lines so long?
�Proto-internet poem – to repeat all possible variations akin to work of a computer, that comprehensiveness; title as pun on this, between John Cage’s surname and the construct. What does Edwin Morgan ‘open’, here? What can’t it open?
Open the last long email you sent or received. Using phrases and words from it, begin a poetic work – it can be as constrained as “Opening the Cage”, or looser. What are the repetitions in the email as a form? Its tone, the ‘text-ure’? And how can it be made queer – do words have to be completely replaced? The swapping of a phrase to make it more suggestive? Play around!
READING EXERCISE II
Rosie Stockton, Permanent Volta, “bad sub” (p. 25)
Consider the diagram on permanent volta’s front cover, a re-rendering of Lacan’s Graph of Desire “dressing up in neon vines” (Stockton, p. 101) + the title
i.e. needs can be fulfilled, desires cannot – distance, failure &c.
�
What does it mean to have a poem be a dialogue, a conversation couched in queer terminology (“sub”)?
�How does the distinction between the two voices become blurred, altered, complicated? The arbitrariness between ‘m’ and ‘w’, one the flipped other, relation to Stockton’s n.b. identity &c.
�Does this poem have a digital ‘text-ure’? The lowercase, the vocabulary (“pls”)? How does Stockton evoke the language of dating apps?
(see also Morgan’s “First Men on Mercury” (p. 39), “Afterwards” (p. 67)
“Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3; stylized GPT·3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. Given an initial text as prompt, it will produce text that continues the prompt” [“GPT-3”, Wikipedia (lol)]
Binbag Press – 2018 e-publisher/ parody/anti-poetry publisher
“I created a persona, the sentient AI poet 3 10, who set out
to make an e-publisher that shot PDFs out into the starless
night of Twitter. “We do not have a website”. […] Here was
an analogue, my petty Metatron: through 3 10 I flirted with
Jack Underwood, got blocked by Dave Coates, and
was mentioned by Charles Whalley. And concerned
David Wheatley, probably. Might have pissed Jeremy
Noel-Tod off (sorry)” from CAPSULE XII
Spiritual successor in character of ‘1846975493’, who wrote poetry pamphlet cursed meals
Continue the following Grindr chatlogs/messages as if you were an AI like GPT-3. How would that work? How would an AI respond to these? What ‘personality’ would we conjure for these AIs, ostensibly impersonal? Feel free to stick with one response, or combine some. (emulation of an emulation, speaking-back to AI prowess?)
Grindr as fascinating repository of (predominantly cis-male) queer language – but also a digital space where same-sex desires are couched decidedly in heteronormative language (“no femme”, “discreet”, “straight-acting”, etc.)
Transactional nature of the language – radical? “Queer conservatism”, even “queer fascism:” (Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure) -- is it merely because it is language against a heteronormative norm that we are compelled to say it is radical, or is there actually something here, outwith contrariness? Speaking-back vs original speaking
�
Elijah Emerald’s creative computing work (2021)
“I created my own machine learning model with the dataset and generated imagined news headlines. My hope was to use the generated text to communicate how the news can leave an imprint on our minds and shape our perception of certain groups of people.”
U.S. news archives, instances of “homosexual”
Dadaist quality, sound poetry -- AI as nonsense, nonsense/poetry relation (Ashbery’s Chinese Whispers, use of that American rhetoric)
Making hegemonic language absurd – speaking-back and humour
Reading Exercise III
Change words in the review of Andrew McMillan physical from the queer poet Gregory Woods, published in a 2016 issue of PN Review, and use this as the basis for a poetic text (feel free to bring in previous sources, mix and mash!)
How can we flip the meanings and intentions of the text. here – how do we do that beyond mere antonyms? How do we reveal the ‘ribbed text-ure’, so to speak, of queerness here, in its inability to be uniform or ‘discourse-smooth’ (generational tensions, even without a specific slice that is cis-white-male/’homosexual’ community vs queerness at large)
Can we ‘queer’ queer language? (Consider Woods’ disdain for the ‘singular they’ pronoun…)
Dysphemistic qualities