negative capability

Quantum computing is the new negative capability

Amy Catanzano

Purported quantum supercomputer, courtesy of D-Wave via NPR

While quantum supercomputers are still at the early stages of development, they will replace digital computers, making the processing of data billions of times faster. Whereas digital computers rely on the binary code of 1 and 0, quantum supercomputers use qubits that can exist as 1, as 0, and, most importantly, as any superposition between 1 and 0. The binary code in digital computing exists in one of two definite states: “You’re either with us or against us....”—George W. Bush, 2001. Unlike binary code, quantum supercomputer qubits behave as probabilistic superpositions of all states like the way subatomic particles behave in Werner Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics.

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If nothing ever ended

PoemTalk #38: Norman Fischer's 'I’d Like to See It'

Editorial note: The following conversation has been adapted and edited from episode 38 of PoemTalk, recorded December 9, 2010, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and transcribed by Michael Nardone. The episode discusses the poem “I’d Like to See It” from Norman Fischer’s Turn Left in Order to Turn Right (O Books, 1989).

September 19, 2018

Milton Resnick 1917–2004 / four poems recovered

Jerome Rothenberg

[Milton Resnick was a very visible and dynamic artist when we met him in the early 1960s, but beyond that he was also a persistent practitioner of poetry, less in a public sense than as a release for ideas and feelings that were a necessary supplement to his life’s work as a painter.

Continuing a body

A review of Bhanu Kapil's 'entre-Ban'

Colin Lodewick

Bhanu Kapil (right) with Lucas de Lima at Kelly Writers House, September 27, 2016. Photo by Writers House staff.

“What is Ban?” The poet imagines an answer, asserting (among other things) that Ban “is a warp of smoke.”

Bhanu Kapil’s 2015 book Ban en Banlieue is a novel of meandering lists. The second (and largest) section of the book, titled “Auto-sacrifice (Notes),” is one such list, and it includes other lists within itself. The notes are less notes than collapsed vignettes offering insight into historical trauma and the creative process of articulating harm both physical and emotional. The notes work together to create a ragged narrative, one that seems contingent on a certain character — “Ban” — but also independent in itself.