Cueva de las Manos — Santa Cruz, Argentina, ca. 7300 BC
Ten thousand years is a test of imagination. By then the time of the body and the temporal duration of my individual consciousness will have been absorbed into a large plume of smoke or have been consumed wholly into the earth. There is no posterity.
Post-ecopoetics is a guide for thinking the longevity and durability of the poem in deep time. I have asked a number of poets and scholars to serve as additional guides by asking them to respond to the following questions: “What will poetry be in ten thousand years? If you wrote a poem that you knew would last ten thousand years, how would this impact your writing?”
Each of their responses will be posted as an individual commentary linked to this series.
Cueva de las Manos — Santa Cruz, Argentina, ca. 7300 BC
Practically speaking, writing something I knew would last ten thousand years would be terrifying to the point of paralysis. I certainly wouldn’t be able to write anything resembling poetry or human language, because I don’t believe such things will last ten thousand years, or even one thousand. I think, not originally, that simple images, music, and math would be better modes of communicating with the deep future, where what we now call the “human” most likely won’t be recognizable, and certainly won’t be listening in any familiar sense.
Post-ecopoetics is a guide for thinking the longevity and durability of the poem in deep time. I have asked a number of poets and scholars to serve as additional guides by asking them to respond to the following questions: “What will poetry be in ten thousand years? If you wrote a poem that you knew would last ten thousand years, how would this impact your writing?”
Each of their responses will be posted as an individual commentary linked to this series.
Cueva de las Manos — Santa Cruz, Argentina, ca. 7300 BC
If a poem fails in a forest because no one who hears it, is it still a poem? If a poem denies time, is it any less timely? Might we speak of a timely poem but also an untimely one? The more a poem is in time the more it becomes part of the folds and veils of deep time.
Post-ecopoetics is a guide for thinking the longevity and durability of the poem in deep time. I have asked a number of poets and scholars to serve as additional guides by asking them to respond to the following questions: “What will poetry be in ten thousand years? If you wrote a poem that you knew would last ten thousand years, how would this impact your writing?”
Each of their responses will be posted as an individual commentary linked to this series.
Mark Liberman, a computational linguist who directs the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, has been fascinated, especially in recent years, with experimental poetry. You can find his ideas and experiments at Language Log. He's been working on Stein's repetitions.
Vana Manasiadis’s interest and use of history and mythology — grounded in her own biography — is a welcome strain to New Zealand poetry. Her reference to Greek and classical traditions, and her borrowing of forms from her poetic forebears, lets her cultivate a poetic voice relatively peculiar to these shores.[1] She holds an MA in Creative Writing — the standard currency for emerging poets in the English-speaking world — but her work has a scope much greater than the contemporary institution’s remit.
What will poetry be in ten thousand years? (8)
Dale Smith
Ten thousand years is a test of imagination. By then the time of the body and the temporal duration of my individual consciousness will have been absorbed into a large plume of smoke or have been consumed wholly into the earth. There is no posterity.
Post-ecopoetics is a guide for thinking the longevity and durability of the poem in deep time. I have asked a number of poets and scholars to serve as additional guides by asking them to respond to the following questions: “What will poetry be in ten thousand years? If you wrote a poem that you knew would last ten thousand years, how would this impact your writing?”
Each of their responses will be posted as an individual commentary linked to this series.
Dale Smith:
What will poetry be in ten thousand years? (7)
David Huebert
Practically speaking, writing something I knew would last ten thousand years would be terrifying to the point of paralysis. I certainly wouldn’t be able to write anything resembling poetry or human language, because I don’t believe such things will last ten thousand years, or even one thousand. I think, not originally, that simple images, music, and math would be better modes of communicating with the deep future, where what we now call the “human” most likely won’t be recognizable, and certainly won’t be listening in any familiar sense.
Post-ecopoetics is a guide for thinking the longevity and durability of the poem in deep time. I have asked a number of poets and scholars to serve as additional guides by asking them to respond to the following questions: “What will poetry be in ten thousand years? If you wrote a poem that you knew would last ten thousand years, how would this impact your writing?”
Each of their responses will be posted as an individual commentary linked to this series.
David Huebert:
What will poetry be in ten thousand years? (6)
Charles Bernstein
If a poem fails in a forest because no one who hears it, is it still a poem? If a poem denies time, is it any less timely? Might we speak of a timely poem but also an untimely one? The more a poem is in time the more it becomes part of the folds and veils of deep time.
Post-ecopoetics is a guide for thinking the longevity and durability of the poem in deep time. I have asked a number of poets and scholars to serve as additional guides by asking them to respond to the following questions: “What will poetry be in ten thousand years? If you wrote a poem that you knew would last ten thousand years, how would this impact your writing?”
Each of their responses will be posted as an individual commentary linked to this series.
Charles Bernstein:
Google's neural machine translation establishes 'spiritual connection' with Stein
Mark Liberman, a computational linguist who directs the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, has been fascinated, especially in recent years, with experimental poetry. You can find his ideas and experiments at Language Log. He's been working on Stein's repetitions.
The grass never stops
Lynley Edmeades on Vana Manasiadis
Vana Manasiadis’s interest and use of history and mythology — grounded in her own biography — is a welcome strain to New Zealand poetry. Her reference to Greek and classical traditions, and her borrowing of forms from her poetic forebears, lets her cultivate a poetic voice relatively peculiar to these shores.[1] She holds an MA in Creative Writing — the standard currency for emerging poets in the English-speaking world — but her work has a scope much greater than the contemporary institution’s remit.