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
such that

it

r's

clear where she stands, what

I sometimes
disagreed), where we're all headed.
she wants to do and (though

'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

Our politics will diverge: where I would

advocate a risky chorality, an axial logic

of

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+.

'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

think, Ireland is part of a new generation

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.

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

a representational

as

problem-

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
an open system in a metasystem of cosmic becoming;
as

both affirm anti-identity politics

(Laboria writes of 'the right to

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

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.

not interchangeable and

I would add that there are

ajc: You seem to be a proponent,

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

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
as a

or denizen, or practitioner,
a

of

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

authorship, blurring human/

to the increasing automation of

nonhuman distinctions, whilst

compositional processes. I am

simultaneously shifting readers

away from habits of close reading
towards 2l1s1n21iy6-one could

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

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
co c c us radiodurant
mighr eventually murate into

B'6k's deino
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 is fulf.lling
the telos of the modernist auantgarde. It has been declared that

indifference, catastrophe is .iust

another word for novelty.

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
is

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

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.

If

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

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
begins as a benign mode

to recognise in leng-tcht a state

of unimaginable rapture as the
body experiences itself coming
to pieces whllst stillfunctioning

of

textual organisation quickly

becomes applicable to human
concentration. Its twentieth
century prototype can perhaps
be found in the mechanical

did Bataille), Twitter can be

grasped as initiating a comparable

writing/torture machine of
Kafkak In the Penal Colony. Both
oversee the virulent machining

complicit.

(as

cognitive vertigo, dismantling

one's attention while the mind
is still conscious... and better,

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

poem'-a

is

part

ofa large, ongoing project called

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-

means for sneaking

poetry into people's most

intimate environments. What
if, we surmised, poems could be
disguised as 'art objects'-sleek,
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

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?'
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

million centuries). There is a

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
a

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

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