A new member of Somerville’s Bagel Bards is Daniel Y. Harris. Harris is the President of the Board of The New York Quarterly. Harris has a manifesto about how poetry should and hopefully will look in our 21st Century. It is a brave new world friends…

By Daniel Y. Harris

Daniel Y. Harris

In poetry’s narrative schism between the 20th and the 21st centuries, pre-lingual and post-lingual tropes vie for the dominance of a new poesis. The pre-lingual confesses. The post-lingual is post-digital and therefore post-human, now determined by Internet detritus. Human beings can now be created out of the refuse of bandwidth. The poetic self is now a digit, an algorithm invented as a bot. Figures are now the boolean crisis of traditional form. To confess is to blog a confession from the spontaneous viral media of annihilation. The original self is an avatar of post-humanity, quicker than the emptied quick of the spammed full. Malicious software spread diseases of hyperlinks. Vessels break to account for another unbreakable form. The text is shattered like glass. The libido, ripe as anthropoid fertility, conjures the last Hebraic hermeneutics.

Post-humanity will/has broken authorial intent. Spiritus, geist and neshamah have become the codes of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball.” Normative narratives will not relent to purple mold and the affected seasons of self. There are no confessions in post-humanity. Pellicles will evoke the future as a golemic rise of the dark prompt. Now, the hagiography is broken from She, who births a new catastrophe-creation myth as untested experiment. Place will be severed from reference. Acrostic Kabbalah will trumpet the new era. Why, ask the professors of belatedness? Because the future agon will be an ur-femmed account of creation. This pilfering of humanity is not unoriginal genius, but rather a mock arriere-gardism, now committed to recovering the new format of disregarded predecessors. Then, the rabblement will be aroused to poke through platitudes seeking the hybrid, clad in its multi-genre glam. Gray indifferences of moderation are computer viruses. Web nonce is paravisual.

Hyle i2 = −1

Soma’s ether of was is as Mr. Was said, Eddy’s cleavage

of tongues is a hip hydrostat, works against him or a rad

cameo of Prot by a last guerilla theater in Proto-Germanic

hyle: wood and matter, not deed nor a jerk-lift caricature.

Hylomorphism only kills the ousia—just morphē, just

skinned bare tonight, ending Eddy: the human ends Eddy’s

gains and losses, body-soul prank inhabits the lying corpse

ceasing to be nous. Nothing rings like hylomorphic theory.

Eddy is fully body, makes up the body, itself after a death

to exist less than not dark yet, gives up these passive agents

for the simple Cartesian life, simply skinned not for body

but for univocity and impossible haecceity. Puzzlement

then distracts quiddity’s stand against its subjective parts.

Three generations of murdered narratives lets no one go.

— Daniel Y. Harris