How is the fast-moving evolution of technology, and especially artificial intelligence, impacting the most soulful and human of written art forms, poetry? /face, the new collection from underground poet and digital theorist William Lessard, may provide some of the answers.
For nearly two decades, Lessard has been out to do what Bob Dylan did to folk in 1965 and Miles Davis did to jazz in 1969: breathe new life into an art form that has grown a little too predictable and static. According to Lessard, poetry has been stuck in the past and has largely abdicated its position to seriously editorialize on, and, more boldly, co-opt and utilize, the tools that emerging technologies offer.
Like the avant-gardists he admires and namechecks below, Lessard knows his work and opinions will generate some much-needed feather ruffling among poetry’s gatekeepers in the staid journals and the musty halls of academia. We at PopMatters could think of no better way to celebrate April’s National Poetry Month than to have this well-informed edge-pusher share his thoughts on the state of poetry, technology, and the creatives outside of his field who have informed his art and mission.
The New York Times recently fired a freelancer for using too much AI in a book review. On the other hand, a few weeks ago, Bob Dylan announced “Lectures from the Grave”, a Patreon page featuring a fictional letter from Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino and other AI-generated content. What is going on here? Why can’t we make up our minds about AI?
Anything we say about AI is informed by what preceded it. During the pandemic, companies had to put the health and safety of their employees above profitability. They hated that shit. AI is valued by the executive class because it automates the fracked skills of human beings. It’s like they invented the automobile and decided its best use was to run people over.
For artists, AI has revealed that what they have been doing for decades is slop covers of their greatest hits. Have you ever listened to post-Dee Dee Ramones? Or what about all those Paul McCartney records from the 1980s that rob any sane person of the will to live? AI wasn’t around then, but the technology has given us great falseness detection.
What do you think is a healthy level of skepticism about the technology? The biggest critics have often been technology insiders and companies themselves.
You can’t be too skeptical about anything. AI is sucking up so much attention because it is the worst advertisement for itself. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, there were no guidelines, no best practices. They dropped the technology in the middle of the room like a stink bomb and ran for the exits.
So, what if you are a teacher contending with C-students who turned into Susan Sontag overnight? Or a journalist trying to authenticate news photos? Too bad. Learn to vibe code, bro.
You recently said to me, “Dylan went electric, so did Miles Davis, but poetry never did.” Since AI literally mulches up the work of others to “generate” new work, don’t you think poets have the right to stick to their analog roots, to riff on red barns and beautiful landscapes? Where do you see poetry as an art form heading in the future?
People will continue their tribal existence until there are prizes for celebrating weirdness. Until then, fewer and fewer magazines will gatekeep, based on criteria that don’t upset their wealthy patrons. There will also be more people like me, writers unable to clear the high bar into the predictable, set-in-stone prestige tier, who wonder why contemporary art isn’t made from contemporary materials.
In /face, your debut collection, the critique you describe comes across, but in an affirmative way that feels retro to me. Do you think we can get AI “right”, or am I reading too much into your methods?
I was born in the 1960s. I grew up on Star Trek and genderless pantsuits that zipped up the front. No matter how much crap I talk, I do believe in the progressive potential of any new technology.
Generative AI, although not “generative” at all, blends content into new configurations not unlike the cut-ups William Burroughs used to create his best work. There is a lot of fun, hip shit to be made, if you forget about awards and artistic prestige and just see what happens.
My understanding is that you started developing this work about seven years ago. With looksmaxxing and “Mar-a-Lago face” filling our feeds, /face reads prophetic. What inspired you to sample Google Patents about facial surveillance?
I was working with a company that used iPhones to do real-time animation. It was crazy. You held the phone up to someone’s face, and the software would map it to a cartoon character on a nearby computer. People at tradeshows were amazed. I was amazed.
I started researching all the technology that had made that moment possible. You would not believe the wild stuff in Google Patents. Automated cat-entry control systems? Or how about smart contact lenses that monitor glucose levels? It’s all in there, baby, along with all the military applications of the technology.
Have particular artists inspired you? You’ve mentioned Miles Davis, Andy Warhol, and feminist painter and printmaker Nancy Spero. Who else is there? The cartoon heads with snarky captions in the final section of the book remind me a lot of Basquiat.
Yes, I love all those artists. And Marguerite Duras. You have to be obsessed with how artists are and what they do to get anywhere. Sometimes I read the same page of Hemingway for a month. Sometimes I go for long runs and listen to the same piece of music on repeat.
Everyone talks about how Miles Davis changed so many times; they land on his periods, from Cool to Modal and Electric. But those are constructs. Miles changed every day, so those minor changes added up to what looked like monumental shifts.
Warhol was another one. He and Miles are more similar than anyone realizes. Warhol was another relentless innovator, unsentimental about past work. You’ve seen “Shadows” (1978-1979). You’d never know it was Warhol, but then, when you think about it, you realize it fits perfectly. It’s the film strip sensibility that unites all his work. The film strip was his version of the newsfeed.
What has been the response to /face?
I have been fortunate enough to be ignored, but not completely so. The broader poetry community doesn’t care about what I do, which has left me to go about my business and be as big a weirdo as I need to be.
On the other hand, there have been great independent mags that put my stuff out there. And there is my wonderful publisher. And there are people like you, Sal, who have known me for a while and understand I might be on to something.
You have also talked a lot about working-class art. Last year, you and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss went far beyond Charles Bukowski and the usual macho realism and performative sadness. Like AI, how do you think we have ignored the complexity of working-class life?
We are class-blind in this country [US]. It’s in the stupidity of all our politics and in our blighted views of art. Being working-class is all sadness and trauma to them, expressed in gut-punch realism and other reductionist forms. It’s all so boring. Boring and prejudiced.
Being working-class, as you know, is more fun and stranger than people in the suburbs will ever understand. I was talking to my friend [Armando Jaramillo Garcia] recently about Joyce’s Ulysses. We were both reading it for the first time, and I commented on how wild the book is, beyond the this-means-that and this-is-a-reference-to-that horseshit everyone says about it. He summed it up perfectly. “It’s a great working-class book.”
Who are some of the poets, like yourself, who have used AI and technology in their work?
I read with some of them recently at an event, one that Poets House in NYC was kind enough to host. Charles Bernstein, Joseph Milazzo, Susan Lewis, Jerome Sala, Sandra Simonds. They are all working with AI and its implications.
I would also direct folks to Renee Gladman, Steven Alvarez, and Don Mee Choi. Their work dramatizes the texture of 21st-century life, which, to me, is as important as anything any poet says.
Respectfully, I have attended many poetry readings and find them pretty dull at times… a lot of insular shoegazing and no real, solid connection to the audience, who is giving up its precious time to listen. You and a few other poets I know seem to be the exceptions, putting a little performance and energy into their art like the punk poet John Cooper Clarke, with some media and musical support.
What is it about some poets, in performance, that frankly makes them so boring? How would you recommend they change to connect more with their audience?
I have lots of thoughts. But people like that will never listen. They are the readers who run too long, ignoring the host’s guidelines and stepping on the time allotted to the other readers.
Personally, I listened to the records of Dylan Thomas’ readings early on. More than anything else, he taught me how to hear myself, which I think is your main complaint about these poets.
You’re a working-class kid from the Bronx who, through his smarts, got an Ivy League education at NYU. A degree in literature, if I’m not mistaken. Your original pursuit was short stories. How, when, and why did you make the shift to poetry?
It was pre-Musk Twitter. That’s what brought me back to writing poetry. I would go on there every night, forcing myself to write something short.
The medium felt like a great way to connect with a broad community. It also connected me to newer poets, like the FLARF people who were doing fun things with technology.
Let’s face it, man or woman cannot live by poetry alone, meaning it’s the rare person who can make a living out of it. What is it that keeps a poet writing when there’s so little remuneration to be had?
It’s the dumbest thing. But you keep going. You don’t write because you have a choice; you write because that is what you are supposed to be doing.
It’s the same for every other form of art these days. Art has lost all monetary value because of its accessibility. Not even Netflix or Paramount can make money, which is why they were fighting over Warner Bros.
We’re all competing with the spectacle. Maybe betting on the weather will save us?
Academia. Is it hurting or helping poetry?
I could talk about what out-of-touch snobs academics are. Or I could say that many of them wouldn’t give me the time of day because I lack the proper credentials. But I won’t linger on those feelings, not today.
Academics are getting their asses beaten worse than anyone else by late-stage capitalism. Where else could anyone work for years as a full-time employee, but have neither job stability nor health benefits?
Your day job, and every poet needs one, has been in the field of technology for the past three decades. What kind of work did you do, and how does it inform your poetry?
Two ways, I think. First, I have been exposed to technology before the broader populace. Second, my job, as a comms person and now a marketer, is why now, why now, why now? The currency of art, its need to be part of immediate experience.
The kids call it “vibe”. I can’t emphasize how important that is, and it comes right out of the Don Draper aspect of my job–that part that will never go away, no matter how much tech they throw in the way.