The poem begins. {Photograph} courtesy of Maureen McLane.
For our collection Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve revealed in our pages. Maureen N. McLane’s poem “Haptographic Interface” seems within the new Spring challenge of the Overview.
How did this poem begin for you? Was it with a picture, an thought, a phrase, or one thing else?
This poem took wing, or distilled itself, throughout a convention on “Writing Follow” at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf in September 2022. I began writing whereas listening to the closing remarks. The scholar Andrew Bennett had given a chat on Keats vis-à-vis haptographics, a time period I hadn’t heard earlier than—that was one spur. Keats is somebody I’ve learn and considered for a very long time (in a single wing of my life I work on Romantic-era poetry). Bennett had spoken about Keats’s handwriting—how shifting it may be to come across it—and his letters, and the matter of “literary stays.” Some months after the convention, I appeared up haptographics—one of many first hits on Google tells you that “haptographic expertise entails extremely sensorized handheld instruments”—is a pen such? Haptography is a way for “capturing the texture of actual objects”—is that this what Keats was as much as, capturing the texture of issues (experiences, feelings, actions of thought)? I feel so. Is that this nonetheless poetry’s goal? These are questions the poem implicitly pursues, however I can solely say that having written the poem. There was no thesis-in-advance.
On the convention, I used to be intermittently taking notes and making notes whereas others had been speaking. Having a pen in my hand in all probability spurred that type of dreamlike composition. The convention raised questions on writing, mediation, materiality, of the intersections between expertise and artwork, of the sensorium. The human sensorium is vital Keatsian terrain, and he’s preoccupied too with poetic ambition. Different issues within the combine included ambient considerations about AI. Through the convention, one scholar invoked the time period human writers, about which I famous in my pocket book, “oy retronym.” A variety of floating issues had been concretized within the drafting.
Pocket book pages. {Photograph} courtesy of Maureen McLane.
How did writing the primary draft really feel to you? Did it come simply, or was it tough to put in writing? (Are there onerous and straightforward poems?)
It was fairly simple to put in writing, a type of channeling—I used to be in all probability usefully disinhibited, doing this whereas additionally listening, a type of parallel play … or lyric dispossession.
Who’s the speaker of this poem?
I suppose you would say that the speaker of the poem emerges en route as “John Keats”—some amalgam of the determine of Keats, a type of AI Keats, and me. So there’s an “I” generated out of some bizarre processing of “John Keats”—as poet, historic determine, consultant case of and for poetry, persona/masks. The speaker is a type of Keats-bot, maybe. Our bots, ourselves.
How did you provide you with the title for this poem?
I used to be drawing on the title of Bennett’s speak, and my poem title was first “Haptographics,” as you see within the pocket book, however in the end turned “Haptographic Interface.” I hovered for some time between the 2, however the bot poet / poet-as-bot in the end appeared to be an interface, and that appeared central to the poem.
A printed revision of the poem. {Photograph} courtesy of Maureen McLane.
Have been you considering of another poems or artworks whilst you wrote it?
I don’t know that I used to be considering of something, per se. Issues got here to thoughts and popped up organically—or robotically!—as I used to be writing, together with Keats’s “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil,” and his sonnet “On First Trying into Chapman’s Homer,” the place he invokes a “peak in Darien.” “Isabella” is a really unusual, creepy-sexy gothic neomedieval poem, and it in all probability occurred to me as a result of I used to be working with a type of creepy “John Keats” determine, and possibly as a result of one other conference-goer had talked about the poem. To be trustworthy, numerous Keats can spontaneously bubble up for me—key phrases and contours. So too, motifs from romantic literature, together with debates about fancy versus creativeness—Coleridge is essential for that.
My poem is partly a tissue of citation and a type of bizarre channeling of these Keatsian motifs. On this approach, the poem navigates between the logic of AI—which presumes an enormous devouring and sifting of current databases—and extra native or conventional situations of poetic composition, what Susan Stewart has referred to as lyric possession, or Derrida, in one other key, has referred to as hauntology. A Keats-bot brings its personal hauntings with it.
Additionally within the hinterland of my thoughts could have been two nice current books by critics—Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse and Erica McAlpine’s The Poet’s Mistake. Nersessian’s e-book provides us a deeply lovable, charismatic, politically progressive, and brilliantly sensual Keats. Keats’s biography haunts the poem in numerous methods—his annoyed love for Fanny Brawne, his extremely fast growth as a poet in his early twenties, his horrible early demise in Rome from tuberculosis. The Keats-bot determine of the poem is partially that biographical Keats and partially a livid or alienated posthumous Keats, which he may be, regardless of normal hagiography. McAlpine has an important studying of “On First Trying into Chapman’s Homer,” which famously incorporates a mistake, inserting the conquistador Cortez upon that “peak in Darien,” gazing on the Pacific with a marvel analogous to Keats’s on first studying George Chapman’s translation of Homer. As McAlpine notes, it was Balboa, not Cortez, who first appeared on the Pacific from the isthmus of Darien. Now we’re actually within the weeds, however McAlpine’s exploration of poetic intentionality and error factors to the challenges raised by a Keats-bot—what accounts of poetic intention or poetic making are believable for us, at this juncture? What variations of poetry are out of date—and are “human writers” out of date? The poem circles and doesn’t reply these questions.
Maureen N. McLane’s most up-to-date e-book is the essay assortment My Poetics.
