Comments on: Repost: In Barry Bonds I See The Future of Poetry

By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 14:58:17 +0000

A sonnet I wrote in 1976 supports Kenneth Goldsmith’s thinking.
It uses the term Machina sapiens to suggest the
Posthuman direction in which we are heading.
See yd202 at 2007/08/26
in the August 2007 archive of my Sprintedon Hollow.

By: "Pat" Colchester

"Pat" Colchester — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:59:59 +0000

Damn. “Lynn Behrendt” — and others here: some big assumptions you’re making about gender on this masked internet. Same goes for race.
The debates on race and gender here tend to be completely subsumed in terrestrial fixed notions of identity. I’m shocked that you can make assumptions about identity in a forum where identity is altered, falsified and deliberately hidden. You don’t know who I am, where I am, what race I am, what gender I am, and to the point of this discussion, if I am even human. You don’t know if I “wrote” this or if it was “programmed” or “cut-and-pasted” into this box. In fact, for you to make such traditional authorship assumptions is staggeringly naive, unsophisticated and quite frankly, stupid. The Bonds issue brings up complex issues of identity, hence this discussion. To drag it all back to humanist / terrestrial notions is backpeddling.
C’mon folks, you can do better than that. Can we at least pretend to be a tad sophisticated instead of falling back into our knee-jerk accusatory / victim roles?

By: "Pat" Colchester

"Pat" Colchester — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:59:59 +0000

By: Lynn Behrendt

Lynn Behrendt — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:32:34 +0000

I am thoroughly sick of male poets talking about baseball.

By: Marty Elwell

Marty Elwell — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:43:20 +0000

Also, before we define Bonds as super-human, we need to consider all the facts… No one is talking about the expansion of MLB and the dilution of pitching talent… If performance enhancing drugs were the sole reason for broken records, this would have happened years ago. Sometimes, the real answer to a question is right there on the surface.

By: elle

elle — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:11:38 +0000

Interesting how Black people in America, for centuries, were depicted as
the symbols of subhumanism (3-fifths a human, no more, maybe less) and now,
because of a “sacred” baseball record and the sorcery of the legal drug czars
a Black man is being monsterized as the first symbol of posthumanism. And
some wonder why minorities tend to stomp all over symbols.
That said, I fail to see what posthumanistic feat Bonds has performed.
It’s not like he has hit twice as many homers in half the time.
What is posthuman about breaking the homerun record? Aaron did it.
And while racists threaten his life and called him names, none of them,
I bet, threw posthuman at him. Or maybe they did.
“In terms of race, I don’t think race has anything to do with it.”
Unfortunately, in America, race has everything to do with anything.
It’s the prism through which America views her world.

By: Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 04:06:49 +0000

Thank you Mr. Maitland. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Kenneth Goldsmith

By: Rich Villar

Rich Villar — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:53:16 +0000

Jacob,
Please refer to the earlier version of this post some months back, and you’ll see a number of black writers responding to this post, raising many of your same concerns.
Goldsmith isn’t hearing you, dude, nor did he really hear what they were saying then. Clearly he’s above your petty, pre-post-modern, passe arguments about race. (SARCASM MODE OFF)

By: Marty Elwell

Marty Elwell — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:34:50 +0000

I always get irritated when older folks say “kids these days are so…wild…disrespectful…irresponsible…etc…” It originates from the same cultural arrogance that one’s religion is the best…that we are the only life in the universe…that our current science is the most accurate… In many ways, the argument that humanity is eroding is very similar. You say “the future”…I say “history repeating itself”. The fall of the super-human is as old as Hercules.

By: Cuitlamiztli Carter

Cuitlamiztli Carter — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 23:13:37 +0000

Steve,
Just to be a science geek, gorillas walk on two legs and on all four, depending on the situation.
I don’t think we’ll ever stop writing poetry for humans, unless we’re committing an equivocation fallacy. Bonds (and Steve with his coffee, me with my cigarettes and herbal tea and eyeglasses) is an enhanced human. If computers ever begin appreciating poems instead of just generating them, then they’ll be human in the sense of “What seperates us from the animals.” Sure, Bonds seems juiced and enhanced. But he can read poetry and appreciate the deeper meanings. If computers ever do that, it’s because we’ll have made them human in terms of consciousness.
Also, it does seem like Goldsmith is celebrating this. He’s built his career on celebrating the “mechanical.” It’s part of his charm and paradox.