Christian Bök Publishes The Piecemeal Bard is Deconstructed

Writing in response to RACTER’s The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed, Christian Bök publishes the essay “The Piecemeal Bard is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Poential Robopoetics,” in Object 10: Cyberpoetics (edited by Kenneth Goldsmith). In it, Bök suggests that “We are probably the first generation of poets who can reasonably expect to write literature for a machinic audience of artificially intellectual peers… If we want to commit an act of poetic innovation in an era of formal exhaustion, we may have to consider this heretofore unimagined, but nevertheless prohibited, option: writing poetry for inhuman readers, who do not yet exist, because such aliens, clones, or robots have not yet evolved to read it.”

-Sasha Stiles