I'm kind of a poet, and I'm aware of it. Wait, that doesn't scan right.

If you can find it, if your local bookshop is lucky or pretentious enough to carry it, please be on the lookout for the forthcoming Rubber Band Society Gazette, a broadsheet published by the Russian art team Komar and Melamid. The first issue featured such luminaries as Ian Frazier, Rick Moody, and Jamaica Kincaid; this second issue features a luminary whose name is: ME.

Strangely, my contribution to the RBS Gazette is a poem. I’m not a poet, you see. In this case, I managed to sidestep that roadblock by not actually writing the poem.

Months ago, when my arms were ineffective little flippers—it’s a long story—I wrote using voice-recognition. The software made writing possible, but it also got every fourth or fifth sentence crazily, infuriatingly wrong. I amused myself by collecting the mangled lines my software invented. It was that or smash the computer to bits, and the flipper-arms didn’t weren’t up for smashing. At one point I was trying to get the day’s date written, and the evil software kept coming up with crazier and crazier phrases that happened to rhyme. And I thought, hey, this looks like a poem! And I spent a few days arranging those lines with some other lines from the pages and pages of mangly bits, and then I sent them to my friend Emily, an editor at the RBS Gazette, and here we are today.

So: Find it, and read! You will be amazed and horrified. You will laugh, and then cry, and then throw up a little, and then giggle, and throw up again. A lot. How can you resist?

Comments

[jilbur]

arrghhh, wish I still lived in Boston/Cambridge area--I'll bet dollars to donuts they have it at the Grolier Bookshop (all poetry--all the time). Well. I am pretty certain that even the surprisingly excellent independent bookstore hereabouts won't have this, but I'm gonna look for it anyway. Am burning with curiosity about what the monkey-computer created with you.