Issue 33: Francis Gene-Rowe

The Guts of Poetry

This is a modified version of the Introduction to Collected Lyrics: 2010-2020 by David Ashford, forthcoming from Crater Press.

Of Maps, Territories and Games

As part of a conversation about British colonialism in India, David started talking to me about Whist and Ganjifa. What I understood from David’s words was that in a certain sense British colonial agents (epitomised by Robert Clive) were using these games, particularly Whist, as a method to sharpen and triangulate the imperial control they sought to maintain and extend, perhaps a little like how the Prussian military used Kriegsspiel to train officers, though to me it bore the feeling of operating as a sort of hacking or overwriting, closer to how William S. Burroughs wrote about ‘the Mayan control calendar’ in The Soft Machine (1961). Months later, when I referenced this discussion, David brought up Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), saying that Phileas Fogg

does nothing but play Whist on his entire voyage. Jules Verne knew what he was talking about. There’s nothing frivolous about the card games in that book – they’re the entire basis for the enterprise in which Fogg is engaging. The British Empire is Whist. [1]

Whist, in other words, is a key cog in the engine of colonial mapping: in some sense, it allows for a hegemonic modelling, a gaming of the system.[2] In Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (1968), the spacefaring crew that are the novel’s supporting characters play Whist using Tarot cards – notably, in the book’s far future setting, distrust and dismissal of the Tarot is considered superstitious and backward. Nova is by no means a retrofuture, and Tarot readings are an integral part of its advanced technoculture. Why are the crew playing Whist, though? I’m not entirely sure, but I think Delany is touching on the fact that official history, the history of the book’s space aristocrats who captain ships and drive its plot ever onward, is a tool or technology, something that is and has been mapped in a specific way and perhaps could be re- or un-mapped. Games are models that constrain, permit and incentivise certain kinds of behaviour. Rules can reinforce certain assumptions, like a zero-sum game. But plenty of games don’t serve to optimise our performance in and understanding of the status quo, and anyone who plays knows that players push beyond rules. ORCS!!! features gamic references written in goblin script, such as ‘the dungeon master’ and ‘world of warcraft’.[3] What would it mean to play a poem like a board game? What are your house rules?

Coming back to our conversation, I’ve been thinking a bit about Fredric Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping. As someone both seduced by and wary of models, the prospect of finding critical, situated, collective ways to map reality holds a lot of appeal to me, though I’m mindful of McKenzie Wark’s observation that ‘Mapping finds what it’s programmed to find’.[4] In Jameson’s view, mapping changes under postmodernity because of how simultaneously abstract and overdetermined material and cultural reality have become. It feels to me that this makes models, or rather the magical prospect of finding The Right Model, more alluring than ever: certainly to the ruling classes, but equally to people lower in the hierarchy who seek to self-locate within reality via typologies, whether they be Myers-Briggs, Western Zodiac or risible manotypes (alpha, beta, sigma, omega, etc.) espoused by misogynistic grifters.[5] The left aren’t exempt, either. Wark notes that cognitive mapping is ‘caught up in a dialectic of essence and appearances, where the phenomenal form of capital is supposed to be captured in aesthetic form in such a way as to reveal its essence, which was known in advance to theory’, which in turn reminds me of Robert Kiely telling me that a problem he has with narrative is that it can operate as a sort of delayed gratification of The Thing That Is Known (or perhaps programmed) in advance. In the computer RPG Disco Elysium, should you choose to internalise the Thought relating to the game’s equivalent of Dialectical Materialism, these are your character’s reflections:

0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself *sad*. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov *fucked him over* personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world. [6]

Ouch. This is a very bad fate indeed, albeit not one that the game binds you to: mistaking the model for reality, imposing it on the real. The thing is, the model is not, cannot be, the real thing. At the same time, modelling is a huge part of how political reality operates. Things are governed premised on unreality. The figure of Urizen in William Blake’s work has always felt like a neat encapsulation of this: he is characterised simultaneously by cloudy opacity (unknown even to himself) and monolithic certitude and rigidity. Dissolving the pillars of capitalist certainty is difficult because they’re hard to see clearly, while at the same time constraining everything. I think we’re getting a hefty dose of this right now in the form of the enshittifying, plagiarism-belching machines that are Large Language Models. In his recent book A Book of Monsters: Promethean Horror in Modern Literature and Culture (2024), David writes that the danger involved in computer modelling is

not that a model might predict the future but that we might allow it to determine the future by believing in the prediction; binding ourselves to a pattern of thought that is not reality but ratiocination, we risk a restriction on our capacity to think out new options, and to take control. [7]

If working with any sort of model or system – and it’s hard to strip these out entirely, even if we want to – we need to look for models against modelling, systems against systematising. Rather than the quotidian objects and gadgets that we increasingly don’t even own, it’s our maps of reality that need to include planned obsolescence. Or rather: any map of reality will outlast the reality it describes, but it’s hard to internalise that truth, to live it. I think what David’s poetry does is both a pushing beyond the rules, the affordances of models and maps, and also a messier and more uncontrolled thing that touches on mythology and divination, constructing an awareness of the perimeter of a model, but also of its guts, its entrails. Mythologies last longer than the situations they describe, which gives rise to mistranslation and anachronism. They also invite the perception of a model at their core, but at the same time tend toward plurality, as every island of the seas has its own relationship with Zeus, its own version of Zeus.

(Mis)Translation, Anachronism

‘untranslatability is not a temporary barrier to be broken into but a fundamental right’ [8]

‘Who will now give/thecommand word?’ [9]

‘broken by a vending machine/Placate the boyars pripigni & no dirty tricks’ [10]

In R.F. Kuang’s Babel, or the Necessity of Violence (2022), British imperial hegemony is fuelled and maintained by a mastery of translation, as the gap in a word’s meaning across two different languages yields tremendous magical power that is used to fuel industry, technology and, of course, colonial violence. Official translation is often an extractive practice which helps maintain uneven power relations. At the same time, translation is at the heart of all poetry, all reading: it is at its heart a speculative practice, regardless of whether it acknowledges that. The poems in this book all undertake some form of mistranslation, fictive translation or similar honest trickery. The Birch Bark Letters are a ‘systematically inaccurate translation’ that go beyond ‘what we thought we knew of the past’, while Xaragmata ‘translates’ writing that ‘According to most histories […] should not exist’.[11] In each case, there is an attempt to make tangible thoughts and feelings that are absent from the map circumscribed by the English language that they have been transplanted into. A similar experiment in experiencing alterity is happening in parts of ORCS!!!, though you will have to judge if the remove is greater or lesser for you, and what that says about you. Some form of estrangement is afoot – getting far away to get close. But the converse is also happening: getting very, very close in order to get far away. The more you magnify, the stranger and less recognisable things become. Mistranslation can be a spotlight, expose the violence of translation, and it can also be a sort of malfunction practice, skittering around the borders of hegemony. Orcs can both be abject undersubjects of modernity and jargon-spouting middle management. Pulgasari uses SYSTRAN machine translation in such a way as to expose the ‘collective subconscious of the American establishment’, but at the same time its raw material, or input symbol, exhibits ‘a semiotic system disrupted by an underlying logic that is in fact entirely alien’ via the Hyangchal system.[12] It’s about Korea refusing the Mandate of Heaven, about working within and against dominant discourses subversively. The experiments in these poems wind up introducing, or perhaps producing, anachronism. To me, the anachronisms in David’s work feel like a sort of flag or indication, which connects to a conversation I had with Robert Kiely about the rationale behind the title of his book Gelpack Allegory (2022), in which the image of a silica gel desiccant (for ideological mould) and a sacrificial sailcloth (that gets mouldy before anything else does) are combined. For me, anachronism-as-flag has a sense of showing the constructedness of things, getting under the hood and giving people a form of ownership or participation that is otherwise walled off by power. It’s a form of poesis, and also a gambit, perhaps of the sort you’d make in a game with serious stakes.

Everything Is In Everything Else/Everything Is Unlike What It Was

‘This poem participates in this creative paranoia’ [13]

‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans/I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create’ [14]

In ‘The Incomputable and Instrumental Possibility’ Antonia Majaca and Luciana Parisi discuss the paranoid programming of the computational tools that underpin technomodern reality. Majaca and Parisi are interested in ‘reclaiming the unknown unknown’ as a route to going beyond ‘the normative, universal subject of history’, that is, the unmarked subject for whom all points on the map are equally close.[15] Feminist science and technology studies[16] tells us that there is no such rational remove from things, that technocapital’s insistence on optimising risk is both violent and fundamentally grounded in falsehood; in fact, that the position of remove (which goes all the way back to John Locke, Blake’s philosophical nemesis) that underpins paranoid computing is a kind of superstitious thinking. Going back to the ‘collective subconscious of the American establishment’ that Pulgasari psychoanalyses, one effect is an allaying of hypnosis by the latest sublime novum of technosolutionism, whatever that might be at a given moment: today Generative AI, tomorrow perhaps climatological geoengineering? Either way, the Global South burns.

               So, what is paranoia, and what is creative paranoia? Paranoia emerges from the fact that reality is interconnected and synergistic. The true mode of life is symbiosis, and the true mode of capital is parasitism. The purpose of a system is what it does. Paranoia reflects and relates to interconnectedness as well as the opaque, complex presence of the social totality under late capitalism. When everything is so thoroughly overdetermined, really subsumed, precorporated, surveilled, etc., ‘Perhaps, in the words of the British poet Nicolas Spicer, ‘No one is paranoid enough’’.[17] Is it really paranoia if they really are out to get you? We could perhaps consider radically emergent, experimental creativity as a paranoid process in the positive, one where you have to want to make the connections between things, want to find alternative patterns to those currently governing things.

               Philip K. Dick writes that ‘Sudden surprises […] are a sort of antidote to the paranoid […] because to the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so’.[18] Is ‘reclaiming the unknown unknown’ a counter-paranoia, or counter-system, with a different relationship to surprise? Is paranoia accurate to postmodern reality, or is it an incommensurate overloading? Is it a process or a destination, or the cancellation of process, or the cancellation of destination? Is there a difference between being the object of a paranoid system and the subject of a (creatively) paranoid process – or perhaps rather the lens, the apparatus, the synapse of paranoia? What if paranoia is a vehicle, or an affect, or the opposite of life, or perhaps of death? Is ‘creative paranoia’ creative because that is necessarily what it is in this moment in time, because everything is paranoid? Would it bear, has it borne, different names at different times? Is there some sort of energy which arises from piercing through the interconnections of unjust hegemony to the interconnection of being, matter, words? Is there some sort of release, or a high? Is this an antidote to the melancholy comedown of leftist historical consciousness?

Oracle Bones

‘presence of mind is an extract of the future, and precise awareness of the present moment more decisive than foreknowledge of the most distant events. Omens, presentiments, signals pass day and night through our organism like wave impulses. To interpret them or to use them, that is the question. The two are irreconcilable. Cowardice and apathy counsel the former, lucidity and freedom the latter.’ [19]

‘Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.’ [20]

‘these signs signify the crisis that is prerequisite for a new beginning’ [21]

A few months back, I asked David if he thought poetry was connected to divination, to which he replied that he did, adding that he gives students divinatory exercises to do: ‘It’s the same process as interpreting the garbled machine-translations or other randomly generated materials. A sort of haruspicy. You’re reading the entrails!’ I wonder if the failed/speculative/mistranslations of Xaragmata, Birch Bark Letters,[22] Pulgasari and ORCS!!! end up producing a sort of oracular diction. There’s meaning there, but it also requires some form of reading, reading away from the insular Lockean self, instead embracing the threads running through a given moment. I see divination as a sort of translation of self, body, mind – there’s often a channelling or connecting to a particular kind of mythological knowledge, but there’s also an openness to unexpected influences that prevents it from becoming a fixed model.

               In ‘Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes’ (1965), Dick notes that the I Ching is about what’s happening right now, not about the future. Blake’s continental prophecies are not about describing the future, but rather concern the mythologies that drive history (or rather, histories) forward. The paranoid/divinatory/mythological/(mis)translative nexus that David’s poetry sits in suggests to me a reading or rereading that is in some sense lived (like the fresh shirt Walter Benjamin writes about), escaping the bad fate of paranoid computational modelling, but at the same time being totally situated in its entrails, having dispensed with any delusory notion of a rational remove:

If there is poetry to be found in these scripts it must be practical: no false divisions between stars-signs, musical notation, writing and mathematics. Why is poetry content to make nothing happen when poesis once meant making [23]

Divination is a speculatively translative process, rather than an unspeculatively transliterative one – it’s not about the fixity of a specific set of symbols or other units of meaning, but rather the influences which flow through them and ourselves. I think this is how David’s poetry works too: I don’t think he’s strongly interested in extensively exploring specific symbols (even the orcs) but more about getting into the weave of processes via their viscera. Rather than being handed a particular toolkit or matrix to build with, we’re embarking on an anabasis.

               In ‘Notes on ORCS!!!’, David states that inspired creative power is incompatible with foreknowledge. In A Book of Monsters, with reference to Benjamin, he writes about getting away from the (both Hegelian and neoliberal) assumption of the future that is known in advance, seeking to strip the future of its magic, to corrode the allure of modelling and steep it in the acid of analysis and creative paranoia.[24] The purpose of divination is not to bring about a final certainty that instigates an end to change and the future: rather than a mastery over destiny that brings an end to experience, it’s a node within an oscillating experience of ‘I know I don’t know I know I don’t know I know I don’t know’. And that’s key, because it gives the present back to us, the time in which we can turn from obsessive predictive modelling to the enactment of alternative possibilities.

Analysis, Then Undoing

‘The roots of human speech are […] in the collective […] The sounds of language, the so-called phonemes are the result […] of the collective labour when producing, they are the result of social labour’ [25]

‘the future unified world language will be a language with a new system — a special system — that has not existed so far…’ [26]

drill

another hole

near the edge

of the label and

play it

from there [27]

Thirteen auspicious theses on poetry, after David Ashford:

1.         Divination & poetry touch on negative capability and raisonné dérèglement.

2.         Poetry as a kind of divination that inspects and dissolves hegemonic models of the world.

3.         Poetry as corrosion, as collective speech, as an attempt to communicate.

4.         The thing cannot be ‘itself’. The description modifies the reality it describes.

5.         Not saying the thing. Saying the thing. Resaying/twisting the thing, against ‘faithful, transparent insights’.[28]

6.         Poetry is supposed to help collapse language around material and political contradictions. But does it dismantle individualism?

7.          ‘call/time on the radical subject’.[29]

8.         Worlds are produced by language.

9.         If you kill a word, you destroy the ability to shape your reality around that word, like a kind of binding spell.

10.         Genuinely critical and ethical thinking is corrosive of the very ground and language it is built on.

11. ‘All that can be annihilated must be annihilated’.[30]

12.         Poetry, divination, etc.: it can offer wisdom, yes. But it needs to be a wisdom that abolishes itself while showing you the enactment of that abolition.

13.         And something is always left behind: the poem, the space and time of reading, your breath and body, traces of being beyond the edges of the map…

And

‘the final Promethean gift is Hope. After every possible post-modernist reversal and blowback, Hope remains at the bottom of the box.’ [31]

Notes

[1] David Ashford, personal correspondence, 2024. David’s emphasis, not mine.

[2] To game the system indicates that there is a system is in play, is there to play for, or to play away from.

[3] ORCS!!!, together with Birch Bark Letters, Xaragmata, Pulgasari, and David’s various notes on these works, is included as part of Collected Lyrics: 2010-2020.

[4] McKenzie Wark, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, Public Seminar (May 1, 2015): https://publicseminar.org/2015/05/cognitive-mapping/. 

[5] Sometimes called ‘male personality types’, these toxic typologies are espoused by followers of the Red Pill Movement or Manosphere. Remember, bioessentialism is always a bedfellow to patriarchy, eugenics and colonialism.

[6] ‘Mazovian Socio-Economics’, Disco Elysium, ZA/UM (2019). For more on the game mechanic under discussion, look up the ‘Thought Cabinet’ in Disco Elysium.

[7] David Ashford, A Book of Monsters: Promethean Horror in Modern Literature and Culture (Manchester University Press, 2024).

[8] Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Youssef, ‘All the Violence It May Carry on its Back: A Conversation about Diversity and Literary Translation’, Asymptote Journal: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/all-the-violence-it-may-carry-on-its-back-a-conversation-about-diversity-and-literary-translation-gitanjali-patal-and-nariman-youssef/.

[9] David Ashford, ‘Comet Song’, Pulgasari.

[10] David Ashford, ‘Berestyanáya Grámota’, Birch Bark Letters.

[11] David Ashford, ‘Note on Birch Bark Letters’ and ‘Notes on Xaragmata’.

[12] David Ashford, ‘Note on Pulgasari’.

[13] David Ashford, ‘Notes on Xaragmata’.

[14] William Blake, Jerusalem. The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1832).

[15] Antonia Majaca and Luciana Parisi, ‘The Incomputable and Instrumental Possibility’, e-flux journal 77 (November, 2016): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/77/76322/the-incomputable-and-instrumental-possibility/.

[16] Such as Donna J. Haraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14. 3 (Autumn, 1988).

[17] David Ashford, A Book of Monsters.

[18] Philip K. Dick, ‘The Android and the Human’ (December, 1972).

[19] Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’, in One Way Street: And Other Writings (Verso, 2021).

[20] Ibid.

[21] David Ashford, ‘Notes on ORCS!!!’.

[22] Which are ‘often urgent […] attempts to communicate’ (‘Note on Birch Bark Letters’).

[23] David Ashford, ‘Notes on Xaragmata’.

[24] ‘to calculate is not to analyse’ (A Book of Monsters)

[25] Nikolai Marr quoted in ‘Notes on ORCS!!!’.

[26] Marr in ‘Notes on ORCS!!!’.

[27] Tom Raworth, Ace (1974).

[28] David Ashford, ‘Note on Pulgasari’.

[29] David Ashford, ORCS!!!.

[30] William Blake, Milton (1810).

[31] David Ashford, A Book of Monsters.

Francis Gene-Rowe is a London-based creator and scholar who works with/on/through science fiction, game design, utopia, ecology, speculative divination, and goblin futures. Francis co-directs the London Science Fiction Research Community, and their poetry can be found in Strange Realism (The Commoner), Corroding the Now: Poetry and Science|SF (Veers Books & Crater Press), and ALOCASIA. 

Copyright © 2025 by Francis Gene-Rowe, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.