Thomas Mar Wee

Mourning Rites  

From the Book of Rites

I.

When one sees at a distance a coffin with the corpse in it

he should not sing.

When he enters among the mourners

he should not keep his arms stuck out

When eating with others

he should not sigh

When there is a body shrouded and coffined in his village

One should not sing in the lanes

When presenting himself at any mourning rite

he should have a sad countenance

When holding the rope

he should not laugh

When going to a burying-ground

he should not sing

II.

At the mourning rites for a parent, the son occupied the slanting shed

He slept on straw, with a clod of earth for a pillow

He spoke of nothing

except what related to the rites

III. 

A son, who had hurried to the mourning rites of his father 

bound up his hair in the raised hall

bared his chest

descended to the court 

There, he performed his leaping. 

The leaping over 

he reascended

covered his chest,

and put on his sash 

in an apartment to the east

*Author’s Note: The title of this poem is taken from the poem by John Ashberry, “Self-Portrait in A Convex Mirror”. These poems were generated by a computer based off a corpus of around twenty-five poems, written over the course of the years 2016-2021. These poems cover a variety of reoccurring themes including: grief, assimilation, loss, memory, and language. These poems were run into a modified version of Open AI’s natural language processing program GPT-2 and lightly edited. The resulting highly experimental poems, taken as a whole, is a self-portrait of sorts, an auto-poiesis. It is a portrait of the author through the medium of a computer.*

You Pay Homage

you pay       homage  practitioner                     to my name
                        you have paid       homage                 to your family
                        you have bestowed        * 牴      on                  one
                        of the Father                             of the Son
                        of the Holy Spirit

                                    of the Father                             of the Son
                                    of the Holy Ghost

                                    of the Father                             of the Son
                                    of the Holy Name

                                    of the Father                of the Son
                                    of the Holy Sacrament

I Sit On A Gallows

Embroiled,
you plead infirmities
                          in withdrawing out of debt
                          I sit
                                       on a gallows
                          square
                          watching morning's movements

                          obliterate
                          the poem
                          Aid to the forgotten
                          void theater

                          Diesel,
            watching empty areas
                          Frisian eyebrow, Sanskrit curls
                          pale, humped horses.
                          They wade into river
                          to learn more
                          see the fruit of firm gender
                          appear in public bearing wares
                          making
                          your presence taught
                          that sometimes,
                          watching its part,
                          watching flower.)
LEAVE.

The Ancestors of China

placed the seed of                     a plump being
            Grows ——
            pale anchored              like the rest of
            the earth’s
            floors
            amid cornflowers
            rising,
            watching the fields
            watching dawn
            watching the sky
            watching dawn
            watching from the East
                                      the Father
            Hearts arise
            Suddenly,
                         from the Father
            From the Father,
            Hearts come
                         From the Mother,
            Evening is about to begin
                         Light matures
            Suddenly,
            from the Father,
            Approach.
                         Our very being
                                adapted for living
                         technocephaly.
                         Our haphazard
                               structure [feuds]
                                             three
                                       momentarily
                                       closed-books
            can we even begin ?
                         could we possibly
                         could we?
                         could it ever occur
                         ever
                         ever     itself
                         null     collection
                         of little
                         momentarily               rippling ripples
                                            notes
                                     howling breath
                                     ale breathless
                                     contemplates               the Problem of Evil
            Beside                           you,                 a plump being
                        Grows ——
            pregnant
            of clear,                          sight
                        Grows,
                        we learn
                        how
                        makes sense
                        is broken

                        can
                        an adequate
                        fertile
                        small
                        void
                        I climb
                                    to the top
                                    of the Everglades

                        among the Father
                        among the Mother
                        of the Holy Spirit

Deva Eveland: Could you describe in more detail how the GPT-2 program transformed the original writing?

Thomas Wee: GPT is a highly advanced piece of Natural Language Processing software developed by OpenAI that allows a computer to generate highly human-like strings of text. I was using GPT-2 for this project, although a newer more sophisticated version, GPT-3 has already been developed. The software is basically a “black box” unless you have an extensive background in computer science. Luckily, for people like me with only a basic grasp of computer science, people have built programs that let you manipulate GPT without having to work directly with its innards. With GPT, you can give it any body of text and it will “learn” the characteristics of the writing and eventually be able to mimic it with a high degree of accuracy. It obviously has a lot of limitations, which I discovered when attempting to have it write prose in another part of the project, but the results it can produce are, I think, already incredibly generative and interesting.

For this project, I trained the computer on about forty pages of poetry and had it generate several lines or stanzas at a time. The resulting “poems” are not merely modifications of the originals, but “original” creations by the computer. As a result, I hesitate to call these poems mere “transformations” of the originals. Although this is up for debate, I’d argue that these poems are original compositions by the computer inspired by the language, style, and syntax of my original poems.

DE: You say your experiment has resulted in a self-portrait. How is it more of a self-portrait than if the original poems had not been modified? What is it about the process that created such a result?

TW: As a poet, my style is autobiographical, so the poems that constituted the source material for the GPT-2 program are drawn heavily from my own lived experience. The poems themselves could be considered miniature self-portraits, slivers of reflected images of my life. Put through the computer, the result was a startling “refraction” of these images. It was honestly uncanny and a bit disturbing to read a computer that had been trained to mimic my writing. The experience was unique and very hard to describe.

The resulting poems generated by the computer, I think, feel more like spontaneous self-portraits than the original, more labored, intentionally composed poems. I guess I’d describe these computer-generated poems, in keeping with the theme, as being candid self-portraits. Since composing them, I find them to be more revealing and, interestingly enough, “authentic” than my original poems. Reading these poems is a bit like hearing your own voice on a recording, or seeing a photograph taken of the back of your head.

***

Critical Accompaniment:

A Mechanical Turk at the Poet’s Desk

It is impossible to discuss Thomas Wee’s collection of AI-generated poems without roving into an area which is usually quite forbidden to the critic; that is, the act of creation itself. Poets are notoriously inarticulate about where and how inspiration strikes, and most, excepting the dubious crowd of poet-professors that Philip Larkin bemoaned, tend to respond to questions about their “process” with sighs of despair. But in the cyborg poems of Thomas Wee, process is the thing. The question becomes less “what and how does this mean?” and more “how did this come to mean anything at all?”

Wee himself offers something like an artist’s statement in an image prepended to the poems. Here is depicted a famous 18th century illusion, the Mechanical Turk, which was said to be a complex automaton capable of playing an almost perfect game of chess. In its time the Turk was enormously popular, and numbered among its opponents such illustrious figures as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Eventually, however, its trick was revealed. Cleverly hidden inside the Turk was a small chess-master, and it was he who made the moves imputed to the automaton. The clockwork was all for show. It is perhaps telling that Wee’s diagram is an incorrect rendering of the Turk’s inner workings, probably devised by a would-be debunker. In reality, the human operator of the Turk never left his box.

So: where is man in the machine? Some observations about the technique of the poems are in order here.

1) The words chosen are often robust simples (“pregnant”, “gallows”, “void”), “literary” peculiarities (“Frisian”, “stethos”, “LECEANCE”), or common formulae, usually of religious connotation (“of the Father…”, “An out and out”, “or is this merely”).

2) Repetition figures prominently, often of set phrases with the noun replaced by a close synonym or antonym. Hence: “of the Father / of the Son / of the Holy [Ghost/Name/Sacrament]”, or “watching the fields / watching dawn / watching the sky / watching dawn”. These repetitions tend to continue until an appropriately “unstable” phrase is reached, at which point they transition into other repetitions. Viz. “watching from the East” inaugurates “the Father” as a motif, etc. This procedure might be thought of as a transition between different “states” of repetition.

3) Transitions from line to line—or more precisely, between different states of repetition—do not maintain the tense or conjugation structures of the previous state, viz. “An out and out flirtation / of men / disguising” or “The Ancestors of China / placed the seed of a plump being / Grows—.” Within states of repetition structures are generally maintained.

4) Each new state of repetition takes into account the foregoing lines, and weighs word choice based on association with the material found there. The phrase “Evening is about to begin / Light matures” derives from the earlier usages of “dawn” “the sky” etc.

5) The poem must be arrested or it will never end.

The purpose of this list is not to step into the role of the Turk’s would-be debunker. Rather, it is to observe that there is something very brilliant and strange happening in these poems that has little or nothing to do with their apparent content. In fact, the more closely any given poem of Wee’s resembles a traditionally successful poem—as in the case of “The Catch of the Free Naked Reproductive Nation,” the most lucid, funny, and complete of the bunch—the more this brilliant quality is obscured.

What is really interesting in these poems is the way in which they function as a “self-portrait,” though not in the sense that Wee seems to take them. Some of Wee’s interests and qualities certainly come through unobstructed, and perhaps even enhanced by their lack of purposiveness, but a more fundamental portrait is being sketched beneath. That portrait is of the associative principle of man.

This is that notoriously unspeakable faculty that a poet calls upon when he sits down to work. In Wee’s poems, we see a kind of mimicry of that faculty. This mimicry is revealing precisely to the extent that it fails. Just as we see a perverse reflection of our appetites in the ape that has been taught to smoke, we see in Wee’s poems a kind of groping towards our own highest aspirations. The principles of their functioning outlined above hold true for many poems, even those written by human hands. That they can be elaborated clearly is a mark in their favor, and an indication of how much is left to be done. All poetry forms a map of the artist’s face. The day great poetry is written by a machine is the day we will have succeeded in forming a map of the artist himself.

—Jack Calder

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”

   — Ludwig Wittgenstein  

I climb daily  

in the crater of language  

Desiring sentences that are like  

shafts of light  

cutting through densest fog  

Words hard & razor sharp  

like iron — hot from the anvil.  

Instead, I worry my molars  

gargling phonemes, I spit  

blood and call it  

Speech, acting  

(and all of us the poorest players)  

Silence is always an option — yes  

But muteness its own kind of speech  

And most of us do not have  

The fortitude for silence  

So instead each day  

we confront  

the muck of conversation.  

I pull on my boots,  

and wade in  

to dip my net  

into the Great Stream of Utterances  

Each poet has considered silence.  

Has weighed the blank page  

And all its implications  

Only to chose our thinest, paltriest  

Language. Returning to it, at first, like the jilted lover  

(with reluctance)  

but eventually greeting it  

with inky lips:  

Each word written— a joyous refusal

(Quotations from John Cage’s “Lecture On Nothing” (1959)

“We   need  a  structure,             

 so     we    can    see 

We    are    nowhere”

Inside this fertile  blankness [   ] 

a plump being 

    grows 

{the space inside  a wheel: 

    how it turns }

on a clear day at the gallery

I gingerly dip

   a toe 

(In Milk River)

touching, briefly an eclipse 

of all thought 

Approach, 

if you look close enough 

you can almost hear it    hum.

I.

noun.

From the Latin, columba

   meaning “dove”

In Chinese, naguta

   “a pagoda-of-bones”

this     dovecote

with its

lattice-work of shelves

pockmarked     by     urns

one recalls:

   the dome of the Pantheon

   Borges and his infinite library

in its sheltering arms

porous, permeating, perforated

   like skin under a microscope

   or a chestnut

   its dark, brawny husk

   guarding the tender flesh

there’s a word in Chinese

   yiwu (遺物):    “leftover”

something discarded & remaindered

which we

   embalm with associations

   maunder with meanings

these few, worthless things

the deceased

have forgotten

left behind:

   [too worn shoes,

   a dozen, burnished coins

   a pair of cracked

   spectacles]

if I have anything like Religion

it might be

   Etymology

   for I enjoy nothing more

   than the opening up of words

   dismantling

   their little boxes

   and, like a well

   peering down

     into them.

II.

In this

budding grove    I sit

on a mossy, lover’s bench

under an aged sycamore

on some decomposing, Irish estate

     amid cornflowers

my presence disrupts

a tendentious stillness

With one careless movement

I startle them

   their cries    echo

   from so many

   small places

suddenly,

   a gust of wind lifts

   the ground swells

   a shroud of white,

   rippling, brilliant

     momentarily blots the sun

Generation Loss

This poem was written in English and translated into Chinese using an online translation program. The result was translated back into English. This process was repeated three times.

V.1:

Definition:

“The loss of quality between successive copies, usually associated with magnetic audio and video media.”

My great grandfather

Left his family in Guangdong Port of entry: unknown

We have distant relatives in Canada, perhaps he emigrated there

One Family legend says that he and his wife came together. Another story says they came separately, and that he left her in China, waiting.

In the version where they come together, they arrive in California, buy a train ticket for as Far East as they can afford.

It takes them to Wichita, a tiny dot on the white plains of Kansas.

My grandfather came to this country Illegally. Under an assumed identity.

The term for the many Chinese men who came with false papers is “Paper Son” Sometime during this translation

Our names were trans placed

My middle name, which can mean horse indicates that my ancestors likely raised horses My last name is a fiction, a false signifier

an invention of bureaucracy

My father was born in Wichita, KS..

He spoke Chinese at home and English at school. He competed with his four brothers

At night in their shared bedroom they played mental chess, the board and its pieces A figment of their collective imagination

He learned English by watching television And listening to the soundtracks to musicals Hello Dolly, Singing in the Rain,

He and his brothers spoke Chinese at a middle school level. A fragmented, diasporic Chinese

My father died three years after I was born

He died without leaving me the inheritance of

Even his tattered language

Growing up,

I ask my uncles to transcribe him to me I ask my mother to recreate him for me A set of letters he wrote on his deathbed, Which I rediscovered at 18

Our only correspondence

My Chinese is only the faintest memory A weak link in the chain of signifiers

A corrupted image

the last layer of the family palimpsest

V.2:

definition:

“The quality loss between successive copies is usually related to magnetic audio and video media.”

My great grandfather

Leave family in Guangdong Port of entry: unknown

We have distant relatives in Canada, maybe he immigrated there

A family legend said he got together with his wife. Another story says that they were separated and he left her in China and waited.

In the version where they came together, they arrived in California and bought train tickets as far as possible.

They took them to Wichita, a small spot on the white plains of Kansas.

My grandfather came to this country illegal. Under the assumed identity.

For many Chinese men with forged documents, the term is “paper son” At some point in the translation process

Our name was transferred

My middle name may mean horse, which indicates that my ancestors may have raised horses My last name is fictitious, false representation

The invention of bureaucracy

My father was born in Wichita, Kansas.

He speaks Chinese at home and English at school. He competes with his four brothers

In the shared bedroom at night, they played the mind chess, the board and its pieces Their collective imagination

He learns English by watching TV

And listen to the soundtrack of the musical Hello Dolly, singing in the rain,

He and his brother speak Chinese in middle school. Fragmented Chinese

My father died three years after my birth

He died without leaving my legacy

Even his broken language

growing up,

I asked uncle to copy it to me

I want my mother to be born again for me A set of letters he wrote before his death, I rediscovered when I was 18

Our only counterpart

My Chinese is just the lightest memory Weak link in the indicator chain

Image corruption

The last floor of the family

V.3:

Definition.

“The loss of quality between successive copies is usually associated with magnetic audio and video media.”

My great-grandfather.

Leave your family in Guangdong. Port of entry: unknown

We have distant relatives in Canada. Maybe he’s emigrated to Canada.

One family legend says that he and his wife were together. Another story says that they separated and he left her waiting in China.

In the version they came together, they went to California and bought train tickets as far as they could.

They took them to Wichita, a small place on the white plains of Kansas.

My grandfather came to this country. It’s illegal. Under a fake identity.

For many Chinese men with fake IDs, it’s “pieces of paper.” At some point in the translation process

Our names have been moved.

signi • fication

After Deleuze

what’s in a name? —

[the ghosts of ancestors, immigration, flight] buried in the encrusted syllables

of imperfect transliteration

Diaspora & Dispersal, or let’s call it entropy:

culture neutered+naturalized

(read: ANESTHETIZED)

to a grey death

[if my family gave me a Chinese name it was never written down]

call it genealogy,

traced through the contours of your tongue

as it dribbles

     out

   dactyls // spondees // syllables

twitching out my name which you

whisper into my spine

hold it in your lips and feel it rise

somewhere in your gullet,bristling,

near the sternum.

A viscous sound / a raised fist

like Adam, you point and name things

making word flesh

someone said

that the body is our first language

the fetus in the womb, a floating signifier

Or maybe to be seen

the same, nearly, as hearing your name

spoken by the beloved

  (transcendence, signified)

the effect of being held, momentarily naked&warm, in the lover’s mouth

Speech Acts

“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

I climb daily

     in the crater of language

Desiring sentences that are like

shafts of light

cutting    through densest fog

Words hard    &    razor    sharp

like iron —    hot from the anvil.

Instead, I worry my molars

gargling phonemes, I spit

blood and call it

Speech, acting

(and all of us the poorest players)

Silence is always an option — yes

But muteness its own kind of speech

And most of us do not have

The fortitude for silence

So instead each day

we confront

the muck of conversation.

I pull on my boots,

and wade in

to dip my net

     into the Great Stream of Utterances

Each poet has considered silence.

Has weighed the blank page

And all its implications

Only to chose our thinest, paltriest

Language. Returning to it, at first, like the jilted lover

           (with reluctance)

but eventually greeting it

with inky lips:

Each word written— a joyous refusal

Stagecraft

(noun) Def:

A definition      OR

an      evasive      maneuver

a defiant assertion    OR

an attempt at the continuous

,,,elision,,,

         of oneself

I perform

mostly to an audience of one

because, unfortunately:

[    ] requires an audience.

I explicate myself

“ I perform ” “ gyrations ” to the “ public ”

linguistic stripteases draped in velour

bending my tongue in contortionist knots

I make       ambiguity

     quiver

like a dancer in the cage

beckoning mocking imploring

like            onstage at the Globe

the air:

       (horse manure, unwashed souls, chloroform, dung)

I stand

getting pelted by roses and occasionally

spat upon

by groundlings in the pit

if someone transitions in a forest:

is it still a transition?

is the univocal, uni-vocal affirmation

of oneself —

     ululations in an open field

     a voice shaking the trees

     — enough?

could [gender] just be a poem

written to the wind?

A Flat Circle

We too often speak of a person’s transition as a series of static, singular events:

     The Surgery

     The Coming Out

     The First Regiment of Hormones

This obscures the reality of transitioning as a prolonged, sustained act.

A continuous reimagining of the self.

Similarly, people mark the changes in seasons with arbitrary events:

     The First Snow (the beginning of winter)

     The First Thaw (the beginning of spring)

In doing so, they neglect the fact that it was already winter, already spring. That somewhere along the way, through infinitesimal gradations, the seasons had shifted, gone unnoticed by the casual observer.

Or to put it into geometrical terms:

     A circle is made up of infinite points.

To isolate the beginning of someone’s transition is to attempt to find one point on the circle, a

seam, where the circle begins and ends.

The yellow settee

(2018)

After Gertrude Stein

     Fragment of her great-grandmother’s lost Lebanon. With curling feet & diasporic stains. Threadbare, we unlost it each evening. We sat and unfolded our legs double decker. Summer stank when We sweated the other. Breathless at the firstness of things. Dangling we were on the edge of shifting questions. Enthralled with ifs and with rarer because. Blushing at the nakedness of the sentence. The slow striptease of the mind. Fetid July up drifted her ever-present question of sex. Licking at our windows. But always enough for me was the talking. The embrace of that fleeting speculative We.

Pomegranate

like some puckered fruit,

a pomegranate perhaps

this unreliable

receptacle which we

douse daily rinsing

dimpled flesh

in this daily stream

we call Life.

(how could we possibly expect it to hold it all?)

each memory

   dislodges

another.

a seed.    a pit.

Rattle like

teeth    Spat

into the sink

I dreamed writing

might stymie this

       Drip.

so I wrote a temporary repair

each day frantically

duck-taping my vessel

bursting as waters

rising each day

plugging.

a hole.      a word.

I found I succeeded

only in ( false )replication

the coating of deadflesh

[in deaderwords]

I became a master

       of taxidermy.

we have been equipped

with so many

ways of Forgetting

in the garden of St. John

this time of year with its

multicolored silences

makes me think of my Father

[who dies each spring]

on Amsterdam leaves conspire

on the pavement a haphazard mosaic

makes light music in

the chanting wind

fall — a form of forgetting

in the garden of St. John the Divine

a peacock

admires itself

contemplates    the Problem of Evil

recites      the Nicene Creed

I believe in        one LORD

Jesus Christ, the Only

Begotten Son

of God born        of the Father

before all ages

God from God      Light from Light

I awaken to bells dripping

from morning’s pipette

each one a golden lozenge

outside of the deli I see a man

who looks JUST like          my Father

who looks like the image of        my Father

who looks like how I imagined       my Father

who looks like someone’s image of      the Father

…consubstantial with the Father

through him

         all things were made

under the portico, in the rain

on the steps of the cathedral

you teach me the names of the saints

HE will come again in glory

to judge the living and the dead

and his kingdom will have no end

I run his name over my lips

my tongue a well-worn rosary

Intoning   Intoning   Intoning