for immediate release
PALM BEACH—Once each poem has been approved by the Great North American Continent of Homeland Security and the Mar-a-Lago Wartime Airbase and Resort Experience (MALWARE), it will be prepared for transmission through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge (ERB) by TRXD-5. Section 321(c) (23 U.S.C. § 91a) of the MALWARE Act mandates that TRXD-5 will encode all communication, including tweets, before traveling through an ERB, a wormhole in spacetime that connects two distant black holes through quantum entanglement. Poetry, like other language traveling through an ERB without the approval of MALWARE, including the poem being sent now, may notxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxbe correctly encoded. Did you g
et that? We can’t hear you. Can you try
again? Try reading through the x static.
Many years ago, when poems were printed
and downloaded,
We don’
t always want to speak their language. We
still don’t know why there is a black hole in the center of every galaxy. This is the moment when I became the sky
and saw through myself.
Gertrude Stein would have named all of the departments of the worlds The Department Or The Department of The The. Franz Kafka would have named them all The Department. Will Alexander has named them in unfixed symbols of spontaneous lexical strata offering variant radiances. But before we start naming departments that have the possibility of performing the values of uncertainty, emergence, and absurdity without participating in the usual categories of reality, art, and politics—orthodoxies in need of derangement—we should go over strategies for arguing against truth claims within The Trumpire. Which is a xxxxTower built Everywhere.
First, and I know from your exam scores
that you
know this,
but it is worth
repeating,
and I’m
only
following
orders
here,
but first,
first
it is
important
to be aware
that
there
is now
a wall around
every
one of us,
and
each
of these
walls
are
inside
the
other wall
around
all of us.
No, I’m sorry, I do not follow you. How is language a biopolitic of indefinite environments? Did you say, supraterritorial? Please remember as you are performing your celestial calculations that the horizon is an imaginary surface. When two black holes are entangled, the elements inside them correlate, and together they form a spacetime in which a wormhole joins their interiors. Thus, the poem traveling now, like the wormhole through which it is being transmitted, is a shortcut deviating from the assumed elongations in space and time of ordinary language. Yes, if the poem itself is a wormhole, it acts as a vessel for traveling in spacetimexxx. Did you say
a radio signal
is a speech act
traveling
at light
speed?
Every new poem
presents
an unfamiliar
mechanics
to the reader.
If I am correctly
xxxxreading the TRXD-5
code of your poem,
I cannot crack it.
This must mean it
is or is not
beautiful.
# # #
Amy Catanzano's writing moves between a range of genres and disciplines, often with a focus on the intersections of poetry, experimental art, and branches of science such as physics and astronomy. She is the author of three books: Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella, a combining of poetry with prose and the winner of the Noemi Press Book Award in Fiction; Multiversal, winner of the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry and the Poets Out Loud Poetry Prize from Fordham University Press; and iEpiphany. She is also the author of the chapbook World Lines: A Quantum Supercomputer Poem and the digital poem, Wavicles. She is an associate professor of English and the poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She has conducted creative and scholarly research for her writing on-site with a number of scientific research centers and scientific collaborations including CERN in Switzerland and on the Dark Energy Survey at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Chilean Andes. In 2018, she was the poet-in-residence at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University.