An Absence So Great and Spontaneous it is Evidence of Light

Poetry. Hybrid Genre. These poems began in 2011 with an investigation into John Cages adventures with chance. I was working at the State University of New York at New Paltz and we had a small museum the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art with a regular exhibition called Reading Objects. The idea of the show is to explore and expand on what is traditionally said on those little cards next to paintings. So we were presented with an array of visual work and could pick pieces to write about. I decided to write something to accompany a musical score by Cage that was to be part of exhibition. I wrote something and I came to hate it. This poem was displayed next to Cages score. I felt I didnt nearly go far enough with the poem to really engage with Cage. So I started again by researching Cage and I also spent time with Jackson Mac Lows Representative Works. . . Around this time I began to really notice and found myself entertained by the way search engines attempt to anticipate our needs. I began to slowly type lines of poetry (eventually working my way toward entire short poems) into the Google and Bing search boxes and laugh my way through the list of wrongly anticipated results that appeared underneath my search. I began to make poems out of these (wrong) search results. At first I thought I was adding chance into the poem but I came to realize it was just the opposite: these search results came from the zeitgeists algorithmic desire not my own which ended up expanding the possibilities for the poem. The poetic I dissolves in this desire.--Anne Gorrick