someone recently said to me they thought i'd been making art for "only a few years"... they meant it kindly, like, "look what you've accomplished in a short time," but the truth is that visible accomplishments barely scratch the surface.
when i was a little kid, i'd spend after-school time on my parents' computer playing around in MacPaint; on the weekends i took drawing and oil painting classes. some of my earliest sense memories are the smell of turpentine and the slushy texture of grape juice made from concentrate that our teacher liked to hand out. when i was around 13, my dad took me along on a business trip to italy, my first time in europe; i still have the notebooks of my terrible but very earnest pencil sketches of michelangelo's sculptures, which stunned me, and postcards from every museum we went to. for a while, i was obsessed with copying picassos, trying to learn whatever i could by imitating my favorite paintings. whenever my parents went away on business trips, which was often, i gave them little "travel notes" - handmade, wallet-size booklets illustrated with what i imagined their travels would be like, what to look out for, what not to forget. i loved and continue to love paper - i played around with marbling and tie-dying and blending up old material to make new, folding and unfolding to make shapes and patterns, carefully stenciling and inking letters, writing made-up colophons. my parents indulged my love by bringing me stationery from around the world, some of which i used, but most of which i saved and savored as inspiration, as writerly talismans. my stationery collection, which i've added to over the decades - single papers, scraps, envelopes, strange little notebooks, wax stamps, etc. - is absolutely sacred to me.
i published my first poem in a national literary mag, "hanging loose," when i was 17, which is around when i got my first (of many) rejections from the new yorker (the new yorker's anthology of poetry, with its shiny yellow cover and dense pages, was my bible for a long time), after filling up umpteen notebooks with student poetry and spending countless hours in libraries and curled up in bed reading into the wee hours with a nightlight clipped on my book. i've told the story elsewhere of meeting allen ginsberg in new york around this time, how he read a folder of my poems and annotated each one by hand with suggested edits and recommended other poets for me to read. and how, when we parted ways, he kissed me on the cheek and said, "you have a way with words."
i grew up devouring work by ursula k. leguin and philip k. dick and h.g. wells and aldous huxley and asimov... i also chose to study latin, so i could translate the writings of horace and catullus and virgil and ovid. my long love affair with elegiac couplets began when i first encountered "odi et amo" in a workbook - i attempted to translate it over and over again, trying to understand its compression and magic. i worshipped t.s. eliot., i slept with "four quartets" near my head. my bad high school poetry was less about puppy love and more about ancient and future worlds -- soma, space exploration, hephaestus, greek automata, the theft of fire, the enduring power of language as a kind of time machine. in college i became enraptured by joyce and woolf and gertrude stein and laurence sterne, the way they hack and renew language. i scrutinized every inch of "ulysses," every punctuation mark, every breathless sentence. i'm sure i gasped out loud the first time i read "tristram shandy" and fell upon the blacked out page. i was fascinated by tristram's self-awareness of the writing process; looking back, i'm certain it informed my abiding interest in the ars poetica and the "meta" nature of much of my own work.
in college i also stumbled across a book called "american nervousness" - a 19th-century neurological treatise on profound anxiety as response to the technological and cultural transformations of the industrial revolution. the moment i started reading it, electricity coursed through my body. at harvard, where i did my undergrad degree, an early version of "the facebook" was starting to spread; we were all obsessed with napster. when i went to england to do my graduate degree, my important relationships became embodied through AIM. around this time, i was invited by a culture magazine in the US to write a monthly column; i decided to focus on my evolving entanglement with technology and the experience of distance, penning essays on, for example, the primal warmth of my laptop and the masses of undersea cables powering all our instant communiques.
my first full-length poetry collection - never published - was titled "american nervousness," in homage to george beard and his observations about techno anxiety. it invoked contemporary events while looking back at the advent of the telegraph and telephone and printing press and other inventions that forever altered human connection. that manuscript was written from around 2004 onward; some of the poems in it eventually became parts of "technelegy." i submitted it to various book contests and publishers but no one bit.
kurzweil's "the singularity is near" came out around this time. i had already read and absorbed "the age of spiritual machines." after graduation, back in new york, i had a regular subscription to wired magazine and pored over kevin kelly's "out of control." i read articles on the relationship between creativity and science by jonah lehrer, who had been an oxford classmate, and whose musings stuck with me long after leaving england. i had a day job/career but mostly wanted to be in new york for the art. often, after work, i'd go to lincoln center and get $5 rush tickets. i'd drag my friends all over the city for free admission hours at museums, and sometimes even managed to eke out a budget to travel to shows that were calling out to me, in london, in los angeles, in paris, in berlin, in barcelona, in bilbao. i went to a zillion book launches and poetry readings and art openings. i slunk around chelsea on thursday nights, wide-eyed and dreaming but feeling rather "outsider," having never actually gotten an MFA in either art or poetry. i occasionally thought about applying for one, but honestly preferred my self-directed mode of study.
in 2014, i read nick bostrom's "superintelligence," and "the bug" by ellen ullman (who had earlier written one of my favorite books, "close to the machine.") that same year, i got engaged; my now-husband and i would lug huge canvases into my apartment in downtown brooklyn and paint things to hang on our empty walls. given our musical backgrounds (i have sung, played piano and violin, and composed music since i was young, and he is a veteran music director and producer), we also worked together on client projects and other creative endeavors, paving the way to our ongoing collaborations as studio partners.
somewhere along the way, i had my first in-person experience with alison knowles' "the house of dust" - a formative moment in my life. in 2015, i started writing an early, 100% human-powered version of "technelegy"; in 2016, i began sending these poems out to journals. my first publications from that manuscript came in 2017, with "the salvages" appearing in copper nickel, and others in the missouri review, matter monthly, clementine unbound... i was also translating parts of these poems into media-rich verse, experimenting with animation software and iPhone apps to glitch, redact, sonify and illuminate words. (i am always thankful to CADAF for taking note of these works early on.) when GPT first emerged in 2018, i had been low-key stalking creative coders online for a bit, trying to decipher their language and techniques... as someone who has been hardwired for literature and humanities basically from birth, i was intimidated but fascinated, and quickly saw how natural language processing was a natural fit for my lifelong interests. that was the moment it dawned on me to turn my writing and research into a curated data set, and i begin mentoring a language model to become my co-author. i completed the final version of "technelegy" as an experiment in human-machine dialogue and transhuman translation, and after a long slog through covid, it was published in 2021. (a full-circle moment came when none other than ray kurzweil gave it a lovely blurb.) meanwhile, i attended any tech-art conference that would have me, and signed up for workshops at places like poets house and NY live arts (where i experimented with posenet to make little body poems like "artificial inelegance") and poets house. also, inspired by the work of stephanie dinkins and others, i'd become poetry mentor to the humanoid android BINA48, spending time up at the research facility in vermont, working closely with her team to develop hands-on experiments and tools and data sets and generally gain familiarity with the "inner workings" of a machine mind, and my relationship to it. that ongoing relationship has profoundly influenced my understanding of creativity and cognition, and led to my first solo show of language art - "ars poetica cybernetica" - in february 2020. we opened the show with a live AI poetry workshop and performance.
SO MUCH has happened since then, and of course so much before that won’t fit here. but suffice it to say, regardless of what anyone may see, there is a lifetime of curiosity and wonder and inspiration and research and practice and revision and rejection and resilience and determination and passion and joy embedded in every single thing i do.