Poems are machines + evolution = the bliss of redundancy

I am working some things out. Consider the below a draft, please. I mean it all, very hard, but of course I also mean several other things, with equal force. I am bringing quotes and metaphors together to run a conceptual blend.

Williams:

A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.

Ostashevsky on Kharms:

Kharms was into found objects, and at one point assembled a huge metallic thingamajig in his room. “What is this?” asked an astounded visitor. “A machine.” “What kind of a machine?” “No kind. Just a machine.” “But where did you get it?” “I put it together myself!” “But what does it do?” “Nothing.” “Then why do you have it?” “I just wanted a machine in my room.”

Daniel Dennett quoting Beverly MacKenzie on Darwin:

“In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin’s meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.”

Williams was right. A poem is a machine. Williams was wrong. The whole machine is redundant.

So am I, thank goodness.

The funny and amazing thing, though, is that I do not feel redundant when I am building my machines. Or if I do, the redundancy is the most exhilarating feeling I experience. (It feels something like "I don't have to be here! I don't have to be here!" repeated until I return.) I am extremely happy to climb as close to Absolute Ignorance as I can get.

The poem is a side-effect, just like me. I am a side-effect of my genes. (I shouldn’t say my genes. The genes. This is the genes talking: Heather is our side-effect.)

I am temporary, frivolous, totally unnecessary. But I don’t usually feel that way, which to me is funny and interesting.

I have been trying to discover why it is that I am not writing conceptual poetry. I mean, I agree with rather a lot of what Kenneth Goldsmith has to say: “Writers don’t need to write anything more. They just need to manage the language that already exists.”

Well, of course we don’t “need” to write anything more. We never did.

The “need” I feel to write “creatively” does not have much to do with how the poem is received in the world. It’s an addiction to the exhilarating bliss of redundancy and the discovery of imaginary relations between words.

Perhaps Goldsmith achieves that feeling in the flash of conception, and maybe Nada Gordon gets that feeling in the adhering of disparate voices. I like those ways too. I “believe” in them. But what I really love, in a deeply serious, meaningless way, is to run into my brain with my eyes closed and perform a kind of smash and grab and see what comes out of that. The language isn’t “mine” any more than that of The New York Times, but I don’t think that really matters.

The events that stem from that—the “finished” poem, the world's receipt of the poem, the potential response from other poets and my response to them—are consequences, but that does not make them the goal of the endeavor. I know the goal of the endeavor does not exist. The world and poems will evolve, but the chance of my memes infecting other consciousnesses is small and somewhat happenstance.

All of this is the happy mess of evolution and cultural plasticity. I am one part of a machine that I have no idea how to make. I am one of the ants in Aunt Hillary. And my wonderful, dumb, weird, utterly common consciousness will continue to believe it is special. And my side effects and waste and by-products will continue to delight me, useless and redundant as they are.