Exegesis

This generative poetry bot was created by Allie Solomon in partnership with the clever minds of the Voiceworks Online editorial team.

It was inspired by Tristan Tzara's 1920 poem, ‘To make a Dadaist Poem’, in which readers are instructed to cut up a newspaper article to create poetry from the fragmented history of their present. Within ‘Unprecedented Press’, the newspaper items being cut up are daily headlines from The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Daily Telegraph between 1st–30th June this year. By swapping Tzara’s 1920 dissection of physical newspapers with a digitised version more suited to 2020, readers can reflect on the nature of global news, truth, and their engagement with both from the comfort of their smartphones.

Central to Tzara’s poem is the recognition that language – as the conduit through which all meaning, law, reason, and beliefs are communicated – can be liberated through its destruction and fragmentation (Russel 2012). Within ‘Unprecedented Press’ this is achieved by ‘cutting up’ the news (and, by extension, truth and reality) to generate infinite new, unexpected reports and alternate histories.

Although the reports ‘Unprecedented Press’ can create are seemingly infinite, they are limited to represent scenarios taken from the past newspaper realities encoded within them; a phenomenon termed ‘canned chance’ by Dadaist artist, Marcel Duchamp (1963). This limitation prompts consideration of their absurdity, as it is only through the overt jumbling of words that we notice how divisive and bigoted newspaper language can be.

By viewing an individual’s interaction with generative poetry as the poetry itself, meaning can be found in the chance generation of recognisable phrases and tropes (both negative and positive) as opposed to the actual poetry generated. Originally proposed by Dadaist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, finding meaning through the subversion of authorial and readerly roles suggests “chance is both the precondition for poetry’s existence and that which poetry strives to transcend,” (James 2012).

Because of this, ‘Unprecedented Press’ exists in the poetic and historical realms of the past, present and (possible but improbable) future of Australian news media, and hopes to foster considered reflection over each aspect.



Alessandra Solomon (24) is a recent Creative Writing grad still trying to figure it all out. Her writing tends to focus on ideas surrounding chance, love and truth, and she is a big fan of exploring them through experimental forms. She sometimes posts on her book review Instagram @bookbitch__ where she stalks other writers.



References

Duchamp, M., 1963, ‘I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics’, interview with Roberts, F., ARTnews, October, accessed 8/11/20,

James, A., 2012, ‘Aleatory Poetics’, in Greene, R., Cushman, S., Cavanagh, C., Ramazani, J., & Rouzer, P. (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 3rd edn., Princeton University Press, New Jersey, pp. 31-34

Russel, C., 2012, ‘Dada’, in Greene, R., Cushman, S., Cavanagh, C., Ramazani, J., & Rouzer, P. (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 3rd edn., Princeton University Press, New Jersey, pp. 333-335

Tzara, T., 2016, ‘To Make a Dadaist Poem’, Stansberry, D. trans., On Feeble Love and Bitter Love: Dada Manifesto, Molotov Editions, San Francisco, p. 8