Generator (Paperback)

In Generator, poet, musician and performance artist Ian Goodman explores the parameters of bardic cybernetics and robot love. Morphing forms of digital interface with traditional poetic structures, Goodman creates new media out of archaic lyric artifacts. Generator invites us to see the world through the reality-twisted lens of Goodman's eye-pod goggle. The result is a poetics of sensitive observation for the seriously insane. Pretend robots develop fatal crushes on novella-collaborators through lavalife.com, pretend poets seduce potential lovers by imagining poetry out of existence, seagulls suffer from jet-fuel envy, and a comet-girl's sneeze sends "a tsunami/ of dust bunnies towards Mercury." Whether generating interplanetary ballads, cyber chat-room conversation poems or spam-filtered versions of Pale Fire, Goodman's fearless approach to formal experimentation makes the world strange for us again. Ian Goodman is the 21st century's answer to the Martian school of poetry.