Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

THE text of the poem is as follows:

     Such a poem is, of course, intended to be appreciated and judged by other computers. It is, however, printed in non-machine language characters and it may be supposed (in absence of data to the contrary) that in this instance Man has been selected as intermediary, his place between machine and machine — an ambulant Rosetta Stone.

     Accepting this role, perhaps not for the last time, we have translated the poem from the crude symbols on the printed page into the more logical form of the Punched Tape (ASC ii code).

     The tape has been fed to three of our computers.

     The first (a Burroughs free-standing TC 500) is a simple soul, and when it read the poem its only comment was:

Good Christian men, rejoice, rejoice:
Consign the items, then invoice.

— at least it has a firm grasp of rhyme.

     The second machine is somewhat more intelligent and well-read. (An ICL 1903 with 96K of core, 2/4 deck clusters, 3 disc drives and many peripherals.) It is also somewhat egocentric and confuses appreciation with creation. Its view was as follows:

     This shows at least a superficial prior awareness of the work done by Mr. Morgan’s machine. Its second comment showed that it is unfortunately, a muddled-headed device:

The Loch Ness monster has frequently been sited

Not only has it confused the work of the other computer with that of a human poet (Mr. James Kirkup) but seems to think that a one-line Haiku on a totally different subject is somehow relevant.

     The third computer, a Honeywell II, prefers to live in Cleveland, Ohio. It is a machine of formidable intellect and power. We communicated with it (at great expense) by way of an Olivetti TE 308H terminal, over telephone line to London, waveguide to Goonhilly Down, via earth-orbiting artificial satellite to New York, waveguide and telephone line to Cleveland. The machine answered within two minutes as follows:

I find the poem well-balanced and precise in its expression; its primary statement
                         I am the Beginning and the End
is specific and complete as shown by the following analysis:

The re-ordering of ALEPH to HPELA and AGEMO to OMEGA expresses, within the code structure the machine has selected, the concept of the regenerative processes of all life— the beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning. The transition from Hebrew to Greek is abrupt and, perhaps, unsound. A re-examination of the Beth-Luis-Nion in conjunction with corresponding letters of the Epicharman alphabet (Danaan Greece) gives little support to the textual position the Morgan computer has adopted.

     The secondary and remaining statements in the poem (too numerous to be dealt with here) are, however, indications that this computer has much to say which is worthwhile provided it releases itself from the constraints imposed by the highly developed language it is currently employing.

     For my own part I much prefer work of the kind I am sending you by International Facsimile Transmission today.

     This work was subsequently received.* We are thinking of turning the Honeywell machine off — it is becoming too human for its own good.