11-21-2014, 06:57 AM
I have wanted to comment on this for a long while since your 'explanation', but I feared I would write an dissertation or something, and I hardly sleep as it is. And to be sure, whatever the problems I have with this (of which there are many), it has inspired me to think about it every day since you posted it, so, swings and roundabouts and all that.
Anyway and in short, I am sorry, but this is not a poem. At best, it is a work of conceptual art, and at worst it is a work of weak-concept conceptual art; and let's face it, the difference is usually minimal and one of degrees.
and just an aside, the real miracle would not be for a bug to land on the white space on the page, but rather that if it did your speculations about how one would react being entirely verified. And to be honest, this is this worst kind of pseudo-speculative philosophy, in as much as it appears unverifiable, whereas in reality one could perform this experiment on a subject (without them knowing, of course) and verify your claims. The fact is, I suppose (and this is me being pseudo-speculative, because I do not have the time nor patience to carry out the experiment) that the only person that this poem would affect, in the specific way you have described, is you.
By the way, I didn't mean this in a mean-spirited way. anything that inspires a bit of passion, which this certainly did, is always a positive, i suppose
Anyway and in short, I am sorry, but this is not a poem. At best, it is a work of conceptual art, and at worst it is a work of weak-concept conceptual art; and let's face it, the difference is usually minimal and one of degrees.
and just an aside, the real miracle would not be for a bug to land on the white space on the page, but rather that if it did your speculations about how one would react being entirely verified. And to be honest, this is this worst kind of pseudo-speculative philosophy, in as much as it appears unverifiable, whereas in reality one could perform this experiment on a subject (without them knowing, of course) and verify your claims. The fact is, I suppose (and this is me being pseudo-speculative, because I do not have the time nor patience to carry out the experiment) that the only person that this poem would affect, in the specific way you have described, is you.
By the way, I didn't mean this in a mean-spirited way. anything that inspires a bit of passion, which this certainly did, is always a positive, i suppose