Asheville Fringe Arts Festival: Artificial Poetry Cabaret
If ChatGPT ever achieves sentience, it’s going to wonder why the hell it was asked to write a poem that began with the proud exclamation, “I celebrate my tits.”
Such a panegyric was in fact the only piece of computer-generated poetry presented at Artificial Poetry Cabaret, the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival offering of the locally based Poetry Cabaret Collective. The hour-long performance at Citizen Vinyl aimed instead to interrogate and question the powers of the machine — to bear “the spirit of rebellious humanity to the fore in this age of post-human treachery,” in the words of the collective.
The performers here — poets Justin William Evans, Caleb Beissert, Kevin Evans, Lau Magie, and Michael Coyle, along with Aaron Price providing live keyboard accompaniment — structured their show as a collection of thematically related readings, bookended by two chaotic cacophonies in which all of the poets spoke at once. Those intro/outro sequences certainly gave the impression of data overload, with many channels of words flashing by and the ear only able to grasp fragments of meaning.
There were also bits of performance art intermingled throughout. At one point, the audience was handed cards with snappy reminders of pre-digital life, like “I used to remember phone numbers,” and a burlesque sequence presented Magie as an awakening AI. But the bulk of the evening was poetry, delivered in a generally earnest slam-style register.
Clearly, the poets are not techno-optimists. But given the theme, I was surprised by how little use of technology they made (although one particularly creative sequence had Evans bouncing his recitation off a recording of himself). The overall mood was one of dissolution; the stage became littered with torn paper as the poets threw completed pages to the ground, replete with evocative phrases like “Pompeii-ed in the industrial snow” and “I’m so exhausted by the miracles in my living room.”
It was far from easy listening, and by the end of the show I felt myself growing somewhat numb to the relentless parade of urgent proclamation. Perhaps that was part of the intended effect. But by the show’s finale, in which the poets marched from the venue and into the night while still shouting their technological warnings, I was ready to walk out quickly myself.
(Photo courtesy of Poetry Cabaret)
