Information Sonnet (Poem by Clara B. Jones)

Information Sonnet*

for Claude E. Shannon

1. p log p= 0

2. "If you can control information you can control people."

3. “*$$< ;<:^=]-{-#* <$^{ #$] _\{] 5-=5\!;]^ -#&$=@;]-$#, -] %^#^]=;]^{ ](^ %\3!-5 @-#< 6-](

<^{-=^{ ;#< 3^!-^&{.”**

4. You are dissatisfied with objective reality but are not opposed to the status quo.

5. Identity is heterogeneous and complex.

6. Entomologists catch red flies for the museum in Chad where scientists study fossils fixed in amber—xanthous as toxic foam.

7. I(X; Y)= H(X) – H(X|Y)

8. Her bruise is the color of the space between your toe and your red sock.

9. "Information is only useful when it can be understood."

10. Everything depends on red socks.

11. If you were an Afrobot I couldn't take you home.

12. Transmitter--(x)--> (noisy) Channel--(y)--> Receiver

13. It is easier to turn genes on than to turn genes off.

14. W= K log m

*First published in the online journal, Otoliths [AU], 2018

**“Good advertising does not just circulate information, it penetrates the public mind with desires and beliefs.”

Doritos (Grid Poem by Clara B. Jones)

Doritos®

for Margo Emm*

1.

Andira is the most beautiful of all beautiful trees.	Experience the before and after of Doritos®.	Make Art, not pizza.
The brightest minds are not yet born.	“The Chinese Century is well underway.”**	Modern states maximize hypersurveillance.
Kanye argued the case against gender equality.	3³ + 4³ + 5³= 6³	Afrobots act in their own self-interest.
China is patient; Congo is bankrupt.	French art de vivre isn't everything.	It's your bedroom; you make the rules.
Physicians are over-rated, but dentists don't care.	In Detroit, past, present, and future converge.	If, rb-c>0, then, I might like you.

2.

To contest the binary is a political act because they are not class-identified since they live in Cleveland but wear designer clothes, driving a used Benz® down Front Street going to visit their lover in Akron where the City Council passed an ordinance decreeing all homeowners to buy at least one non-binary Afrobot from Brazil where macaw vocalizations filter through wet leaves, their raspy staccatos and showy displays overhead, sounds infusing darkness between canopy and soil where hermaphrodite earthworms live bisexual lives as soil engineers for microbes and rhizomes and mycorrhizae with no sex lives like revolutionaries in solitary confinement revising theories of profit and loss as tools of oppression and alienation in Braverman's terms. The Amazon sang Love me forever—but, they are programmed by wet synapses, their persona now stabilized, their life a terra incognita of radical outcomes.

*Photograph
**The Economist, October 27^th-November 2^nd, 2018

The Sand Pit (Grid Poem by Clara B. Jones)

The Sand Pit

for Mary Thomas

She bought a pseudroid at auction in Ithaca while Z4F1 waited in the wings.	Neuromorphic Emulation is bound to change the way we think about fashion.	A network is like an ecosystem because it can collapse.
Post-gender bots are selling like hot cakes.	Botness is the new Pinot Noir.	Peter Scholze described “perfectoid spaces” to a group of replicants.
Joe said “machine envy” is the next big thing.	Fembots live in yellow houses while electric cars are sold in Utah.	There is nothing more durable than Technographic Art.
By 2040, the Post-Human will dominate Psychology.	Science is over-rated since all truth is subject to the will of mathematics.	Synths are retooling Nature throughout the Free World.
New Hampshire is the Ubergraph for all red states.	Brooktondale is the most quiet town within twelve miles of Cayuga.	Post-Racial music is Kanye's new craze.

2.

Fundamentally, you want to change your view of Fondazione Prada since the art of pannini is symbolized by Settis' "Serial Classic" depicting a stolid cyborg in Greek pose in the manner of

a god about to enter a temple or a marketplace, receiving grateful sycophants, slaves to myth

and antiquity. Everything depends on cats stalking mice at dusk along the pathway to Cayuga crowded with students marching to Buffalo Street for theater and myth like synths take their place

beside humans, and devices advise the Thought Council—powerful as Helen's face. The young always bow to Beauty though the old favor gold and fame, knowing that their lives depend

on wine and boiled eggs served by servants imported from Chad on ships built in Spain after

the war, before Celant ran the gallery in Ithaca. It was foolish to think that the Thought

Council curated the show, but the Lanthanum sculpture made you obsessed with grotesque objects and furry pets.

Rules Of Art (Poem by Clara B. Jones)

Rules Of Art

for Dalton Anthony Jones


Sol Lewitt: "If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature."

Morgan Parker: “What does it mean to be at once upheld and at the same time continually made to feel less than?”

Louise Nevelson: “Different people have different memories.... Some have memories for words, some for action—mine happens to be for form.”

Frank Stella: “It's art, or it wants to be art, or it asked to be considered as art, and therefore the terms we have for discussing art are probably good enough.”

Doris Rita Alphonso: “[Christine Delphy] criticizes feminists and others who challenge sex as a natural category and yet maintain the distinctions between masculine and feminine as a necessary cultural construct.”

Claudia Rankine: “Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.”

Helen Vendler: “I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse.”

Jennifer Hansen: “Each subject ought to be free, argues [Luce] Irigaray, to pursue the unique possibilities of his or her subjective identity in ways that do not subordinate their differences to a hierarchical, patriarchal economy.”

Sol LeWitt: "Perception is subjective."

Mel Bochner: "What has been generally neglected is a concern with the object of art in

terms of its own material individuality--the thing itself."

Gertrude Stein: “Afrobots make better pets than cats but hiss like snakes.”

Alice (Poem by Clara B. Jones)

Alice

for Robin (Asheville, 2015-2016)

You are a radical poet in love with a

transgender rap star who speaks Russian and

sings patriotic songs about Putin's good

looks--decompensating like silt sliding down

McKinley or bones decaying in the Sahel.

If you don't do something now you'll never

be the same again unless your pets run away

or Paul Beatty wins another prize though you

ate lobster on the beach where your cousin

brought a kilo that she shared with Richard's

wife whose puppy ran in Lagrangian move-

ments around the fire. You're as troubled as my

nephew Alice whose husband studied ants in

Sudan before the revolution changed every-

thing, and his thesis was a referendum on

animal rights when another case of hack-

ing proved his theory about the American way.