i-ROBOT Poetry

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Experimental poetry and science fiction actually go together quite well,
but perhaps never as seamlessly as in Jason Christie’s i-ROBOT. It is
“a poem in nodes,” “a serial from instances,” a kind of story
with only a hidden narrative. The book offers a sequence of parodic
takes on contemporary culture, and a witty, subversive commentary on
both life and literature. Christie takes as a given that we are already
in a robot world, adding only the possibility that all machines will
soon be upgraded with language, minds, and personalities. He then offers
glimpses of the kind of world in which they and we would interact.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this series of commentaries,
tales, and epigrams is the way Christie is able to combine
science-fiction imagery and poetic concerns with language and rhetoric.
“The poem splits into the parts of a robot, open arms and runs guns
into a congested valley of nouns, all the verbs to bravo tango and robot
agents on red alert. At this point a robot climbed into the sentence and
drove the noun home.” But he also insists that the interchange between
human and robot (with cyborgs and “auggies included) will have led to
moments of metal sentiment: “The saddest robot in the world works at
the robot ossuary, in the book, where it collects the pieces, the scraps
of all the other robots that end up there. It is an ancient robot from
before the language, memory and gender updates. It works in silence,
except its own whirrs and clanks, since there is nobody to oil its
joints. Rumour has it, that this robot builds companions from the bones,
writes poems.”

What with the robotic parodies of poems from Tennyson’s “The Charge
of the Light Brigade” to Ginsberg’s “Howl,” such sharp upgraded
proverbs as “It is a poor robot that blames its programming,” and
little documentary moments like the first robot wedding, Christie has
compiled a suitably challenging text for our times. i-ROBOT will easily
satisfy readers of sci-fi and contemporary innovative poetry.