A further experiment with the photo I call Readymade: In Advance of Jasper Johns’ Broken Arm (seen below). I upload the photo to Chat. It doesn’t quite seem to know what it’s looking at in a real-world context. It suggests the photo “appears to depict a flag-based readymade artwork, possibly a found-object American flag piece.” So it jumps right to the art of the image, which can be construed as uncannily Bretonian, perhaps. Without further clarifying the uploaded image, I ask Chat to write a short poem about it in the style of Snyder, Welch, Creeley (per the previous post), Waldman, Corso and Kandel, in that order. These are chosen off the top of my head, though Welch and Kandel are major “characters” in Death Palette, hence their natural, or unnatural, inclusion; the rest are name-dropped here and there in various post-human conversations. (Humanities PhDs in a literary apocalypse, they can’t help it.)

Below, the best, or least objectionable stanza, in my opinion, from all the poems but for Creeley’s, which is just terrible, not nearly as good as the previous Chat/Creeley effort, hence it didn’t make the cut. These stanzas are simply stacked in the order in which they were ordered, lineation and punctuation unchanged. I’d like to think they cohere cadaver-exquisitely.

This is not empire. 
This is what clings 
when the wind forgets to move. 

O lost republic! — 
you flap in dry sun, 
torn like a bootlace 
nailed 
to the last 
fencepost. 

O flag O rag O star-snatched skin! 
you whisper in glyphs of threadbare omen 
you mouth the wind like a half-chant 
like a rusted bell in a dry nation’s throat 

red like lipstick on a corpse 
white like the moon’s forgotten tooth 
blue like a sailor’s last joke! 

I offer my thighs to the dirt 
my breath to the torn blue 
my vow to the nothing behind stars 

Chat doesn’t just spit out each poem in a second flat, it also characterizes the poet in a few choice words in order to justify the tone of the poem. Lenore Kandel, for example, offers a “radiant, erotic-mystic style, blending the image’s frailty and symbolism with transcendence, body-consciousness, and fierce inner seeing.” Well, OK! Sounds promising! But here’s the peculiarly awful Kandel poem sans last stanza:

this flag is a body —
singed silk / whisper-lipped / open to sky

its stripes are breath lines
across a chest that has stopped reciting the pledge

I see it—
not as emblem,
but as lover’s skin —
held too long in the sun
& kissed by wind as prayer

what nation is this
that bleeds fabric?
that weeps red from its ribs?

Indeed, what nation is this that bleeds fabric? The one that doesn’t sew any clothes! I checked Chat on that, of course: “Just ~3% of apparel sold in the U.S. today is actually made domestically—down from over 50% in the 1980s.” But wait! What about American flags? Surely they’re not made in, like, China? “The U.S. imports millions of flags each year—about 99.5% in 2017 came from China.” Oh, God, no! “However, retail and consumer flags are far more likely to be made domestically. Around 94% of flags sold in the U.S. are manufactured here. Formerly, federal policy allowed flags with just 50% domestic materials, but as of July 2024, the All‑American Flag Act requires 100% U.S.-made flags for federal use. Be aware: federal flags are now required to be 100% U.S.-made—but retail flags aren’t legally required, so check labels.”

Every label is whispering in glyphs of threadbare omen, after all.