It’s July 28. Something must be run through BTR to celebrate this hallowed occasion. I ask Chat for poets who have referenced Duchamp in their work, and foremost among the responses is Ron Padgett, who, it turns out, has a very short piece titled Prose Poem (On Marcel Duchamp). I’m not particularly familiar with Padgett, and I don’t have any of his work on hand, but this sounds like the ticket. Hey, Chat, can you just lay the poem on me? It’s very short, right? “Yes . . . it is very short, and it has appeared in full in multiple publicly available sources (including anthologies and academic discussions), so it falls within reasonable fair use for reproduction. Here is the complete poem: 

I want to be Marcel Duchamp. 
I want to be old and French and brilliant and have a long white goat’s beard and sit on a mountain top. 
I want to be Marcel Duchamp and contradict myself and make art that is not art and be happy doing it. 
I want to be Marcel Duchamp and never work and always be doing something. 
I want to be Marcel Duchamp and be respected and loved and left alone. 

Of course, is this really the complete poem, or the poem at all? Long white goat’s beard? What if Chat is hallucinating? It could’ve had spiked punch at a Bardo Pond party in Philly or something. All the better! But I check with Gemini and Claude to see if they’ll give me the poem, and they won’t give me squat, going on about copyright restrictions. Haven’t the LLMs scraped just about everything on the Web, and haven’t they done so largely without any regard for copyright law? Well, they contradict themselves, they contain multitudes. For our purposes, Chat’s version is the real thing. And so is this image Chat made via a very vague prompt that requested Duchamp blowing out the candles on his cake in a photo that somehow encapsulates the entire history of Dada and Surrealism.

Note the default advertising 10:10 on the clock, discovered in an earlier post. And compare that to two efforts made by Gemini, the second requiring some hand-holding, and we see how far Chat’s ahead of the game.

Is that supposed to be Bretonian hair? Thanks, Gem, now put your coat on, there’s a bus arriving in five minutes, check your soft clock. Now to the poem. We’re running it in French, Arabic (Romanized), Batak Toba, Cebuano, Dari, Estonian, and Faroese, most of these tongues chosen very fast, more or less semi-automatically, and notable for their relative obscurity—particularly Batak Toba (North Sumatra, Indonesia), Cebuano (an Austronesian language of the southern Philippines), Dari (a Persian variant spoken in Afghanistan), and Faroese (a North Germanic language spoken by roughly 69,000 Faroe Islanders).

And here it is, unchanged, as it emerged from Bing Translate, right down to the strange bits of punctuation:

I want to have Marcel Duchamp. I want him to be a charming scholar, with long white hair, tied up with soft wool and mountain heights. I want to have Marcel Duchamp and he is better than me and gives me nothing- and art, and he is also a witness and good. I want to have Marcel Duchamp and he is a very valuable and beloved individual, and he lets us in politics be at peace. 

In politics? Perhaps BTR is channeling . . . the disgraced former House infestee and brand new Federal incarceree George Santos? I check with Gemini to see if there’s any evidence that Duchamp had been referenced anywhere in recent American political history. Tommy Tuberville, perhaps? Uh, no, nothing pops out. But Gemini, before the bus arrives, wants to be helpful:

<Here’s why such a connection could be made, even if it hasn’t been widely articulated: 

Challenging Authenticity and Reality: Duchamp famously challenged the very definition of art and authorship with his “readymades” and the concept of the artist’s role. He blurred the lines between what is “real” art and what is merely a manufactured object presented as art. George Santos, on the other hand, presented a fabricated persona, a “readymade” politician built on demonstrable falsehoods about his education, career, and personal life. In both cases, there’s a profound questioning of authenticity and the constructed nature of reality (artistic for Duchamp, personal/political for Santos). 

“Anything Goes” Mentality (for better or worse): Duchamp’s work can be interpreted as an “anything goes” approach to art, pushing boundaries and rejecting traditional standards. While Duchamp’s aim was artistic liberation and intellectual provocation, Santos’s “anything goes” approach manifested in a disregard for truth and a seemingly boundless invention of biographical details. One could argue both, in their respective spheres, operated with a certain audacious indifference to established norms. 

The Spectacle and the Audience: Both Duchamp’s artistic interventions and Santos’s political performance relied on an audience’s reception and, in some cases, gullibility. Duchamp’s “Fountain,” for example, challenged the art world to accept a urinal as art. Santos challenged the political system and the electorate to accept his fantastical narrative. The “success” of both, in their own ways, depended on the audience’s willingness to engage with, and perhaps even be complicit in, the presented “fiction.” 

The “Anti-Hero” or Provocateur: Duchamp was an artistic provocateur, deliberately unsettling conventions. Santos, while not intentionally an “artist,” became a political provocateur through his sheer audacity and the extent of his fabrications, ultimately exposing vulnerabilities in vetting processes and public perception.> 

Gemini, is there any record of Duchamp bouncing checks in Brazil? Kidding! But a tip of the hat to Ron Padgett is in order. The poem in question is apparently in Great Balls of Fire, his 1969 book debut, which was hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “a sustained virtuoso performance, a staggering display of poetic forms and voices, a literary arsenal,” according to Gemini. I also learned, through a 2017 Times Sunday Routine piece, that Padgett is a Judge Judy freak, and the fact that the show is not on on Sundays forces him to watch football instead, but he keeps the sound off. Sensitive poetic ear, of course. And there’s this, which I learned only after I ran the BTR: Book-length collections of his own work have been translated into most of the expected European languages as well as, yes, Faroese! Interpenetration of all things!