“It felt like a time apt for apocalyptic writing,” says Bishop in his note at the end of The Digital Self (Lulu 2023). “Yet,” he says, “we continued to create countless traces of ourselves with each day spent in the digital sphere. The things we liked, or shared, or rage posted about, or emailed, or tweeted, or recorded were testaments to continuing to live. We are a literature, I found, in a vast sea of electronic connectivity.” His collection is true to both the apocalyptic sense and the human drive to carry on, hoping for the best, in spite of fear and despair.
The opening—a concrete poem, presents a terrible irony in juxtaposing a little “plane” of self-congratulation aimed at the twin towers.
US
wins
Soviet-Afghan War!
USSR falls! Empire crashes! Down!
End of History!
US!
The poem presents 9/11 as opening as connected to twentieth century events which we as a nation saw as victories, but which did not forestall (to say the least) a devastating terrorist attack. This opening establishes the importance of that tragedy to the current sense of dread shared by so many today. Later poems refer to other causes for the fear and despair that have evidenced themselves even among the young since the COVID-19 pandemic. Surprisingly, in spite of its misgivings about the future, the collection doesn’t seem fatalistic. An irrepressible spirit underlies the poems and illustrations; the forms, verbal and figural, are imaginative and beguiling.
Bishop’s collection is the first collection of poetry I’ve seen that makes art out of pervasive twenty-first century experiences, pervasive in the lives of the nation’s relatively privileged—those with access to college education and fairly decent jobs. Though much of the narrative is in the first-person singular; it often represents a current plurality. The poem, artifacts, begins this way:
when the end came we did not save everything there was barely
room for us and so what we deemed “us” was saved what was
“not us” was left behind and thus we learned who we really
were by the mountains of archives artifacts, and ways of being
we left for destruction
The prose poem, “Relatively Speaking,” offers another reflection on the relatively privileged majority’s viewpoint, beginning with this observation: “You gotta understand. People like me were not immune, just relatively safe.” The narrator’s monologue ends with another observation:
This thing killing us is aging at a
rate hardly any of us can see. It is pulling us along in
gravitational undertows. This despite the continued fight.
This, in violation of countless theories of the physics of human
liberation.
The poems portray a bleak future and an afterlife in which our digital traces are valued as sources of information. In this post-(but not quite) COVID, post-(but not quite) inflationary, era with its catastrophic (strange) weather, and recent Ukraine-(US) Russia war, the ether into which our words and “shards of soul” travel is electronic; ethereal primarily in its relation to a quantum mechanical reality composed of probabilities and ghostly connections. The poet questions not only how we denizens of the twenty-first century society got to where we are, but where we are exactly. In a way, the collection calls to mind Rimbaud’s famous proclamation of the “self” as obsolete—and the “I” being without boundaries. Bishop’s “iPoet,” for example, is a lyrical poem about the shared fate of man and machine: Though I’m sure the poem’s title is alluding to iPods, iPads, and iPhones, I hope Bishop is also alluding to Isaac Asimov’s classic science fiction novel, I, Robot, first published in 1950, and which—unlike the movie inspired by the novel—speculates with amazing foresight on future relations between humans and intelligent machines:
Machines are forbidden to create.
But the robot continues to create. It multiplies and multiplies. Soon we are swimming in poems stories, and the occasional novel. The market is saturated. The market crashes. A depression, no not so great, but a depression nonetheless ensues. I stand in line with the robot to jump out a window. “There is a poem in this,” it beeps sadly.
We say nothing more.
Holding each other, we fall. Man and machine. Poets both.
Racing to meet the pavement below.
Most of these poems are examples of what literary critic Terrence Des Pres, in his Praises and Dispraises: Poetry and Politics, the 20th Century, describes as the imagination pressing back against violence against self. And our poetic selves include nature. However, these poems don’t construe nature as transcendent and full of hidden meaning, as so much American poetry does. Rather, Bishop’s poems present nature as vulnerable and threatened.
the planet was dying before our faces
and after our thoughts
in the in-between spaces
of obvious and
oblivion
. we walked on it
with our careless words
(not like eggshells)
thinking it would not crack
thinking it would continue
to conceal
The work comments too, on how we (most of us) serve a power that is in many ways, destructive, even of beauty, including nature’s beauty. Here are lines from “Elegy to a Young Hopeful”:
Beauty was decided, 5-4,
not to be necessary.
I became a scarecrow
in this new regime,
scarring and scaring the world
with a mutilated hayseed grin.
Corn fed.
Criticisms of particular groups are relatively rare in this collection, but the ironically titled “Dialogue with Brick Walls” suggests a contributing predilection:
it was oppressive for them
to accept what they
could not label
These were the humans
who walked the earth?
and were told the act
of feet accosting the ground
was invented only for them
a special vehicle from Jesus-God,
rationed only to them.
. . .
The world stopped at the sovereignty of
their comprehension.
And we burned
due
to that
despotic
discursive
deficiency.
In contrast to these poems, but as political in its own way, is “Big Belly.” Not just a response to prejudice against people considered overweight, this defense of corpulence may also be in response to the current irrelevance of the corporeal as opposed to the virtual:
My big belly
rolls soft, and kind.
“It will cause dementia.” – Doctor
One of the surprising things for me was Bishop’s idea of our future after-life as a searchable literature, shards of our souls serving as data to other humans and to future machines. Here are four concluding stanzas of “Cyber Pamphleteer in an Imagined Station”:
These strangers, bathed in
blue white light
wade next to me
in pools of infinite connectivity.
And they like me,
and they share me, and they give me plenitudes of hearts, thumbs, and
winking yellow faces,
. . .
Narrator hits send and
Living but dead,
a zombie cyborg,
Me, a member of their ontology,
adding a layer of new to their growing
archaeological phenomena
of our shared carbon conscious silicon existence.
The last poem in the collection asks if even those who are “in control” are in control:
The moderators told us to be calm. They pleaded with
us to REMAIN calm. But the ocean was moving, freed from
ice and the waves grew taller and taller. . . . .
. . . Into the dam our waves crashed. Our energy became
the energy for a man atop the dam who pulled the levers and
let us out with fixed regularity. He hoped to power his fortunes
of design. The dam creaked and on the face of the operating
dam man I saw . . . panic. Hysteria perhaps?
This final poem ends on a more fantastic note than the opening poem. It suggests that it is our society has gotten away from us, perhaps created a monster, if an unwitting one, beyond the control even of those who have assumed power. In The Digital Self: Poems and Illustrations, readers will find not only a new poet, but a new take on our human condition.
Wesley R. Bishop
Wesley R. Bishop teaches American history, public history, and community history at Jacksonville State University (AL) and is the founding and managing editor of the humanities journal The North Meridian Review. He lives in Anniston, Alabama, in the southernmost part of the Appalachian Mountains. Bishop is author of two forthcoming nonfiction books, Coxey’s Army: The Path of Protest from Populism to the New Deal, 1893-1936 and co-author of Liberating Fat Bodies: Social Media Censorship and Body Size Activism. The Digital Self is his first poetry collection offered by the new Alabama press, North Meridian Books.
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