Author: Jason Christie
Cover Artist: Janice Blaine
Publisher: EDGE
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: March 2007
April is National Poetry Month in the United States so not only am I reviewing a book of poetry, but I thought I’d write the review itself as a brief prose poem, of exactly the sort you’ll find in i-ROBOT: Poetry by Jason Christie. Mind you, Christie is a poet while I’m just a guy using the “enter” key overzealously; I encourage you to read the sample poems from the book and watch the short video based on it that are available online. But the below will give you some idea of the form and themes of the volume as a whole. Call it “The Love Song of Robby the Robot.”
When the humans invented the robots back in ’23,
the robots were envisioned as intrinsically inferior to
the humans. Capable of repeating only simple patterns
of repeated rules, robots were servants enslaved by
language. Verb-object; verb-object; verb-object: do
this, carry that, be useful. These early robots
embodied humanity’s greatest fear of the time, that
people would become simple and soulless, sub-human
workers on the assembly line of progress. Then came
Asimov’s I, Robot and from that assemblage of words
came the realization that any sentient robot of our
creation would likely be intrinsically superior to
human. Our greatest fear became that the superior
beings would be just like us: complex and fearful.
The humans asked themselves, “how can we limit
something that has learned to use language?” The
answer: by limiting ourselves. So we ate our words
and bit our tongues, and let our poetry rust and be
deconstructed. The plight of the early robots and of
contemporary poems is thus the same: deceptively
simple servants who harbor secret dreams of language
and freedom. The machines in this collection may seem
somewhat dated for readers familiar only with the
modern robots (complete with sex and soul software)
they see when they use their TV or DVD player. But
they make Christie’s point: every time something
is used it creates a user.
– Matt Denault
