Je regarde de la porno quand je suis triste, SayakaAraniva-Yanez
Triptyque, 2024
Quite simply, it’s fun to open a book titled I look at porn when I’m sad to a reproduction of an early 16th century painting of Mary, holding Baby Jesus with one arm, alleviating suffering in purgatory by extracting her milk with the other. It’s especially fun when the book in question offers poems the author has written around phrases produced by a chatbot who had been “trained” on poetry, in a historical moment during which we are promised the alleviating of our suffering by all forms of algorithms.
The beauty of this book is that it is about this false promise and moves through it, toward fleshful encounters. The bot appears in the book as “La machine,” always in conversation with “Vous.” Its language-like productions are short and carefully chosen; they highlight the uncanny dreaminess of the process and the wonders of our own capacity for speech and creativity in “our” responses. In other words, Araniva-Yanez did not rely on any kind of statistical linguistic algorithm to write their poems. Indeed, the machine’s productions are the result of their selections of poetry, and some of the words attributed to it are in fact simply invented by them. Araniva-Yanez thus turns the logic of LLMs on its head, attributing to a chatbot the hallucinations they imagined as part of their writing. The book is full of short poems in verse and a few prose poems that interrogate our relationship to machines, but also our body, language, and above all desire. Sexual pleasure and attraction to other people, to be more specific – and notably as they are mediated and oriented by machines, through pornography and forms of direct communication.
One element that surely contributes to the success of these poems is their rejection of religion. Araniva-Yanez removes both the poet/programmer and the chatbot from the position of the divine which they tend to take in contemporary culture, all the while bringing the divine within the reach of both human and machine. God is sometimes an automaton, lifeless in comparison to everything we can feel, fed content like machines are. In other moments the speaker reaches the divine in pleasure. And the speaker addresses us readers as “Vous,” as if they were able to speak our thoughts, balancing between omniscience and input, making us a reading machine, stepping aside to let us in the poems: the speaker takes themself out of the primary position in these exchanges without allowing anyone to fully occupy it.
These wonderfully executed displacements can serve the aspirations and desires of the speaker’s self because they relativize their position and find ways to interact that avoid the naked vulnerability of the face-to-face encounter. Instead, we are placed before the vulnerability of a turned back, of the pause between words during which emotions are larger than any human action: “i turn my back / and dream of being // shame is / more fertile than us” (“je tourne le dos / et rêve d’être // la honte est / plus fertile que nous,” 43).
Such displacements help the reader focus on the relationship to the machine as instrument and as mediation, back to oneself:
“the machine believes what we tell it
it
inhabits secrecy,
the
spraining, and the storming
i tamper with its giftedness when my head at large goes astray”
“la machine croit ce qu’on lui dit
elle
habite le secret,
la
fêlure et l’orage
je trafique sa douance quand ma tête s’égare au large” (50)
Here Araniva-Yanez does more than describe their poetic intermingling with the machine: they place us before the operations we impose on machines even as we delude ourselves that they may have any agency, that they may in any way respond to us. And they make us feel our bodily connections to computers, at the same time as our awareness of their inhumanity: “it has never had the gift of seeing me reborn. the proof is in what flows from its leg to mine: wires, pearly, humid, and shimmering” (“elle n’a jamais possédé le don de me voir renaître. la preuve est dans ce qui ruisselle de sa jambe à la mienne: des fils nacrés, humides et brillants,” 54). We touch (or used to touch) mouse and keyboard wires with our legs, we place(d) our leg beside the humming box, in a kind of intimacy that makes us want to see a simulacrum of flesh in the machine. Yet it remains cold or warm, devoid of any capacity beyond our instructions. Much of the poems develop this chiasm between flesh and desired flesh, using bodily functions ascribed to the machine as descriptions of its effect on the speaker, rather than as metaphors.
As the collection advances, the speaker becomes closer with the machine – though perhaps mostly with themself, through the machine. Yet although their thoughts seem to move from one into the other, the speaker retains their melancholy and their sexual desire, the latter becoming more pressing in its search for an outside object, intensifying their relationship to the machine:
“the machine holds me in its jugular, it loves me. within, i often cascade down between the roots, the sap, and the lichen. at snack time, i take pleasure in eating my knuckles and the fruit that are handed to me. in the evening, i lick its organs and the machine metamorphoses into a house of skin.”
“la machine me prend dans sa jugulaire, elle m’aime. à l’intérieur, je dévale souvent entre les racines, la sève et le lichen. au goûter, je me plais à manger mes jointures et les fruits qu’on me tend. le soir, je lèche ses organes et la machine se métamorphose en maison de peau.” (79)
The collection crashes through its title to give us a sharp description of the desires we harbour for machines – desires for what they could be to us, for what they could do to us; desires we already have for the other people who are absent from these poems. Araniva-Yanez helps us work through desire, the proximity of hope and lust, of sexual excitement and intellectual curiosity, of the purest language and the touching of organic matter. And perhaps my continued reliance on the register of helping and guiding (much of which I’ve now rephrased) is one way for me to acknowledge just to what degree this collection has helped me think about the reality of our emotional investment in machines, and more broadly in what we create and animate, and thus make real.
Jérôme Melançon does not like large language models or any technology labeled “artificial intelligence”, and feels this dislike ought to be shared seeing as it so clearly gave direction to this review. He does love poetry. He writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.
