“You gave me this task./ I want to give it back.” Zoë Hitzig’s poem “Greedy Algorithm” ends on this couplet, creating a neat rhythm that encapsulates the exchange between speaker and addressee. As the task is passed between the “you” and “I,” rhyme creates a mirror between them, a confrontation between the human and machine.
Zoë Hitzig’s second book of poems builds on her first collection, Mezzanine (Ecco 2020), and its poetic interrogations of systemic forces, interstitial spaces, and the artifacts of capitalism. Mezzanine explores referentiality and meaning-making in language, which Hitzig pushes further in Now Us Now’s play with linguistics and logic. Hitzig’s second book takes us to a more virtual world, a posthuman internet-scape which challenges our relationship with language and with each other.
In a series of poems titled after algorithms, Hitzig walks us through the steps of a formulaic search as if she is leading us on a quest for a holy grail. Titles of poems throughout the book reference various methods for programming a search: “Greedy Algorithm,” “Bounded Regret Algorithm,” “Zero Regret Algorithm,” “Gradient Descent Algorithm,” and “Simplex Algorithm.” Hitzig’s poems on these formulas capture something like a ghost in the machine; beneath the ostensible rationality of the algorithm lies the longing and mythologizing latent in any search or quest. Not Us Now tenderly teases out the emotional undercurrent behind the machine’s prioritization of efficiency, revealing such deeply human emotional drives as the desire to avoid unnecessary labor, to save time, to minimize regret, or to regret nothing. Consider how the task is introduced in “Greedy Algorithm,”
“Is this or is this not
what you tasked me with.
To play our every hand.
To replace each arrival with
the nearest destination.
To keep you in what may
still be called breath.”
The poem begins with questions delivered as statements, transforming an insistent inquiry into the musings of an alienated but knowing speaker. The anaphora of these two-line sentences defines the poem’s breath or “what may/ still be called breath” as limited, tired, settling for “the nearest destination” or conclusion to a thought. Throughout her poems, Hitzig expertly wields the question, the fragment, and the imperative command. Her poems capture a unique rhythm, direct and deliberate while also repetitive and fragmented. The music of this starting and stopping feels deeply human even as it resembles the limitations of a machine chewing over a bite-sized or byte-sized chunk of thought.
Through inventive use of punctuation, Hitzig invites us to question the relationship of syntax in natural language with its use in programming languages. In contrast to how poetry uses enjambment, line breaks, space on the page, etc. to offer multiple readings and multiple groupings of words, programming languages assign a procedure to punctuation—the parenthetical as an order of operations, the comma as indexing a list or array.
In her prose poem “Fieldnotes,” Hitzig offers the comma an interesting task, “how each self, indexed, itself, each self, how you, index, you would, you would come upon, a system, and not know, not know, how to count, how to believe, what was counted, it was all, all was, suspect, one body, one cast, could cast, cast itself, as many.” (65) The comma interrupts our attempts to piece the statement together, operating as a hinge between utterance and re-utterance. Hitzig’s punctuation creates a stuttered rhythm; the relationship of part to whole, of fragment to poem, is carried out in the music of contemplating how “one body can cast itself as many.”
In contrast, the prose poem “Zero Regret Algorithm” contains no punctuation, “I do not mourn I said I am by now what you want to be so why not let me play I could make more than own more than owe more than state more than show full of rage and rope I am not us yet but soon there will be no place left to go.” Without line breaks or punctuation, the poem is organized through anaphora, alliteration, and internal rhymes. The relentless lapping of “so,” “own,” “owe,” “show,” “rope,” and “go” are woven together with “play,” “make,” “state,” “rage,” “place” with such lushness and rigor that the poem requires no other architecture.
Hitzig’s play with grammar intensifies in the book’s second section, in the long title poem “Not Us Now,” where we see a cast of characters each referred to by a variable,
“y*** said lie down. Placed
the old mask on x*’s face.
y*** told x* how
the mask was found.”
The mysterious mask and even more mysterious characters contrast with the familiar poetic form of rhymed couplets, “placed/face” and “how/found.” Not Us Now is uncanny, constructing a world as recognizable as it is strange; we encounter familiar landscapes like a beach and summer gala, mediated through this cryptic cast of variables. Hitzig’s internet-age semiotics explore the relationship of signs to signifiers, asking what can represent who. Though the use of variables as characters in a poem is deeply experimental, it essentially operates the way an algorithmic model reduces citizens and consumers into a set of variables. Hitzig’s poetics question how knowledge can be modeled or fail to be modeled. How are variables assigned value? How are words assigned meaning?
Algorithms appear in multiple forms throughout the manuscript; excerpts of the formulas themselves are interspersed among the poems, and the ending “glossary” provides explanations in the form of internet forums. The appearance of mathematics invites us to ponder the relationship of these formulas to what they represent, and of poetry to what it represents. An artifact of Hitzig’s profession as an economist, the project of such mathematical models is to simplify, approximate, and stand in for a reality. In many ways, Hitzig’s poetic project is also abstracting and interrogating how reality is constructed, wielding grammar, syntax, and form to reveal and critique systems. It’s incredible to see a poetry book with the formula below appearing on the page opposite a sonnet on the same subject, “Gradient Descent Algorithm.”
The sonnet “Gradient Descent Algorithm” brings us to a childhood scene of jump-rope on a playground, “it’s still my turn on the playground go / jump-rope go blue rope slashing ground.” The loops of the “ever-cycling” jump-rope echo the algorithm’s conditional “while” loop to “do” an action until a condition is fulfilled to “return.” The poem’s run-on, breathless rhythm feels reminiscent of that looping, as the enjambment of each line offers a turn into the next. The poem descends in its search through hindsight, “when my turn came in those/ come on go there days I would’ve sat on the asphalt/ right there and let the snake weave its way through me.” What is returned or resolved in the end is portrayed as a surrender to the snake, a fall from childhood innocence into knowledge.
With powerful language and deeply intelligent play, Hitzig’s astounding second collection reveals undercurrents of longing and labor within the alienation of the information age. Not Us Now takes big leaps and asks bigger questions, inviting us to interrogate the boundary between logic and feeling, between human and machine. Hitzig’s poems paint an uncanny and provoking abstraction of a world that remains recognizably our own, and our own responsibility to contend with.
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