He finds it hard going, however, because the piles of poetry collections on his bookcases and around his junk-jammed desk contain so many masterpieces that he can’t stand it. Every tap at the old computer keyboard is mocked by the volumes behind and around him, Shakespeare, Shelley, Stevens, Snyder, shit! It’s impossible to write any more poetry in this day and age. The best poets of his time make Jim laugh with scorn, though he imitates them slavishly in his own attempts. Postmodernism, moldering in its second half century—what does it amount to but squirming? You have to do something new, but there’s nothing new left to do. Serious trouble, that. Jim solves the problem by writing postmodern poems that he hopes to make post-postmodern by scrambling with some random program. The problem with this solution is that postmodern poetry already reads as if the lines have been scrambled by a random program, so the effects of Jim’s ultraradical experimentation are difficult to notice.

But it’s time to try again. A half hour’s staring at the blank screen, a half hour’s typing. He reads the result.

Rent an apartment.

There are orange trees growing under the floor.

Two rooms and a bath, windows, a door.

The freeway is your roof. What shade.

The motorized landscape: autopia, the best ride.

Magnetism is invisible, but we believe in it anyway.

Step up the pylon ladder in the evening sun.

Lie on the tracks to catch a tan.

They truck the sand in for all our beaches.

Do you know how to swim? No. Just rest.

Eat an orange, up there. Read a book.

Commuters running over you take a brief look.

Okay, now run this through a randomizer, the lucky one that seems to have such a good eye for rhythm. Result?

The freeway is your roof. What shade.

Eat an orange, up there. Read a book.

The motorized landscape: autopia, the best ride.

Rent an apartment.

Lie on the tracks to catch a tan.

Two rooms and a bath, windows, a door.

Magnetism is invisible, but we believe in it anyway.

They truck the sand in for all our beaches.

Commuters running over you take a brief look.

Do you know how to swim? No. Just rest.

There are orange trees growing under the floor.

Step up the pylon ladder in the evening sun.

There, pretty neat, eh? Jim reads the new version aloud. Well … He tries another variation and suddenly all three versions look stupid. He just can’t get past the notion that if you can let your computer scramble the lines of a poem, and in doing so come up with a poem that’s better, or at least just as good, then there must be a certain deficiency in the poem. In, for instance, its sequentiality. He thinks of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo.” Is he really performing the same activity they did? “Rent an apartment”?