I wrote this semi-poem thing, Ship to Crete, in 1982.
Let’s see if Claude can produce something roughly similar:
…that we might catalog with a systematic arrangement of the actual volumes anticipated would appear certainly to encompass a spectrum of readings that as yet remain unarchived and probably would circulate for minimal fines through a downtown branch referring naturally particularly to one of the westside metropolitan outlets dictating as it were an essential principle of access of probable browsings within the structure both of intellectual hospitality and digital circulation systems or at least if we are to embrace methodologies of departed librarians who at one time appeared to have mastered the challenge of multiple acquisitions and precious surplus of damaged periodicals and critical shipments of philosophy journals specially transported by cart across the city’s concrete arteries regardless of the efficiency or indeed the risk of obsolescence some diligent cataloguing led to a concept of provision of immediate service to the mechanical variables that govern with unfailing accuracy like the whispers of patrons on stifling afternoons a quiet rustle fundamental to the thoughtful deliberations of the educated not by the masses that routinely bring their minds to foreign sections and whilst browsing and sighing watch their treasured leather-bound volumes deteriorate at the bindings previously sturdy and perceive in this some indication of neglect or at the very least some overwhelming sentiment of lost and vanishing scholarship assuming that any shelf will support a collection full of worn spines and bookmark scraps returned to the reference desk cats that wandered between their grandfather’s stacks…
A little bit too close to the original poem but works in places. And to be honest the approach that I adopted to produce the original involved a deliberate effort to derange any ordinary communication. I drew upon resources of language more than any coherent, meaning-focused inspiration. My focus was on maintaining the flow of the sentence as long as possible and at an unsustainable limit. I was anticipating the methods of an LLM, paying careful heed to context and exploring paradigmatic and syntagmatic possibilities. I would like to have written more but ran out of impetus. Claude can plainly assist in this regard, but the question arises: does this simulation render the whole exercise pointless? Yet why should it when my initial goal was to approach poetic expression via some sense of machine process? Why is one mode of automatism intrinsically preferable to another. Why can I copy the machine but not the machine me? In any case, what trace of myself remains in a text in which I was precisely aiming to displace the typical conditions of creative expression?