Zoë Hitzig. Not Us Now. New York: Changes, 2024. 112 pages.


 

        One strange side effect of the TikTok era is the way that “the algorithm” has firmly entered casual conversation—it is invoked as a presence that arbitrates popularity, commodifies our attention, determines what words we use (or don’t use) and who will hear them. There is also the variant of my or your algorithm, the individualized response of the code that calls each of us to surrender to our nearest social type and its tastes. This pull towards type is both insidious and, of course, deeply human: a magnification of the social process that has always bred norms, trends, subcultures, imagined communities. In their 2003 book Giving an Account of Oneself, the philosopher Judith Butler describes self-expression as inextricably bound with self-effacement. “If I try to give an account of myself,” they write, “I will, to some degree, have to make myself substitutable in order to make myself recognizable.” [1] The algorithm takes care of this process for us, guiding us each towards the spoonful of substitutability it knows we will find sweetest. Part of what we are seeing as generative AI proliferates is an uncomfortable externalization of our own translation into social selves—an externalization that, potentially, allows us to tweak the code.

Zoë Hitzig’s second collection of poetry, Not Us Now, is in part an extended examination of the way that humans think like algorithms, and of the social possibilities that this comparison might give way to. The first section of the book includes five poems named after algorithms commonly used in machine learning: “Bounded Regret Algorithm,” “Greedy Algorithm,” “Zero Regret Algorithm,” “Gradient Descent Algorithm,” and “Simplex Algorithm.” Hitzig’s poems are rife with technical terms so evocative as to first seem invented. Regret and greed, in their algorithmic context, refer to game theory principles used to calibrate future decisions based on a comparison of past decisions to optimal outcomes. To the extent that our own path through time is both cumulative and coherent, it may be to the degree that our evolving response to regret forms a pattern: the degree to which we resemble an algorithm. Here is the voice that opens “Bounded Regret Algorithm”:

Mine is a life dedicated

to the calculation of loss.

I know with certainty

almost nothing. Yet here I am

executing legions

of decisions each moment.

I aim to organize

my ledgers like a skull.

A place I imagine to be full. (4)

A place I imagine to be full: it is the human mind that presents a black box here, holding the unverifiable promise of meaning or morals or soul that underwrites the code of any machine that learns to think like us. But though Hitzig’s poems often favor nonhuman speakers, it would be a mistake to read them as the laments of robots. Instead, algorithmic thinking comes to figure what is most knowable in human thought: its uncertainty, its instinct for self-preservation, the unexamined content of its received structures, that withheld promise of a greater meaning. “Bounded Regret Algorithm” is a learning process that uses its avoidance of loss to form conclusions, bounds:

Eventually I learn to limit
the loss. I come to know

where I should not go:

The fire escape, zip codes
with low property taxes,

some drugs, some jobs.

Then the threshold beyond

which I’m just an airplane.

Occasionally I fly new routes

but never load more than

a few hundred passengers.

Nor advance into the sequence

of sky that vibrates behind the sky

I have seen. […] (4-5)

The speaking voice here moves from casually acquired human biases—let’s not forget that generative AI programs have repeatedly reflected the race, class, and gender prejudices ingrained in our language and behavior—to something stranger, the threshold of the known. The sky, of course, is the traditional locale for this threshold: Wallace Stevens’ great poem of secular meaning, “Sunday Morning,” calls it “this dividing and indifferent blue.” [2] A recent prose poem from Ben Lerner’s The Lights rewrites the sky’s indifference as the occasion for a sort of negative re-enchantment: “I think you need either meaning or a sense that it has fled, especially when you look up.” [3] In taking the airplane (or its code) as her central figure, Hitzig finds the transcendent within the sky, looking not up but straight ahead. Where “Bounded Regret Algorithm” glimpses something greater is not in the spiritual or the enchanted but in the uncharted, the perception of a vibrating moment where we might (but most often don’t) choose to go off the grid.

Poets can perhaps be categorized by their favorite aspect of sky—Lerner’s is snow, Stevens’ a blazing blue with drifting clouds. Hitzig prefers the dawn: that everyday passage from darkness to light, metonym for revolutions and new eras, moment separating lovers who have joined in the night. That moment of leave-taking is the basis for the conventional lyric form of the aubade, which Hitzig overtly reinvents in her first book of poetry, Mezzanine (Ecco, 2020). There, three poems entitled “⏻, 1st, and 2nd Trial for the New Aubade” reorient the form around the defamiliarization of the received self. “Today is a truck? It shakes this structure in which we sleep. / Yes. That’s our new definition of dawn,” proposes the speaker of the “⏻ Trial,” concluding with the question: “My day, / my data, how much of you do I lose with this dawn?” [4]

Hitzig’s new definition recalls the waking moment beautifully described in W. H. Auden’s poem “Prime”: “Recalled from the shades to be a seeing being, / from absence to be on display, / without a name or history I wake / between my body and the day.” [5] Hitzig adds the equation of self with data, and she leans into the dawn’s more radical connotation as a shaker of old systems: this is both a metonym for a coming upheaval and an investment in the vibrating quality of the present moment. Not Us Now is epigraphed by a strange dawn: an excerpt from the notebooks of Gerrit de Veer, a crew member of the 16th century polar explorer William Barents, describes the moment of finally seeing the sun rise on the horizon after a darkness that the expedition could not quite believe had lasted for days: Amongst us were of opinion that we had mistaken our selves, which neverthelesse we could not be persuaded unto. This is the obverse of the moment of glimmering potential that is turned away from in “Bounded Regret Algorithm”: to go beyond the sky one has seen is also to find one’s own self falsely coded to exclude it, to be mistaken.

Hitzig does not elide the brutality embedded in our social structures and institutions, nor the danger of automating that brutality through mechanical proxy. “Dysrhythmia” paints a bleaker picture of an algorithmic state:

some of us gloried

in the foreign command

relieved of the need

to war against idleness

so then was it a virus?

well yes others died of this

some via concessions

some via conscience (16-17)

For those able to ask the question, the system’s casualties are passed off here with a jaded, routinized dismissal: “whatever murder chorus / sang that year” (17). This is the cruelty embedded in learning where one should not go, and Hitzig is clear-eyed in her refusal to let state-sponsored murder and its naturalization be written off as excess, exception, or mistake. The question of what “good” machine learning looks like within a murderous system is taken on in the virtuosic closer to Not Us Now’s first section, the optimized existentialism performed by the speaker of the linearly formatted “Simplex Algorithm”:

[…] am / I / the / save / curve / or / the / dread / curve  / or / just / the / find / arg / min / arg /max / curve / am / I / the / line / that / creeps / to / break / the / bound / as / cain / made / seth / as / nod / was / found / I / lord / I / find / I / climb / I / max / I / min / I / am / the / wren / that / metes / the / dawn (22-23)

A simplex algorithm (Hitzig includes the mathematical notation for one, and a fictional Zoom lecture transcript as explainer in the book’s glossary) is designed to optimize a function, to trace the outer bounds of its “feasible region.” The crucial question— the same question driving the researchers on AI alignment seeking to avert a doomsday scenario—is what exactly is being optimized, and what extremes that optimization might lead to. Align a program to the incentives that currently drive our systems—profit, power, viral popularity—and our society’s clear tendency to make some lives conveniently expendable may well be the thing that scales up.

As should be clear by now, Hitzig’s are poems of ideas; but her tremendous skill lies in creating a kind of language where algorithmic notation, systemic critique, and poetic tradition can mutually replenish each other. Note the embedded line of iambic pentameter in “Simplex Algorithm”—am I the line that creeps to break the bound—and the following rhyme (as nod was found) that shifts the poem from a mathematical to a biblical register, which in turn produces another rhetoric of justification. The poem’s final lines suggest that poetry may risk becoming a third rationalizing strategy, and Hitzig uses the ambiguous spelling of “mete” to make the poem’s competing registers, its hope and its horror, hang together in a single image. The listener of the poem hears first the lyric welcoming of dawn, and indeed this sense is both encouraged (and consigned to the past) in the plausibly Middle English spelling of “meet”; but the chosen spelling also evokes the Biblical term for measurement (and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again) and its contemporary sense of allotting punishment. Does this bird greet the dawn, measure it, or condemn us to it? The answer depends, perhaps, on which definition of dawn we are talking about.

Where Not Us Now’s poems voice the logical patterns that maintain (and perhaps strain against) a market-based system that sacrifices the innocent, Mezzanine mythologizes the creation of these structures that hold us. Its poems ventriloquize the logic of capitalism (“We already have empire. Let us make market”) [6], its commodities (“We are all stolen,” says an object in a department store) [7], and its injustices (through a series of poems that animate the evidence used in wrongful death row convictions). A poem titled “The Cryptographer Speaks” provides a key for understanding the tension between systemic knowledge and its boundaries that pervades Not Us Now:

And there is no panic.

It doesn’t fit in. The cracks

of the sidewalk are filled when

concrete is poured. Fill

them with nail clippings.

Extra product. That

is how excessive we can be.

And resourceful, masters

of manufacture. Now do you know

what dust is? The chime

that signals entry into

the convenience store.

It shadows knowledge

of the system. It is testimony. [8]

This may be Hitzig’s most ominous figure for the threshold between the structural and the unknown. Fill them with nail clippings: in the cryptographer’s sinister monologue, the mundane and the cast aside are ground up and plugged back into the system, stifling whatever mouths or senses might have produced panic. Now do you know what dust is? I am reminded here of the oracular voice that speaks out at the beginning of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”: “(Come in under the shadow of this red rock), /And I will show you … fear in a handful of dust.” [9] This utterance is one that Hitzig enters into open dialogue with in Not Us Now, and “Cryptographer” is perhaps her first integration of its motifs—dust, shadow, fear—into her own symbolic language. In the confessional voice of the code-maker, the words are both an epiphany and a denial of meaning, pregnant with a sudden sense of the possibilities they exclude.

The eponymous long poem that makes up the second section and centerpiece of Not Us Now asks to be read as a successor to “The Waste Land,” or at least as an adaptation of Eliot’s ambitious form to Hitzig’s themes and to the challenges of the present moment. Hitzig projects Eliot’s “fragments … shored against my ruins” into a post-apocalyptic future, centering “Not Us Now” around a series of interwoven poems labeled “fragments of unknown origin / % survivors attempt to reconstruct.” “The Waste Land” is, of course, the landmark poem of a modernism that responded to the onset of a new and terrifying era in the wake of World War I, attempting to fashion the fragments of a poetic tradition into a useable past. It does not feel especially bold to suggest that our current moment—in which the term X-risk (existential risk) has become a buzzword of Silicon Valley, in which drone-delivered bombs have decimated the cities of Gaza and Ukraine—might be a similarly urgent one for the future of the twenty-first century.

Remember the annual “murder chorus” that sang in the shadow of a convenient system in “Dysrhythmia”? Sooner or later that murder will out, and this phrase crystallizes into the figure that sets off the ambiguous apocalypse of “Not Us Now.” The poem begins with a narrative verse scene that grows increasingly menacing: a family meets for the holidays (“The family never thought / it would be the last Christmas / Eve dinner”) and over drinks one sister asks

What goes on in the war

gone wrong room. Asked sister

let the question pass. As

they heard the first. Sound

of trespass. Is the wood-

pecker trapped in the lead

chimney again. No. No

not lead it must be over-

head. Hear rhythm now.

Hear dread. Hear tones. Feel

pity. The soon. The unseen. (29)

What kind of dread is being visited upon whom in this war-gone-wrong is left unclear, but soon a flight of swallows begin to hammer into the glass, dancing “the murder chorus,” their collisions “Violent as eyelash. / Against everyday dust.” The cryptographer’s systems are falling apart here, and panic is seeping back in: in a shuddering present tense the poem calls the family to “Press faces. / Faces to the cold glass. / Feel dread. In the every-/ day.” Dread in the everyday is what Hitzig offers to show us in her handful of dust, a world in which security is always at the cost of others: “A some-of-us exodus” (30-31).

The narrative of “Not Us Now” goes silent after this scene, and we are transported into the retrospect of a dire future. The poem’s first section is followed by “tablets of unknown origin” that cycle through the possible permutations of the phrase we are not us now, then by the series of survivors’ fragments. The first of these fragments begins with a voice that deliberately echoes “The Waste Land”:

z* pounding at the ground

as if the ground couldn’t

be found. Like past. So many

miles of past. Now behind

z*. z* sees a shadow

jump-cut across an empty

swimming pool. Come in says

a voice come in into my shadow. (35)

This voice remains as unknowable as Eliot’s, but who or what is z*? It soon becomes clear that a signature feature of the fragments’ interwoven short poems is their notation of all apparently human characters with algebraic variables. Many of the scenes here (each labeled by location) present one or two letters with indexical variations: e.g. o', o*, and ô are the characters of a poem indexed as +silo. The occasional copresence of multiple letters and their variations, or references to e.g. “the other ts,” make it clear that there is a sort of kinship or communal identity involved in these designations. This is, perhaps, the way an algorithm would filter people. But though this notation appears at first blush to risk inaccessibility, even gimmick, the effect is melded with tradition by the lyric beauty of these short poems. Here is a standalone fragment indexed as +plain:

All those days of where

is p* and p̄ finally wrote

the deadmate song. Only

then did p̄ see p*’s face.

Percolating in the dark.

Contour in the eggplant-

black bruise in the dark sash

strung below the moon.

Above the frozen plain.

p̄ lies down. Sings deadmate

when the spring comes I

song to the face of

reaching out as if to grasp

the dark sash. Sing reach.

Sing reach to bring

the face in the dark sash.

Freeze with the plain. (38)

The variables present an immediate challenge to the reader—how does one sound them out? I chose to vocalize the letter alone, leaving the written differentiation as an unspoken valence of meaning hanging over the sound. The poem’s first complete sentence calls its two variables into a scene of grief, the writing of an elegiac “deadmate song” that transmutes long days or years of mourning into something like an epiphany of remembrance: sing reach. It is fitting that the dead p*, who we only see as an apparition in the clouds through p̄’s lament, would have a name almost identical to their surviving partner’s. What are we if not functions of the minds of those who would remember us? The variables also offer the inhabitability that the lyric poem has always promised: this could be anyone’s grief, and Hitzig’s algebra is not so far removed from the interchangeable classical names given by convention to the shepherdesses and lovelorn swains of pastoral poetry: Corydon and Chloris, Daphnis and Celia.

The more notable departure from tradition in this poem is not in its names, but rather in Hitzig’s resetting of lyric address in the third person. This is a poem about a poem being written and sung, but its poetic “reach” lies in the description itself: the dark sash, the frozen plain. The words we are given of p̄’s elegy follow the age-old convention of English lyric, the springtime opening to song that passes from medieval troubadours to Chaucer to Eliot’s famous inversion: “April is the cruelest month.” [10] Like Eliot’s, Hitzig’s long poem seeks to inhabit the many voices of this tradition while establishing a firm sense of distance. Poetry will continue to be the voice we step into in our pain, our love, our longing; but poetry must also change if it is to be honest in the light of a strange new dawn.

Hitzig has certainly not abandoned the first-person lyric speaker—in her poems it is an essential poetic device, but also one that resists any stable notion of human selfhood. The first person becomes a mode of being in the algorithm poems, a latent testimony in Mezzanine’s structural ventriloquy. The speakers who most sound like people in Hitzig are also those whose identity is made most precarious from moment to moment. Am I me in photos of me, asks the fragmented narrating voice of “Exit Museum,” a long poem in the final section of Not Us Now (91). In a quietly beautiful moment, the speaker of the earlier poem “Exit Muse” wishes to be transported by their longing: “And that cedar tree by the gazebo— / it reminds me of you. / If only I could wear it like a mast, / I’d fill myself up with the wind of an instant” (9). A stable self is patterned, algorithmic; longing, if only one could only wear it, might carry us away from our programmed selves.

Exit Muse, Exit Museum—the former is paired with a poem called “Exit Music.” Something about poetry and its conventions is being ushered out here, but what kind of loss is this? “Distance is the entering / variable. We are the leaving / variable,” declares the end of “Not Us Now’s” “final monologues,” as survivors gather in a tabernacle in the desert (58). Algebra is not required to read Hitzig’s poetry, which never proceeds without its terms carrying their own poetic sense. We are the leaving variable carries poignancy enough in a book thinking about the individual’s, or the human’s, place in an automized society. But a dive into the math also bears fruit: the terminology is drawn from the inner workings of a simplex algorithm, in which the “leaving variable” is the term of greatest constraint, which must be re-expressed in terms of the “entering variable” (the term of most possible untapped potential) to determine the furthest bounds of a function’s feasible region. This clarifies that humans are not quite being evacuated from the poem (replaced by robots), but rather that a stand-in for human limitation must be baked into the formula so that the potential of a new variable (here, “distance”) can be calibrated. If the machines outlast us on Earth, Hitzig suggests, they will still be trying to solve for the black box that is the human skull — how much further might a bit of distance take them?

Both Mezzanine and Not Us Now are essential reading for anyone concerned with what weight, value, and insight the resources of poetry might have in a post-AI world. But Hitzig’s poems provide a moral beacon as much as an avant-garde event. The polyvalent title of Not Us Now invokes the defamiliarized selves of its epigraph’s new dawn (we are no longer ourselves) and the approaching moment of AI singularity (for now, it’s not us); but I also hear an echo of the famous post-Holocaust confessional poem that begins “First they came for the Communists, but I did not speak up, for I was not a Communist,” and proceeds to follow that loss-limiting function to genocide. [11] For those on the optimizing side of our system’s dread curve, it has not come for us: not now, not yet. But if we fail to see its ravages in terms of human care, and if we fail to enter that care back into our systems, our future—whether its decisions are made by people or by machines—will continue to push its bounds towards the expendability of life. Hitzig’s poems are a call to not let that happen blindly, no matter what comfort our algorithms may be feeding us.







Notes

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[1] Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 37.

[2] Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13261/sunday-morning

[3] Ben Lerner, “The Curtain.” Port Magazine. November 29, 2023. https://www.port-magazine.com/commentary/the-curtain/

[4] Zoë Hitzig, Mezzanine (New York: Ecco, 2020), 30.

[5] W. H. Auden, “Prime.” Nones (New York: Random House, 1951), 11.

[6] Hitzig, Mezzanine, 39.

[7] Ibid., 7.

[8] Ibid., 13.

[9] T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land

[10] Eliot, “The Waste Land”

[11] Martin Niemöller, “First They Came.” Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin-niemoller/