The front page of an issue of The Floating Bear newsletter. The background is text from another issue overlaid on artwork from a separate issue.
Library, Museums and Press Staff
April 10, 2024

A View from the Vault: The Floating Bear Newsletter

By Jeannette Schollaert, Digital Initiatives and Preservation

“A View from the Vault” showcases some of the unique, notable or rare items that are a part of the Special Collections and Museums holdings at the University of Delaware. Each month, we highlight a different item and share interesting facts or intriguing histories about it. If you are interested in seeing any of the materials featured in person or want to learn more about anything showcased in the series, please contact Special Collections and Museums at AskSpec or AskMuseums.

 

 

The newsletter page reads: "POEM, by a computer at M.I.T., which was fed the elements of English Grammer, and directed to produce sentences. What does water find water and four blue plants on three black and red roofs for? Not only on five rats does his tree admire three stoves. It does make a black, tragic, gay, wide, thin and wiry list proud no longer. Least of all, is it painted? Below the wood above the three flaws, beside green trains and tame hands, five flaws and newspaper, re runs the table behind Willits and Piper. She makes a rug nowhere. He is no longer afraid of wood and a newspaper isn't hungry, tame and tame. Why isn't General Small good and cool? When is she hungry and how does she hear three engines, three bright, fat and hungry trees, two shiny and oiled cars and the six blue roofs below a funny list? Water is oiled, Piper is tragic and red, and it isn't cooled. Is a plant green and fat now? Because it is appreciative of a wide, new, bright, blue and black window, it isn't cooled. Does coal hate the funny and thin smokestack and two desks or isn't he fat and funny? Is a thin and smooth pencil, clothed?

A poem from issue no. 34 of The Floating Bear newsletter. Click to enlarge.

The Floating Bear newsletter

Issues No. 1-38, 1961-1971

PS301.F58

The Floating Bear literary newsletter included poetry, articles, reprints, translations and artworks, and is one of many materials in Special Collections that reflects the work of 20th-century American poet-activists. The range of subject matter spans from anti-war action and critiques of police brutality to reviews of theater and concerts.

Poets Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones) printed the majority of the issues together. The list of featured writers reads like a who’s who of Beat poetry legends and luminaries from various schools of 20th-century poetry, including Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, Stephen Jonas, Gary Snyder and Victor Hernandez Cruz.

Issue no. 34 of the newsletter includes a poem that resonates with the contemporary fascination with artificial intelligence and computer-generated text. Among contributors like Jack Kerouac and Frank O’Hara, there is a poem credited as, “POEM, by a computer at M.I.T., which was fed the elements of English Grammar, and directed to produce sentences.”

While clunky, the poem includes occasional, if uncanny, poignance. There is very little shared about the technical process of creating the poem – a noticeable absence of information amidst today’s concerns with the details and ethics of generative AI.

Some contemporary poets engage with AI to explore and critique the use of technology in our daily lives, but this poem from 1967 – published in a poet-activist newsletter, printed with a mimeograph – shows that even as technology changes, the will to create and push the boundaries of language remains.

The complete run of The Floating Bear newsletter has been digitized and will soon be publicly available as part of the Poetry as Activism Project, a UD Library, Museums and Press initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation.