If you wrote a computer program that translated French Surrealist poetry based on the neural feedback of a squid, you might end up with lines like these:

The phosphorous cheeks of an ailing jester fallen that day
from an alien haze over jade lanes
to blades arrayed in ribboned mazes
created to flay a dilated spirit hole
He was a chaotic boy with phosphorous cheeks
and a glistening sphinctral sanctity
a violet fallen alloy of a Medium
and a gigolo to sleep

Produced by a marine invertebrate, this automatically written cacophony might have scientific worth. It delivers a very different effect when you know it's the opening of "A Chocolate and a Mantis" by Jeff Clark, a graphic designer for Farrar, Straus & Giroux who has just gotten his second book of poems published by—you'll never guess—Farrar, Straus & Giroux!

Various subcommittee members of the avant-garde are furious about all this. The poet Ron Silliman has even written a dire post on the internet, warning that the publication of Music and Suicide might actually be a plot to discredit genuine avant-garde writers.

This seems a bit overheated. I suspect Clark knows what he's doing. He's not actually trying to write poems with real feeling or intellectual shrewdness. Like Jeff Koons's statue of Michael Jackson in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, his is more of a publicity stunt than a work of art. Clark's prose poems "Teheran" and "Succumb" may detract from that effect by containing some lucidly rendered and amusing dream scenes. But the gassy burst of a lyric like "White Tower" or the globular accretion of "Dilator" are meant to impress with the sheer surprise of their actually existing at all. There's none of the artistic surprise you get from the deep irrationality of Henri Michaux or John Ashbery, because there's no formal ambition. Clark writes and publishes these poems for the same reason Kim Jong-Il shoots missiles over Japan: simply because he can.

— Peter Campion