John Paul Davis
Newsletter
The Uncomputable
In which I explain what I've been up to, again, because it's been so long
Recently (like, very recently, as in mere minutes ago) I responded to a friend who is contemplating starting their own newsletter but who also is feeling apprehensive about the prospect by saying “The world is full of voices and forces that will tell you not to write. Don’t listen to them.”
I could, as it happens, take this advice myself. Case in point, this newsletter, which I have, for one reason or another, put off writing and sending out since around New Year’s Day, so, having sent my words of encouragement to my friend, am now sitting down to write this very belated entry.
I had imagined, back in January, writing some mission statement or manifest or ars poetica that outlined why I’m still writing newsletters and also poems about angels or the moon or beautiful birds in these dangerous and frightening days. This imagined statement would have pointed out that not writing is exactly what They want (insert your own They) and/or writing only about The Terrible Things They Are Doing is also exactly what They want (insert your own list of Terrible Things; they are plentiful), but honestly I think if you are reading this particular letter, you already know that. You already know that poems or newsletters aren’t going to save the world, and that that fact is not a recommendation against writing them, but rather an invitation to write them, because I do believe strongly that poems, writing, songs, and art help us imagine possible new worlds, that is, they may not save the world but they help create new ones, and they help make this world a place worth living in.
So, I intend to keep writing about the weird and strange things I tend to write about, as well as writing about the things that make me angry or sad, and the things that bring me delight and joy. I once heard the poet Martín Espada once mentioned that he writes political poems as if they were love poems, because for him, they are, and ever since, I have adopted that same approach, which, I’ll add, seems also to have been Neruda’s approach.
I also realized, sometime in the past year, that I have the most success with most projects, when I work a little bit toward it regularly, be it daily or weekly, so at the beginning of the year I started consciously taking that approach with several projects. At the same time, I decided that I no longer wanted my work (and here I mean both artistic work and labor in general) to help Meta make money, given how hostile to my own values I find Meta’s actions and software architecture to be, so I determined to stop actively posting to Instagram.
When I did that I decided to migrate my social media posting to BlueSky, which, for now, seems like its business model and software are not hostile to my own values, though I recognize that like Facebook, and Instagram, and Twitter before it, that could change at any moment.
I also decided I no longer wanted the focus of my online activity to be creating things for these businesses. If I was going to write or snap a photo or do any creative work, I wanted it to be for John Paul Davis, in service of John Paul Davis’s values and goals, and so I decided to post to my own website that I maintain and own and control, and then, if possible, if it doesn’t cost me too much work, maybe cross-post elsewhere (the elsewhere, for the moment, being BlueSky).
I then spent the better part of the last six months refactoring and updating my personal website to accommodate those goals. I created a new Photography section, and now instead of taking photographs for Mark Zuckerberg’s benefit, I post them to my own site. I also began the practice of, five-ish times a week, posting what I call a “Micro-Review” to my site, which is a one-sentence summary of the experience I’ve had with a beloved album of music. Both of these get cross-posted, via an automated script, to BlueSky.
And then, after feedback from some friends (I’m looking at you, Kimberly, and you, Caroline) I decided to revive and retool the poetry podcast I attempted in 2023, tweaked to acknowledge my own limitations, namely, instead of reading several poems a week, I would just read one a week. I changed the name, too, to The Uncomputable, same as the new name of this newsletter, which also has undergone some fairly nerdy changes (it is now self-hosted and managed with the open-source newsletter tool phpList, and subscribing now no longer requires Javascript, and archives now live as part of my main website).
I chose the name The Uncomputable for both after a promise I made (to myself? To you? To God?) in a poem I wrote just after the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, when Joe Biden, for whom I voted, won. Here is the poem:
Ars Poetica, When The Candidates the Poet Voted For Have Won
Yes I am contrary, a killjoy.
I can’t help but notice
the cracks in the surface,
all the ways nothing’s changed.
Sojourned so long in the country of words, an immigrant
from a hundred possible futures, belonging,
as I do, to the whole world, I cannot be loyal to any party or movement,
compelled as I am to redescribe
everything in this irreplaceable & confounding
world & redescribe again, which is how a poet prays,
seeing no one as salvation or redemption,
seeing everyone as broken & breaking,
like me, sometimes healing, never whole.
I pledge to face the wrong direction. To love my enemy.
I pledge allegiance to the land & the oppressed. I pledge side-eye
& word play when the technocrats roll out the mandated jargon,
the latest gadget. I pledge to close my account, delete the newsletter, resist
advertisement. I pledge to be uncategorizable, to not add up.
In the ticker-tape & fanfare, I might forecast our doom.
In the darkness, I will insist on joy.
All of which could be summed up as: I promise to be uncomputable. In a world increasingly dominated by the domineering technologies of “AI” (scare quotes because nothing about it is intelligent) and digital footprints and target markets and RealID and opinion polls and algorithms that make ever blander and blander playlists of soulless music that could, if it isn’t already, be made by robots, be uncomputable. Refuse to add up.
Recent Publications:
It feels odd to have this poem about late autumn see publication in early spring, but also, see above, re: be uncomputable.
"Autumn's First Frost" in Stone Circle Review
Part of my goal for this new version of the newsletter is that it act as a sort digest for the little work done in each of my projects since the last entry, so we may as well begin that now:
Podcast:
The first epsiode of The Uncomputable Podast is up; I read my poem "Healing, You Might Say."
Subscribe: RSS Link | Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Micro-Reviews:
I think, for this first outing, I'll just link to the archive page for these, noting also that if you are inclined, you can follow them on BlueSky.
Photography:
