The object of Wenaus' analysis-Harris's "posthuman poetry"-interrupts, interjects, rejects and retaliates against the analysis, breaking-into and breaking-up this human-all-too-human endeavor in order to perform a lysis of its own. These previously published, previously-separate pieces separate one-another in being brought-together, disrupting each-other in-and-on the battlefield of the book-as-such. The work, therefore, makes two familiar texts rather foreign, and in so doing transforms or transcribes them ("transtuli"), via this textual transmigration ("metempsykhosis"), into an encounter ("incontro"), or perhaps a countering rather than encountering, between "human essay" and "posthuman poem" wherein the latter punctures and is punctured by the former, bleeding onto its pages and sustaining itself in the splatter, the speckles, the stains. The result is a speckled/speckulative work (here para-and-misphrasing Germán Sierra) of mutual xenosmos: a "xeno-text" that, as Sierra states, "is hopefully a poem" (or what Wenaus calls a "xeno-poem") harassed by Harris' poetic-rather-than-poemic xeno-code[s]. Harris's "wish...to discover the poetry of digital programming" (Wenaus) keeps him on the analogue side of the digital divide: "it is essential to note," insists Wenaus, "that [this] is not 'electronic literature', in the sense that it is not composed electronically nor is not intended to be read electronically." The "xeno" here is very-much still "xylo"-paper-based, both produced and printed-out on wood-pulp-and the "post-human" here still has a human hand, as Harris himself stresses in his comments ("The Posthuman Series isn't using any software-programs nor artificial intelligence apps to auto-generate any parts of its five published volumes, nor in its sixth volume-in-progress. The coding is, indeed, manually inserted into the poetry with meticulous concern for some semblance of congruity between the code and the stanzaic trope"). I-T-M: a xyloxenic transcription, textual transmigration, and essay-poetic collision the speckled/speckulative crash-space of which might indeed be, as Sierra suggests, "an abstract morphospace of indeterminacy and uncertainty" that (again) is "hopefully, a poem";-) --Dan Mellamphy
