[Tony Barnstone]

Carl & Glenn,

I guess it is a common use among the sci fi crowd, but less so for the rest of humanity: synth is slang for "synthetic humanoid, an android, a robot, a clone" -- normally, of course it means "musical synthesizer."

Is it too obscure, therefore? If so, I am in trouble, because the only other rhymes are hyacinth (shades of Eliot) and plinth.

On the doorjambs meter, it is an interesting metrical debate. My go-to solution for anapests is to add another stress at the end and turn it into a double iamb (pyrrhic, spondee) or minor ionic. There are those who argue that spondees don't exist because one of the two syllables will always take extra stress. But in context, after a pyrrhic, the two relatively stronger syllables take stress to my ear, "jambs" less than "door" of course.

My go-to for this is Robert Frost, who also loved this rhythm, as in "As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored / As the stir cracks" in "Birches" where he uses three of them in two lines!

Lots of allusions--too many, perhaps ("Once by the Pacific," "The Second Coming," "The Tyger," Song of Myself, the myth of the labyrinth in Crete, in Eco and in Borges, futurist and 19th century sci fi fears of the mechanical womb, Odysseus in the cyclops cave, etc). The poem is a theodicy like Blake's "The Tyger," asking: who created the tyger, and did he also create the lamb? Is God the source of evil and of good and does that make God evil? --but applied to AI, which many in the industry feel is the most dangerous technology to be invented after the atom bomb.

The death-life stuff has to do with that question at the core of all artificial person stories, from the golem to "The Sandman" to Frankenstein's monster to Blade Runner to Isaac Asimov's I Robot series to Star Trek, etc.: At what point does the machine become organic? At what point is a thinking being human? Is the soul simply a function of the body, as Blake would have it: "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul. For that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age"?

So when the technological singularity comes around--when technological growth achieves I. J. Good's "intelligence explosion model" of chain-reacting, uncontrolled machine intelligence that becomes ever smarter and surpasses human intelligence"--is that intelligent machine without spirit, ex nihilio and also nothing at the core, and if so it is a different kind of beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, one constructed of nothing.

The unscrew the doors stuff to my mind is about the dangers that come from endless innovation on the one hand, but also a meditation on binary code--at what point does the machine transcend yes and no, one and zero, life and death, organism and machine, and become open and closed at the same time. When does nothing become being? (For literary detectives, it tries to undermine the inventive optimism of similar lines in Whitman's Song of Myself).

So, yes, the poem is very densely packed. It embraces difficulty of reading, with the hopes that the thought behind will reward the persistent reader. But I also hear from you, Jan and Glenn that it might be too difficult, so I'll have to think about that!