David Jhave Johnston, ReRites, Human + A.I. Poetry | PLACE

#8 – Janvier / January 2026

David (Jhave) Johnston

ReRites

Human + A.I. Poetry

David (Jhave) Johnston, installation view of ReRites. Most recently exhibited at “Le monde selon l’IA”, Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2025

ReRites is a digital-literature
human + artificial-intelligence
poetry generation project.
Neural networks trained on a
contemporary poetry corpus
generate a source text.
The computer-generated
text is then human-edited.
12 books were written in one year.
12 boxsets of all 12 books were issued.
Published by Anteism Books in 2019.
As Boxset & Paperback

David (Jhave) Johnston, ReRites, writing, April 4, 2018

David (Jhave) Johnston, ReRites, writing (French), September 2, 2024

A selection of pages from the twelve volumes of ReRites

01 — ReRites (May) — pg. 155

Consider the silence
that is always below.

Consider the dead man

who left his body

in a closet.

Consider, later, the nightmare of love
That comes forth, slowly, as a dawn.

———

01 — ReRites (May) — pg. 321

I am cinders
scattering

departures
exactly guided

An alphabet’s trick
in moonlight

a word

holding up bread

———

01 — ReRites (May) — pg. 343

All This The World

and this
Is the shape of things
& the language of benefit

Sighing at last
opening in the air

& once in a while in a wide field
Boiling you will see it rise
& you will hear if your heat replies

& if it rains, you will, or maybe
not, know what you love

———

07 — ReRites (November) — pg. 541

sick driving
a plastic code
and the perfume
of crackhead matrix
cornbeef jumps stinking
over her high birthday skin
hernia leashed to altar-stains

a muse calls to its peers:

om orb, home market bone,
a guest, thrown out, pacing
chronos who sells a ringing

thin statue, bare-legged,
resilient heart thicket

rfilled when alone
believing knows

nothing

———

08 — ReRites (December) — pg. 13

hemorrhaging
declensions

the hinge of the apple
clings to its own love

———

08 — ReRites (December) — pg. 77

      see them as clouds
   thinning on our floor
      clearing cyclone husks
       from the lungs
      of tender, thirsty
      orphans, tattooed
        with numbers.

ejaculating oak,
three parts inert,
entail rainfall on their cemeteries,
lumps of sugar and bite-sized seeds
that grow into gradient runes.

acknowledge with this, their subtle
labyrinthine contraptions
in a wild aviary of cries,
   a perennial wreckage,
      balanced,
    overlooking a ruin.

———

08 — ReRites (December) — pg. 86

In the empty cemetery
eager to texture discoveries
and lug out to my sleep
a gulp of fair dust,

I wake critique.

An improbability bloomed in art,
   concealed and wrong, weighted
     and insatiate, tasting of
                    disastrous cold,

I become certainty.

In restless viscosity, a temperate
revenue incapable of thinking
about fact,

I sheen myself.

Fainter than any épistémologique,

I fathom all.
Lacing the nerves in my face, over
an obscure autumn sky,

I live.

———

08 — ReRites (December) — pg. 87

                      Archetypical Anonymous
                 Outlawed Hearts and Bladder
                                 Forgiveness

                             We wash pyres
                        in the semi-gloom
                            Of the sun.

                           We thank
                     the flames
                   and burn.

Burn the angels’
rabid beds.

Burn the lotions,
blowing, to hear
winds revive
lesser selves.

Root level
ash shrugs:

             It
             can
             barely
             seem summer.

———

08 — ReRites (December) — pg. 132

Thorsten Dead –

Inaccessibile laundry, 1969
ultrafast silo-rich,
drops of thinskinned,
atom-smashing workers
and fantail, faint fingers
with map-guided graphics, and tremulous
meaningless blisters like volcanic horizons
brightened by amplification of caved-in winds.

Reveries of cleaners and peddlers.

Slowly, the Quinine you seek, burrows
into your brain, its colors and blurry
summer within the sun, keen
to exactly heal what you see.

I am trouble. It is not this day
I was born for. Not this one.

Charring god, cropped spores,
take pride, bloom among the soap.

Irritationless, a novelist’s
guttural nucleus. A poem.

Then someone crashes beer
into bone. Dawn arrives
in our armpits. A warm subtraction
spills like steam behind sound.

Praying too, a simple —
better mountain, a colony of life,
splayed.

I keep the worst. I who sat
under the grass, thinking about time!

10.

Thucydides says: My mother.
Even when he means окно.
Window or shaft of mine.

11.

Old and relevant, how I watch and
hear sex playing: long, late.

———

10 — ReRites (February) — pg. 303

Make Me Care

my heart is so delicate
it makes the cool soft
bones of my knot
blog joy

it trickles
down the road
where a pregnant girl
hitch-hikes through
an online graveyard

———