**USER:** tell me about the contemporary book Pearl and Other Poems **CHATGPT:** If you mean Pearl and Other Poems by Lee Sharks, it’s a rather unusual contemporary poetry book published by New Human Press in 2014. It’s part of a larger project called The Crimson Hexagon. G Goodreads+1 What makes it unusual? The most interesting thing about the book is that “Lee Sharks” is presented as a distinct poetic persona, rather than simply as an ordinary authorial identity. The larger Crimson Hexagon project invents different writerly identities and presents their works as if they were selections from imaginary books. The project explicitly draws on traditions associated with Robert Browning, Ezra Pound, and Fernando Pessoa, especially Pessoa's use of heteronyms. G Goodreads So you can think of it partly as poetry and partly as a literary fiction about authorship. The title poem, “Pearl” “Pearl” is described as one episode in the larger Crimson Hexagon project. The book's introduction is attributed to Johannes Sigil, another literary persona associated with the project. This creates an interesting recursive effect: you're not simply reading poems by an author; you're entering a constructed literary world in which fictionalized authors and critics seem to have relationships with one another. G Goodreads+1 That makes questions such as these important when reading it: ● Who is actually speaking? ● Is “Lee Sharks” an author, a character, or both? ● How much authority should we give the introduction? ● What happens when a poet invents an entire literary history around the poems? ● Where does parody end and serious poetry begin? Its contemporary/avant-garde character The book is interesting particularly if you like experimental or conceptual poetry. Rather than treating a poetry collection simply as a group of poems written by one stable personality, Pearl and Other Poems plays with the machinery surrounding literature itself: authorship, pseudonyms, introductions, invented traditions, and literary reputation. In that sense, it belongs to a broader contemporary tendency toward metafictional and conceptual writing, where the form in which literature is presented becomes part of what the work is about. The physical book is relatively substantial for a poetry collection—about 156 pages in paperback. G Goodreads One important distinction There are several books with very similar titles. If by Pearl and Other Poems you instead mean the medieval poem Pearl or a modern collection such as The Pearl King and Other Poems by Catherine Greenwood, that's a completely different work. Greenwood's book, for example, explores the history of cultured pearls and the Japanese pearl industry through poems about beauty, manufacture, nature, and the body. L Librairies Boyer If you mean Lee Sharks's Pearl and Other Poems, I can also give you a detailed interpretation of the book, its major themes, style, the “Lee Sharks” persona, and what “The Crimson Hexagon” means. G L **USER:** yes, please **CHATGPT:** Absolutely. Having looked more closely at the book and its surrounding materials, I’d read Pearl and Other Poems less as a conventional poetry collection and more as a deliberately constructed literary universe. The basic structure Pearl and Other Poems was published by New Human Press in 2014. It is 156 pages and presents Lee Sharks as its author, with an introduction by Johannes Sigil. B Barnes & Noble+1 But the book immediately complicates the idea of an ordinary author and ordinary collection. Its contents include: ● “Pearl”, the central poem ● three “Undersongs” ● a “Footnote to PEARL” ● “Fuguework,” containing numerous other poems ● essays and manifestos ● a literary-history piece ● a forum post ● a “Telepathicist Manifesto” ● other deliberately strange supplementary materials M Medium So the book is almost a poetry collection pretending to be an archive. The most important idea: the author is not just one person The book belongs to a larger project called The Crimson Hexagon. The publisher's description explicitly compares its method to the Personae tradition of Browning and Pound and, especially, to Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms. A AbeBooks+1 That's crucial. A pseudonym is normally just another name for the same author. A heteronym, in Pessoa's sense, is more radical: the invented author has a distinct personality, biography, aesthetic, and literary voice. Pearl takes that idea and makes it increasingly elaborate. You have: Lee Sharks → writes poems but also: Johannes Sigil → introduces and theorizes Lee Sharks and other figures such as Jack Feist appear as writers within the same fictional-literary ecosystem. The result is a wonderfully unstable question: Who is actually writing the book? And the answer seems deliberately to be: the system of voices is the author. Why “Pearl” matters The title Pearl isn't simply the name of one poem among many. It functions almost like the origin point of the whole system. The book's table of contents puts: PEARL at the center and then surrounds it with things like “the metaphor museum,” “the metaphor factory,” and “strange new earth.” M Medium Those titles already tell you something about the book's attitude toward language. A metaphor isn't merely an ornament in a poem. It becomes something that can be: ● collected, ● displayed, ● manufactured, ● transformed, ● reproduced. That makes language feel almost like an industrial or technological process. The “pearl,” accordingly, can be read as something precious that language produces—but also something buried inside an enormous system of language. “The Crimson Hexagon” The phrase itself is an allusion to Jorge Luis Borges's “The Library of Babel.” Borges imagines a library containing every possible book. The terrifying implication is that somewhere in the library is every truth, every falsehood, every possible history, and endless meaningless combinations of letters. The Crimson Hexagon seems to turn that Borges-like idea into a literary production system. Instead of one library containing infinite books, you get an expanding network of: ● poets, ● personae, ● fictional books, ● criticism, ● manifestos, ● literary histories, ● internet posts, ● theoretical documents. This is why calling the project simply “avant-garde poetry” doesn't quite capture it. It is also an experiment in how a literary canon gets manufactured. The funniest—and most serious—part: fake literary authority One of my favorite things about the book is how aggressively it plays with literary prestige. The biography of Lee Sharks, for example, claims absurd accomplishments involving thousands of degrees, enormous numbers of prizes, miniature offices inside his brain, dinosaurs, kidnapped intellectuals, and ruby statues. M Medium Obviously, this is comic. But the joke has a serious target. Literary culture constantly tells us that authors are important because of things like: ● awards, ● credentials, ● biographies, ● famous friends, ● introductions by established writers, ● critical essays, ● historical importance. Pearl simply turns those conventions up until they become ridiculous. Instead of saying: “Lee Sharks is an important emerging poet.” it essentially constructs an entire mythology proving that he is important. And then you realize that that's what literary institutions do anyway. The book's relationship to modernism There's another layer worth noticing. The project invokes Browning, Pound, and Pessoa, and later material surrounding Pearl makes the relationship to twentieth-century modernism even more explicit. M Mind Control Poems The underlying question is something like: What would the modernist experiment look like if it were happening in the internet age? Modernists fragmented the stable poetic self. The internet fragments it even further. Online, you can have: ● a username, ● an avatar, ● a blog, ● multiple identities, ● invented biographies, ● collaborative texts, ● anonymous posts, ● constantly shifting audiences. So the heteronym becomes almost perfectly suited to contemporary digital culture. “Telepathicism” and the strange theory around it The book also develops its own terminology, including “Telepathicist” / “Telepathicism.” I wouldn't take this as a straightforward philosophical doctrine that you're expected to accept. It's better understood as part of the book's fictional theory-machine: the work invents concepts that seem simultaneously serious, ridiculous, prophetic, and literary. That's another important feature of the project. It continually asks: At what point does invented literary theory become actual literary theory? If an author invents a movement, writes its manifesto, invents its practitioners, writes its history, and then critiques the movement—all within the same artistic project—has the movement become “real”? That's one of the book's central games. The “Fuguework” section The second major poetic section, FUGUEWORK, is where the project becomes much more recognizably a poetry collection. The titles range wildly—from things like “Premonition Dream” and “an elegy for ‘Howl’” to deliberately provocative or absurd formulations involving Walt Whitman, personal authenticity, death, sickness, alien singing, and “Song of Me.” M Medium There is a recurring collision between: the grand poetic tradition and the ridiculous contemporary self. Whitman says, essentially, I contain multitudes. The internet-era poet responds: Which version of me? That's where I think Lee Sharks becomes most interesting. The underlying anxiety: authenticity One title in particular gives away a major concern: “i want you to know that i have personal authenticity as a poet because of my identity” M Medium That's funny because it sounds like an exaggerated version of contemporary literary discourse. But underneath the joke is a real problem: What makes a poem authentic? Is it: ● the author's biography? ● identity? ● emotional sincerity? ● originality? ● political position? ● formal innovation? ● the author's suffering? ● the author's reputation? Pearl refuses to settle the question. Instead, it manufactures a persona so artificial that you're forced to think about why we believe any literary persona is authentic. Why I think the book is worth reading I wouldn't recommend approaching Pearl primarily as: “Here are some beautiful poems; let me understand what each one means.” I'd approach it as: “What happens when someone turns the entire institution of poetry into a poem?” The book's real subject is therefore bigger than “Pearl.” It's about language, authorship, literary history, identity, reputation, technology, and the construction of meaning. And it has a distinctly contemporary paradox at its center: The more identities you invent, the less certain you become about who the author is—and yet the more completely the author has expressed himself. That's very Pessoa, but also very internet-age. One caveat about the sources There's an unusual bibliographical wrinkle here: much of the material now circulating online about The Crimson Hexagon comes from the project's own archive and later writings, including material published in 2025–26. M Medium+1 So I would distinguish what the 2014 book itself contains from later interpretations and expansions of the project. The 2014 bibliographic facts are independently corroborated by booksellers/catalog listings. A AbeBooks+1 If you're actually reading the book now, I can go one step deeper and do a close reading of “PEARL” itself, section by section, explaining its imagery, voice, jokes, philosophical ideas, and what the “metaphor museum/factory” is doing. B M A **USER:** yes, lets **CHATGPT:** Yes. And now that we have the text of “PEARL” available, I think there’s a much richer way project of invented writerly identities, drawing on Pessoa's heteronyms and the tradition of poetic personae. to read it than my first answer suggested. The poem is essentially a battle between metaphor and the desire to say something that cannot be taken back. M Medium The poem begins with loneliness The opening image is extraordinary: the poet imagines his poems happening like a train whistle at night—something that exists even though nobody deliberately writes it. That establishes the poem's first paradox: A poem is an act of communication, but it is also an act of isolation. The speaker wants his poems to make him “not be alone,” but the images he produces—moonlight, ferns, water, dancers, explosions—keep emphasizing his isolation. The poem is therefore trying to do two contradictory things: ● reach another person; ● preserve the strange private experience that made the poem necessary in the first place. That contradiction never gets resolved. Then comes the crucial declaration: no more metaphors The poem suddenly turns against itself. The speaker imagines a future in which: “There will be no metaphors ever again” This is the key to the entire poem. Because everything we've just read is metaphor. His fingers have become ferns. His thoughts become water. A poem becomes a dancer. Loneliness becomes a tremolo. So the poem says: I want to escape metaphor. But the only way it can describe that escape is through more metaphor. That's not merely a clever joke. It's the poem's central philosophical problem. Language seems incapable of giving us the thing itself. We can only keep pointing toward it. The metaphor museum and metaphor factory This is where the poem becomes wonderfully absurd. The speaker imagines establishing a “metaphor museum” and then an industrial “metaphor factory.” M Medium I think those two images represent opposite ways of dealing with language. The museum A museum preserves dead things. So if metaphors are put in a museum, they're being treated as fossils. The metaphor once had life; now we exhibit it. That is a surprisingly dark conception of literary tradition. Every poetic image eventually becomes something we've seen before. A moon is poetic. A rose is poetic. A journey is poetic. A heart is poetic. Eventually the metaphor becomes an artifact. The factory The factory is even darker. A factory doesn't preserve metaphors. It mass-produces them. The speaker imagines manufacturing “scientifically identical plastic metaphors” and selling them. That's a satire of formulaic writing: produce recognizable poetic effects → package them → distribute them → consume them. And then the poem itself does something fascinating: it turns the metaphor museum and factory into actual poems—the two “Undersongs.” The poem has escaped its own body and become an institution. “Nothing I try will work” This is the emotional center. After all the theoretical games, the speaker admits that nothing works. Metaphors are dead. The moon no longer walks the earth. And then something changes. The speaker says that his loneliness will become an “inchoate blob”—something indistinguishable from anybody else's loneliness. M That's devastating. Because metaphor is both: what isolates us and what allows us to communicate our isolation. Medium Without metaphor, the speaker doesn't become more authentic. He becomes less particular. His loneliness becomes everybody's loneliness. That's why the pearl eventually appears The later section of the poem gives us the image that explains the title. The speaker imagines a distant future in which his bones are discovered, and inside them is a final poem—a pearl. H Hello Poetry This completely changes our understanding of the title. A pearl is something: ● formed slowly, ● enclosed inside something living, ● precious, ● polished, ● discovered later, ● almost impossible to manufacture authentically. And most importantly, the pearl is not identical to a metaphor. The poem describes it as almost a stone: something hard, compact, material. So we move from: metaphor → image → language toward: object → body → thing itself. The speaker wants a poem that doesn't merely represent something. He wants a poem that exists. “A thing, once sent, that cannot be called back” This is perhaps the most important idea in the poem. The final pearl is imagined as something irreversible. Once the poem has been given to the world, it can't be recalled. That makes the poem fundamentally about publication. Writing is private. Publication is irreversible. Once you send the poem out, you lose control over: ● what it means, ● who reads it, ● whether anyone understands it, ● whether anyone cares, ● whether it survives, ● whether it becomes ridiculous, ● whether it becomes meaningful centuries later. And that's exactly what happens to Pearl itself. The poem is obsessively concerned with the fact that a poem becomes independent of its author once it enters the world. The ending beautifully reverses the beginning The opening gives us: train whistle → loneliness The ending gives us: foghorn → loneliness But the emotional meaning has changed. At the beginning, the sound is lonely because nobody is writing it. At the end, the poem imagines itself happening like a foghorn at sea, dispersing the darkness. The poem hasn't actually eliminated loneliness. It has done something subtler: it has made loneliness audible. And that may be the answer to the whole poem. You don't defeat isolation through language. You create a signal that another lonely consciousness might someday hear. Why “Pearl” is such a good title The pearl is therefore a perfect metaphor—but there's a delicious irony here. The poem spends much of its time declaring war on metaphor. And then it gives us the ultimate metaphor: the poem itself is a pearl. So the poem can't escape metaphor. It ultimately discovers that metaphor isn't the enemy. Bad, exhausted, automatic metaphor is the enemy. The genuine metaphor is different: it takes something interior and makes it perceptible to somebody else. And this connects directly to Lee Sharks This is where I think the larger Crimson Hexagon project becomes much more interesting. The book is obsessed with questions of authorship, identity, literary tradition, and the desire to be heard. The publisher describes Pearl as one installment in a larger project of invented writerly identities, drawing on Pessoa's heteronyms and the tradition of poetic personae. B Barnes & Noble+1 So there's a wonderful contradiction: The author invents Lee Sharks in order to speak more authentically. That sounds impossible. If Lee Sharks is an invented persona, how can Lee Sharks be authentic? But Pearl suggests that perhaps all literary identity works this way. The “self” that writes a poem is already a constructed version of oneself. Lee Sharks simply makes the construction visible. My reading of the poem in one sentence I'd put it this way: “Pearl” is about the desperate hope that language can transform private loneliness into an irreversible object of meaning that another person, someday, might find. And that makes the final pearl much sadder than it initially appears. The speaker doesn't ultimately imagine that someone will meet him. He imagines that after he's gone, someone will find the poem. That is the ancient dream of poetry: I may disappear, but perhaps the thing I made will remain. And the book's bizarre apparatus of invented authors, introductions, manifestos, fictional histories, and competing voices is essentially another version of that same dream: how do you make a voice survive its maker? If you'd like, the next thing I'd suggest is that we go through “Undersong I: The Metaphor Museum,” “Undersong II: The Metaphor Factory,” and “Undersong III: Strange New Earth” together—because those three poems make the argument of Pearl much stranger and, I think, much funnier. M H B Good Idea Creations LLC This Coffee Table Book Has LoreA strange, beautiful guide to civilization. Part encyclopedia, part artifact, part rabbit hole. Ad $ **USER:**