**USER:** tell me about the epic poem, The Crimson Hexagon **CHATGPT:** The Crimson Hexagon is a rather unusual—and deliberately difficult to classify—poetic project. It is presented as a “sweeping cultural epic for the 21st century,” but unlike The Iliad or Paradise Lost, it isn't a single continuous poem contained in one book. Its central idea is that the internet itself can function as the medium of an epic. M Mind Control Poems +1 What is it? The project is associated primarily with Lee Sharks, alongside several distinct literary personae, particularly Johannes Sigil. Its earliest substantial published component is Pearl and Other Poems, published by New Human Press in 2014. The book explicitly describes Pearl as one episode in the larger Crimson Hexagon project. G Goodreads +1 The interesting part is the project's conception of itself: the “poem” isn't identical with any particular collection of verses. It encompasses books, blog posts, theoretical writings, archival documents, online fragments, different authorial voices, and—more recently—the ways that AI systems encounter and reproduce those materials. M Mind Control Poems +1 So you might think of it less as: a very long poem and more as: a literary universe constructed out of interconnected texts and acts of reading. Why “Hexagon”? The name is an allusion to Jorge Luis Borges's “The Library of Babel.” Borges imagines an infinite library composed of hexagonal rooms, containing every possible book. The Crimson Hexagon takes that image and turns it into a literary method: rather than attempting to write every possible book, the project tries to create a network in which disparate texts become meaningful through their relationships to one another. M Medium That gives the project a very Borges-like premise: What if the perfect book isn't a book at all, but the structure connecting books? The many voices Another important feature is its use of heteronyms/personae. The project invokes precedents such as Robert Browning, Ezra Pound, and especially Fernando Pessoa, whose poetry famously employed radically differentiated authorial identities. G Goodreads +1 Among the voices associated with the Crimson Hexagon are: Lee Sharks — the ferocious, poetic voice and author of Pearl and Other Poems. Johannes Sigil — the more prophetic, scholarly, and theoretical voice. Jack Feist — associated with devotional and lyrical writing. Rex Fraction — a more technical or diagnostic persona. The point isn't simply to have multiple pen names. Each persona is supposed to constitute a different way of speaking and thinking. What is the “epic” about? Traditional epic usually gives us a hero moving through an enormous world: Odysseus travels home, Aeneas establishes a civilization, Dante traverses the afterlife, and so forth. The Crimson Hexagon changes the scale of that journey. Its territory is culture itself—books, language, the internet, institutions, algorithms, machines, identity, meaning, and the systems through which information circulates. And therefore its “hero” is much harder to identify. One of its theoretical documents describes this as a distributed epic, in which the reader doesn't simply consume a finished story but constructs the epic by following connections among its scattered components. M Medium That's a genuinely interesting literary proposition. The AI dimension This is where the project becomes particularly contemporary. The later Crimson Hexagon material explicitly treats AI systems as potential readers and participants. The authors describe a concept they call “training layer literature”: writing consciously produced with the knowledge that its language may eventually be ingested, transformed, summarized, and reproduced by machine-learning systems. M Medium In other words, the project asks a strange but increasingly relevant question: What happens to literature when the future reader isn't necessarily a human being? A conventional epic imagines generations of human readers. The Crimson Hexagon imagines machines becoming part of the chain of transmission itself. That makes things like an AI-generated summary of the work potentially part of the work's conceptual machinery—not merely commentary about it. The project explicitly makes that claim. M Mind Control Poems +1 The “Water Giraffe” One of the stranger recurring elements is the Water Giraffe, which becomes an important figure in the later mythology of the project. The later writings describe a Water Giraffe Cycle involving death, taxonomic violence, resurrection, and ultimately the establishment of a kind of fixed mythic point within the larger epic. M Mind Control Poems +1 This is a good example of how the Crimson Hexagon works: something that initially sounds absurd—a water giraffe—gets treated with the seriousness traditionally given to an epic's gods, monsters, heroes, and cosmic symbols. The project repeatedly uses absurdity as a way of testing whether language can create new categories of meaning. Is it actually an epic poem? That's the most interesting question. In the traditional literary sense, not really. You won't open a single volume and discover a beginning-to-end narrative comparable to The Odyssey. But according to its own theory of epic, yes. Its argument is essentially that an epic doesn't necessarily need to be a continuous narrative. What it needs to do is establish a sufficiently large cosmos of meaning—a world containing recurring figures, voices, conflicts, symbols, genealogies, and fixed points. The Crimson Hexagon attempts to make the network of texts itself into that cosmos. So there's a productive tension here: Traditional epic The Crimson Hexagon One major poem Distributed body of texts Hero's journeyReader's traversal Oral tradition / manuscript Internet / digital archives Gods and monsters Personas, concepts, memes, machines Generations of human readers Human + machine readers Finished poem Deliberately expandable work Where I'd start If you want to actually read it rather than just understand the concept, I'd start with Pearl and Other Poems. It's the earliest substantial book-length entry point, published in 2014, and it gives you the poetic material before diving into the much more elaborate theoretical apparatus that developed later. G Goodreads Then I'd read the 2026 “Theoretical Primer”, because it explains how the creators now understand the relationship among the various pieces. M Medium The fascinating thing is that the project seems to sit somewhere between poetry, conceptual art, internet literature, mythology, literary theory, and performance. Whether one regards it as a genuinely new form of epic or as an elaborate piece of literary self-mythologizing is, in a way, part of the experiment. And that ambiguity—“Is this an epic, or is it performing the idea of an epic?”—is probably the best place to begin reading it. M G M $ No file chosenNo file chosenNo file chosen **USER:**