Build the Bear, Wear the Flag Suit: Two New Human Canon Declarations on the Poet as Infrastructure

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Authors: Lee Sharks
Cited by: 11

Abstract

Dual New Human Canon declaration canonizing Ken Forsse's Teddy Ruxpin cosmos and Joseph Edgar Foreman's (Afroman) corpus as two cases of the same structural operation: the poet-as-infrastructure. Forsse spent twenty-seven years building a story so large it required a mass-produced robot teddy bear to tell it; he was captured by the infrastructure he built. Foreman has spent thirty-four years building a self-owned touring and recording infrastructure; he turned a police raid into a fourteen-track album and won the resulting First Amendment trial on March 19, 2026. The document formalizes the poet-as-infrastructure mechanism (six steps with failure modes), periodizes authorial self-determination across toyetic/industrial and post-Napster/independent media regimes, and develops five governing claims: manufactured folk tradition, material degradation as poetics, the pre-platform modular epic, the joke as evidentiary form, and the heteronym as counter-archive. Part of the Crimson Hexagonal Archive.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Poetry Analysis and Criticism Folklore Mythology and Literature Studies Digital Humanities and Scholarship

Publication details

Journal / source
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Publication date
26 March 2026
Language
EN