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Digital Poetics Language as Transmission: Poetry's Electronic Presence
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"Do rivers not render an increase in letters by going where they're going and not stammering." The Electronic Medium Indeed, charting the
production and circulation of poetry is germane to any study
of poetry since poetry's circulation has always been related
to its making. The same was true of poetry in the past
century, when its means of production and distribution was a
crucial consideration of writing. The rise of little
magazines and the small press from hand presses of the
Fifties through the mimeo, Xerox, and offset production of
the following decades demonstrated not only poetry's
[i]
engagement with its mode of production but its dependence
upon its means of dissemination. It is important to note
that, in the twentieth century, such previous engagements
involved "discarded" technologies. As such the production
and consequent distribution of poetry texts lagged behind
publishing and distribution channels more current with
production technologies [ii].
Distribution was also effectively limited by national
boundaries, with the concomitant problems of postage costs,
duty, and currency exchange. The nineties presented even
greater challenges with the collapse of poetry distribution
channels (Segue, Inland, and others) and the nearly
totalizing rise of bookstore chains. The decade finished
with an even more debilitating blow delivered by online book
merchandising companies, companies bound neither to serve
any community nor even to make a profit.[iii]
Poetry's distribution problem was further compounded by the
practically nonexistent means of distribution for poetry in
other media such as sound, performance, and the
visual. The continued importance of
print notwithstanding, poetry has a current engagement with
electronic technology [iv].
The electronic medium offers unprecedented opportunities for
the production, archiving, and distribution of poetry texts,
all possible with present technology. Several computer
poetry production efforts were made from
1980-1990[v]
yet during that decade poetry's victories in the electronic
realm remained scattered and the texts themselves often
proved elusive. (Divergent programs were required for
operation. Further, some of the publishers involved
were arguing the proprietary status of their texts and
fighting distribution battles tougher than those of the
small press.) The nineties also compounded the difficulty of
access to specific electronic texts with the rise of the
Internet and the Web. Though this might seem a
contradiction, the sudden proliferation of electronic texts
of all varieties has made access to specific types of
writing even more challenging. What have become crucial in
the climate of this textual dystopia are (1) gathering
places or subject villages for texts with related
engagements, and (2) a recognition of the materiality of
digital poetry texts. Central to the success of
electronic poetry is the notion of a "subject village," a
site for the access, collection, and dissemination of poetry
and related writing. Such a site provides a gathering
ground, flood plain, mortar for the pestle of poesis. It
should be understood that such a subject village neither
attempts to collect everything nor does it exert "control"
in a traditional sense. Rather: Much as with earlier
technologies, the electronic medium is not only a publishing
and distribution means, but as a technology, enters the
material of writing. What writing is becomes altered by how
it is physically written through its production technology,
its files, codes and URLs (sometimes called "earls"). We are
living in a material world and these are material URLs
[vi].
The same material influences occurred in the media of clay
tablets, papyrus, and the codex, and it is no different now.
A parallel for such an engagement with the material in the
twentieth century? Think, for example of film -- not when it
attempts to reproduce reality but when it functions as a
medium conscious of being constituted of pans, camera
angles, lens effects, and montage; i.e., there are certain
limits and specific effects concomitant with the materials
of a given medium. Further, the medium affects the
materiality of the work. An example of this is the way
distortion, once a by-product of electric instrumentation in
rock music, has now become an aesthetic element in the
music. (The rock group Orgy's use of distortion in their
1998 hit song "Blue Monday" is a prime example of this.) As
a writing medium, online electronic space depends on the
fact that the Web is itself an instance of writing. Not only
do web pages contain writing but these pages are presented
through the medium of the home page and are themselves
written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)[vii]. In Digital Poetics, I
look at such writing. Picture yourself with two windows
open: in one you are editing pure ASCII text using the
glistening, black Model T Ford of EMACS and sputtering
through the black & white fields of VT100. In the other
window you have Netscape open, that graphical but heinously
sloppy browser that seems out to get you with its delays,
bull-headed error messages, and proclamations that it just
found you 750,000 items that match -- exactly -- your search
for the term "phanopoiea". You are editing not on some
back-up up system then uploading but on the server itself,
every time you save your work in progress -- improvements,
tests, errors -- it is immediately available to the world.
The process has all the risks of live television but there
is an added excitement since it is the act of writing that
is the performance. In this investigation we will write,
read, and breathe within the UNIX C-shell environment. A
C-shell so efficient you swear you can hear the ocean if you
put your ear to the monitor. This is a dynamic, expansive
writing space, a pixelated meadow on a revolving disk inside
a UNIX box. It is a field for which permission is an actual
fact of the UNIX environment, in Robert Duncan's words (with
the meadow representing creative space for
Duncan): The Web is a
representational discourse cast from natural language
cradled in the matted barbs of mark-up. If a field has it
prose and versus, these are its verses, nested within a
frame of webbed electronic poesis. Our task is to explore
the texture of the clods the plow leaves behind; to
celebrate its nitrogen, iron, and mulch, to furrow the
"everlasting omen of what is" (7). Digital Poetics
attempts to take on a task different than its peers. First,
this is a book about Web-based electronic writing viewed
through the lens of poetic practice. It is not another book
about "la vie en prose". Second, rather than idealize,
hyperbolize, speak in the abstract, propose egolessness,
waltz around conjectured possibilities, deny intention,
postulate, berate, or generally irritate, the goal here is
to argue electronic space as a space of poesis; to
employ the tropes, hypertextualities, linkages, and static
of the medium; to speak from the perspective of one up to
the elbows in the ink of this writing machine. (Though in
this metaphor, the ink in question would be less like that
of the printing press and more like the obfuscating fluid of
the squid.) It is also important to acknowledge that
electronic writing has crossed the threshold into our common
conversation. (Indeed, our collective vocabulary is steadily
growing: by some estimates, 25% of the new words entering
the English language each year are now related to
computing.) I hope to suggest that one may go beyond looking
at technology as something that should be on a shelf,
labeled, and out of reach; there is much to be gained by
simply investigating it as writing. Indeed, the digital field is
a real form of practice and immediately relevant to any
informed sense of what we will call "poetry" in coming
years. But one must learn to see through a new lens, one
with expanded focal points. Trying to understand the digital
work solely through codex practice is like trying to
understand film, for the person that has never seen one, by
looking at a still. It is this general lack of understanding
of the electronic text file as a physical, visual, and
verbal writing material (akin to a Pollack-painted,
barn-sized wall of dizzying links, splotches of error, and
black holes of hang time) that is addressed here. This study
presents not a theory of electronic textual artifice, not
emotion as represented by the emoticon (;>), but an
investigation into the materiality of electronic writing. It
addresses, to varying depths, the three principal forms of
electronic textuality, hypertext, visual/kinetic text, and
works in programmable media. (Though by the end of this
study the goal is to emerge with a clear sense of the
relative importance of these three forms.) It does not try
to determine what might occur under ideal conditions.
Rather, it looks at electronic textuality as writing per
se and investigates how the materiality of electronic
writing has changed the idea of writing itself, how this
writing functions in the real world of the Web, and what
writing becomes when activated in the electronic medium.
There is a sense of “active” being argued here
similar to what William Carlos Williams argued for the print
poem. As Robert Creeley mentioned at a reading in Buffalo
(November 5, 1999), Williams's insistence was not on the
poem as afterthought (the classic concept of "recollections
collected in tranquility") but on the poem as itself an
instrument of thought. He has written: The poet thinks through the
poem. Similarly, investigated here is not the idea of the
digital work as an extension of the printed poem, but the
idea of the digital poem as the process of thinking through
this new medium, thinking through making. As the poet
works, the work discovers.
[i]
In general, the term "poetry" is used in this volume to
refer to practices of innovative poetry rather than to what
might be called academic, formal, or traditional forms of
poetry. [ii]
For example, letter presses, mimeo machines, early photocopy
machines, and daisy-wheel printers passed from businesses to
small presses as they were superceded by newer
technologies. [iii]
In this light it is surprising that some poets choose to
list an online book merchandiser as a source for their books
when they could as easily list a small press book store.
(These often also offer ordering through e-mail, the phone,
and the Web.) Since online book merchandisers have not
committed to ongoing support of small circulation books, it
might be naive for poets to support them without questioning
the impact of this practice. [iv]
There is no agreed-upon term for digital poetry. It will
sometimes be referred to in this volume as digital poetry,
electronic poetry, e-poetry, or computer-generated writing.
See the section "Future Tenses" in Digital Poetics
for a fuller discussion of the terms and boundaries of
electronic poetics. [v]
These efforts included Jackson Mac Low and John Cage's use
of computer programs to generate mesostic and diastic
readings, the publication of Hugh Kenner and Joseph
O'Rourke's Travesty program in the November, 1984 issue of
Byte, Charles O. Hartman's presentation of the program
Diastext to Jackson Mac Low, and the development of
Storyspace. See the chapter, "E-Poetries:
A
Lab
Book of Practice, 1970-2001" for more on this
topic. [vi]
The URL itself contributes in a small way to your experience
of reading. What are you thinking as you type in those
symbols, fragments of names, tildes, and gutteral utterances
that invoke Web screens? For example, how is your experience
different approaching a writing at a URL containing the path
"/authors/glazier/theories/hypertext.html" versus
"/authors/glazier/tomfoolery/hypertext.html"? Such text
strings are not transparent carriers of information; rather
they form part of the material of the writing. |
