In terms of analyzing my own work, I would say that I need to proceed with humility. I come back to Hayles’ Writing Machines (MIT, 2002), in which she explains that technotexts “play a special role in transforming literary criticism into a material practice, for they make vividly clear that the issue at stake is nothing less than a full-bodied understanding of literature” (26). All texts are “technotexts,” and the question of new media helps us to see this.  A simple observation.  But many of the most complex questions have simple solutions. And simple solutions often have complex consequences.

I believe that Dorothy’s musings about Utopia offer instruction for the place where poetry exists:

“A place where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place Toto? There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away. Behind the moon, beyond the rain.”

And

“Well, I – I think that it – it wasn’t enough to just want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em – and it’s that – if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with! Is that right?”

In other words, to find poetry you’ve got to travel to exceptional places.  But, in the end, the exceptional place is where we live.  Good poetry is a vehicle for estrangement; it launches us into new frames of experience.

About my colleagues, I have learned a great deal. They are diligent, bright, creative people. But more importantly, I learned the value of bringing a highly personal approach to the work that we do. How do we ground our work in our experience? And I was reminded of how important it is to be integrated with a community.The people involved worked well. I attribute its success to the personalities involved.

What did not work well were the consequences of poor planning on my part. The pacing was too quick. The size of the cohort was too small. The season seemed wrong (particularly as we ran into August). And, I did not allow (as Jason Nelson correctly pointed out) for community to develop as fully as it might have.

In the future, I would work on a larger cohort, perhaps twice as many people. I would include a discussion list and orientation period so that people could get to know each other online before, during, and after the symposium. This would encourage a more relaxed approach and improved commenting.

Having said that, there are many great pieces that have emerged from this experiment. Personally, I have written a great deal that I would like to refine and consolidate for publication. This is true for each of our active participants. And I am convinced that this format would be incredibly useful for a graduate or, even, an upper-division undergraduate seminar.

• What insights (both practical and theoretical) have you gained into the poem/poems that you have studied?
• What have you learned (both practically and theoretically) about hypermedia?
• What have you learned (both practically and theoretically) about your own work (creative and critical)?
• What have you learned (both practically and theoretically) about your colleagues and their work?
• What about epoetica worked well?  What didn’t?  How would you improve this process?

Reading Lori’s entry on Karpinski and Howe’s open.ended,  which  ties previous discussions about three-dimensionality to the current one about chance, I was reminded of a work which I had forgotten about, but which I want to share: Brooke M. Campbell’s Choose Your Own Sexuality from Rhizomes 8.  Campbell’s piece combines poetry, biography, and history under the familiar form of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel to create a queer biography of Emily Dickinson.  Campbell’s piece takes seriously the implications of queer scholarship, shedding light on the general import of such work:  The author is often just as much what he or she is as what he or she isn’t and that creative works reflect this similar tension.  Decision-making is not simply the rational evaluation of two choices, rather they are heavily laden with cultural expectations, social frameworks, habits, law, and deep desires.  Though Campbell’s piece uses the familiar framework of binary choices, the fact that Campbell’s piece is based on actual historical events loads the choices up with the questions: “What happened?” and “What do we want to happen?”  The effect is not to simply fork the work, but to play in the imaginative spaces between the choices, to speculate about possibility.

A similar experience in narrative forking is Scott McCloud’s Choose Your Own Carl, a fairly straightforward, early, and lo-fi experiment in digital comic.  Inspired by Zephyr’s comment on Lori’s piece, I was inspired to revisit McCloud’s online comics, and found them to remain interesting, particularly because they employ forking in a way that allows the reader to view both “choices” at once.  [As a sidenote: McCloud’s The Right Number  does not explore forking formally, but it does a great job addressing this experience in the narrative.] .

Zephyr’s entry on “chance timing” shifted my focus towards another aspect of chance.  While Lori’s piece focused on chance as a process of unfolding in the present time, Zephyr’s piece considers chance as a process of recursion [The video, by the way, managed to push so many buttons–dread, fear, happiness, regret, sadness–what an accomplishment.].  So often in life, our experience of the variable is not a process of unfolding as much as it’s an experience of reflection.  What happened?  What did I do?  What might I have done?  What should I have done?  Chance is experienced is a process of reflection, in which we meditate upon how now might have been different.  Or why now is the way it is.

To bring this back to Neruda’s “Ode to Broken Things” is a challenge.  Thinking about Campbell’s Dickinson, for example, I might consider the fact that poet’s work is simply an expression of larger life experiences.  I could write a fork in which Neruda’s poem doesn’t exist.  Something never happened, he was never inspired, it was never written.  Or, I could introduce an internal variable to the piece: A shift in attitude or a shift in narrative structure.  Perhaps I could ditch the speaker’s apparent peace with the continual breakdown of things, and heap blame upon the “hands,” “girls,” “hips,” and “ankles.”  I could turn the poem towards anxiety, frustration, and anger.  Or, I could alter the proposed human action of the final stanza, “Let’s not put all our treasures together…”  None of which makes a great deal of sense or sound particularly appealing.

But to reflect upon the piece might simply be enough—to cling to the writer’s commitments, because those are the only ones that we have.  And, if I had to apply to look at how this insight might work in the field of new media, and I see it clearly addressed in MotionText Ferment by mIEKAL aND and CamillE BacoS.  A combination of texts in a variety of formats drawn together to meditate on the notion of lost knowledge, dead languages, destroyed formats, and vanished cultures.  From history’s dead ends, MotionText Ferment reaches for the living, as if to suggest that we are all just a hair’s breadth away from annihilation in this renewed era of burning books, cultural imperialism, war, and accelerated technological obsolescence.   Here, things aren’t broken by “invisible deliberate smashers,” but by deliberate forces.  In spite of this difference, both pieces are chances to see things differently.  Neruda accomplishes this through his writing, mIEKAL aND and CamillE BacoS accomplish this through theirs.  The strength of much good hypermedia spins on this potential to provoke reflection in readers—buttons, images, sounds, motion, time—all must function like words to promote this end.

And, to revisit the insights gained from Lori and Zephyr’s pieces, good hypermedia does not necessarily give us choices.  It gives us depth.  It allows us to experience richly.  Sometimes this is accomplished through a nonlinear processes, sometimes through linearity, but they always seem to provide windows into the nonlinear, subjective realm of the reader’s reflection.

After a month in the suburbs of St. Paul, I am happy to be back home in Adrian, Michigan.  Instead of getting too texty, I decided to go for a walk and take a picture of rustbelt decomposition.  Different from the creative destruction of the suburbs, the sort of industrial decline that characterizes Michigan tends to convey a certain feeling of heaviness, as through cities are just settling back into the ground from whence they sprang. 

And, so I began the trek to the downtown cafe where I am composing this week’s entry.  This spot is a favorite of mine.  Occasionally, I pass this place while running.  It’s nestled between two occupied houses.  I wonder what it once was.  And, if there is a zombie or giant trapdoor spider inside, waiting to snatch me as a I run by.  I run faster.

This was a car that I passed.  I had promised I would photograph a car while I was walking.  In my neighborhood, there are lots of rusty cars (including my own).  But this one seemed especially interesting.

Here, we are approaching an old factory that once supported this neighborhood.

Here is a house a couple blocks down from the factory.  It frames the current situation of working-class America.  A formerly nice family home, in a state of decay, and put up for sale.  The only new thing that isn’t in a state of total disrepair is the satellite dish on the roof.   

Here’s a detail of the siding.

And another of the foundation.

This is the house next door.

And another house a few blocks away.  Fortunately, many homes do not look like this.  The difference seems to be simply a reflection of who has steady work and good benefits. 

This is the library, which is currently being renovated. 

And now we are downtown. Thinking about this experience (thoughts of Neruda, the trip from Minnesota to Michigan, my walk to work, and the electronic poetry symposium), I must reflect on something Jason says in his post, “that all creative works could be construed as digital poems,” alongside Michel de Certeau’s famous description of “the long poem of walking.”  On the one hand, we run the risk of broadening the category of digital poetry to the point of meaningless…  on the other hand, thinking along these lines might reveal something that is truly spectacular and liberating about “new media.”  While my new media piece (a bunch of pictures with some words) is technically unexceptional, it is this window into banality that new media affords us that makes it truly revolutionary.  I took a pretty ordinary, unspectacular walk through my little town on an unremarkable day.  I documented my walk.  I stripped out the colors and cropped the images.  And arranged them for you to see.  And here they are.

It is truly a lo-fi application of new media, but it transformed the walk as I experienced it.  And it allows you to participate in an extremely specific slice of life that you may not otherwise experience.  Your reading of my post will never replicate my experience of walking (you won’t, for example, know entirely the warmth and affection of the setting; the dread that comes with passing the vacant building that I run by every day or so; or the twinge of pain that I feel as I see yet another crumbling house vacated, foreclosed, and put up for sale), but you will have an experience of it.  This cultural packet switching has always been possible, but never to this extent, with this speed, and with such minimal effort.The density of information, too, allows for subtleties to be transmitted in ways that were not possible before.  For example, Strasser and Coverley’s “in the white darkness” or Jason Nelson’s “Panhandle” or Zoe Beloff’s “Influencing Machine” succeed in combining words, images, motion, and sound to create worlds of experience that far surpass the simple series of images contained here.  On the other hand, Phil Smith’s “Dread, Route, and Time” focuses on the physical act of walking and the collectively produced Exeter Mis-Guide actually provides instructions on how anyone can walk artfully through a city.  Considered as acts of packet switching, these experiences unite as meandering flows of consciousness, not “made possible” through new media, but certainly made more probable.

Use any means or media to communicate your insights to the rest of the group.  You have one week to complete the assignment. P.S.  Over the next few weeks, consider looking at the ways that others have approached these questions in new media contexts.  Whenever possible, draw upon interesting works that enhance, challenge, or expand the readings of the poems that you have selected.  If you are unfamiliar with the field, this is a good place to start: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1. 

“A labyrinth of symbols,” he corrected. “An invisible labyrinth of time. To me, a barbarous Englishman, has been entrusted the revelation of this diaphanous mystery. After more than a hundred years, the details are irretrievable; but it is not hard to conjecture what happened. Ts’ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.

–Borges, Jorge Luis.  “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Trans. Donald A. Yates.  <http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/forking_paths.htm>

Last week, I provided a fairly straightforward reading of Neruda’s “Ode to Broken Things.”  This week, I am torn among proliferating approaches to the question of “context” in relation to the poem.  As readers do, I started first with a basic reading of the text (broken pots and clocks and things of that sort).  From there, as readers do, I began to interpret, translate, and decode more aggressively.  Next, I moved on to the human life process that is implied by the passage of time and the inevitable breaking of things.  What began as a lucid description of physical processes became quickly a meditation on physics.  And, always anthropocentric, I shifted my reading from physics to metaphysics, once again looking for the human story that the poem is telling.  From one text, I managed to generate anywhere from two to four different ideas about the realm in which it operates (objects in the concrete, humans in the concrete, objects in the abstract, humans in the abstract).  And, each of these approaches, I suspect is immediately prone to retranslating and further forking.

But, before I go any further with this struggle, I have to ask myself: “How much of this is simply a result of poetry?”  Not “poetry,” in the sense that my confusion was caused by this poem.  Not “Poetry,” in the sense that poets are possessed by some eternal muse who inspires the human soul towards infinite creativity.  But poetry, in the sense that I have pushed myself to interpret based on the expectations I bring to a culturally loaded term.  You call something poetry or art, and suddenly people start to look for meaning.  If we called it a manufacturer’s warranty, I would staple it to a receipt and put it in an envelope in a filing cabinet.  If we called it a romance novel, I would imagine it to be full of pirates and a headstrong woman who, in this exceptional case, wants to be dominated by a musky (but not stinky) swashbuckler with good looks (and without syphilis).   But, since we call it poetry, I am invited to active close reading and the presumption of literary care on the part of the writer. 

So, I am compelled to interpret by the codes that are put into place by the contextual frame that poetry offers.  This, in itself, is not a revolutionary insight.  But it is something to be mindful of when we consider hypermedia art, electronic literature, digital poetry, new media, interactive fiction, etc.  There is a pressure in the field of new media studies (or should I say, “cyberstudies” or “literary criticism” or “communications studies” or…) to figure out which designations are solid and which are yet to be defined.  Much of this is a consequence of the pressures of postmodern life, in which cultural existence is tied to successfully distinctive branding and life is defined by a morbid drive for novelty.  And much is a consequence of real and actual change in the way that people read, write, and store information.  But the specific labeling crisis of new media studies really ought to be understood as a synergy of the two impulses: We know that new media brings something different and we know that writing technologies/techniques are limited by how we think about them.  While many critics might be driven by their own desire to distinguish themselves in the academic world or to solidify thinking about new media, there are surely just as many, if not more, who enjoy the freedom of breaking up the paradigms of language.  This was true of many literary modernists—they struggled to create new forms.  But the contemporary creative scene, the writing techniques and technologies, are geared specifically for the creation of new forms.  It is inherently slippery, multiple, and entropic.  The struggle for practitioners today is to create something that can hold together, to deconstruct then reconstruct.

So, as I struggle with Neruda’s work, I have to think whether I can represent, in a language other than alphabetic text: a) objects in the concrete, b) humans in the concrete, c) objects in the abstract, and/or d) humans in the abstract.  How do I imply a reading of the poem that would capture each narrative trajectory?  Or, do I have to imply a narrative structure that implies all of these paths, since they all exist in my mind?  And, additionally, which representation implies which narrative path?  (Does an image of a table imply the potential fall of an object, the scene of a human drama, the relationship between order and chaos, or the place of humanity in the cosmos?  Does a vacant image of the void of space say something about the future of clay pots, the tragedy of life, the physical realities of the universe, or the existential angst of the human?)  Just as representation tends to proliferate and expand to multiple meanings, we also want it to cohere (see, for example, my previous comment on Charity’s e.e.cummings image).  We “split” and we “clump,” to use the terms that Helen has introduced to this symposium. 

So, having said nothing in particular, I am off to take some pictures of potential scenes of collapse.  Hopefully, they will imply something about “broken things”…

And this is what I found.  This jumble of images is my attempt at an “implied poem.”  It’s not an attempt to imply Neruda’s work, although the photo-excursion that it flowed from was done with “Ode to Broken Things” in mind.  It is a composite of four images.  The first, which I used as a background, was the picture of a closed Best Buy put up for lease (which I used last for last week’s posting).  This image serves as an appropriate backdrop for the entropic suburban picture that I am trying to paint.The second was an intersection, with green lights added to suggest the scene of an impending accident.  The automobile is the lifeline of the suburbs, without it, there are none.  On the other hand, it is the number one threat to personal existence in the suburbs, and, some argue, the number one threat to global existence as well.  This intersection was used because, like most other intersections, it is the scene of frequent collisions and a strange attractor for feelings automotive aggression.The next was some kind of telecommunications obelisk, surrounded by cryptic markings, as if to suggest that the obelisk was going to be upgraded or something was going to be buried.  I like this image because it flaunts the corporatist ethos of modern civilization.  Only in the context of commerce do we tolerate cryptic markings and/or offensive messages in public space.  If I paint the sidewalk with my message, I go to jail (even if I intend to dig the sidewalk up at some future date).  But, this paint has been there for weeks.  And there are similar marks for several blocks along my daily path.  I also like that the marks represent the perpetual obsolescence of economic development…  the ground is going to be torn open, the cables replaced, and the sidewalk patched up…  only to be torn up again in a couple years. The final image is of a dumpster, the ultimate symbol of “creative destruction” that I have described above.  A command from above, and at malls across the nation, dumpsters roll out, facades are torn down, and new ones emerge.  Every day, focus groups and strategists create new atmospheres for shoppers to embrace.  And every day, these new atmospheres appear on our horizons. Taken together, these images have very little to do with the process that Neruda describes.  Instead, they reflect a new religion: That things are broken before they even leave the store, that we are broken, and that our society is broken.  And so, I piled these things up, one upon another, like a vertically arranged triptych, with the dumpster seated high in the heavens, and a sublime glow (a “diffuse glow,” as Photoshop refers to it) permeating the scene of life, death, and renewal. 

Create detailed “stage directions” for the piece.  Be as empirical, phenomenological, or philosophical as you like.  Use any means or media to communicate your directions.You have until July 15th! Until then, take the time to read and comment on your colleague’s work.

I begin this symposium with a certain advantage.  I have an inside knowledge of the weekly assignments because I wrote them up myself.  So, what I lack in knowledge, talent, and skills, I make up for in prescience.  I know the order of things before they unfold—not through intuition or anticipation or precognition—but through the conceptualization of the symposium as a whole.  What is for some the beginning of a span of time broken into five week-long periods, each marked with the introduction of a new task, is for me a single, organized event.  You get surprises, I struggle with expectations.  At least this is how these things are supposed to go in theory.

This first week, I have been refreshed to discover that I am snared up in my own assignment.  The thought process began something like this (only much more fragmentary and unfocused):  “ I guess I should do Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to Broken Things’…  I enjoy reading it…  I know it reasonably well…  It’s beautiful…  It’s fairly concrete and straightforward.”  In fact, my biggest concern was that it might be too straightforward to lend itself to analysis and interpretation alongside the growing body of hypermedia works that I also enjoy.  Now, in Week One, when I actually am sitting down to think about the “time” of the poem, I struggle to begin this work.  The theoretical framework cannot contain the piece that I have selected.  Humiliating Hypermedia Insight #1:  Expectation is the foundation of surprise. [1]

Initially, I had hoped to respond with a series of images that could capture visually and chronologically the passage of time Neruda’s poem, which begins, “Things get broken.”  I could begin with a camera and some things, preferably glass and ceramic, which could be placed on a table in a dusty vacant lot to be shot (with a digital camera) at high noon.  Two photographs of each, one before and one after.  The first photograph would include the thing itself, the surface it would be placed on, the place where it would land if pushed.  The goal of this photograph would be to reproduce the relationship between objects, the potential energy, and the prelapsarian state of things before the fall.  The second photograph would be the same view, but after the fall—an empty ledge, a glittering pile of fragments and shards.  In between the images would be the implication that, as Neruda writes, these things “were pushed/ by an invisible, deliberate smasher.”  A retelling of Adam and Eve in two short acts, two brief simulated clicks of a digital shutter to be uploaded and accessed whenever—bookends to an unrepresented and unrepresentable event (Should I have someone photograph me setting the scenario?  Pushing the things?  Taking the picture?  Or should I dispense with the playacting altogether and write about the idea like a poststructualist closet drama?)  It’s there if you read the poem, but that’s not all that’s there.  Pablo Neruda, that invisible, deliberate smasher of a poet, knocked this idea straight off the top of my head and onto the ground.  And so I am going to try it once again, much more slowly.

So, I’ll begin with a real time and place.  On July 3, 2007 at Noon at the Maplewood Branch of the Ramsey County Library, I sat down to read Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Broken Things.”  Today’s reading took exactly two minutes and one second.  I glanced up from the poem at intervals to check my watch, and was surprised at how quickly a stanza could be read and comprehended.  I was equally amazed at how slow the second hand moved on my watch as I read.  Two hours and eleven minutes later, four paragraphs into my essay, and two cups of coffee later, I am finally writing about my reading of the poem, a story edited out of an overwhelming sea of stimulation— the door which surely clattered in the distance as it does now, the conversations of other people that I cannot see who have since moved on, the intermittent thunk of books being fumbled out of overstuffed arms, kids talking, parents hushing them, shoes squeaking and clicking, keys jangling, and all the other things that surely must have happened.  But I have my doubts, just as I doubt that I even read the poem as I said I did (Was it really noon?  Did it really take two minutes?  Did time really move more slowly, when it has moved so quickly since?). 

In a very superficial sense, this is the time of the poem—the interval of time marked off in my day.  The moments spent before and after in anticipation and reflection, preparation and writing are also the time of my reading of this poem.  But, as you read this, your time is added to my time, and the time of the poem becomes a joint venture.  Taken collectively, the time of Neruda’s “Ode to Broken Things” may be some boundless feat of collective consciousness, gathering the minutes and hours of untold millions, shifting the weight of the world and its things over some precipice which we haven’t yet realized.  At least, this is the hope for literature.  If only there were Nielsen Ratings for such things, we could measure and compare the impact of things like “the yearnings of the human spirit” in the way we slavishly quantify the worth in dollars and cents of prime-time slots.  Actually, that would probably be a terrible, terrible thing.  But measurement of the aggregated snowball of human minutes devoted to Neruda, as interesting as it would be, is an impossibility.

Similarly difficult would be to reconstruct the time of the poem in relation to the poet.  When did he publish it?  When did he write it?  When did the thought enter his mind?  What events in his life precipitated this thought?  Or should I hitch these questions to larger geopolitical events?  All are good questions that ought to be taken up by good scholars.  But, at the end of the day, they are just dreams that readers have about a poem.

It is much simpler to read the poem and dream about its content.  Fortunately, I have a poem that is quite explicitly about time and its passage.  And so, I am led back to the beginning:  “Things get broken.”  Neruda begins with a statement of fact, the description of an inevitable, universal occurrence: The complete, the harmonious, the stable is destined to become incomplete, disorganized, and disturbed.  Neruda continues, “at home,” stating that this event is inevitable even within the secure, comfortable, and knowable space that we consider “home.”  And furthermore, there is no agent upon which this disorder can be hung.  Instead, he offers a simile of action by a nonexistent thing: “like they were pushed/ by an invisible, deliberate smasher.”  Nobody makes things broken, but it seems intentional.  In the first sentence, Neruda paradoxically declares that, even (perhaps especially), in the most familiar corners of daily life, chaos is a certainty. 

In this first sentence, Neruda describes an event that takes place in the life of each thing: It gets broken.  This conception of time is not based on the passage of a specific interval or unit of duration (like a minute ticking away across sixty even seconds or the vibrations of cesium atoms or the movement of the sun across the sky), the breaking of things is synonymous with the passage of time.  In more universal, abstract terms, we might call this “entropy.”  In physics, entropy is the process by which energy is distributed generally throughout the system.  Heat it transferred.  Potential energy is dispersed.  An equilibrium emerges.  As with Neruda’s declaration that “Things get broken,” the increase in entropy is a law (it’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics).  In this first sentence, Neruda lays out something more than a practical observation about objects, he sets out to describe the passage of time itself as characterized by a process of breakdown, a devolution away from order, and outside of human control.

He goes on to list all the agents that did not push things.  He eliminates possible human agents of destruction: “my hands,” “yours,” “the girls,” “the nose,” “the elbow,” “the ankle,” and “anything or anybody.” He goes on to exonerate the large geophysical causes of change: “the motion of the planet,” “the wind,” “the air,” “the orange-colored noontime,”  “night over the earth.”  In this piece, which is preoccupied a definition for the passage of time, Neruda is careful to explain that even these standard metaphors for temporality and motion are not the causes of this change.   He even releases aging, the most personal experience of time passage, from responsibility: “It wasn’t even… the hips getting bigger” that did it.  Instead, it just happens, as though the will to break is embedded in unity itself.  In simple declarative phrases, Neruda lists the events, “The plate broke, the lamp fell/ All the flower pots tumbled over/ one by one.”  Form itself merely postpones its inevitable demise.

The most assertive declaration of will takes place in the following line: “That pot/ which overflowed with scarlet/ in the middle of October/ it got tired from all the violets/ and another empty one/ rolled round and round and round through the winter/ until it was only the powder/ of a flowerpot,/ a broken memory, shining dust.”  Here, Neruda’s flowerpots are overtaken by simple fatigue, simply strained by their own coherence and surrendering their unity to the will of physics.

So powerful is the desire to let go that Neruda devotes an entire stanza to stanza to the collapse of a clock, before restating his initial observation: “Life goes on grinding up.”  He continues, “what lasts through time/ is like an island on a ship in the sea,/ perishable/ surrounded by dangerous fragility/ by merciless waters and threats.”  Here Neruda drops the matter-of-factness which prevails in the poem’s beginning to highlight the precarious fate of human contrivance in the face of this law.  Surrounded by a reality hostile to continuity, he proclaims the persistence of perishability.

In the final stanza, the speaker, like the flowerpots before him, gives up under the strain to maintain order: “Let’s put all our treasures together/ –the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold –/ into a sack and carry them/ to the sea/ and let our possessions sink/ into one alarming breaker/ that sounds like a river.”  Here the speaker acquiesces to the force of time, giving up his belongings to “the long labor of [the sea’s] tides.”  They are, in the final analysis, “So many useless things/ which nobody broke/ but which got broken anyway.”

So, we can conclude that the poem is packed with a variety of references to time (aging, planetary motion, clocks, memories, fatigue, the seasons, etc.).  However, these references are put in place only to be refuted as causes.  The two understandings of time which are alluded to in the beginning of the poem that remain relevant throughout are: 1) The event in which a thing is broken.  And, 2) the larger characteristic of time passage: Entropy.  The struggle movement of the poem is not about revealing something new about time.  Rather, it is about coming to accept the initial insights, accepting the movement from order to disorder, and giving up the struggle for coherence.

Revisiting my initial idea (Taking some things, photographing them, breaking them, and photographing them, again), I tried to imagine an alternative method of simulating the larger process of grinding up.  I could put a small clay pot in a larger container (like a coffee can), tie the can to my bumper, drive around for a while, and document the gradual degradation of the clay pot into shards, pebbles, and dust.  Such an attempt at recreating the process of entropy through the expenditure of energy would be dishonest if presented as a representation of a natural process of decay. 

On the other hand, nowhere in Neruda’s work is it materially or chronologically possible to crush a clay pot using the process he describes.  The duration of the poem, unless it were read extremely slowly over many years, is much too short to contain the grinding up process.  The language of poetry is itself simulation, pointing, in this case, to the time of the cosmos within the mundane.  Within the two minute reading, there is contained my two-day (and who knows how many more to come) reflection on Neruda.  Within this reflection is a larger sense of time which ties the broken bottle I passed this morning as I walked down the street to the processes of the cosmos.  In this context, we might consider my various simulations of things getting broken as inelegant, derivative poetic acts, but poetic acts, nonetheless.  And we might re-consider the power of poetic acts to reflect a materiality that we cannot otherwise comprehend.  Humiliating Hypermedia Insight #2:  Language is representation.  Representation is language. [2]

To conclude, then, the time of this poem happens both at the level of form and content.  At the level of content, it is a poem about time and the breakdown of things.  At the formal level, it engages with the temporal qualities of language.  Meaning-making is a struggle for coherence in which we communicate exceptional and informationally valuable details through the mundane and the familiar (see HHI #1).  The mechanism of communication, even at the most mundane level, is symbolic (see HHI #2).  Together, this means that many of the formal literary rules that we cling to are like Neruda’s clock: Futile human impositions of order on a dynamic and chaotic system.  And that as pedestrian and mundane readings (think of my proposed before and after pictures) begin to break away from strict one-to-one representation and drift into the chaotic web of multiple associations, the poem becomes profoundly meaningful.  But it can only happen if I am willing to toss the shards of useless, broken signification into the breakers.  Humiliating Hypermedia Insight #3: Poetry is meant to be broken.  [3]

Postscript: Suburban Ozymandias

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!

I went running one day in the suburbs of St. Paul, thoughts of broken things filling my head.  I stumbled across the smashed corpse of a plaster dog and promised to return with camera to document the scene of the crime.  When I returned, most of the dog was gone.  instead, I took pictures of the two remaining paws.

Driving later that day, I paused to photograph a closed Best Buy.  What struck me most about the scene was the speed at which suburbia crumbles when the forces of order “give up.”  People stop paving and replacing, watering and cutting, sweeping and painting, and soon the stones themselves begin to crumble.

And, finally, I think of my son, Oscar, who broke his face open this week on a stone fireplace.

Notes

[1] As the alphabetic print poets and the oral poets before them, repetition and form are techniques which rely upon repetition and expectation to solidify a structure.  Breaking with structure becomes a powerful occasion for dramatic effect.  These techniques attempt to mimic through symbolic means the cognitive processes of daily life.  Meaning is forged between the ordinary and extraordinary.  To employ this technique in a hypermedia context, the poet must, as all poets do, understand the grammar and lexicon of their particular form and medium. 

The potential interactivity of new media poems (through, for example, internal navigation features like links and images and external conventions like back buttons and windows) creates different possible patterns for reception.  A good example of one possible this dialectic of expectation and surprise is Jason Nelson’s “Uncontrollable Semantics.”  Nelson’s interface is simple enough.  Readers can navigate away from each screen by choosing one of four words (each of which implies a different directional movement).  Each new screen brings a new mouse atmospheric mouse-follower experience which accompanies the chosen word.   As readers learn the interface and the associated navigational techniques a set of expectations are developed.  Inevitably, readers will stumble upon a button entitled, “a trap.”  Here the exploratory habits of new media and the presumed symbolic nature poetic language converge to override Nelson’s very practical and honest warning: It’s a trap.  It’s a surprise, and I’ve blown it, but you’ll probably walk into it anyway.  Isn’t this what literature has always done, anyways?

So, I call it a “Humiliating Hypermedia Insight.”  It’s a bit obvious, but nevertheless I had overlooked it.

[2] This one has such a strong “Well, Duh?” factor, that I thought I might as well rub my own nose in it, and get over my textual snobbery.

[3] Artists struggle with the rules of mediums and genres.  This is not a new fact.  Unfortunately, my own attitude (which is echoed by many critics) is characterized by an overbearing traditionalism when it comes to new media work.  The possibilities of new media have provoked in many (myself included) an attitude of suspicion against pieces which do not overlap significantly with established traditions.  This attitude has more to do with insecurity about the ability of critics to evaluate or even understand the merits of digital works and the burden of authority rather than rigor or insight.  As a result, the strong criticism that is needed to advance the field is absent. 

And so, my insight, obvious to all except me, once again is appropriately labeled a “humiliating” one.  And it especially humiliating because, in a recent conversation with Jason Nelson, he suggested that he tries to “break” his technology.

By now you have selected a poem that you will use as a jumping off point for this symposium.

Identify the poem's temporal element. Consider its duration, its moment, its progression, its pace, its beginning, and/or its end.

Use any means or media (a written explanation, a series of images, a video, another poem, a song, a hypermedia piece, or something completely new) to communicate your insights about the “time” of the poem to the rest of the group. Your contribution can be witty or obvious, straight or unconventional. You can be concrete or abstract. Just think about the poem and the time it represents. And then do whatever the hell you want to.

Note: If you want to read about time, start with the Wikipedia entry, here.

Post your results by the end of the week (July 8^th). And have lots of fun doing it.