Reading over the posts from the last couple of months, what’s been most fascinating for me is discovering how heliopod, Zephyr, Davin etc. are all thinking about the issues I’m thinking through, but doing so in wonderfully different ways, using different methods, different trajectories. Who would have thought that a comic book project or a digital poem or a series of photographs would have much in common with Williams’ Paterson? That said, this completely unexpected coming-together of disparate interests and approaches is exactly what’s needed, I think, to better/fully understand electronic writing. Now we need to hear from some visual artists!

Also, as a non-blogger (I’m a bit squeamish about broadcasting my thoughts) I’ve learned to feel more comfortable publishing as posting, or posting as publishing, my thinking as it evolves over days and weeks. This forum seems to be a much more truthful way of representing thinking rather than as a finished, polished gem.

What I’ve learned of my own work: how strange it is that every time I set out to write about hypermedia writing, electronic writing, digital poetry, whatever, I end up writing about what I call “bookbound” poets! I spent 90% of my time writing about Williams and only 10% writing about digital poetry. Perhaps this is because I can’t begin to talk about e-writing until I establish a ground – criteria, terminology. Or perhaps this is just indicative of how e-writing insists on a rewriting of the rules of literary scholarship. How does a scholar or thinker or essayist write about writing in the digital medium and not fall back on conventions of reading/writing that were built on hundreds of years of the book? Maybe there’s something revealing about my rootedness in the book.

As a result of this symposium, I’ve managed to work my writing/thinking on Williams into a dissertation chapter I’ve been working on. Here’s how I ended the section on Williams – some conclusions that came out of my epoetica participation: Williams’ significance for this chapter is less that he was very likely the first to write a “poetic manifestation of Einstein as muse” in his 1921 “St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils” and more that he, as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, spent the greater part of his poetic career searching for a way to bring a flexible space-time into poetry (Friedman and Donley 68). Despite what can often appear as an unbridgeable gap between digital and bookbound poetry, surely we can now say, looking at Williams through our present moment of electronic literature, that his work stands as a bookbound example of what we now recognize as an emergent, flexible poetics? However, there are always exceptions to the lineage I am advocating with Williams as examplar. While my argument proceeds from the premise that non-euclidean mathematics (that assumes the possibility of multiple and/or shifting, fluid spaces) has made possible digital works by Lori Talley, Judd Morrissey, and John Cayley that make the most of their medium, there is a lineage of poets that departs from Williams’ search for the contours of a relative measure, the variable foot. These poets—for example, the bookbound poet Raymond Queneau and the digital poet Simon Biggs—are engaged in writing with the use of euclidean mathematics (or mathematics that assumes the existence of transcendent realms such as infinity) and they fully embrace a move toward abstraction, one that the digital age makes as available as it does a move toward emergence.

With real-time 3D rendering & dynamic text generation, open.ended attempts to refigure the poetic experience through spatialization & interaction. As visitors manipulate a joystick to control interlocking geometric surfaces, stanzas, lines, & words move slowly in & out of focus, while dynamically updating text maintains semantic coherence. Order is deliberately ambiguous & multiple readings encouraged as meaning is actively & spatially constructed in collaborative fashion & new potentials for juxtaposition, association & interpretation are revealed.

And not surprisingly, given what I’ve been writing over these weeks, these beautiful little poem-spaces seem to come right out of a dream William Carlos Williams might have had – I wrote last week:

He has activated “blank” space and in this way turned it into what Charles Olson would soon see as a field of energy—a pulsating, fluctuating space that girds the words, as if Williams wants the words themselves to pulsate but, given the limits of the bookbound page, he settles for the surrounding space of the page which is unmarred and open for any appropriation. Further, since “. . . to talk in the American idiom you can’t talk as Shakespeare used to talk, or Milton, or Eliot. You have finally to get away from this pattern of speech and invent another speech . . .”, how else to reinvent language but to do so negatively, taking advantage of the flexibility of the blank space of the page—space that can be shaped, again and again, to reshape in turn the language of Shakespeare, Milton, and Eliot? “I’ve got myself in wrong before the critics by attempting to bring in the idea of mathematics. Of Einstein. Not Einstein, we’ll say, but Einstein’s ideas. The uncertainty of space” (Interviews 45).

Or maybe open.ended is also the opposite of Williams’ dream? Like so many digital poems I’ve looked at, quite in contrast with Williams’ firm belief in the redemptiveness of the particular, the way in which the ground, the ground of history and language, forms us, open.ended seems to be in love with the pure, abstract spaces made possible by the digital – spaces that we may visit but that are seemingly completely independent of the messy, organic world. This abstract quality is only exaggerated with the interactivity built into the poem that not only puts the abstract poem in touch, literally, with the organic world, but that also introduces chance into the poem. The reader/user can move the poem-cube in any direction, moving around, on top, or inside the cube; the reader/user can also double click on any wall of words to “create” the poem as it is simultaneously being read by the authors. But I still argue that this digital poem, just like those by Simon Biggs (see, for example, his web-work Book of Books) gives us the illusion of chance, the illusion of genuinely participating in the unfolding of the poem. It’s not unlike a Choose Your Own Adventure book: true, you have three choices, but not only are they predetermined choices, but the predetermined choices also have a predermined outcome set out by the poet/programmer. Thinking about the version of Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes that’s published by Gallimard – here each line of the poem has been cut across the page so that the reader really can construct “cent mille milliard” readings of the poem – how could it be that a bookbound poem offers us genuine chance operations, options for the reader/user creation of a poem that are as close to infinite as possible?

*

In “Book One” Williams is still working out a consistent spatio-temporal mapping of the speech and space of Paterson. For the moment, his solution, which he largely abandons by “Book Two,” is to use periods as in the foregoing quote to score certain blank spaces; the dots act as a textual version of a musical rest of a given duration and so re-enliven both the unmarked and marked white (though not empty) space of the page. Still, while “Book One” is indeed a complex of fragmented thought, speech, historical documents, and letters, his innovative use of the period cannot have satisfied him as at this point Paterson is still fairly formally rigid, structured as it is by blocks of left-justified text. A text that both represents and acts as a catalyst for the discovery of the varied, constantly shifting spaces/speech of a given place must necessarily be formally fluid yet aurally precise. As he writes a few years later, reflecting on “The Poem Paterson”:

It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the “thought.” To make a poem, fulfilling the requirements of the art, and yet new, in the sense that in the very lay of the syllables Paterson as Paterson would be discovered, perfect, perfect in the special sense of the poem, to have it—if it rose to flutter into life awhile—it would be as itself, locally, and so like every other place in the world. For it is in that, that it be particular to its own idiom, that it lives. (The Autobiography 392)

As we now know, it is in “Book Two,” “beginning with the line: ‘The descent beckons,’” that Williams decides that “the lay of the syllables” of Paterson can best be scored with the variable foot (Selected Letters 334). First, before we turn to this passage from Part III of “Book Two,” I would like to return to “The Poem as a Field of Action,” a talk Williams gave the same year that “Book Two” was published in 1948; here we find that the driving force behind his attempts to create a consistent variable foot is his realization that “[t]he only reality that we can know is MEASURE” (Selected Essays 283). Sounding strikingly postmodern here, he asserts that we can never have unmediated knowledge of a given place—we can only ever know the way by which we come to know which, in turn, is only ever a means of measuring reality. And further, given that Einstein shows us that measurements are not only relatively true but they are so only in relation to a constant (“Einstein had the speed of light as a constant—his only constant” [286]), poetic measurement should likewise be relatively true in relation to a constant—perhaps, Williams muses, the constant in poetry should be “our concept of musical time. I think so” (286). And, if time in poetry is not determined by a rigid meter such as iambic pentameter, then it is almost entirely determined by speech patterns and rhythms. Thus, not only must we “. . . listen to the language for the discoveries we hope to make” (290), but we must also accurately recreate what we have heard and/or catalyze further discovery of the language with a “well spaced” page. He writes in Part I of “Book Two,” prefiguring the poetic turning point in Part III:

Without invention nothing is well spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, theline will not change . . .. . . without invention
nothing lies under the witch-hazelbush, the alder does not grow from among
the hummocks margining the all
but spent channel of the old swale (50)

Despite the spatial regularity of this passage, Williams is calling for nothing less than a culture-wide recognition of the fact that we only know the outside world (or that the outside world only exists for us) through measurement and further, since at least 1920, we can only measure or know the “relative positions” of the outside world. Simply put, “[r]elativity gives us the cue” (Selected Essays 340). More, the first two lines of the above excerpt—“Without invention nothing is well spaced” (emphasis my own)—also imply that, for Williams, relativity means perpetual innovation: as every speech event has its own space-time, so too then must every enactment of that speech event.

However, it was a passage from “Book Two” that brought Williams to the inventive spacing of the variable foot; this passage not only shows us Williams listening to the language, trying to translate what was heard into what is seen, but it forces us to listen to and observe the particular patterns of speech he maps down and across the page:

The descent beckons
        as the ascent beckoned
                Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
        a sort of renewal
                even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new
places
        inhabited by hordes
                heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
        since their movements
                are towards new objectives (78)

Note how Williams’ revelatory move to break the line into a regularized tri-partite structure enables both a horizontal reading across the three rows and a vertical reading down the three columns of text—the structure insists on a particular rhythmical reading that is determined by the line-breaks. However, while Williams had some particular rhythm in mind (one that, because of the unique event that he is representing, cannot be scanned for patterns or taken up as a standard poetic form), presumably we recognize “the variable foot” spatially, as a line of text, rather than by the externally imposed metronomic beat of a metrical foot. Further, since a foot is now visually marked by a line, but a line of poetry in Paterson is properly made up of three feet that are, again, marked as lines, Williams’ variable foot therefore obviates the need for stanzas which insist on the reader treating the blank space between stanzas as empty rather than as a crucial space by which to more precisely score the poem. The passage above also engenders a pictorial reading given the eye rhymes binding one line to the next—for example the diagonal stacking of letters ‘e’, ‘a’, ‘o’, ‘i’ and ‘h’. But note too how the aural and visual echo in the opening two lines—“The descent beckons / as the ascent beckoned”—and how the lines subtly reinforce the fact that they constistute a reading/writing event. Because “the ascent beckoned” can be read as referring back “up” to the previous line, it effectively marks, instead of effaces or transcends, the passing of “real” earthbound time during Williams’ writing and our reading. In a sense, he has created a three-dimensional poem whose three axes (two spatial axes and the temporal axis of speech or rhythm) are all constantly utilized. (All of the foregoing aspects of just these few lines of “Book Two” bring to mind Williams’ fascination with Whitehead and his hypothesis that Einstein’s theory of relativity means we ought now to think not of absolute measurements of space and time, or even of relative measurements of space-time, but of the relative measurement of the space-time of a given event—here, the event is that of two lines of poetry.) Not suprisingly, however, the perpetual inventiveness that Williams called for early on in Part I of “Book Two” is not sustainable (and so in a sense Paterson is a record of his poetic successes and failures more than it is a record of Paterson itself). Only a page later after the passage quoted above from Part III, Williams’ inventive spacing approaches the limits of recognizability; any more innovative measuring/spacing and the poem will become, as I earlier quoted him writing in a letter to Kay Boyle, “a rhythmical blur,” (Selected Letters 132).

The descent
        made up of despairs
                and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening:
                which is a reversal
of despair.
        For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
        what we have lost in the anticipation—
                a descent follows,
endless and indestructible    .(79) 

formally, almost always break where a careful American English speaker might pause. Williams has even broken away from the neatness of the tripartite line; instead he has positioned his lines as steps that loosely move back and forth across the page and between the diagonal poles of “[t]he descent” and, ten lines later, “a descent follows.” Thematically, whereas “[t]he descent” on the previous page seems largely to refer to the text’s descent down the page, here, again as we move down the page and through the duration (read: space-time) of the speaker’s musings, “[t]he descent” is amplified to refer to the relentless struggle against abstraction (the ascent), the upwardly mobile drive for “accomplishment,” and the embrace of an unceasing excavation or acknowledgement of the historical, environmental, linguistic ground of particulars underlying Paterson/Paterson. Ironically, while such a descent into the messiness of particulars makes possible “a new awakening,” what we are in fact awakened to is the realization that the descent would not have happened in the first place without the experience of failure, denial, loss. Not suprisingly, then, as form is nothing more than an extension of content in Paterson (to paraphrase Williams’ literary inheritor Robert Creeley), Williams retreats from formal inventiveness and so straightens out the lines of Part III (which now coalesce around the left margin), and the part ends not with poetry but with a scathing letter written to “Dr. P” accusing him of having “never had to live . . . —not in any of the by-ways and dark underground passages where life so often has to be tested” (90). Failure, denial, loss. *In the later books of Paterson and in his letters and essays from the 1950s and 1960s, Williams only grows more insistent about his sense that “. . . the foot can no longer be measured as it was formerly but only relatively . . .” (Selected Letters 332). As he writes at the end of “Book Five,” “The measure intervenes, to measure is all we know, // a choice among the measures . . // the measured dance” (235). But it’s not until a 1961 transcription of a curious conversation between Williams and Walter Sutton that he explicitly addresses the spatial dimensions of this poetic measure or how he designates a given cluster of words as a foot if the verse is not measured accentually:

WCW: . . . the variable foot is measured. But the spaces between the stresses, the rhythmical units, are variable.
WS: You mean that there are feet, even though the feet may not have regular stresses, as in conventional verse?
WCW: Very definitely, I do.
WS: But you wouldn’t think of them in terms of stresses?
WCW: No, not as stresses, but as spaces in between the various spaces of the verse. I would say perhaps the confusion comes from my calling them the feet. (Interviews 38-39)

How to make sense of Williams’ explanation here? If the “spaces between the stresses” are variable, then what is the constant by which the stresses themselves are measured? How do we recognize a “rhythmical unit” as such if the surrounding context is constantly in flux? Williams, now nearing the end of his writing life, seems to have reversed the principle by which poetry had long been ordered; now, the poem is measured not by its words, sounds, or rhythms, but by the spaces surrounding the words/sounds/rhythms. He has activated “blank” space and in this way turned it into what Charles Olson would soon see as a field of energy—a pulsating, fluctuating space that girds the words, as if Williams wants the words themselves to pulsate but, given the limits of the bookbound page, he settles for the surrounding space of the page which is unmarred and open for any appropriation. Further, since “. . . to talk in the American idiom you can’t talk as Shakespeare used to talk, or Milton, or Eliot. You have finally to get away from this pattern of speech and invent another speech . . .”, how else to reinvent language but to do so negatively, taking advantage of the flexibility of the blank space of the page—space that can be shaped, again and again, to reshape in turn the language of Shakespeare, Milton, and Eliot? “I’ve got myself in wrong before the critics by attempting to bring in the idea of mathematics. Of Einstein. Not Einstein, we’ll say, but Einstein’s ideas. The uncertainty of space” (Interviews 45).

Q: Well – is it poetry?

A: We poets have to talk in a language which is not English. It is the American idiom. Rhythmically it’s organized as a sample of the American idiom…If you say “2 partridges, 2 mallard ducks, a Dungeness crab”…it is, to my mind, poetry.

Q: …you agree that it is a fashionable grocery list.

A: Yes. Anything is good material for poetry. Anything. I’ve said it time and time again…In poetry, you’re listening to two things…you’re listening to the sense, the common sense of what it says. But it says more. That is the difficulty.

It’s as if you only need the ether of “poem”, you only need to “think poem”, and it is. Although I sound naieve even to my own ears, I can’t imagine it any other way – which is why I read the following letter at an event for a writer’s conference in fall 2006 – it was, after all a poetry reading – the venue itself, the attendees, girded whatever was read there and, I assumed, made it all “poem.” I received a handful of puzzled claps at the end.

Dear Owner. How do you do. I am a sudden letter and think whether it was surprised that it is also from I am sorry and Japan. I live in a place called Tokyo in Japan. If March 11 next year comes around, it will become 18 years old. Please hear it, although it becomes somewhat long. Thank you for your consideration. I finish the compulsory education in Japan, and 15 years old. I separated from the family, separated from Tokyo, went to a place called Hokkaido in Japan which is north most, and was allowed to study one season of work of a farmhouse immediately after graduating from a junior high school. One season is finished, and after greeting 16 year old, it is coming to Okinawa in the south in Japan now base and many living of an overseas man is also known, is a place called Okinawa known? The sea and empty are beautiful places to the extent that Japan cannot be thought, since it is a southern island. I am in an island called Izena of a detached building island. He wants to feel work of a tourist home corporally and to memorize it, and I have a talk heard and have you accept, furthermore it is the 2^nd year by this year. When needed for doing work of the farmhous of two years ago, he does not think that it carried out in the interest half. He wanted whether a thing called a natural partner is serious however and to have experienced corporally and to carry out various discovery, and I had you accept.personally and which was performed by having a lot. This time, as soon as it is thought of wanting to progress in front to a slight degree, or already brings close to its target just for a moment and cooks, it is in the state which it began to think and has been accessed. I may be hard to be transmitted and think that it is thought that it does not understand what is considered. But I came by 120% of feeling all the time, and I am still passing enduringly in the feeling. It is earnest. Although it is just surprised at first, I am always earnest and think seriously. I think that one way is progressed and that is must study that it is various until it makes a goal. But he does not do the thing which being refused is used and into which it breaks. It is the situation busily passed by two persons with the mother of the tourist home here everyday now. It is the place which promised itself when the first step which has been decided to be two years, and which had been considered at 18 years old was carried out and became 17 years old at last. Although it is the same accomodations as the work there, in me, it is different. Don’t I have me looked after there? I think that I want you to inquire. Thinking earnestly, putting in concentration and investigating English, it searched, and I wrote hard and was allowed to send a letter. Although it is trouble, I think that he wants a reply. I who have separated from my home from 15 years old have the conditions not changing. It is a live lumpif it sees from parents, although it may be that there are worries in my having myself feel easy most, I consider inside. Since it does not go to work but I am allowed to study, I want to do anything hard. Please consider neither a salary nor such field. It is also saying from me. Unreasonableness does not say. If the letter was opened, I appreciate for it by it. Since English weak was faced, it is glad. Thank you for your consideration. It did not end for a long time. I am sorry. I am sorry at a sudden thing. Family composition—Mother, Father, Grandfather, an elder sister, and younger sister (They are three sisters.) Favorite food is a banana and thick milk. Disagreeable food is chocolate and legumes. Special ability is badminton. He likes moving the body.

The descent beckons
        as the ascent beckoned
                Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
        a sort of renewal
                even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new
places
        inhabited by hordes
                heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
        since their movements
                are towards new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned)

There is something about the three-tiered line—strangely enough it’s the spacing!—that drives your eyes and mind on—it insists on a durational reading and insists that you not, as Williams writes only a few pages earlier, “Time Count! Sever and mark time!”