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?

LadakDigital!payLoss

Route       y        If a review appears in Serbian

Makarasana       of

terremotosLhasa             : : Lakshmi

noqancheq

(Loss Pequeno Glazier, “Io Sono At Swoons”)

Interested in breaking down with traditional syntax and in abandoning punctuation and linear arrangement of words, in “A Throw of the Dice” Mallarme invites the reader to follow the poetic text in a nonconventional format, which, at first sight, reveals itself as being devised under the sign of chance or random because words are left free on the page, verbs and adverbs, nouns and articles are no longer bound to each other, capital letters follow no orthographic rules, punctuation marks are almost absent, and sentences can be barely read and identified. The feeling of incidental organization is caused by the very first visual impact of each page that Mallarme had skillfully manipulated in an attempt to escape “the four extremities of the page by jumping the boundary of the spine to tie two conventional pages into one,” as Dorothy M. Betz beautifully describes the poet’s intention and writing strategy. In Betz’s opinion, “the generally-falling movement of the text across each page depicts the fall of the dice; the ship on page three, the hat on page six, and the constellation on page eleven depict objects named at those points” whereas the arbitrary position of the words translates the poet’s playfulness and intent to mock the limits of the book and to express his frustration in writing.  

An interesting poetic exercise on the idea of chance and random is Loss Pequeno Glazier’s poem-program entitled “Io Sono At Swoons.” The weirdness of its opening lines stems not only from the intricate and random mixture of bits of lexical materials with etymological roots in different languages from Mexican, Nahuatl, Quechua, English, French, German, Italian, Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic to Tibetan languages but also from their particular arrangement in the stanza, which, it its turn, signals a complementary aesthetic complexity. Linguistically, what adds to the poem’s feeling of randomness is the title itself made of the Italian words “Io Sono” for “I am” and “At Swoons,” a phrase which, in the poet’s own words, encloses multiple connotations ranging from fainting, ecstatic joy or rupture, to the archaic “swounds,” a shortened form of the phrase “God’s wounds.” Often, the word selection for the title gives a clue about the content of a literary work, and hence, in the case of this poem, the Italian—English word combination should send to a semantic content related to its linguistic antecedents. And yet, there is not such an accurate correspondence between its title and its content because despite the poem’s collection of lexical elements from many other languages its subject matter does not address any of them in particular that is neither the words nor their arrangement in sentences highlights any specific information about the cultural context from which the linguistic components derive. Because “Io Sono At Swoons” “presents collages of lexical fragments from various languages, including medical terminology related to the brain, which come together in compound formations with multilingual inflection” (Glazier), it would be difficult even for a dilligent observer/reader to identify the cryptographic element necessary in order to turn these linguistic bits into a readable text. Additionally, its message tends to be unpredictable because, as Glazier remarks, in this poem, “languages overwrite other languages” and therefore, “language centers are disturbed.”

As if these idiosyncrasies were not enough, by spinning language and exploring the possibilities of the lexical ecstasy, the poem refreshes every forty seconds with a new iteration of text on the screen so that it would be hard both for reader and writer to ever see the poem twice. Indeed, in “Io Sono At Swoons” there is no describable deterministic pattern as chance equals randomness. In this respect, the poet’s confession on the composition process gains signifcance, “When I first make a piece that generates poems regardless of my presence, I often panic at the thought of all the poems that are getting ‘lost.’ I will hit the Print Screen key to try to archive versions of the text. But the program goes on and on, producing a new poem every forty seconds, and eventually, I come to terms with such loss. I eventually realize that the iterations aren’t the point. I become less attached. [. . .] I understand that, even as the writer, I don’t have to see every text that my code produces. Later, I become more fascinated with the poem’s endless ability to produce ‘my’ poem, and I just sit back and let it run.”

This event demands not only a series of repetitions across years, but insinuates by including the date included, that a huge and elastic group has repeated this event year after year. Events repeat on a more fundamental level as well allowing performers to produce “events” (in quotation marks) because it is a different structure now: I am following — following instructions; I am mimicking as a form of event-making. I did not invent the constraints in 1966, but I am acting it out now as if quoting the events of, say, Dick Higgins, Ken Friedman, Yoko Ono, or others. Peter Frank’s definition of seven different types of events already identifies internal structures, but the issues of signature, and time, of events gets little if any attention. The structure of repetition relates to the geographic distance (as opposed to the immediacy and presence) and musicality (of works waiting to be performed by others). Still, these issues do not completely express the inherent “event-ness” (in quotation marks) of the event structure. It does not exist as an original that one can recover like art historians recover the Mona Lisa, or even trace its provenance. Events become events as “events,” and that has significant implications for the meaning, signature, and social function.

Events are, at least in part, about the context and structure of art, performance, events, and everyday life. The event corrodes the neat structure that opposes the mundane repetitions to the originality and special-ness of art and performance. The event resists reducing its essence, its event-ness, down to a structural opposition between the real original thing (let’s call it art) and the repeated constraints of instructions. As Ina Blom explains,

Now, the event seemed to name nothing but a series of disappearances: instances of boredom so intense they undermined all traditional concepts of aesthetic “attention” and “appreciation”, indications so minimal or insignificant they could hardly count as artistic creation, a radical and continual erasure of the very frameworks of artistic situations and a general refusal of “dedication”, “seriousness” and “professionalism” in the name of art.

 Events parody the profound, challenge the supposed privilege of the sublime, and, in spite of that mockery of sincerity, play a game with structures. They move the play to a meta-structural level. Playing with our habituated notions of time, space, life, death, and even the structure of events, events play with infrastructure and convention.

Shortly before the poet, publisher, musician, and event-performer Dick Higgins’ death, he visited the school where I taught. I had brought all of his books and pamphlets, which I owned, in a large bag thinking that I would like him to sign my copies or draw a little picture in each of them. A curator (friend of mine) saw the books, and scoffed, “Are you going to have him sign those?” I felt so ashamed that I was reducing Higgins’ work to a commercial exchange with monetary value, instead of the more profound poetic value of the event instructions and poetic events contained in these works. I said, “No,” lying], and put the books back in the bag. Dick Higgins left Philadelphia and went to Toronto where he did a performance of an event by following the instructions to “yell as loud as you can for as long as you can.” He performed the event, went back to his room, and passed away. Signing a book seemed at the time a habituated, mechanical, and disingenuous form of respect for the author of the events; it was in retrospect, precisely the mechanical and repetitive aspect of the signing that I should have had Higgins perform as an “event” or “signature.”

The atmosphere of the poem-event I have chosen involves boredom, regret, and lack of poetic value in its conjuring of feeling. 

While analysing the visual properties of writing in a captivating essay on “The Art of the Written Image,” Johanna Drucker perceives writing as encompassing two layers of signification: the visual and the linguistic codes, or, what she labels, the imago&logos duality. And the author goes on conceiving a definition that translates writing’s visual/verbal substance as she explains “it [writing] is both an object and an act, a sign and a basis for signification, a thing in itself and something coming into being, a production and a process, an inscription and the activity of inscribing” (57). To decipher writing’s dual nature requires to identify and interpret the meaning located at the intersection where the two binary qualities manifest themselves for the logos of writing ( the text’s linguistic content) intermingle with the imago of writing (the shape of the letter, the space between words and sentences, the arrangement of the text as a whole on a page). Thus, writing’s discourse gains complexity and, consequently, not only the text is necessary for its understanding, instead this newly-formed textual system in which the richness of signification broguht by the imago of writing comes into play as well. In this light, the context displayed by Mallarme’s “A Throw of the Dice”can be identified with the text and its placement on the page, or as Drucker says, “the space of the page as a space and his careful measure of the relative weight of words as forms on the page” (115).

Page three of the poem, the one brought into discussion for the theme on temporality, starts on the left page with “BE that the ABYSS whitened slack maddened on the slope slides desperately a wing its own al-” (each word on a single line with the exception of “slides desperately” placed one near the other) and continues on the right page adding to the last word “al-“ its last letters “-ready fallen because the flight was badly planned.” The ending lines on this page “its gaping deep so much that the shell of a ship pitched from side to side . . . “ foresees a “shipwreck” both by means of the linguistic and visual codes in the sense that the single sentence of the poem stretched on these two pages lacks any punctuation marks as there isn’t a full stop to signal a definite end, instead the poet prefers the use of the ellipsis signaling a suspension point, an endless abyss, which can be visually associated with something that is floating until is dissolved into nothingness or even an unfinished thought. In other words, the context can be located in the poem’s imago& logos duality, which conveys the generally-falling movement of the text. As Mallarme himself confesses in a letter to Andre Gide with regard to the intended effect through his free positioning of words in“A Throw of the Dice,” “Thus this attempt, a first, this groping did not shock you; it is still presented badly. . . . The poem is being printed, now, as I conceive it; regarding the pagination, where all the effect lies . . . The constellation will stand out there, accurately and as much as a printed text can convey, inevitably the appearance of a constellation. The ship passes from the top of one page to the bottom of the other, etc.”

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. 

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.

“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.