instead – i’ve been painting lately. another practice perhaps best left to experts but i find that pushing paint around is like my recent walking of the city – slow going, meditative, rhythmic and physical. sometimes i make an errant mark and my finger plunges towards an imaginary undo apple-z. it’s been years since the smell of oils and turps has seeped into the air of my ‘studio’ space. it’s not just an office anymore, and pleases me. this has always been fundamental to both my attraction and repulsion towards the digital experience – discorporealizing.mourning, facing death – wading the abyss – first expells ‘me’ from ‘my body’ and i take refuge in the placelessness of information, codes and pixellated texts. (we continue leaving comments on his myspace page long after he last logged in) …later, ‘i’ need to convince ‘myself’ that i still hold a space in the material of the moving world. like all good projects, this one leaves me (and has always been departing from my space to no-place) with more questions than i’d began with. how to bridge the digital – material ‘divide’? how to embody information? hyperlink in actual space? who’s gonna be on my A-team? who do you play in the ‘real’ world? what happens next? and what’s the first step? 

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?

Lets play with these both. As I find it so very hard to separate the two these days. The two being poetry and hypermedia, and days being time, or the artificial measurement of the earth spinning. They say the earth is slowing down, and days millions of years ago were half of what they are today. So perhaps early humans lived to be hundreds of years old, simply because everything was so much faster. But I digress. Yes, yes I do.

Back to the original point. When I think of poetry I think of interface and movement and sound. Words are always attached to navigation and color and image. So both questions (and in fact it appears all the questions posed here) are great friends, separated by long distances and speaking different languages. But again a digression.

First…I find I don’t read as much print poetry as years past. I am perplexed by this. Is it because I have become a self-obsessed ego maniac only interested in my own odd creatures (a real possibility). Or is it because poetry, I am proposing, has or will or at least should make the very nature and important transition to the hypermedia format. But if we say poetry will soon be e-poetry, then where is the basis? How do we decide what is an e-poem, a digital poem, a moving and evolving poem, a game poem and what simply is a digital creation we like. Is everything poetry? This is not a question I can answer with any authority. But I do find that when I create new artworks, many suggest they have seen nothing like them, and that they elicit the same responses and emotions and confusions that most good poems elicit. What that means is I consciously think of my artworks as digital poems. I think of creating poetry through these varied texts.

I think what needs to happen, and one of the things I have learned from Epoetica, is we need to develop bridges. We need to find ways/methods/forms which entice and encourage people/artists/writers/poets to translate their ideas and poems into simple digital forms. We as artists/e-poets are creating these islands, these strange and wondrous creations, which people can visit, but cannot emulate, cannot find ways to create their own islands. Each backyard is a small island, so how can we encourage more backyard e-poems, to make an e-poem as clichéd and accessible as print poem has become?

Perhaps these are all questions which should be answered by Epoetica 2. But more on that later.

 What have you learned (both practically and theoretically) about your own work (creative and critical)?

As far as my work, I had a very interesting discussion recently regarding my PhD confirmation (a 30 page document to prove I can be a PhD candidate). The external supervisor/judge suggested that my PhD was a theory free zone, that I was all practice. At first I agreed in that my PhD is mostly creative work, with an exegetical section describing that work. But while I was working on the PhD confirmation document I was also considering Davin’s epoetica. And it struck me. Why must the theory be somehow separate and removed from the artwork/poetry? And why must e-poets attempt to “ground” their work in a theoretical framework? To me the very nature of creating a digital poem has the theory built into the process and creation. Additionally the notion that a poem must be dissected and analysed also becomes muddled when considering e-poems. Therefore I think one result of Epoetica has been for me to rethink how I write about my work, and to try to find method of writing theoretically that emulates how the work functions. And at the same time, leaving , what is a very new and haphazardly growing field, without rules, without any strict idea of what is and isn’t a digital poem. Eventually we will need to explore and establish this. But for now, I would suggest we simply encourage poetics in the digital realm. Offering more examples than directions.

Oh crap that completely goes against my previous comment about creating e-poetry forms to act as bridges between the print and digital realm. Maybe it is this conflict, this conflict between that which is established and that which is fleeting, between the words and the multi-media. Maybe that is where the digital poem lives.   

What have you learned (both practically and theoretically) about your colleagues and their work?

In short….I want to find ways to encourage others to make more e-poems. There are far too many digital theorists and not enough digital poets.

What about epoetica worked well?  What didn’t?  How would you improve this process?

As Lori suggested, I am overjoyed that Davin has taken up e-poetry as one of his many and diverse interests. Mostly because he is the most intelligent and honest and creative person I know. What didn’t work is cross communication. I don’t feel like I know who the other people are, and don’

t feel like I communicated with them. Perhaps next time we should explore other techniques like forums and messengers and other formats. Also we need more games, more playtime. Maybe even a dispersed writing concept where we load our writing into all the various public places/spcaes on the net where user entered content is allowed.

More on this soon.

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.

• 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.”

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.

My mom comes and brings a vhs recorded with Kelsey’s memorial service. Why do we call it hers? Ours, about Kels (’over my dead body’). None of us have ever watched it. I take it to school, turn off the monitor and dub it to DVD. Then watch it one night in my basement studio, lights off, lying on the futon, blanket on.

i didn’t know – and couldn’t be bothered to learn – how to rip right from the DVD. so i filmed it again on my (cracked) computer screen, mini dv camera balanced on a beer bottle and a stack of books – as am, often, i. an aesthetic was born: lo-fi, rascuache and hand-made-for-youtube style.

Editing. The more I clip and playback the further the distance between the white-faced 23 year old with the hollow eyes and skeletal shadows and the me that’s like, ‘hey Chris can you do me a favor? Film me dancing around and singing to billy idol? It’s kinda weird but it’s to edit over the film from the funeral… you know, ‘hey little sister, what have you done?’

i’m into all the the youtube tropes – the music videos, the narcissistic (self-conscious) metubes, the i.movie edits, the bedroom girls – and i can claim my interest’s academic (it is – somewhat – so i do) but the youtube context (which is a separate theatre from the one i set to screen these works in) also works to disable any academic reading (comments & responses).

one of the most intriguing aspects of contexts such as youtube – such as livejournal, myspace, blogspot and so on – is the publicizing of ‘the private.’

death is a private affair. aren’t most affairs private? don’t they often start and end in public, though? i upload the evidence of my romance with death to explore the connections between ‘our’ fascination with voyeurism (personal, pornographic, violent or vitriolic), ‘our’ exhibitionist, group-therapy think-out, ‘our’ cathartic acts of record and replay.

to revisit death by video, to edit loss, reflects my process of memory and memorial, and speaks to and about the process itself. it repeats and it distances. reminds and cuts out. i work with little intention (just make something, anything, from this) – rely on chance encounters with timing, tuning, imagery. there are moments when two tracks (or more) align just-so, seemingly at random, and sense is made, momentarily. that sense-making, meaning-making moment, motivates the next motion taken.how to describe a process? to play it, and/or play it out.

To refer to death as a creative process does not imply that it is attractive or even ‘artistic.’ We humans have an instinctual aversion to the sweet, sickly effusions that decomposition produces. Yet this stage is necessary before the cleansed, aesthetically comfortable ‘bare bones’ state can be attained…

Mary Bradbury writes that the split between what is real and what is theatre is patricularly hazy in the social organization of death, as certain aspects of this organization are highly ritualistic in character: the funeral, the burial, even the embalming of the body are all performative traditions…

Academic attachment became elusive – instead, we reverberated, echoing the emotions of loss and reclamation that we purported to investigate impassively, and performing exuberant grieving as playfulness infiltrated the pathos and sadness that had marked our individual mourning practices…

All we may expect of time is its reversbility. Speed and acceleration are merely the dream of making time reversible. You hope that by speeding up time, it will start to whirl like a fluid…The imagination is scarcely any better equipped to appreciate reversibility than the person who has never slept would be to appreciate dreaming. And yet we experience in it that electrocution of time we call predestination. The signs exchanged in the process are instant conductors unaffected by the resistance of time. Certain linguistic fragments run back along the path of language and collide with others in the witticism, dazzling reversibility of the terms of language. In this they fulfil an unexpected destiny, their specific destiny as words, conforming to the predestination of language.– Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

You can, with your little hands, drag me into your grave -you have the right — I myself who am joined with you, I let myself go — but if you wish, the two of us, let us make… an alliance -a hymen, magnifcent – and the life left in me I will use to…- so not mother then?ceremony – coffin – etc.there we saw (the father) the whole material side – which lets us tell ourselves at need – ah! well yes! it is all there – no fear for me thinking of something else (the reformation of his spirit, which is eternal – can wait (granted but eternity through my life)_____father -shape his spirit (he absent, alas! as we would have shaped him better present but sometimes when it all seems to be going too well – as an ideal – cry out – in the mother’s tone, she who has become attentive – This is not enoughI want him, him – and not me – 

my dad first introduced me to eric whitacre on the westernmost tip of portugal, in april of 2004, more or less 5 weeks before the cabrillo college chorus sang ‘i thank you god for most this amazing day’ at my sister’s funeral.

hold onto that moment then – before but foreboding. i sat on the edge of the cliff in the sun and the wind and listened. for days before i’d been stricken with most horrible plummeting feelings of wrong/wrong/all wrong, stuck/angry/lashing out at him (on holiday) until i got the email (in the whitewashed shop) that kelsey was in the hospital and as i rushed heavily through the town to find him to tell him, i fit again (though cobblestoned) – it wasn’t me i felt but her. i felt better knowing why i’d felt so bad. and dad -he tried to get a flight back to london that day, or the next, but couldn’t. so we drove to sagres instead. to the cliffs. each town in and out, fumbling with quarters for phone booths – how much has mobile technology changed since even then – the time difference, time lapse. somehow we came to a little cove. it was still the off-season. we were out of time, but i felt at home there. the algarve is roughly the same latitude as santa cruz, and there was something about the air there – and the ocean, though atlantic, pacific. so i was pacified, momentarily. suspended on the brink of the big sink (or swim).

and you his sister, you who one day – (this gulf open since his death and which will follow us to ours – when we have gone down your mother and I) must one day reunite all three of us in your thought, your memory_____- just as in a single tombyou who, in due time, will come upon this tomb, not made for you -PrSun down and windgold gone, and wind of nothingness blowing (this, the modern void)?