Etiquette: Not just for Dinner Parties

-A Short and Subjective Behavioral Guide to Literary Reading Etiquette and Success -

For Readers:

The Front Range area of Colorado has a wonderful program called the 4x4 reading series which I have been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to both read in and experience as an audience member. The idea is that one student from each of the four writing programs in the Front Range (CU, DU, CSU, and Naropa) read for fifteen minutes each. The first 4x4 of the year was held last night at Naropa and two new MFA students in the University of Colorado's creative writing program asked how long I thought the reading would take. I laughed and said about two hours. Their rough reaction: Ok let's back up here Erin, that sounds like faulty math. I thought you said that four students are each reading for fifteen minutes. That equals one hour, not two. I chuckle at their naiveté and tell them never to underestimate the ego of the writer. Ever.

Sure enough, one of the readers last night read an admittedly entertaining story that lasted 45 minutes. Two additional readers could have been added to the program in the time this took up. The problem I am trying to correct is this: someone told him prior to the reading that this would be fine. It is not fine, and this enabling pattern is a disturbing one, violating simple rules of etiquette. One of his equally misguided peers perhaps told him, yeah no one cares if you read over the time limit. The reality is, yes we do care. We do not care if you read five minutes over but ten flirts with rudeness and thirty minutes over is just plain out of line.

So yes, tripling your allotted reading time is rude to the audience, but who lost the most? The reader that had to follow him. Richard Froude is a brilliant writer who I had luckily heard read before, but after nearly two hours of a break-less reading I and most of the others in the audience had understandably already hit their physical attention span breaking point. I could not give Froude the attention he deserved because of the rudeness of the reader that preceded him. This happens at AWP at the mega press readings constantly. Readers are given five minutes to read and read for twenty. When there are nine people reading that time adds up fast. It is unacceptable, inconsiderate, and it undermines your wonderful work. I understand this is difficult for fiction writers to do, but you have to. Create an abbreviated reading version, or write some flash fiction. You should only read for forty five minutes if forty five minutes was the time allotted for you at the reading. This is about respecting your audience, your fellow readers, and your own work.

For the Audience:

The audience should act like they are at a church service that has the potential to switch to an opera/ballet/play/comedy club at any moment. Be respectfully engaged and ready for whatever might happen during the reading. Even if the reader rule above is broken, you cannot leave in the middle of the reading. You cannot leave between readers. You must clap, and you must not fall asleep (students). If you are annoyed by a reader breaking the rule above or for any other reason, hold your frustration until after and wait for that sweet validation you get when you realize everyone else felt the same way. Put yourself in the place of the reader and realize how difficult it is to get up and read work that you care deeply about to strangers . Turn your cell phones off.

I Love Readings

I love literary readings and I hate leaving upset like I did last night. I like to feel inspired not like I had been held against my will for two hours. Publishers, reading series coordinators, and readers: tell your readers that the time limit is strict, tell your audience to silence their cell phones and to not leave (or leave quietly if they have to) before the reading is over. Your reading will be a more successful event and most importantly, consistency in etiquette will help build an maintain a more solid literary community.

The Joys of Publishing

This is an email that the editors of SpringGun just received- it was clearly mass emailed. I guess donating a significant amount of your time to publish work you believe in is not enough for some people. I wish he could have been at the Boulder Small Press Festival. Finally, who is this guy? :)

Hello:

Do you pay for accepted works or have you become a paying market? It would be nice to tell readers this in your guides area for submissions. There is really no excuse for being evasive about your guidelines regarding pay. These are basic things that need to be in your guidelines. Why do half you editors out there have to be admonished to put basic stuff in your guides like pay and rights issues? Where are these things at your website? They should be in conspicuous places. You are more concerned with putting fluff instead of terms for writers to access up front.

And if I've asked before, well...i don't memorize guidelines, so it would help to just be communicative to writers and save extra emailing back and forth. Though since so many editors choose not to let the writers know if they pay or not, I'm creating a NO PAY journals in my email account so I don't have to keep asking.

If you don't pay, please don't give me that tired cliche-ridden lecture that small presses don't pay like I've gotten from a number of small press eds...I could give you list that's very long of presses that are small and pay something.

Some pubs. that do pay something don't state it in their guidelines, too.

Also, some eds. who don't state their full guides make me feel like I'm the only writer to ask these questions. Yet any writer who submits work to you or another publication without knowing the pay, rights, and reprint & simultaneous sub. issues, is very naive, indeed, and is not looking out for their interests.

Why is it so hard for some of you editors to be upfront with writers about pay issues?

Thanks, Roy

In Bit, Out of Print

When I first read Stephanie Strickland's Zone Zero in 2008, I wrote a brief paper on it for my "Poetry and its Others" graduate poetry course. Stephanie actually visited our classroom and I remember reading a part of my paper aloud to her. Julie Carr said that the part I read sounded like it could be one of the blurbs for the book. I have been trying to find that paper desperately because I think I understood and appreciated the project better two years ago. The project never actually excited me all that much back then, but at least I felt like I had a way to talk about it. Now that I have seen/watched the digital version of Zone Zero countless times including a presentation by the author herself, I am somehow even less excited about it. V however, is much more exciting to me.

I had seen vniverse before this week, during the 2008 presentation by Strickland that I referenced above- but I don't remember her mentioning that there was a book portion to the project. As poetry, and that's what it is, I think the book is quite beautiful. There is some of the same cerebral poetry for cerebral poetry's sake that plagues Zone Zero, but in V it is nicely balanced with touching political and philosophical insight like "for all human beings, our vocation/ in the world is to restore the sense/ of a rightful self to those deprived of it. To all, (Strickland 21). Besides the title's unforeseeable association with V the TV series (for Visitors) or the drug derived from vampire blood in True Blood, I enjoyed this book. It begs the question, why is this book out of print and Zone Zero is not? Penguin is likely more worried about the bottom line than Ahsahta for starts, but I guess a possible (though unprecedented :) ) reason is that I'm wrong about this and Zone Zero is incredible. Someone convince me.

When I first saw the digital version of Slipping Glimpse I was confused. I remember that CD was making my crappy HP laptop hot and bothered, making mufflerless car sounds and then I realized that it was 2008 and this poem had to be online somewhere-and of course it was. So why Ahsahta and Stephanie, is there a CD in your book when this can be found online? That was my first and less interesting point of confusion that was easily answered with a simple, the internet changes response from one of my classmates at the time. Under my breath I said something about 8-tracks, VHS, Beta (omg remember Beta!?), cassetes and so on. All technology changes, a CD is technology and it changes, it has changed. My netbook has no CD-ROM, why would I need it with USB 2.0 and the internet?

Anyway, so this was the first digital poem I had encountered besides DeCampos' Hearthead
which is much different than Slipping Glimpse. The first thing I noticed about this poem was that it was not readable, at all. Then I found that you can scroll the text, but if you have to scroll the text to read it, why put it in there to begin with? Nothing about the poem was even aesthetically pleasing.

Then I got to The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot which won the Boston Review's poetry award in 1999. While discussing the print version in class, we were mostly silent (awkwardly so) while Strickland explained her reading of this poem. A love story between sand and soot built through associations and there were more details that I can't remember. Ok what? So here is a room full of people who read poetry (usually difficult poetry) for a living and we struggled to follow the connections she was making about this poem. We smelled a stretch. Maybe we missed the point but as I read it again, I'm still in that room awkwardly looking at Stephanie Strickland defending the poem. I thought that the digital portion of this would help but sighed when I saw it was hypertext. Which we all forgave for it being done in 1999, but still. For me it didn't add to the poem at all for me, but I do understand that over a decade ago it would maybe. Basically I felt like it was an opaque, sterile and impenetrable poem put into hypertext (sorry) and I still do.

But back to the good stuff. During that same presentation, Strickland showed Vniverse. I remember thinking, now this is more like it. Although it is a little antiquated feeling now, it is still a beautiful digital poem. I love the idea of navigation in the universe juxtaposed with navigating the universe that now exists digitally on the web. After reading the book, reading the words on the digital vniverse was quite pleasant and the writing didn't feel so lost and isolated as it often does in digital poems like Slipping Glimpse. Vniverse.com exists within the book and within the web, creating an interesting constellation itself which joins the digital with the material (for lack of a better word). For the most part I can close read the poems in V, and I can close read vniverse which is a relief after Zone Zero. Not to say that a poem is bad if it can't be close read-Fanny Howe's work usually defies close reading and I find it to be incredibly rich and emotionally accessible.

I guess this week's blog was kind of a reaction piece. I do think we should all write to Janet Holmes and tell her to call Penguin, get the rights to V and start printing that rather than Zone Zero. Or she can do both, but I see V as a much closer attempt to truly combine literature and new media. V is the two way bridge we need between the book and the screen and that bridge has been knocked down.

Procedural Writing is Kinky

Since I read Tom's post before writing my own, I now seem to be thinking about my response to him and about a question he raised whether he meant to or not. How is procedural writing like Oulipo, workshop writing exercises, detournement, appropriation, remix, collage, metagraphs (Debord''s word for poem-collage), erasures and other human made restraints placed upon writing different from computer generated procedural writing? What makes this murky for me is that computers are a type of person too because we made them and we program them.

Hartman says that the real question is, how can a computer and a human collaborate to create interesting writing? Although I think he has a fair point, I think it's a cute way to avoid the question and in the context of his project(s), that response makes sense. In "Sentences" (which could easily be renamed, "Making Computer Generated Poetry: A Love Story") Hartman takes us through a writing procedure much more difficult to explain than something like Perec's lipogram La disparition or Queneau's Exercises in Style (one of my favorites I might add). Yet the idea is the same: what fun things can happen when you put writing in handcuffs? Enter my gimmicky title to this post. Obviously those handcuffs are made of different materials, shapes and secured to different objects but the general outline is the same.

There was a lovely panel on procedural writing at the Boulder Small Press Festival a few weeks ago in which author Gillian Conoley discussed her experience with using the plot genie to write a book with the same name. The plot genie is a device that I took to be a wheel that the writer spins in order to put together different elements of a story. From the blurb on Omnidawn:

"The inspiration for this book is a plot-generating device created in the 1930s by an ex silent screenwriter, Wycliffe A. Hill. The original "Plot Genie"--used widely by Hollywood writers until the late 1950's--relied on a numerical game of chance, including a cardboard spinning wheel used to divine character traits and plot points."

Plot Genie is not a computer, it's a piece of carboard and yet we should note that the blurb calls the genie a "plot-generating device." A plot generating device sounds a lot like a computer but the genie is made from cardboard, not silicon. Someone did however, have to build it and program it with plot elements in order for it to function and create writing. This sounds exactly like computer generated poetry but had Hartman been there showcasing his computer generated work as procedural writing, I have no doubt it would have been more questioned that Conoley's. I think I would have, I think I do. So what's my/our problem with computers that we made and we programmed being used as restraints for writing? The answer is probably ignorance and code-awe (I made that term up). My mind can manage the mysteries of a cardboard wheel much easier than of a computer program. I am more interesting and more impressed by Janet Holme's "The Ms of my kin" which is an erasure of the already condensed poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Labor has to be a factor as I learned from last week's post. My classmate's were more impressed by my conceptual writing of alphabetizing the intro to UBU's Conceptual Writing anthology when they thought I had done it "by hand" when in reality I put it into a free online alphabetizing program. We are trained to be impressed with hard work, even if it's as tedious and dull as alphabetizing a set of words.

Finally, I think the question of why we choose to write within constraints is important. My students love workshop writing exercises and using constraints to force the artist into exciting and new directions is the aim of such exercises. My own teacher, Julie Carr is having me write a series of poems in ballad verse to force my language into something more rich and grounded. Oulipo functioned/functions in pretty much the same way.

So, why do we want to write computer generated, computer restrained poetry? Hartman says, "The brute-force effort to make a machine into a human poet seems doomed to death by boredom"(Hartman 4). But he does advocate as I have already mentioned, for the potential interest of poetry derived through human/computer collaboration. While going through a writing exercise like write the 100th version of the story in Exercises in Style, we learn something through writing through that restraint. We learn more about what we want from writing, our own creative process, about language itself and ultimately how to write a better poem/story. After reading "Sentences" there is no doubt in my mind that although his process is dressed a little differently, Hartman also learns these things. If that were true then computer generated writing is not alone, but living under the same umbrella of procedural writing as the plot genie, Oulipo and erasure; and the direct end results from such exercises whether computer or human generated are as Hartman points out, just as varied.

Guilt, Risk and Conceptual Art

"Ordinary language does not use itself to reflect upon itself"

"Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional sense - one does not need to 'read' the work as much as think about the idea of the work"

- Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms

I sat down to write my blog then stopped. Then I started again, then stopped. It occurred to me that according to the needs of the conceptual, a written response that provokes the reader "to think" could just as easily be a conceptual art piece as a sensical analysis. Isn't that part of the point? Or even the whole point?

Also, I am a poet and a person who learns by doing. So by creating conceptual writing, I was able to better understand it. My idea is not original, alphabetizing existing texts has been done by Kim Stefans, Cristobal Mendoza (I published it, see Every Word I Saved on springgunpress.com) and I'm sure many others. The concept of my piece however, is different from The Dream Life of Letters and Every Word I Saved, mostly because my piece was framed as a blog entry assignment for a graduate course. I subverted "the man" (or woman-Lori) by attempting to achieve the same level of thinking and communication of a concept rich scholarly essay on conceptual art, by creating/participating in conceptual writing. My source material is of course that of the intro to the Conceptual Writing Anthology on UBUWEB which adds another conceptual layer to the writing. It draws attention to the absurdity of having an introduction like this on conceptual writing, or having any scholarly writing on what is already self-conceptual and unconcerned with its outcome.

Now to get to my title. I immediately felt guilty after subverting my graduate student duty to complete this assignment on time and as an accountable member of the classroom community. It was so easy to alphabetize source text while my classmates typed away some serious and thoughtful analysis on conceptual writing and how it relates to digital poetry. I should mention I think the connection to digital poetry and conceptual writing is an obvious one and won't discuss that here. Back to my guilt. Hard work is rewarded in the world I live in. I feel good about myself when I work hard and make something meaningful. The nonproductive, easy act of alphabetizing this text gave me the opposite feeling. It was not hard work, and I felt like I was disappointing my classmates and Lori. I wondered if the inherent low-energy work and cleverness that goes into conceptual writing always feels this way, and this brings me to the risk part.

Participating in conceptual writing is risky because there is nothing but the concept and because of our social pact that hard work is a positive thing, peers may view the work as lazy, or easy. At least these were my fears. Like I said, I am a poet and when you think back to the workshop, you might hear things like, "I am not following the concept of your poem but lyric quality of the fourth and sixth lines are beautiful. The way your poem moves, feels like taking a shower while drinking lavender soda." Ok so that was a stretch but the point is, other writing has something else, or a lot of something elses and is therefore less risky. You have more to fall back on if the concept doesn't pan out.

Finally, there is yet another quote in Fitterman's Notes on on Conceptualisms that quotes Sol LeWitt: "If the artist changes his mind halfway through the execution of his piece, he compromises the result and repeats past results." Now it appears, I have done just this, but for the day when I was behind my decision to keep that post up there with no explanation (it is the explanation!) I had this quote in mind.

and Anthology by Conceptual Craig Douglas Dworkin edited introduced the UBUWEB Writing

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"Conceptual Writing rarely “looks” like poetry and uses its own subjectivity to construct a linguistic machine that words may be poured into; it cares little for the outcome." -Kenny Goldsmith

Stream of Concrete

Tom asks in his blog post, how is concrete poetry different from comics and I wonder how concrete poetry is different from visual arts. Would a poet working in the concrete be better suited in an English department or an art department? Shouldn't they should have access to screen printing equipment, paint, wood etc ?

Using text as visual material is the obvious connection between digital poetry and concrete poetry. Concrete poetry is meant to be self contained, but it also knows that when it uses words like "heart" and "head" (DeCampos) or typographical symbols, that the material it's using is a flexible and endlessly meaningful one. What is the grammar of pictures of eyeballs stacked upon each other or letters and symbols torn from context and floating on a page? I just read Gertrude Stein's "Poetry and Grammar" again recently and I couldn't help make a connection between her curiosities with disrupting grammar in order to free up the noun, and concrete poetry. Perhaps stripping language of its grammar, by depending heavily on its typographical semantics rather than its denotation and connotation, is another way of freeing language. What are the implications of a language free from meaning? I don't mean socio-political,though there are certainly implications there. What I mean is what is interesting about a language free from meaning? Besides my skepticism as to whether this is even possible I think one answer is an idea dada might have been after: if we free language we can start over building meaning.

One thing that concrete poetry and digital poetry do very well is point out the arbitrariness of language and of meaning making systems in general. That is at least one of the reasons why many of us poets and scholars of literature tend to cringe at the pieces that reduce language to a pyramid of eyeballs. We know that language is more than that, concrete poets and digital poets must also know that so in essence, artists working in the concrete (whether its digital or print) are pushing up against meaning making as an idea and even destroying it. How frustrating for us who spend our lives as artists trying to find and express meaning. What this conflict tells me is that (enter Stein again) our world is what we call it so why aren't we calling it something else? However, like most things, it is much easier to destroy something (especially meaning) than it is to create it. For example, I can create a concrete poem on the concrete poem generator with one click and a drag. Do you know how many freaking hours a five minute video art piece (that I want to mean something) takes me? Hundreds of hours.

But this goes back to my skepticism. Even my one-second concrete poem has meaning. Even the eyeball pyramid is playing with what our idea of language is and with what makes meaningful symbols. The concrete poem I just made consists of a huge letter K, and a little @ sign that evoked plenty of meaning to me. I thought of K, slang for the drug Ketamine, then K-hole (the state of mind), then K - Hole (the coco rosie song), then my friend Derrick who likes/ed Ketamine and Coco Rosie and whose name ends with a K. The associations, the meaningful associations that my mind created were there in that one symbol. This brings me back however to how similar this is to visual art and painting. We see a picture of an oak tree and we get associations like we do with that K, but not like we're reading Dickinson.

Dream Life of Letters - A Close(ish) Reading

Oren and I did our blog post response as an experiment on google wave where we tried to have a conversation about the poem. It worked fine, it was fun and a little challenging on the technical side so check that out too:

Oren and Erin Wave a blog on digital poetry from Erin Costello on Vimeo.

Aw man, I guess you can't read the video. I added everyone to the wave to you can see it and add to it there if you want.

There are so many gravities to The Dream Life of Letters, gravities that pull the letters into alphabetical order via the poet’s brain , the poles in which the words, letters, utterances or anagrams are formed, deformed, reformed and pulled into varying movements, and the gravity of the alphabet itself-it’s constant demands for order to be made. As a piece created out of a feminist theorist’s writings (I know we were trying to avoid this talking about the source material), it was inevitable that a sense of gender would still be at the forefront of Stefans’ poem. But he took away syntax but left the diction so the associations of each word she chose must stand alone out of their original contexts. This freeing from context, a context that was so opaque to begin with that it may have not mattered anyway, is what I see to be the dream of these letters. But the argument the poem (and the intro) make is that the words are still bound to their denotations, connotations, associations. However, when Stefans puts these words into a dynamic form, they are launched into a new context. Letter A’s raining, words filling a windmill martini glass and spilling out can be read the way that Apollinaire’s Calligrammes are read. When we see his heart crown and mirror and the words that create those images, add a new layer of context that is separate from traditional poetic form, connotations, denotations and associations. It ruptures the old layers but their fragments are still left on the page. When we see those “id”s dynamically forming different words that begin with “id” in an animation, we still see and process the word “identity” as a word but we also see it as being a part of the other “id” words and a part of the motion arc that formed its creation. The poem lifts up form as an equal player in meaning making. The “id” animation is a literal enactment of identity creation as well as a literal enactment of identity creation for the word “identity.” Had that word just appeared whole on the screen or had it appeared say, swinging across the flash stage in an arc, “identity “at that moment would not have been as multi dimensional. Like Apollinaire, the words are a visual component that make up the poem, can you imagine reading Dream Life aloud? Dadaists and Schwitters would I guess.

Words by themselves make visual associations , but words that create images through their typography (hey Dada/Futurism) expose not only our visual dependence but our Rorschach ink blot need to make meaning, make sense out of everything. Stefans is trying to make sense of, through a response, a piece of writing that he experiences as opaque and Dream Life, instead of making sense of the source material, chooses to attempt control over it through an alphabetization that never moves towards an attempt at sense. If art is life (omg!), then the world according to Stefans is one with a false sense of order that hints at sense but is in constant motion.There are so many gravities to The Dream Life of Letters, gravities that pull the letters into alphabetical order via the poet’s brain , the poles in which the words, letters, utterances or anagrams are formed, deformed, reformed and pulled into varying movements, and the gravity of the alphabet itself-it’s constant demands for order to be made. As a piece created out of a feminist theorist’s writings (I know we were trying to avoid this talking about the source material), it was inevitable that a sense of gender would still be at the forefront of Stefans’ poem. But he took away syntax but left the diction so the associations of each word she chose must stand alone out of their original contexts. This freeing from context, a context that was so opaque to begin with that it may have not mattered anyway, is what I see to be the dream of these letters. But the argument the poem (and the intro) make is that the words are still bound to their denotations, connotations, associations. However, when Stefans puts these words into a dynamic form, they are launched into a new context. Letter A’s raining, words filling a windmill martini glass and spilling out can be read the way that Apollinaire’s Calligrammes are read. When we see his heart crown and mirror and the words that create those images, add a new layer of context that is separate from traditional poetic form, connotations, denotations and associations. It ruptures the old layers but their fragments are still left on the page. When we see those “id”s dynamically forming different words that begin with “id” in an animation, we still see and process the word “identity” as a word but we also see it as being a part of the other “id” words and a part of the motion arc that formed its creation. The poem lifts up form as an equal player in meaning making. The “id” animation is a literal enactment of identity creation as well as a literal enactment of identity creation for the word “identity.” Had that word just appeared whole on the screen or had it appeared say, swinging across the flash stage in an arc, “identity “at that moment would not have been as multi dimensional. Like Apollinaire, the words are a visual component that make up the poem, can you imagine reading Dream Life aloud? Dadaists and Schwitters would I guess. Words by themselves make visual associations , but words that create images through their typography (hey Dada/Futurism) expose not only our visual dependence but our Rorschach ink blot need to make meaning, make sense out of everything. Stefans is trying to make sense of, through a response, a piece of writing that he experiences as opaque and Dream Life, instead of making sense of the source material, chooses to attempt control over it through an alphabetization that never moves towards an attempt at sense. If art is life (omg!), then the world according to Stefans is one with a false sense of order that hints at sense but is in constant motion.">

futURIsm SEEds!! FutuRism sEEds!!

For today's blog, I want to focus on how I see futurism as an influence to the emergence and current shape of digital poetry. While reading Nicholls, the Manifestos and the prologues to Futurisms in Poems for the Millennium, the parallels are pretty blatant really. In fact, I have collected so many quotes from these readings that speak to digital poetry that I am having a difficult time choosing which to talk about. As difficult as it may be, I am going to try not to focus too much on the obvious and malignant problems with futurism such as its violent anti-feminism and pro-fascist agendas because they are obvious and discussed in depth by Nicholls.

As the Italian and Russian futurists faced a changing world in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, we in the 20th/21st century are faced with a Digital Revolution. I almost had a meltdown last night because my internet connection was down, and it seems that the South Park Episode in which the whole world turns to chaos after the internet inexplicably disappears, is not as absurd as we think. Our world is the internet, is the computer-the distinction between our online lives and our corporeal ones becomes further blurred every day. The futurists like us, saw their world changing into one that cannot function without collaboration with machines and they, like me, wanted to celebrate that. Nicholls says, "Futurism was the progeny of those northern Italian cities like Genoa, Milan and Turin where modernity was powerfully experienced as the everyday clash of cultural tradition with the forces of industrial innovation", and they "celebrate the very humanity of the new machine age"(Nicholls 85). Nicholls later disusses how the triumph of the mechanical over the natural allows the modern subject to be uncontaminated by tradition. This last point, as we have discovered in our discussions is proving to be all but impossible in regards to digital poetry. We have time and again pointed out that part if not most of the problem is the undefinable and deep traditions carried by the word "poetry" itself, but it seems that digital poetry is not in fact uncontaminated by tradition. It is as we have seen, influenced by futurism, language poetry, cubism etc. Digital poetry does have a tendency to want to separate itself from tradition however, especially in form and concept. "Tradition" has never seen computers, flash, java, googlewave, html, actionscript etc. in poetry before and therefore there seems to be a sense in certain works that what is being done has never been done before, and often, that itself is the piece. The "sound" poems of Jim Andrews for example (it's fresh in my mind), are like Futurist writing,"poems" that question what poetry is, can be and has been traditionally. I "read" Andrews's work and am convinced based on my traditional knowledge of poetry, that it is not in fact poetry but is conceptual digital art. Here I am back again to where I was trying not to go this week. The point is, Futurism was a cleaner categorization than "Digital Poetry" to begin with and therefore had more room to play with the impossible task of ignoring history. The" transformation of language to sound-a new transrational language that undermines or ignores the conventional meanings of a given word, thus allowing its sounds to generate its own range of significations or the invention of a new word based in sound" is a more true step in the direction of making language new. As we all know, language is inherited, is social, and when used can inherently never completely escape history. Honestly, the idea is nifty but I find both print and digital poetry that is only worried about escaping history and doing what has never been done before rather dull. Marinetti's manifesto calls for a "dread of the old and the known. Love of the new, the unexpected." Digital poetry does reject this idea in a sense because code is shared, work is remixed, Adobe programs are used etc.

I disagree as I said with most of Futurism's polarizing claims but I do appreciate its influential importance in the poetry to follow. I think where Futurism and some digital poetry both fail is in their beliefs that an artist can work outside of an uncontaminated tradition. Not to say this is the only way in which they fail but I think that the possibilities of human/machine interaction that do include human (both male and female!) traditions of art and culture (which include) machines hold more possibilities than machine art that enacts identity erasure in what is really thinly veiled self interest. The dehumanizing elements of Futurism and Digital Poetry are obviously problematic unless you are a human to begin with. J. Michael touched on this in his first blog entry and it remains relevant. Women, the poor, minorities, the oppressed are already dehumanized and have no "human" to begin with to lose, and therefore only a machine to gain. I am all for the "renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science", but need human to mean all humans. The possibility of using machines to renew our sensibilities is a Futurist idea that can be applied to and attracts me to digital poetry; but I am interested in how human/machines can, through art, actually give us more humanity, more voice, more culture and not less of it.

More quotes related to DigPo (working list):

"The futurists created a radical form of poesis, the poem as the act of making, in which theory and practice are inextricably tied together. Marinetti's call for the total destruction of syntax."

"Except in struggle there is no more beauty...Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man." (like the mystery of womanhood?)

"Want to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible, why look back?"

"The book, static companion of the sedentary, the nostalgic, the neutralist, cannot entertain or exalt the new Futurist generations intoxicated with revolutionary and bellicose dynamism."

"One must free the cinema as an expressive medium" (sounds familiar)

"We shall project two or three different visual episodes at the same time, one next to the other."

"Cinematic musical researches (dissonances, harmonies, symphonies of gestures, events, colors, lines, etc."

"A lyricism that seems antipoetic to all our predecessors"

"Futurist destruction of syntax"

"Art is a need to destroy and scatter oneself"

"Completely dehumanize his voice, systematically doing away with every modulation or nuance. Completely dehumanize his face...Metallize, liquefy, vegetalize, petrify, and electrify his voice."

"Futurism limited itself simply to imitating machines, and this capitulation to immedacy was reflected in its practice of words-in-freedom, which exhibited a 'blind faith in raw material, in sensation, in chaotic impressions'" (sounds very familiar)

"The subject no longer counts, or if it counts, it counts for very little." (Cubism)

"It's all roundness, sun, earth, horizons, fullness of intense life, of poetry which can't be put into words" (Cubism)

"The machine provides a model, an 'approximation', and the Russians have no desire to follow the Italian habit of making imitation art'" (Russian Futurism)

Pleasure

I am usually a much better student, my apologies to everyone for the once again late blog. The truth is I got pretty stuck on Bernstein's essays and have had to read them so slowly and carefully that I lost valuable time there. I still don't completely understand what he wants, or what his central arguments really are and I continue to be frustrated by his introduction of abstract terms defined by abstract examples and definitions.

One quote that has stuck with me as it relates to digital poetics is, "Absorption and antiabsoption are both present in any method of reading or writing, although one or the other may be more obtrusive or evasive. They connote colorations more than dichotomies" (22). If I understand what he means by absorptive and antiabsorptive (and I have already told you that I don't) then it seems to me that digital poetics cheat heavily to the antiabsorptive side of both the reading and the writing of the genre. As I write this, I realize how easily it would be to discuss this in circles, as Bernstein argues that antiabsorption (or, impermeable as he switches to sometimes) can create absorptive texts and they connote colorations more than dichotomies but for the sake of my sanity I will attempt to explain why I see digital poetics as more "colored" by the antiabsorptive. The words Bernstein places into the absorption category (I thought they were not to connote dichotomies Bernstien!) are words that I would associate with a pleasurable reading experience. One that sucks its reader in, like a Rosemarie Waldrop poem. Of course impermeable elements serve absorptive works insofar that they provide interesting contrast to the piece, a way to break the monotony of absorption, or simply to create drama.

Right now, digital poetics are not in general, a Rosemarie Waldrop poem. They usually do not suck their reader in, and seem in fact to be purposefully and meaningfully impermeable. The words listed under the impermeability category seem to match up much more closely with my reading experience of digital poetics than the absorption category. Yesterday after discussing digital poetics and Bernstein with Julie Carr during a car ride back to Denver, I realized I had an uncomfortable question that maybe we have all been asking, but in a round about way. When did pleasure in art stop mattering? After experiencing (I wouldn't call it reading really and I don't mean that in a bad way) the work for today, I found myself more interested in the curatorial statements than in the pieces themselves- like the poems are borrowing Kenny Goldsmith's thinkerships. Not to say conceptual art is not pleasurable, I think Goldsmith's work gives me an absurd kind of pleasure to think about. What I want (I know I am beating a dead horse here) is not an abolition of conceptual digital poetics but rather a response to it that provides a digital poetic that is pleasurable to experience, not just to intellectualize or ponder. I think that Mez's work is a step in that direction in that it is rooted in language whether it be computer code or human code (social language), the meat of the work (from what I have seen) is still experienced and absorbed by the reader.

Even though interactive works like Joerg Piringer's sound poetry, or any hypertext poetics would lead one to believe that they are inherently absorbing the reader/navigator into them, it is so often a false absorption that invites the reader in, only to remind them of how powerless they are. This is interesting stuff, but it's getting tired. Young as it it, the genre is begging for a revolution that stops intentionally frustrating the "reader". You win, impermeable digital poetry, we're frustrated, now what else can you make us feel?

Unlearn Me

I was all set to write a blog that discussed the first rule to remix: start with rich source material, end with a rich resulting project. Funkhouser however, was good enough to address my concerns at the end of a fifty page discussion that focuses on randomly generated syntax and all but ignores the presence of human generated diction. Thankfully he acknowledges this problem of "randomly" generated textual quality that seems obvious when comparing poems composed with Kafka's language and poems whose words were created by combining random syllables.

Obviously the Kafka poems are much better if approached from a purely literary standpoint, which Funkhouser would advise me not to do. I found myself asking, then how am I supposed to approach the work if not from the standpoint of a poet? Of course this confusion explains our circular debate in class over linearity and nonlinearity, and our fruitless though desperate attempts to ground analyses of digital writing theory in metaphors related to already existing art forms. Here is another analogy that is very Boulder-esque. When I was a snowboard instructor (yes I was) it was much more difficult to teach students who had been teaching themselves for a few days than students who had zero experience with the sport to begin with. With the the three day students, we embarked down a pedagogical road of unlearning and unteaching that proved over and over again to be more frustrating than learning and teaching. The same could be said about teaching literature but especially poetry to undergrads here at the University of Colorado. In the paraphrased words of my own teacher, Noah Eli Gordon "they have been taught that poetry is a secret code in which we the teachers have the decoder ring." I spend an immense amount of time teaching students to approach language as a material used to constuct an artform that can be "solved" but should also be experienced, the way a painting or a roller coaster (Joshua Clover's favorite comparison) is experienced. Anyway, I think the analogy is clear: I believe studying digital poetics would be easier if a) one had little or no experience in reading poetry/literature or b) as we talked about last week, poetics when it comes after digital needs to be redefined and thought of, as Funkhouser seems to believe, as something completely other than poetry. So the question I am left with at the close of Funkhouser's chapter 1 is, and excuse the Carrie Bradshaw ending but, how do we unlearn?

Holy Epigraphs

Loss Pequeno Glazier not only shamelessly quotes himself in his book Digital Poetics, but preceding each chapter he includes up to four epigraphs! Sometimes, they even appear mid-section of text. My first and only thought on the matter was that he had to pad the book with the epigraphs for the same reason he had to pad it with the history of the internet, and two pages charting (literally) who was mentioned more as a master hypertextist. There was (and is) just not an abundance of material to work with when discussing digital poetics. The experience of reading this book was frustrating in part because rather than Glazier facing this head on from the beginning (he does tackle it at the end), he padded his book with epigraphs and seemingly irrelevant material. In his defense, some frustration originates from this book being a decade old (Lycos!?, wallpaper!?), which is a long time in digital time.

My frustrations aside, I found parts to be interesting, useful and surprisingly helpful to understanding some new digital poetics I encountered this week via several fantastic digital writing submissions for SpringGun (so exciting!). The overwhelmingly prevailing trend in digital poetics to favor form over content has often left me wanting more from this genre of writing; however, with Glazier's help I am beginning to see why 'poetics' is misleading and why this trend is necessary (for now). He writes, "...e-poetries, which show characteristics of Futurism's concern with the machine, the procedures of Oulipo, the multi-media events of Fluxus, and the material innovations of contemporary meta-semantic innovative poetries, substantively demonstrate that we are well past wondering when an electronic poetry will appear: e-poetry has arrived. Indeed, e-poetry affirms that it is the poet who is at the front lines of writing in the electronic medium" (Glazier 126). While reading this book and simultaneously experiencing work like Mez Breeze's ":TERROR(AW)ED PATCHES", a video screen shot of real time google wave collaborative writing, I finally accepted that the material of digital poetics is the writing. Although in Breeze's piece the actual displayed language of this work is both rich and beautful, the material, the coding, software, keyboard, internet, digital video etc. is the writing. Jerome McGann wrote, "Poetical texts operate to display their own practices." This idea is essential not only to understanding the showcasing of materials that favor form but also to understand the self referential, self conscious language that often accompanies digital poetics.

What I have wanted from digital poetics is an art form that matches its title: one part digital, one part poetics. In other words I always wanted a beautiful poem made more fascinating by code or another digital element, instead of the other way around. Honestly, I still want that but I do believe that by beginning to understand the theories behind a digital poetic, I am able to appreciate the genre as something that is not two parts (poetic and digital) but as more complicated and conceptual than that (digetic?). Yet by rooting digital poetics so deep into its material, it often moves it into the realm of strictly conceptual; and although I am interested in conceptual art, I am also excited to see how electronic literature can (like other conceptual poetic movements have) remain rooted in its form and materials while beginning to move away from the conceptual and toward the experiential.