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.">