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.

Updated slice of my project for Thursday

Here is a small but hopefully representative slice of what I have been working on. Integrating text into video is one of the most frustrating and difficult challenges I may have ever encountered in art. That sounds like an exaggeration when I write it out like that but I think I mean it. This snippet is similar to my last sample but the time it took me to get here was substantial. I remixed the Wikipedia text for elevator use as source material for the text. All materials are found:

DJ Spooky's iPhone app - like a Dj mixing board (in beta)

See his video on it: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/video/video.php?v=190803035900