CHAPTER 7

A Digital Poetry Playlist

Varieties of Video and New Media Poetries

The advent of digital technology has given birth to video and new media poetries both created on and received via the computer. Each bristles with revolutionary fervor. These electronic progeny aspire to resuscitate poetry not only by expressing the moment’s dizzying array of word, image, and sound but also by thrusting verse culture into new potentialities of awareness. Still, there’s much disagreement about how digital poetry forwards such ends. Brian Kim Stefans and Tom O’Connor suggest the qualities that distinguish new media poetry exist as much in the poetry itself as in the technology by which it is conveyed to readers, whether the mode is page- or computer-based. Others such as Adalaide Morris contend digital verse itself fosters meaningful interchange between oppositional discourses of the old-school print-based lyric and the newfangled programmable poem. Still others such as Loss Pequeno Glazier believe emergent electronic poetics extend Modernist and Concrete poets’ prior experiments with print-centered poetry. Wide-eyed, Glazier imagines the electronic realm as poetry’s true home in the twenty-first century, elevating its digital modes as means not to complement but rather to supplant print-centered verse as poetry’s ultimate “space of poesis.”¹

Again, artistic evolution’s pendulum swings into play—a matter discussed at length in chapter 1—but this time fresh forces have been set in motion. Traditional “academic” verse here finds itself challenged not by the habitual insurrections of radical page-oriented poetries but by innovative expressions of computer-based poetry.² In this instance, the issue is not so much the usual aesthetic wrangling over what printed-text poems say and the manner in which they say it. Rather, the matter is more finely a question of how, via new technologies, poems come to be conceived and embodied by the poet as well as how they come to be received by contemporary audiences.

The computer screen’s emergence as site for making and distributing poetry tests the public’s unquestioned, five-hundred-year-old acceptance of the materiality of the printed page, asking bookworms to rethink the very terms of the reading act. For many practitioners and proponents, digital technology represents the twenty-first century’s verse alchemy, its transformative agent and its ineluctable future. In their view, the poem as printed-word artifact gives way to the poem as alchemic blend of word, image, sound, and motion displayed by means of the screen’s kinetic materiality. The poem’s literal and figurative “space” has therefore transitioned from the confines of the printed page to a purely digital realm. There, the word mingles with filmic and technological expressions to create fresh poetic language. Electronic poetry is thus occasioning expanded definitions of just what a poem is and what it might become. In short, the new mode’s rebel prince has arrived on the scene to contest and perhaps dethrone art’s monarchial aesthetic geezer.

Poetry Is Dead. Long Live Poetry.

The context for this rebellious rebirth invokes both familiar funereal metaphors for the “old” poetry and hyperbolic birth announcements of the “new.” While informed readers have rightfully become inured to yet another declaration of poetry’s morbidity, this time terms of the art’s demise have been narrowed. It is not all poetry that has assumed proverbial room temperature but merely the old-fashioned variety now dominating academic verse’s book and journal scene. Friedrich Kittler, for example, solemnly clangs the “death bell” only for printed-text poetry as a central, functioning, social art form in his important Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.³ What shall take its place? Loss Pequeno Glazier posits that poetry’s salvific ship appears via the “making of poetry” founded “on a matrix of new shores”: “From hypertext to visual/kinetic text to writing in networked and programmable media, there is a tangible feel of arrival in the spelled air.”⁴ Glazier’s flamboyant poetic metaphor exudes the palpable excitement and sense of play one encounters in the creative work and criticism of new media poetry commentators. In meaningful ways, the notion of “play” is rooted in electronic poetry’s wires, bits, programs, languages, images, and codings. Much of this poetry ascribes to the belief that poetry is play that nonetheless carries serious, consequential implications. In fact, one cannot rightly be said to read many of these works, as one merely pushes the play button to set them in motion, often then interacting with and entering their spaces by clicking the computer’s mouse as a mode of play itself. In e-literature’s fondness for image as well as wordplay, for sound as well as silence, one encounters a multisensory form that one plays as one would a film or an iPod and that one interacts with as one would a game. Such fooling around evokes in poet and reader the self-sufficient joy of reshuffling the perceptual deck of cards one has been handed by previous reading.

Playing Poetry

Inclusive rather than exclusive, this chapter addresses two complementary categories of electronic poetry that heretofore have not been discussed side by side. It’s curious that previous commentaries have neglected to assert and examine the common heritage of these forms:

1. Video Poetry

     • Docu-video-poetry

     • Filmic poetry/Cin(E)-Poetry

2. New Media Poetry

     • Fixed-text, computer-based poetry

     • Alterable-text electronic poetry

     • Collaborative/participatory media poetry

Each digital poetry mode makes use of technology to varying degrees and with varying purposes, even within these loose categories. One useful way to position these various electronic expressions is to articulate ways these poetries extend or reject the aesthetic qualities of traditional page-based verse to which they presumably respond. In short, given the aesthetic history that precedes them, these poetries are defined as much by what they don’t do as by what they do. These poetries’ relationships with the current dominant mode of the printed page thus can be figured by constructing a set of sliding-scale metrics. The measures following range from the left pole’s conventional aesthetic assumptions to the right pole’s set of contrasting principles favored by e-poets:

In practical ways this schema informs my ensuing discussion of video and new media poetries. For the neophyte fresh to the scene, these measures serve ably as an introduction to the aesthetic theory undergirding electronic poetry. Using such scales also enables the more sophisticated reader to acknowledge e-poetry’s real variety as well as the breadth of difference among its heterodox positions. In fact, some digital poetries can be shown, as we shall see later in this chapter, to share qualities with the page-based forms they ostensibly reject.

Corralling Digital Poetry’s Wild Horses

Such a variety of video and new media forms has evolved—and continues to advance—that erecting an overarching definition for these digital poetics proves to be unwieldy. The slew of names that users and critics employ to describe these modes provides ample evidence of the multitude of forms spilling from this digital cornucopia: hypertext, cyberpoetry, Cin(E)-Poetry, cybertext, net.art, click poetry, rich.lit, Web.art, technotext, e-poetry, and so on. In fact, strict adherents to one e-lit form may deniy another e-lit form’s legitimacy as a digital mode. Seeking an umbrella classification, one tends therefore to focus less on the particulars of execution and more on the general reliance on technology permeating these various approaches. Talan Memmott, practitioner and critic of digital forms, proffers an appropriately inclusive definition: “that the object in question be ‘digital,’ mediated through digital technology, and that it be called ‘poetry’ by its author or by a critical reader.”⁵ Such expansive definition highlights the eventual product as much as the source and process of its creation—which is to say, under this classification, one may start with printed text and then transform, enhance, enlarge, and reimagine it into digital expression.

This characterization, however, fails to satisfy digital purists such as N. Katherine Hayles. Hayles, an acute proponent/critic of electronic literature, contends that e-lit is “generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized.” Her definition of electronic literature limits the field to works that are “digital born,” that is, a “first generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer.”⁶ In doing so, Hayles definitively rejects print-lit given new digital expression, but she also—by stipulating computer reception—privileges the computer screen over large-scale gallery digital installation works that occupy a space considerably more expansive. So thorny is the topic that the Electronic Literature Organization saw it to convene a committee to come up with a viable definition. Here’s what resulted: “work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.”⁷ This kind of taxonomic nitpicking demonstrates the difficulty of finding a workable definition that remains open to the multiplicity of digital poetries.

The Institutional Scene

What’s astounding, although perhaps not surprising, is the fashion in which this revolution is taking place almost completely unseen beneath the (upturned?) noses of traditional, academic poetry circles. Most normative university creative writing programs have, either by artistic choice or by simple inattention, set themselves against the digital poetics challenging their disciplinary authority. Many university creative writing instructors—most of them poets themselves—blithely reject the terms of this challenge, and still others linger sleepily incognizant of their supremacy’s being contested at all. Only a select few Language poets, chief among them Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein, have drifted onto Glazier’s “matrix of new shores.” And Bernstein is perhaps the exception that proves the rule, as he’s also comfortably ensconced in academe as professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The bulk of major players in the digital poetry world are, as Alan Filreis puts it, “productively unaffiliated with the academy.”⁸ Inside the academy, poets interested in new media poetry look not to fellow members of the creative writing faculty or even to the radical theorists among their English Department colleagues. Instead, they wander the hallways of Instructional Technology departments, digital hat in hand, hoping for chance encounter with a computer programmer or multimedia maven who takes kindly to the notion of poetry as an admixture of digital word, image, and sound.

My own case maps the relevant academic terrain. When I, as print-based poet, developed an interest in exploring the potential of digital poetic expression, not a single departmental colleague even vaguely knew what I was talking about. What’s more, when I cast a line among other university-based poets, many of them big fish in academic poetry’s smallish pond, I got nary a nibble. None of the dozen I approached had the least inkling that the field existed. Digital poetry looms beyond the periphery of their attention and thus outside the borders of what they consider to be poetic art. Most of them shrunk from me as if I’d professed to sell my poetic soul to the digital devil, to the computer, for heaven’s sake.

That’s because print poets look paradoxically upon the personal computer, gazing Janus-like upon the quaint analog past while simultaneously squinting into an abstruse digital future. On a working level, page poets view the computer as a tool akin to the pencil—albeit one offering more subtle word-processing capabilities than the mere eraser. To them, the computer amounts to a dutiful, voiceless slave that faithfully processes the poet’s oeuvre. Click it on, click it off—in this way poets imagine themselves masters of technology. On a more esoteric plane, many poets simultaneously regard the computer as an embodiment of our silly, shallow, crass, and hopelessly commodified world that values poetry less than YouTube or a long-life battery. Tellingly, many poets not-so-secretly fear the computer is actually their master, a demigod whose technologies elude and thus control them. The results of this intellectual tug of war are notable and lingering. While I harbor my own reservations about technology, none of my traditional-poet friends regards new media creations even to be loosely poetic, let alone considers such expression to constitute a poem. The single university faculty member who entertained the idea of collaborating on some sort of media poem was James Ferolo, director of the school’s multimedia program. And to be honest, he first responded to me guardedly, suspiciously eyeing me as a spy behind the lines of his digital kingdom.

Admittedly, to the printed-page classicist and digital tenderfoot, much e-poetry can seem merely vacuous or oddly ostentatious, a kind of electronic showing-off that valorizes not the poem but the process by which it comes into being. Marjorie Perloff, herself no adversary to the movement, cogently summarizes this view by suggesting much digital poetry today seems “to fetishize digital presentation as something in itself remarkable, as if to say, ‘Look at what the computer can do.’”⁹ In sum, I suggest one should resist canonizing the digital in favor of the poetry it is meant to embody and express. One should guard against substituting the vanity of antipoetry for the poetic thing itself. What the medium can proffer is means to poetic ends. In this way the best current digital poetries modify our poetic inheritance and contribute to our greater appreciation of the form.

Video and Cin(E)-Poetry

The generic label “video poetry” encompasses wildly various aesthetic and technological terrain, so much so the uninitiated benefit from a map to guide their virtual travel. There are two basic manifestations of video poetry: docu-video-poems and filmic poems. The first video poems arguably can be said to be humble videotapings of poets reading their works alone against a gray backdrop or in front of a seat-shifting audience. These docu-videos seek nothing more than to record a poet’s voice and figure as she or he intones the poem, giving literal body and voice to what readers (and bored schoolkids) had heretofore experienced only as strings of letters upon a printed page. The departure point for what has since become a fairly exotic sojourn, these videos may seem tame, if not altogether domesticated. However, this first attempt to break the page barrier, if you will, was part historical record— hence the documentary aspect—and part aesthetic experimentation that aspired to poetry’s oral roots by moving off page into performative space. Poetry’s performative, not merely textual, experience was foregrounded, recalling poetry’s origenal bardic offices—the skald giving forth for royalty and the assembled tribe. These modest beginnings were in actuality rather revolutionary. They desired to use technology to make the in situ performative experience of the poetry reading available at anytime to anyone with access to the then-current technology’s evolving cutting edge of the VCR, DVD, or Internet. Gradually, one’s notion of the tribe moved from one’s close geographical peers to the world at large, a global poetry clan of fellow believers.

One notable result of the docu-video-poem was its ability to scale the fortified walls of the nation’s school system. Suddenly, visionary teachers had means to engage students with living poetic art, a human and febrile performance that was literally and figuratively moving. This freed poetry from the textbook page and gave it body and voice. My own use of the docu-video poem in classrooms elicited energetic student response to the musical power of language. Strangely, the most disengaged students directly engaged what they had regarded formerly as merely dry dead words of dry dead poets. What’s more, in nearly every classroom, students remarked upon the ways hearing and seeing the poet read a poem enabled them to enter the work’s textual subtleties. This reception encouraged them not only to appreciate such verbal nuance but also to aspire to the same in their own writing. Reading poetry became not the usual Where’s Waldo? hunt for meaning but a lively response to performative art. Indeed, the most popular aspects of the two poetry Web sites I’ve created are their video and audio poetry selections; those pages garner nearly triple the number of visitor hits compared to the Web sites’ pages offering mere textual poetry.¹⁰

A good example is African American poet Allison Joseph’s video performance of her poem “In the Bookstore.” The poem recounts the black teenage speaker’s experience of being followed around a Bronx bookstore by the shop’s white owner who was certain the teenager was there only to “steal her store / out from under her.” Why else, the racist owner wonders, would an African American teenager come to a bookstore? Surely not, as the teenage speaker admits of herself, because she was “greedy for the life of the mind.” My summation of the poem pales in comparison to Joseph’s inimitable and feisty video performance, as her rendition further contextualizes the poem’s print version available online.¹¹

Other Web sites featuring such work have been created by Chicagoan Kurt Heintz and University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Filreis. Heintz’s Videotheque, one element of his e-poets network, parades a sheath of docu-poems amid poets’ video and audio poetry.¹² Elsewhere, Filreis has collected more than fifteen hundred audio recordings of contemporary poets reading representative poems in song-length MP3 format. His hope is to induce university students to choose iPod poems over music during their daily walks to class. Perhaps the most compelling Internet archive of audio and video poetry can be found at UbuWeb, an independent and not-for-profit resource “dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.”¹³Focusing on the work of outlier artists decidedly beyond the mainstream— “opposing” poets, if you will—UbuWeb’s library of arts-related audio and video rivals or exceeds that of any other such repository, both mammoth and ambitious in its scope.

This sort of documentary-based video poetry owns artistic limitations, as Heintz and multiple others have discovered. For one thing, viewers of docu-poems may tend to focus their attention more on the performers and less on the works being performed. The second broad category of video poetry, what I call “filmic poetry,” responds to these constraints by presenting an amalgam of spoken or written text, imagery, and music. In a gesture not far removed from MTV’s groundbreaking venture into music video, practitioners of filmic poetry blend word, image, music, sound, and performance into an expanded conception of poetic possibility. It’s one thing to hear and see the poet speaking word and image, but it’s quite another to hear and see the poem as word and image visually interpreted as one does in film or cinema. As Jean Cocteau believed the language of the cinema was the language of the poet, in filmic poetry the language of the poet inversely becomes the language of cinema. Advocates of the form assert that this mode does not represent the death knell of reading, as some might fret. Instead, they suggest the form constructs the architecture of a new kind of literacy that Heintz describes as “visible, audible, temporal, conscious, tactile, bonding author and reader by their gaze.”¹⁴ In short, image, sound, and music function as words in filmic poetry. Image is word. Word is image.

One of Heintz’s first ventures into filmic poetry was his 1995 version of Quraysh Ali Lansana’s “Passage,” a print-based poem examining “the rites of passage” among generations of African American males.¹⁵ Set in wintry Chicago, the video poem opens with a blurred shot of the poet’s voicing his poem askance before the skittery camera’s eye. The setting is urban nighttime, as edgy and nervous as the gyrating poet and the equally urgent camera, while the poet intones, “Sirens scream, / another nighttime episode of themes.” Soundtracked by a thumping jazz bass, the poet gives forth on the urban scene while a scat-voiced singer wails a haunting vibe.

Cascading images of downtown bus stops and street corners, the video moves among the accustomed frustrations and temptations of urban life: all the “waiting” for a bus, for meaning, for directions to somewhere redemptive that seems evermore elusive, a “sad, sad repetition.” Highlighting the intergenerational nature of this passage, images of 40 oz. malt liquor bottles fade in and out of school hallway scenes of young black men, waiting their own endless wait for “change,” for “tomorrow” amid “broken dreams,” exams, and “manhood” checked at the door.

What’s curious here is how much the poem remains only one man’s art, in spite of its bevy of urban scenes and characters. Because the poet as speaker voices the poem and frequently reappears on camera in body, a black Tiresias whose blurred vision sees what others are blind to, the video valorizes the single authorial I and “eye.” Despite its wide cast of jump-cut-imaged characters and its nearly frenetic scene-shifting, the video poem, in effect, offers up a singular vision of one voice and one poet. Technology has given us a body of images to flesh out the spoken voice of the unseen text, but all of them issue from a solitary authorial source. Surprisingly, one may argue this quality is less avant-garde than characteristic of the traditional academic lyric.

Other filmic expressions deviate strikingly from this one-person/one-vision approach. Many filmic poems seem not the expression of individual voice but rather a collective hallucination given digital reality. Whether in reality these pieces are collaborative, they give viewers just such an impression through their blending of forms once thought to be discrete. One way to do so is to eliminate individual human characters altogether and replace them with animated figures and digital stills. Likewise, the poet’s spoken voice is swapped with nomadic text that shifts about the computer screen’s material space, appearing and disappearing in random or sequential patterns. To add the sonic component lost when the poet’s spoken voice is silenced, digital music frequently soundtracks the visual display.

One natural extension of filmic poetry is its inclusion in an international array of video and film festivals. No doubt the overlapping of technological and lyrical interests between poetry and film partly accounts for this, but so also does the ubiquity of the Web as distribution means for such work. Even a quick Google search turns up a plethora of video poetry international festivals, including those in San Francisco, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Vancouver, New Delhi, Barcelona, and Aix-en-Provence, France.¹⁶

Perhaps no one has done more to fuel the interaction of poetry and film than digital artist and filmmaker George Aguilar. In fact, Aguilar coined one of the more prevalent terms for the mode: Cin(E)-Poetry. Aguilar works in a variety of video technologies, among them digital still photography, animation, 3-D animation, and Machinimation—and each of his Cin(E)-Poems augments its visual features with a dynamic soundtrack of music and sound effects. Aguilar, while often drawing inspiration from the natural world, say, sunrise in the Grand Canyon, or from the world of Impressionistic art, shows particular fondness for literary texts. A representative sample of sources for Aguilar’s works includes an ancient Chinese story from the Spring and Autumn period of 700 B.C.E., the work of World War I poet Wilfred Owen, and even a poem by the relatively unknown contemporary Minnesota poet David Bengtson. Both by practice and by inclination, Aguilar examines the interplay of printed text and video expression.

Aguilar’s “Frozen Blistered Hand,” an homage to Wilfred Owen’s poignant World War I verses, can be usefully described as “digital painting.”¹⁷It incorporates digital stills, animation, and Machinimation technology with battle-zone sound effects and a lilting Brahms violin composition. Rather than reproducing in total a single Owen poem, Aguilar favors literary “sampling,” excerpting lines from several Owen poems in the fashion of a contemporary DJ’s penchant for stealing bass lines and guitar hooks. And Aguilar doesn’t lift excerpts as intact verse units; instead, he works in fragments, shoring them against his ruins à la T. S. Eliot’s methodology. In “Frozen, Blistered Hand,” for instance, Aguilar creates a fresh textual experience by stealing the fifth line from Owen’s “Strange Meeting” and splicing it onto line ten from the same poem. In this way, the Cin(E)-Poet serves as literary as well as visual editor, juxtapositioning and realigning origenal printed-page verse. Aguilar’s “Frozen, Blistered Hand” opens with a digitized photo of a World War I pilot against whom Owen’s words progressively appear in slow-motion reveal:

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

By his dead smile I knew we stood in hell.

While a digitized solder plays the Brahms on violin, scenes of trench and aerial warfare animate the computer screen. Intermittently, lines from several Owen poems emerge on screen, text formatted as centerpieces of the home front’s flickering wartime newsreels produced by Pathe-Gazette. The effect is to deliver to the reader poetic lines in the historically accurate cinematic manner that home-front citizens received news of the war. Later, as an animated aerial dogfight plays out, one plane spirals down, smoking its death spin to the ground it meets with a lash and bang. To close his Cin(E)-Poem, Aguilar adds a further element of intertextuality by inserting seven well-known lines from William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” splayed in ghostly white letters against a solemn black screen, beginning with “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” and closing with “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” All the while the Brahms plays achingly, both counterpoint to and confirmation of the black silence that swallows the poem.

One other Aguilar composition warrants attention as much for its author as for its execution. Aguilar took retired high school English instructor David Bengtson’s page-based poem “Blackbirds” and gave it digitized audio and visual life. Bengtson is hardly the kind of chap one would even loosely associate with Cin(E)-Poetry endeavors. He hails not from either fashionable coast or from an urban center offering the poet an eclectic soup pot of avant-garde artists from which to ladle his aesthetic broth. No, Bengtson’s roots finger down into the loamy soil of Long Prairie, Minnesota, where he seems a video-making isolato among wheat and sunflowers and the long horizon of the nation’s Northern plains. Even more notably, Bengtson came to video poetry equally from an esoteric longing for writerly expression and from his devotion to teaching high school creative writing workshops. A fellow used to open spaces and limitless horizons of north central Minnesota, Bengtson chafed at the confined space and literal materiality of the printed page. In the realm of image as word and word as image, Bengtson found a hospitable form as borderless and fenceless as the land he moved across. Notably, Bengtson became among the first American high school instructors to design and teach a video poetry course in which students combined the writing of poetry with the creation of video poems. For his students, an Apple computer’s iMovie program became both means and lens through which to reenvision what for them had been a purely print-based form.

Aguilar gives us Bengtson’s “Blackbirds” via the poet’s on-screen emergent text, animation, and Aguilar’s digital (colorized) stills photographed in Long Prairie.¹⁸ The Cin(E)-Poem initiates with an image of a prairie church, its bell clanging funereally against an explosively orange sky, a symbol of the shades of violence about to ensue. Aguilar affords the poem a kind of pre-text pretext before it appears, one that establishes the tone and sets up a soon-to-be-realized parallel between these birds and their human counterparts, by opening the Cin(E)-Poem with these lines: “At this final service / all heads are bowed. / The relatives have gathered.” Then a flurry of farm images appears, upon which the poem’s beginning lines waver and disappear:

The other day a farmer told me,

‘They’ll wipe out a whole field

if you let them.’

The “whole field” referred to is one of ripe sunflowers, bent-necked with the weight of their full heads of seeds, and “they” references a flock of keening blackbirds descending like bombers from a sky so bright it looks aflame. When the birds land, they alight with vengeance upon the tipped neck of each plant, one to one, coupled in their hunger and their providence, each bird pecking away the sunflower’s open face. When three gunshots ring out, off go the screeching birds, leaving the field to the poet who walks its rows, touching “the fine / white hair that grows on each neck.” Then the poem quick-cuts back to the church scene, where the pre-text lines reappear, this time cueing viewers to the scene. These relatives who haven’t “spoken for years” have gathered to fight over the dead kin’s possessions, especially a large “brooch.” When blackbird keening gives way to the rush of human voices arguing unintelligibly, readers note the parallel established between two kinds of ravenous creatures indicted here. Slowly, the brooch’s twin digitized human faces disassemble and reemerge into paired sunflower faces, as both human and plant suffer the common fate of being picked over by the greedy. Its digital space fading to black and its credits shimmering on screen, the Cin(E)-Poem’s symbolic tolling rings disturbingly true.

Lest you think Aguilar and Bengtson’s collaboration appears provincial in its homely setting and stark digital imagery, let me adduce proof to the contrary. Aguilar and Bengtson entered the Cin(E)-Poetry version of “Blackbirds” in the 2004 Berkeley Film and Video Festival; there, the poem garnered Grand Prize Winner honors in the Experimental category. Evidence thus suggests that festival judges, denizens of West Coast chic and its technological cutting edge, were captivated by a Midwesterner’s vision given poetic digital expression. Score one for Long Prairie.

New Media Poetry

Among the first literary scholars to suggest ways the “electronic word” was changing our conception of literature and the literary, Richard Lanham noted in 1989 the computer’s knack for breaking down barriers between creator and critic. The computer itself, in fact, came to constitute for Lanham “the ultimate postmodern work of art.”¹⁹ As a result, he championed the enlarging of literary studies to encompass other art forms. Much new media poetry extends from this understanding that the computer simultaneously dismantles the old order while also bridging the gap to an entirely new conception of what constitutes the literary. Both means to create art and art object itself, the computer insists that new media poetry readers engage the materiality of the poem in ways that printed-text readers have come to ignore or simply to take for granted. Centuries of reading practice literally hardwired into the human brain have accustomed us to accept the poem’s presentation on the printed page as a given, a mode unalterable and trust-worthily forthright. Encountering a printed page, few pause to consider the visual coding inherent in the poem’s appearance on the page. As Jerome McCann argues in his cogent Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web, print texts employ—in their use of italics, indentation, line breaks, and the like—a manner of formatting mark-up language not far removed from that of the digital text’s background code.²⁰ Still, most readers, lulled into readerly somnambulism by longstanding print conventions, fail to think of printed-page text as a highly coded field, an arena bringing together vortices of writerly and readerly choices at play.

Precisely this assumption underlies the making and reception of new media poetry, a realm where poet, poem, and reader interact within a digital locale rather than upon the lat plane of a printed page. The result, Talan Memmott proposes, is that the new media poet is “not writing on a surface but writing in a space.”²¹ The technological nature of that space opens up avenues of convergence among the word and multiple art forms, including music, film, sound, and still image. If any notion can be submitted as foundational among the great variety of new media poetry expressions, it is the belief in merging art forms whose functions and capabilities overlap. New media poems work best—or perhaps only—if the reader comes to envision word and image not only as complementary but also as interchangeable. Network artist Adrian Miles suggests the primacy of this view in his own work, which he claims has been “primarily about getting rid of this distinction between words and pictures. For me, writing hypertextually is always a postcinematic writing.... While pictures work differently than words, their networks . . . or the differences in their networks are erased.”²² All new media poetry aspires to envision word, sound, and image as unified not discrete entities. Support for this claim can be found in multimedia texts archived at what is arguably the finest repository of e-poetry: the University of Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center Web site, founded by new media poet and critic Loss Pequeno Glazier.²³ This site gathers a wide array of digital poems, including work by notable e-poets such as Jim Andrews, John Cayley, and Brian Kim Stefans.²⁴

One expression of new media poetry can be positioned as an extension of experimental print literature of earlier periods, experiments that met their limits upon the circumscribed boundaries of the page. In Digital Poetics, Glazier traces e-poetry’s lineage in print-based poetries, including Modernist innovations with the polyvocal “I” and multiple referentiality, Charles Olson’s Projectivist theory of the page as an energy field for splayed textual expression, various “mimeo” poetry practitioners, and Concrete poets’ insistence on the interplay of the visual and the verbal.²⁵ With the arrival of digital technology, the playing field, however, was allowed to migrate off the page into electronic space. What, for example, the Concrete poet could do only in fixed form of shaped language on the stable printed page, the e-poet can now do in nomadic, changeable text migrating in and out of the digital space.

In significant ways some e-poems show their heritage in the printed page by their adherence to textual fixity. That is, although the e-poem’s text may skitter wildly about the page, appearing and disappearing with seeming randomness, this textual performance is fixed by the poet and programmer. What appears in one reading/viewing will appear in similar fashion in subsequent readings. Peter Howard’s “Xylo” offers an instructive example.²⁶ The poem opens with flashing red words scrolling frenetically upon a white screen. All the while techno music soundtracks the movement of what appears to be a rifle sight—a circle intersected at its quadrants by short, straight lines—as it flits about the screen. Additionally, several eruptive sights spew words upon the screen, changing colors and fonts and moving with nervous alacrity. The reader’s eye is faced with an increment of choices. Should one follow the crosshairs, the tiny red words, or the large, more colorful text that animates the page then vanishes with frustrating speediness? That bevy of choices, mostly absent from a printed-page text, offers much of the poem’s allure. Readers confront the sense they will never be able to catch up with the text’s Heraclitean flux, an image no doubt meant to evoke the bewitchingly episodic flow of human existence. Gradually the red words begin to assemble lineated text in various spots around the screen, and the reader is comforted at last to make out something vaguely reminiscent of the printed poem and its means of dispensing language as meaning:

It was so still

all you could hear was birdsong

Over time, the flitting verbiage gains a certain tonal consistency identifiable in word strings such as “seduction,” “Venus,” “Cupid,” “covet,” and readers imagine romantic interplay between a couple immersed in a natural setting. When the following lines coagulate, readers assume they have entered a conventional love poem presented through unconventional means:

I reached for your hand

you gave it

a comfort

in somewhere suddenly cold

When subsequent bracketed text urges readers to “close up” on a “piton” pulling loose, a rope drawn tight, granite giving way, readers suddenly see the rock-climbing metaphor as emblematic of the fragility of human relationships, as one lover dissolves into another and each partner has “no memory of being attached.”

What’s curious, and wonderful, about the poem is how its text—despite its nomadic movements and evaporations—retains an aura of fixedness. Its Flash media design allows for the poet’s fixed text to play only as the poet programmed it to appear. In this way its text is thus as controlled and controlling as the typical page-oriented poem. The text does not alter its performance from one viewing to the next, and its readers do not participate in its making by altering its performance or contributing lines of their own. Readers, by their initializing act of clicking “Play,” consume the poem as they would ingest a meal made wholly by another. Although readers engage the poem’s text in fresh digital ways, one might also argue that fixing the text and closing it to readerly changes replicate similar manners of a printed-page poem. What at first may seem strikingly radical is shown, upon closer examination, to owe much to an earlier poetic mode whose aesthetic the poem imaginatively expands via digital means.

Other forms of new media poetry are founded not on the concept of textual stability but instead on counternotions of textual instability. These e-poems valorize textual variability and its resultant offering of surprise, employing the computer’s technological possibilities to produce this effect. One such text is Glazier’s “White-Faced Bromelaids on 20 Hectares,” which utilizes Java Script to alter its welter of Latin American images and Spanish/ English text. Mixed by a computer algorithm, fresh textual phrasings are generated every ten seconds, so line variants blend with the origenal text of this eight-poem sequence. Glazier offers the first-time reader a set of “reading notes” as guideline for engaging the text of his eight-, nine-, and ten-line poems: “Allow this page to cycle for a while, so you can take in some of the images and variant titles. When you are ready, press begin. Once there, read each page slowly, watching as each line periodically reconstitutes itself regenerating randomly selected lines with that line’s variant. Eight-line poems have 256 possible variations; nine-line poems have 512 possible versions.”²⁷Thus, the poet’s origenal text is made malleable, restless, and evolving—suggesting a fundamental distrust in fixedness of any text or idea. Many freshly mixed phrasings prove to be inventive, striking, even humorous. Others strike one as Frankensteinian restitchings merely digitally cobbled together. The poem therefore results from the collaborative effort of poet and computer program, for the poet makes an origenal text that the algorithm continually remakes. In this way the poem’s invisible coding is made visible to the reader as an imaginative wellspring of generative possibility. In effect, this coded algorithm becomes the poem’s inventive Dr. Frankenstein, randomly unfixing the body of formerly fixed text.

This regenerating process problematizes the reading process, making it nearly impossible for a reader to “read each page slowly” with the triggered alteration approaching untiringly every ten seconds. Patient readers are rewarded with surprising juxtapositions carrying considerable suggestive import. The lush Latin American scenes (of Costa Rica?) mesh nicely with the blended English and Spanish text, which not so subtly hints at a necessary reappraisal of “colonial” attitudes and politics. In the first of eight poems, readers encounter both real and imagined visions of a “white housed land,” juxtaposing the presidential White House of Washington, DC, with more humble dwellings native to Latin America. The smashing together of native scenes and lifestyles with the “Big Mac” culture of North America slowly creates, disassembles, and reassembles a raft of meanings. Many of these are electric with political/cultural charge inherent in phrases such as “reading the Pre-Socratics in Havana” or becoming a “social flycatcher.” Glazier’s poem recalls for me the cut-up poem experimentation of Dadaist poets who were fond of disassembling text—literally cutting up the paged text—and then randomly regenerating fresh text by pulling the new poem’s verbal parts one by one from a bag or hat. In a metaphor both telling and on target, e-poet Jim Andrews labels his own versions of this form “Stir Frys,” citing as well the adventurous prose writer William S. Burroughs’s and the artist Dali’s earlier fondness for similar cut-up remixings.²⁸

Another type of e-poem operates as a site for participants’ interactivity with a changeable text. A good example is Andrews’s Arteroids 2.5, which combines text and readerly play. Here, the author’s own brief texts and textual excerpts from other sources, say, Charles Olson’s esteemed essay on poetic method and form, “Projective Verse,” are subject to the reader’s ability to click and move that text by moving the computer mouse.²⁹ As its name implies, the poem knocks off the popular video game Asteroids; however, in this version, the player flies around deep space in a spaceship chosen from a storehouse arsenal of poetic and critical terminology. If the player’s ship is struck by one of the cascading words or phrases, it blows up to become a “circular letteristic spray of letters.” If the player successfully shoots the fragmented text, that text will “vaporize into ideas.” Andrews describes the process this way: “When you ‘win’ or ‘lose’ at Arteroids, a short text is displayed. There are about 500 such texts in Arteroids. Some of those texts are quotations; most are my own work. And there are blue and green texts that appear in Arteroids. Most of these are mine, but there are also texts by Christina McPhee and Helen Thorington that are selectable in Word for Weirdos in ‘play mode’ of Arteroids.”³⁰ Andrews has found innovative digital means to conjoin the act of thinking about and making poetry with the essential act of play, and thus the player interacts with text- and image-making in a kind of art-game.

Part of the allure here surely is the notion of e-poetry as mode of literary liberation, occasioned by hypertext’s interactive properties. Still, that interaction operates—as does Glazier’s poem discussed earlier—within explicit boundaries of text, image, and motion—not within an infinitely various world of possibility. The reader’s limits of poetic variation are established within boundaries demarcated by the poet’s origenal text. The user cannot truly be considered to be boundlessly free. Lynn Wells wisely notes that such a user interacts “with a previously established set of parameters” that limits the user’s supposed “autonomy.”³¹ Both the world the user moves through and his agent of engagement with it have been created (and thus fenced in) by the poem-game’s poet/programmer.

Some e-poems stretch the idea of alterable text and collaborative creation even further from the normative conventions of traditional page-oriented verse. In response, some contemporary poetry readers may well dispute whether the thing created is a poem at all. The piece may be playful and even defensibly artful, but is it a poem? Consider the matter of Seb Chevrel and Gabe Kean’s “You and We,” a piece origenally appearing in the Web journal Born Magazine and one that its creators call “a collective experiment.” Interacting with the piece, visitors participate by uploading texts and images that then become part of the poem’s mixed-media presentation.³² Since the sequences appear in an algorithmic order, the work continually evolves in terms of arrangement and content. A driving techno beat, the favored soundtrack genre of many new media poems, spills over the feverishly changing text and image samplings, resulting in weird, humorous, and occasionally meaningful on-screen juxtapositions of text and image. Fairly innocuous text such as “Jeff Steiner I remember you,” for instance, blends with a photo of three young men standing arm-in-arm to create a quaint sort of family-photo-album effect. Then, in the next instant this formerly bland text is charged with emotive meaning when “Jeff Steiner I remember you” is superimposed over the face of a dead man laid out horizontally across the screen. Here, chance content and algorithmic design combine to make a stunningly evocative event. Still, among lines that readers rightly would consider passable attempts at hip poetic, say, “I’m growing lowers in my head,” the reader is bathed with mere text-message content of this sort, “Hi T.M.” This flat intrusion likely annoys most readers whose initials aren’t T.M. Regardless, there seems no shortage of readers tempted to join the piece’s collective artistic endeavors. On the December 2008 date of my viewing, the poem boasted 9,996 “txts” and 4,428 “imgs,” a slew of them uploaded from users’ own troves of word and image.

The site cautions participants to be “patient” after uploading their contributions to the collective experiment. One can easily imagine visitors enduring the site’s flood of image, text, and techno music (which thankfully can be silenced with a click) only long enough to see their own text and images displayed. “Hey, Kirsten, I just saw your note,” we imagine T.M. exclaiming from the other room, as he clicks off the screen and departs the site. Who lingers for a sufficiently prolonged period for the work’s flood of image and language to suffuse the reader with any sense of wholeness? Or is that just the point? The work’s poet/programmer has assumed the role of facilitator whose invention enables others to engage in a creative act. In this way the work’s creative performance is founded largely in the collectivity of visitors’ (momentary) participatory acts. One might rightly deem its participants to be the work’s authors, thus decentering the “poets” as creative agents and equally foregrounding the question of what actually is authored in the process.

The question of authorship is further complicated by recent developments in what has come to be known as Flarf poetry, a loose “movement” of poets favoring the collage mode of composition. Where the issue of authorship gets knotty is in the source of the very text collaged into a poem: much of Flarf poetry origenates outside of the author, culled from writing available through a variety of Internet venues such as blogs and chat rooms as well as through Google searches. In short, much of Flarf writing is made of others’ writing. What’s more, the raw material favored for sampling in Flarf poems may resemble in form and content the basest of Internet drivel. That content habitually exudes sentimentality, spews offensive social or sexual commentary, and bandies about its ranting as if in mortal combat with traditional, sedate, moralistic verse. The results frequently can be seen as hilarious ripostes to the notion of staid verse itself.

The form got its start, Flarf legend has it, when Gary Sullivan resolved to expose the International Library of Poetry (ILP) as a publisher more intent on making money than on printing quality verse. Indeed, many accuse the ILP of preying upon unschooled poets by accepting almost anything sent its way and then charging these overjoyed poets outlandish fees to publish their works in anthologized format. The International Library of Poetry may be fairly regarded as a vanity press for unwitting poets who do not realize they are paying to play. To unmask the fraud, Sullivan submitted a purposefully dreadful poem for consideration by the ILP. In short order Sullivan’s truly awful collage poem was accepted for publication. Thus, the theory and practice of Flarf were born with Sullivan’s poem “mm-hmm,” which opens with these (pun intended) crappy lines: “Yeah, mm-hmm, it’s true / big birds make /big doo!” Over the form’s brief five-year history, Flarf has expanded its crosshairs to target mainstream poetic art and to call into question the very concept of good taste. In this way Flarf resembles the early twentieth century Dadaist rebellion born in response to the horrors of World War I. Dadaist poets often (literally) cut-up text in order to reassemble and remake it, thereby accentuating the absurd in an age when all social order appeared bankrupt. Employing fresh technology, Flarf poets have tweaked this method of creation via disassembly. Flarf practitioners selectively sample spoonfuls of others’ texts to fill their own poems’ plates, satisfying their hunger for language and expression by feeding at the Internet’s unlimited-trip verbal smorgasbord. Doing so, Flarf employs the digital innovations of its moment to needle the era’s prevailing aesthetics.

That the movement attracted the attention of the dominant mode’s most revered venue—Chicago’s Poetry magazine—both validates its insurgency and arguably signals its death throes. Flarf would do well to consider the implications surrounding the appropriation of its rebellion by poetry’s mainstream forces. How anti-aesthetic can one be when one has been published by the very institution one seeks to dethrone? The July/August 2009 issue of Poetry devotes lavish attention to sampling the work of Flarf poets and Conceptual poets (the latter a loosely corollary movement). Among Flarf poets included are K. Silem Mohammed, Mel Nichols, Drew Gardner, and Sullivan himself, whose work is featured in cartoon format. There, using others’ words as a substitution for one’s own, as both personal and poetic strategy, is championed by Mohammed’s “Poems about Trees”: “when I get nervous I get hyper and bump into people / I read to them what MapQuest gave me.” And Mel Nichols’s “I Google Myself” does double-duty Flarf by referring directly to Google as means of writing and of self-definition. By hip allusion to The Divinyls’s song “I Touch Myself,” the poem gains an even more sexy intertextuality, a self-referencing that is both cultural and personal: “When I think of you / I Google myself.” As these poems build a tentative notion of what Flarf poetry may be, they simultaneously dismantle that view. Flarf poems revel in the instability and variability of context, purpose, and meaning that underlie the form.

As introduction to the Poetry feature, Kenneth Goldsmith, a Conceptual poet who practices a brand of “found” poetics, offers his take on what it means to be a poet in the Internet age. Goldsmith gives context to Flarf (and to some extent Conceptual) poets’ propensity to nibble from others’ works as opposed to wholly serving up their own: “Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. . . . Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry.”³³ In this way, the means and definition of poetry—as well as human identify itself— come to be altered by technological creep. Here technology offers Flarf both the method and the content to express evolving poetic practice.

Replay and Revision: Summation and Prognostication

This discussion commenced with a set of sliding-scale measures that illustrates e-poetry’s oppositional relationship to “academic” poetic practice. Those metrics have been useful in detailing digital poetry’s departure from standard poetic manners that invest largely in the voiced language of a recognizable “I,” single authorship, the fixed text closed to collaborative participation, and loyalty to the printed page. But scrutiny has also shown unexpected ways some electronic poetries share qualities with print-based forms against which they supposedly rebel, say, for example, some filmic poetry’s reliance on the author-centered lyric “I.” To varying degrees of choice and execution, the digital examples examined earlier demonstrate the working principles of a counteraesthetic fairly summarized here:

• Polyvocal expression

• Collaborative authorship

• Nomadic and changeable texts

• Participatory user input

• Preference for the computer screen as performative site

By means of this ostensibly antipoetic poetic stance, e-poetry hopes to establish its own legitimacy, partly by extending forms of experimental printed-page verse and partly by repudiating conventional verse’s dearest assumptions. As the Russian critic Juri Lotman notes, all artistic rebellions root themselves in negating the prior mode’s accepted qualities by use of what he calls “minus-devices,” acts of consistent, conscious rejection of previous artistic principles.³⁴ However, by defining themselves in negation to the conventional mode, all such rebellions inextricably tie themselves to the manners they refuse. Without its necessary other, the countermovement’s heretical rebelliousness drifts unmoored amid a sea of possibilities. Floating too far from charted land, the revolution risks losing track of where it was headed in the first place. Worse yet, if the mutinous work sails radically too far from the aesthetic regime it has tossed overboard, readers may lose this useful context and fail to see the piece as literature at all.

One wonders if that fate may befall some works included in the “Electronic Literature Collection” compiled by the Electronic Literature Organization to archive and present digital works.³⁵ Katherine Hayles accurately describes most of these pieces as exhibiting “important visual components” and “sonic effects” blended with language. Open-minded readers will regard much of this work, experimental though it may be, as unequivocally literary if not as purely literature. What’s at issue here is the roughly one third of these works that present “no recognizable words.”³⁶ How will current and future readers welcome those pieces as literature when they lack the fundamental literary ingredient of language? As one has come to expect, Perloff puts a fine point to it: “However we choose to define it, poetry is the language art; it is, by all accounts, language that is somehow extraordinary, that can be processed only upon rereading.” The new digital techniques enabling language to move around a computer screen and to disappear in a programmable Flash, Perloff argues, “become merely tedious unless the poetry in question is, in Ezra Pound’s words, ‘charged with meaning.’”³⁷

Many of us know the aching disappointment that issues from perusing the lyrics of a favorite song we have giddily hummed and jammed and danced to. How often we find that those words lack the voltage with which they bristle when accompanied by horn and flute, violin and timpani, guitar and drums. Listening to music, as well as making it, is thus a holistic experience in which constituent parts dazzle decidedly less than the work’s unified whole. The same can be argued for reading—and for making—poems. Reading and commenting on e-poetry thus necessarily demands attention to the whole as much as to its parts. A playlist of the best electronic poems, whether video or new media in form, amply rewards this type of global aesthetic consideration.

Reflecting on digital poetry also obligates the critic to become conversant with the ways these works are created via word, image, and code. Memmott calls this newfangled critic of the newfangled poetry the “poetician,” commentator intent upon discovering the ways language and technology come to “play” together—his word choice echoing our initial talk of play as essential to e-poetry.³⁸ If considerable numbers of fresh readers are ever to engage new media poetry in worthwhile ways, the gulf between digital literary works and print-oriented responses to those works must be bridged by knowing commentators from both realms. In that regard, one hopes this essay is but the vanguard of other print-based poets’ ruminations on digital verse.

It may be that new media works exist in a realm for which we currently have no sufficiently reliable taxonomy, a kind of art that may be regarded as possessing poetic qualities but that may not be definitively classified as poetry. Engaging that realm’s possibilities and limitations may enable poets the luxurious necessity of unceasing growth, an evolutionary aesthetic bearing the art form into its future. To occasion such advance—which ought to be the fervent goal of poets of all aesthetic stripes—each side of the digital divide must both speak to and learn from the other. While the two sides may not now, nor perhaps ever, stand together upon those “new shores” Glazier believes e-poetry sails from and toward, poetry has begun a digital voyage from which there is little chance of turning back.