What happens to poetry when it goes online?
Marcelo Moreschi
What happens with poetry when it goes online?
a) how the Internet changes the
circulation and availability of
poetic texts
b) how new poetic practices
incorporate and explore the new
media environment
Circulation/availability
Is the internet poetry friendly?
www.poetry.com
Avant-garde poetry archives
• Ubu Web (http://www.ubu.com/)
• Electronic Poetry Center
(http://epc.buffalo.edu/) (more
than 10 million users annually
from 90 countries)
• http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pe
nnsound/
• http://www.futurism.org.uk/
Online poetry journals
• www.jacketmagazine.com
(500,000 visits since 1997)
• www.epoetry.org
• www.octopusmagazine.com
Blogs
• Ron Silliman’s blog
(http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/)
(more than 615,000 visitors.
Never had a book that sold more
than 4,000 copies)
Circulation/availability
• New instances of publishing,
publicizing, discussion and
canonization
• It is a new literary system or a
new subsystem within the
system?
Silliman:
“I buy more books than I did before, in good
part because the distribution system for
printed poetry is so abysmal. But that really
doesn’t matter when every small press can
sell direct, or at least can get their work into
the online catalogue of Small Press
Distribution” (http://www.spdbooks.org/)
Charles Bernstein, in the early beginning of
the Web:
“I don’t believe that technology creates
improvement, but rather that we need to
use the new technologies in order to
preserve the limited cultural spaces we
have created through alternative, nonprofit
literary press and magazines. This is
particularly important for poetry on the net
because the formats and institutions we are
now establishing can provide models and
precedents fro small-scale, poetry intensive
activities”
New media poetry
“If you look at experimental poetry of the 20th century, works by Futurists, Dada
poets, Apollinaire, Schwitters, Concrete Poets, Sound Poets,
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, Burroughs, Howe, Antin, Cage, you see a
consistent attention to the relation of technology to art. But more so, you see a
will to bend the instruments of technology to engage and recontextualize the
possibilities for art in a new age. At this crucial time, the form of practice of epoetry that interests me has this focus and is invigorated by a mission to
interrogate the possibilities for the new media innovation”
Loss Pequeño Glazier
• Incorporation of media and reading/writing technologies into poetry making, in
order to rethink technology, poetry and their relation
• Electing precursors, proposing genealogies
Strategies and resources explored
Exemples:
• Hypertext
“Letters Demand Things”, Micheal Medsen
“Clues”, Robert Kendall
• Interactivity
• Game-like action
“Click Poetry”, David Knoebel
“I am simply saying”, Deena Larsen
Mez, Mary-Anne Breeze
• Various multimedia elements
“Cog”, Loss Pequeño Glazier
• Aleatory creations
“The Dreamlife of letter”, “Kluge”, Brian Kim
Stefans:
Google does poetry
• Computer generated texts
• Exploration of aspects of
networked environment
“Get a Google Poem”, Leevi Lehto,
“1:1 (2)”, Lisa Jevbratt
“Ambient Fish”, Caroline Bergvall
Terminology
• (Rickey and Beaulieu:)
•Other terms:
• e-distribution
•new media poetry/new media
poetics
• e-publishing
• e-translation
• e-poetry
•digital poetry
•cybertext
•ergodic poetry: requires a "non-trivial effort" to
traverse the text. This effort must be extranoematic, that is,
it must consist of more than simply reading by moving
one's eyes along lines of text, turning pages and mentally
interpreting what one reads. The term was coined by
Espen Aarseth in his book Cybertext--Perspectives on
Ergodic Literature, and is derived from the Greek words
ergon, meaning "work" and hodos, meaning "path".
(Ubuweb listserv)
Critical issues
• Author/reader relationship
• reading experience
• what is new in new media poetry
•Subjectivity/authorship, specially
in computer/algorithm generated
texts
•code and poetry
•“Uniqueness” of display
• electronic poetry or electronic
poetry (role of language in more
•describing/searching aesthetic
conceptual works.)
experiences in specific situation of
data transmission/retrieving
• “poetics of click and drag”
(“transcendental data” hypothesis,
(Perloff)
sublime. Liu)
“Chopsticks can either be a simple eating utensil or a deadly weapon, depending
on who uses them”
Bill Viola (apud Perloff)