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[Question 8 from the 9x9 series that CA Conrad does. Most of my answers have been pretty uninspired but I took some time to write this one.]
Most poets seem to have at least one poet they've read and admired who is not well-known, a poet whose work we like to share with those who will appreciate the work. Is there such a poet's work in your life? If so, who is this poet? Tell us something about how you came to discover their work, and how it inspires you. Maybe share some favorite lines, and titles.
Over the years, there have been a few poets who I've been reading who are not entirely well-known, though they have significant reputations elsewhere, such as the Scottish concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and the Australian poets Martin Johnston and Kenneth Slessor. I've written about Finlay and Johnston for Jacket, as well as about Veronica Forrest-Thomson who is better known now than she was in 1995 when I wrote the article (I discovered her in Charles Bernstein's Artifice of Absorption essay).
One day, Miles Champion handed me a chapbook by the British poet John Temple that completely blew my mind; he moved to Belgium in the Seventies and practically stopped writing poetry after that, though his collected works were recently published by Salt Press. I always thought Hilda Morley was a really great and interesting poet who never got her due; I've wanted to write about Temple and Morley for some time. There's another Brit whose recent collected poems is fantastic, John James, very much alive though I've never met him.
These days I've been reading Edwin Arlington Robinson, who won three Pulitzers late in his life but who isn't really read much now. People think he's stuffy probably because he often wrote sonnets and in blank verse, but he reads to me these days as more "modern" than many of the Modernists, possibly because one could see in him the first successful use of language as "speech" in verse -- he really let speech as he heard and spoke it determine his syntax, rhythms and cadences more than many of those poets who have never cared for form at all, and hence never had a stage on which to properly enact "speech." (Whitman used "speech," for example, but it was only his own manner of intoning things rather than talking. Most people don't talk in such a way that would fit comfortably in several-page long orations.) Robinson's use of Browning's was much better than Pound's, probably because he was actually concerned with living people -- real moderns, losers, outcasts, urbanites, the people you find in Faulkner for example except in the North East-- rather than historical figures that he knew through books.
The handful of poems I've read by the nineteenth century poet Sarah Morgan Piatt are really fantastic -- I’m ordering a recently issued Selected pretty soon. I tend to dip into my American Library anthology of 19th century poetry quite frequently for little finds like this -- Jones Very, Christopher Pearse Cranch and William Cullen Bryant are people I've been interested in in the past.
There's something very exotic about poets whose reputations have not survived their lives in any great form, as if they were actively rebellious against the future -- our present -- and we are invited to join them in it. Quite frequently, I find it quite difficult to read poets whose reputations are rather inflated or whose works are too well known. I read them, of course, but often not in a way that tells me something I didn't already know. Sometimes I wonder if the only true "difference" is the difference of the past, not any weird little thing we can conjure now.
In order to simulate a domestic work environment, the following are tasks should be randomly assigned to audience members at readings of A Poem of Attitudes. The assignments are best conveyed through index cards, but of course any method is fine. Once the assignment is completed (and the card returned to the reader, who is directing her reading to an painted image of Ataturk), the auditor will then leave the building. Once all the auditors have left, the reader will recite Paul Celan’s "Todesfuge" one time in German, and that is the end of the performance.
Electronic Desire 1:
You have an electronic desire for tight pants, but are embarrassed to expose this obsession. Find the person in the room with the tightest pants (or who looks most attractive in tight pants) and try to find out where he/she purchased them. Do not let on that you are interested in the pants,; be clever and gather this information secretly. Find the person with the loosest pants in the room, and convey the information you have discovered to this person without letting him/her know you are doing so. Leave the room.
Electronic Desire 1:
You have an electronic desire for tight pants, but are embarrassed to expose this obsession. Find the person in the room with the tightest pants (or who looks most attractive in tight pants) and try to find out where he/she purchased them. Do not let on that you are interested in the pants,; be clever and gather this information secretly. Find the person with the loosest pants in the room, and convey the information you have discovered to this person without letting him/her know you are doing so. Leave the room.
Electronic Desire 2:
You have an electronic desire to aquire votes in an upcoming election in which you are running for treasurer. Find the names of all of the people in this room whom you don't know (up to 15) along with the state/city/bourough in which he/she lives. Once you have collected all of these names, alphabetize them and return them to the me, who will eventually provide you with email addresses. Leave the room.
Electronic Desire 3:
You have an electronic desire to meet the person sitting directly across from you (if there is no one across from you, then the person behind you), but rather than a sexual or personal interest in this person, your interest is that of a evangelical therapist with a specialty on insecurity complexes. Approach this person, and try to engage in conversation with him/her. Convince this person that he/she is the most interesting person in the world; however, do all the talking, don't let him/her get a word in edgewise. Be polite! When you are convinced that this other person has lost patience with you, leave the room.
Electronic Desire 4:
You have the electronic delusion that you are the two-year old daughter of a famous avant-garde artist, and your mother brings you to several parties where you behave very well. However, today you want to be outside playing in the snow (or running in the sun), and so you imagine that this room is actually outdoors. When you are feeling bored, make as much noise as you can without attracting the interest of your mother, who is the woman sitting directly across from you. If you are interested, remain silent. When your mother leaves the room, take her hand and leave also.
Electronic Desire 5:
Because you believe that smokers are an oppressed species despite the harm they do to themselves and others, you have an electronic desire to make sure that all smokers in the room are enjoying themselves. Find a smoker in the room and bum a cigarette off of him/her and deliver this cigarette to another smoker whom you fear may not have any cigarettes, or to a non-smoker whom you believe should start. After you are convinced that all of the cigarettes in the room have been adequately distributed, leave the room.
Electronic Desire 6:
The person sitting across from you is a famous avant-garde artist. You have an electronic desire to write a short essay on his/her work for a forthcoming issue of The New York Times with the hope of making him/her famous, and for this reason need to acquire bibliographic information on this writer. Interview this poet on his/her publishing history and general ideas on the premises of his/her work. Return the information to the me and leave the room.
Electronic Desire 7:
You have an electronic desire to clean up the empty glasses and bottles in the room, but are afraid to leave the room because of your interest in hearing the music. Collect the glasses and bottles and place them on the largest table (or table where they will be most undisturbed) as quietly as possible. When you are done, leave the room.
Electronic Desire 8:
You are under the electronic delusion that you speak perfect German. In reality, you only know one line of Rilke's: "Werr, wenn ish schreie, horte much aus den Engeln Ordnungen?" You have spotted someone in the room whom you believe is German, and have an electronic desire to impress this person with your ability. Do so, using these or any German words you know, and for those you don't know, German sounds such as harsh guttarals and a range of false umlauted vowels. After you have exhausted the permutations of these sounds and the line from Rilke, leave the room.
Electronic Desire 9:
You have an electronic obsession with political slogans. Collect three differing viewpoints on an event of the day, and create several slogans that represent these viewpoints beginning with the phrase "Frodo says..." Cover the walls as completley as possible with these slogans. Leave the room.
Electronic Desire 10:
You have an electronic desire to purchase new shoes. You haven't looked at what people are wearing on the street in nearly two years, and are afraid that the styles may have changed. Examine the shoes in the room, and determine whether they reflect what the world outside believes is fashionable footwear. However, like Plato you are not sure if your image in the cave reflects the reality outside. Interview the person with the most attractive shoes about where he/she bought the shoes, as well as his/her general philosophy on shoes. When the person has made a reference to Plato, leave the room.
Electronic Desire 11:
A very important event occurred today, one that you are have an electronic assurance will make a significant impact on the immediate future of world events. However, you are not sure what this event was, and have an electronic desire to find out. Ask several people what they felt was the most important story that they had read in the newspaper today. Keep doing this until you have received at least five duplicate answers. Describe this news event on a piece of paper and return it to the reader. Leave the room.
Electronic Desire 12:
You have an electronic interest in patterns of percussion, particularly those that are achieved by clapping. You like to preoccupy yourself with making intricate clapping rhythms and teaching them to friends so that you can perform them together. Create a clapping rhythm that you think you can teach to someone in a short time. Find a person whom you believe would be a good student, and teach the rhythm to him/her. Rehearse your routine to satisfaction and perform this to a group of attentive listeners. After the performance, leave the room.
Electronic Desire 13:
You have an electronic obsession with maintaining calm in the room, as if you were a bouncer with ambitions for sainthood. You fear that there is friction, and that someone is liable to "blow up" at any moment. Follow this person until he/she leaves the room, making sure that he/she avoids any serious points of contention with anyone else. Be discreet, but diligent! Leave the room also once this person has left.
Electronic Desire 14:
You have an electronic obsession with haircuts, and hope to bring everybody up to the vanguard in terms of styles. Find the person in the room who needs a haircut the most because he/she has become lax. Find the person in the room with the most hip, overmanaged hairstyle and introduce these two people to each other. Find a subject they have in common and like to discuss, and if possible bring the conversation around to hairstyles. Once it becomes apparent to both of them that they conflict on the issue of hair care, leave the room.
Electronic Desire 15:
You have the electronic delusion that you have to meet someone forty minutes from now at Astor Square. Determine when you would have to leave the room so that you would be exactly five minutes late for the appointment. Leave the room at the time you have determined.
Electronic Desire 16:
Someone is trying to leave the room, but you have an electronic desire to have him/her stay until he/she has collected certain cues. Tell this person that he/she cannot leave until the word "disembark" has been spoken five times by other people. Go around the room eavesdropping on conversations until you have to agree that "disembark" has been spoken; if it is taking too long to occur, artifically bring around situations that are propitious for these events. After you are satisfied this has been done, leave the room.
Electronic Desire 17:
You have an electronic obession with getting free drinks from the most unlikely persons. Find the person that is most enjoying the party and convince him/her that it is in his/her better interest to continue the party in the vicinity of the bar. Don't let on that you are planning on asking him/her to buy you a ginger ale at the bar. Leave the room with this person.
Electronic Desire 18:
You have an electronic desire to confound others with hermetic statements regarding members of their families. Locate those in the room who do not seem to be enjoying themselves and lure them to the bar with the line "Your Aunt Jessica is waiting for you in the other room." If he/she asks what you mean, repeat only this line with whatever dramatic inflections are possible to convince him/her that he/she should leave the room. Once you have escorted seven of these people out of the room, leave the room yourself.
Electronic Desire 19:
You have an electronic delusion that disaster is imminant on Houston Street. Somebody has just started to put on his/her jacket. Stop him/her! After you have saved the lives of three people, calmly put on your jacket and leave the room.
Electronic Desire 20:
You have the electronic delusion that you are the responsible mother to a small troop of panda bears that have been stranded in Grand Centeral Station, and you must now collect enough bamboo sticks to feed them through the winter. Collect enough information from the people in this room about bamboo sticks—where to get them, how to store them—until you are satisfied that you can supply enough for your cubs. Leave the room.
Look who's coming to dinner...
Lectures, poems, all the trimmings, by a bunch of seedy old weirdos you were hoping to forget about.
Friedrich W. Block, Christiane Heibach, Karin Wenz, editors
Hatje Cantz
Digital poetry is "emergent": the geography of concepts and cross-discussions that is finely, fiercely mapped in p0es1s is at the stage where artists are talking to each other, often in tones that ache to resemble the chiseled concision of a Joseph Kosuth or a Guy Debord, the premonitory kuhlheit of a Walter Benjamin or Marshall MacLuhan, or even the comfort zone of the seasoned raver or the dry authority of a research white paper. Most of these writers - often in a good, invigorating way - suffer from a case of what John Cayley refers to as the "baroque euphuism of New Media."
It's no surprise that those with the most achieved prose styles also have the most to say as artists. The Brazilian artist Giselle Beiguelman exhibits a contagious fascination with the increased nomadic quality of (privileged bourgeois) individuals, investigating the poetics of writing for PDAs, cellphones and highway billboards. Additionally, the concept of digital translation and the ruin-less disappearance of digital products (turn off the power and it's gone) is explored in her use of Wingdings to replace, and inhabit, poetry itself. Eduardo Kac from Argentina, perhaps most famous for his having genetically modified rabbits to grow in the dark, chimes in with an amusing, if cute, visionary manifesto advocating poems coded into DNA, one of several manifestations of which is "Luciferase signaling: create bard fireflies by manipulating the genes that code for bioluminescence, enabling them to use their light for whimsical (creative) displays." His version of "poetry" is more `pataphysical than anything likely to garner a Nobel.
The punchy essay by John Cayley, "The Code Is Not the Text (Unless it is the Text)", is the center of a certain hub in the latter half of the book, as he systematically, and effectively, disputes several concepts that have wended their way into the digi-po world, such as that there is a homology - i.e. by reading one you've read the other -- between the "text" of a program (such as uncompiled C code) and the text of a poem (or the texts that govern culture, such as laws). He lambastes (politely) the radicality that some digital writers claim for themselves for "revealing the control structures" of programs, as if they were all good Brechtians exposing the workings of capital through salty doses of the V-effekt, or good Foucauldians by foregrounding the workings of the competing (and fascistic) archeologies of meanings. True, some of this could happen in the correct, university-nurtured interpretive framework, but because these hybrid languages - such as "Mezangelle", the online creation of the protean Mez - are not the "pidgins" and "creoles" critics such as N. Katherine Hayles claim they are (if only metaphorically), the horizons of their social-political, not to mention cultural, effects are limited to those who care about what computers, were they to be human and were their use of English really how they talked to each other, are thinking. Unlike pidgins, this poetics of the "reveal code" just provides a new, Wifi-enabled mirror so we narcissists can remain in the front row.
Which is where the writing of Mez, an Australian (nee Mary Ann Breeze) who is probably the most prolific -- if that's a word one can use to her peculiar brand of listserv logorrhea -- digital poet out there, plays a large role. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle fame made a basic play for singularity and collapsing the art/life divide by tacking an extra "e" on the end of the word "the" in all of his written communications - his latest band is called Thee Majesty. Like androgyny, making basic changes to ones way of writing puts one at odds with much of the normal functioning of the world - imagine filling out a job description using "thee" - but also re-places one, existentially, in the premise of one's decision: counter-cultural agency is thereby systematically refreshed. Mez elaborates on this principle exponentially, creating a carnival of artificial modifications out of the "restraint" of working in the ASCII set sans italics, justification or anything you won't see in a low-level terminal:
> [for instance, 1 email
> identifier|meznoma of _app][lick.ation][end.age_ which
> unpacks/translates in2 the tag|labels of _appendage_, app
> [abbreviation for application] end, _app.lick.ation_ etc - all
> avataresque names indicating segmented expressive allusions -
Mez's project is engaging partly because of the rich surfaces -- part freed-signifier and part charismatic tsunami - that she creates, but also her choice of venues: she has chosen to produce her work primarily in listservs, hence elevating the mundane commercial avenues of internet communication into an overstuffed, somewhat kitchy commune. She becomes the architect of the public square just by her propensity to embellish every dark corner.
Owing partly to the infelicities of translation, the French poet Phillippe Bootz, prone both to name-dropping and telegraphing his concepts, ends two sentences with the exact same, inscrutable phrase: "the horizon of expectation in the Jau?ian sense" - in neither case explaining what this sense, in his sense, is. The general thrust of Bootz's essay - that digital text objects have a different ontological character than print ones (i.e. they are not objects like a loaf of bread is), but are responsive to the whims and agency of the eye and can hence turn readers into readers of themselves reading by more fully "accounting for the real functioning of the brain" in their responsive variability - is couched in so much verbiage (and absurdly detailed diagrams) professing infinitesimally fine knowledge of the inner workings of the mind, one is dissuaded from useful debate from what is the profound core of this idea: digital writing can talk back, and teaching it to talk back is one of the things a digital writer, rather than write, does - that is her contribution to culture. Whether they can cure depression or improve depth perception in the process is another matter.
Other notable contributions include editor Christiane Heibach's "Synopsis" of the discussions that took place in 2001 in Erfurt between several of the contributors; this distillation of what appears to have been a highly fruitful, contentious meeting could set the stage for the next step in the discussion. Another editor, Friedrich W. Block, makes a similar, air-clearing gesture in his "Eight Digits of Digital Poetics," speaking most importantly about the relationship of the "digital poet" to the "avant-garde." He rightly argues that merely shouting out to esteemed predecessors like Apollinaire, Queneau or the Concrete poets does not allow the new media poet to robe himself in the Senate toga of the "new" - Modernism is not "bagged" so easily.
Throughout the book, one can sense an expansive, visionary quality competing with an attempt to reframe the debate and/or put the house in order - it is this dynamic that makes this collection of essays rich and important to anyone taking an interest of where this uniquely international, educated and proactive community of writer/programmers is doing. There might not be any obvious reason for the use of "poetry" over "word art" to corral the range of theories and practices discussed in this thick volume other than that practitioners of "digital poetry" recognize each others names, attend the same conferences, and most likely get passed over in discussions of new media art, even as other work that relies on the skilled, hardly prosaic use of words (the amazing Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries being the most obvious example) is considered knowledge ready for prime time. It is this leap into the imaginations of the international art world - and not literature, given the constraints of translation and the conservative trends of literary culture world-wide - these artists might have to make for survival.
Kenny G holding /ubu disks
Stephanie Strickland
Geoff Young (right) and his Mini-me
The ever-present alliterative skip of Dworkin's "conceptual" writing makes these enactments of linguistic "tectonic shifts" fun, but also frightening, to read: there is something monastic yet sensual in the surrender to limited, fixed vocabularies and recombined grammatical blocks which suggest endless mazes that never pass "Go" - can one say "Piranesian" here? - and that make a saunter in this prisonhouse seem like Sunday in the parse with Ludwig. The pathos is in the process, which is never so elaborate as to leave its readers behind - we all know what a "geology textbook" is even if never having read one so puckishly effaced - and the more high-falutin' references are grounded by the aleatoric ploys of the up-sized Everyday. "Norway" and "Smithson" are two other words that come to mind, the barren vacation spot of dear W. himself trespassed by the New Jersey quarryman and procurer of spirals - coy references, of course, fittingly stranded at the tail end of this giddy expanse of extreme reading.