Interview for Albanian magazine

January 18, 2005

This is a short interview on digital poetry I did for a friend, Erica Weitzman, living in Kosovo. Please don't translate it into Albanian before its publication.

I would venture to say that most people still see an inherent contradiction between computer technology and poetry. Why do you think this is, and what led you to bring these two things together?

I was programming at a pretty young age, around 11 or so, and spent a whole lot of time in my room making video games in BASIC. I think I wanted to be an illustrator of science fiction books or something but really have no skill at drawing or painting, so the computer was a way for me to be creative. But it certainly didn't put me in touch with people, rather kept me in my shell, exiled indoors.

Poetry really took over my life when I was 15 or so, but initially I wrote in very formal ways, down to the syllable, and very concisely (Pound was my teacher in all of this), I guess as a hangover from being a programmer on a computer that had all of 16k memory. But of course I wanted to spill my heart out (I wanted to write songs for a band also, but I was too shy to perform).

In any case, spurred by the blossoming of new media arts, and angered in a way by the phony sounding theory that sprung up around it, I decided to see what I could do as a programmer again, and naturally I created works that were text heavy (because I still can't draw), though perhaps not "poetry" proper.

There really shouldn't be a contradiction between poetry and computers if one doesn't think of poetry in purely Romantic terms, as some overflowing of the emotions, something close to "nature." People reacted negatively at first to poems that were typed -- Jarrell has that famous quip about a poem looking like it was written on a typewriter by a typewriter -- but now it seems even romantic to use one of those -- Dylan wrote his Chronicles on a typewriter, as nearly every reviewer rushes to remind us.

People have always tried to make words look good, also, and technical innovation has always been there also, from Gutenburg to Blake, who invented his own form of copper etching, right to now.

What do you see as the fundamental difference between cyberpoetry and other forms of poetry? What constitutes cyberpoetry, exactly, if not the mere act of putting something online?

I use the word "cyberpoetry" with scare quotes -- I don't really know that there is such a thing, just as Eliot (my model in that cyberpoetry essay in Fashionable Noise) didn't believe there was such a thing as vers libre.

But imagining there is such a thing, it can certainly exist off-line -- things distributed on CDs or projected on walls in public places can be cyberpoetry. And certainly all poems put online are not "cyberpoetry," though they, like all digital texts, are vulnerable to becoming part of someone else's idea of a "cyberpoem."

I think of "digital text" as being that text that is vulnerable to computer processes, such as loops: sorting, searches, all that stuff, is due to loops and variables. So any poetry that somehow benefits from this, whether it be a poem written with the aid of a computer to a poem that is animated, would be "cyberpoetry" of a sort. It's really quite wide open. The real question is when it is "poetry" and when it is just digital art that uses text very nicely and unusually.

I don't have an answer to that, but I usually point people to Young-Hae Chang's Flash works (http://www.yhchang.com/) and ask, well, if they're not poems what are they? Poetry has become the catch-all for text projects that don't fit elsewhere, which is fine by me (usually).

I like your line in Proverbs of Hell (Dos and Donts): "The cyberpoem that doesn't "stare back" the more it is stared at is not a good text, not a good app, and not very polite; the cyberpoem that stares back too sweetly devolves into the nirvana of neurobuddhist hype." What does it mean, to you, for a poem to "stare back" enough, yet not "too sweetly"?

I think of what Bruce Naumann says about the "interactivity" of his installation works, such as the one in which there are four video cameras and televisions positioned around a square column, in such a way that you are only ever to look at yourself turning a corner from behind. He says that he doesn't want the viewer to "make their own art piece" out of his art piece, that there must be a limit to the interaction. This makes you an actor in his minimal theater, and I think good interactivity is predicated on the theater in which you interact being good.

I think there is a valuation of interactive art pieces based on how much the user is able to do him or herself with it -- the more you can do the, the logic goes, the better it is. But usually, these are art pieces that are demos for the possibilities of computers to one day be at the core of good art, not good art in itself. If it's trying too hard to impress, it's probably not confident in itself as a statement about the world, or in favor of another world entirely.

How do you come up with an idea for a new work? Where (or from whom) do you draw your inspiration, and how does a work develop once started?

Quite often, it is just by chance -- having the time to work on a new piece, having something around suitable for it, and convincing myself that the context or time was right. I rarely plan much ahead, partly out of laziness, partly out of the fact that, once you get your mind rolling about a computer piece, it could take months to learn what you have to learn to make it happen, by which time you feel trapped by the project. I do my learning first, come up with a piece later.

Sometimes I have a text that I don't think would work successfully as a page poem, but which I think has some core that can be exploited via computers. The "Dreamlife of Letters" text, for example, was not something I would have put my name next to on a page, but it had a neat movement to it, and there were all sorts of puns, repetitions, sound and visual plays, etc., that I thought could be usefully annoying as an animation.

My "Vaneigem" group of New York Times detournements were all done in the last minutes of a work day -- I would just flip through a Word file of Raoul Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life, find a group of quotes and put them into whatever Times story most aggravated me that day. "The Truth Interview" was a way to get a lot of Kim Rosenfield's text online and exploit qualities of her writing that I think can get lost in her books.

That's usually how it goes -- several facets coming together, rather unplanned.

What do you think are the most exciting developments in poetry today? The most depressing?

I think for all of the electronic communication that we have, a lot of younger poets in different countries are not in fact in touch with each other. I love meeting people in England and Canada that I just hadn't heard about who are doing great things that couldn't be done in New York because we are all caught up in our sense of "tradition," Beat, New York School or otherwise.

I think the most exciting thing that could happen -- certainly hasn't yet -- would be some of these younger writes having well distributed books out, with the right reviewers making them known. I'd like people to argue knowledgably about the merits of new poems, rather than the dithering that happens on, say, Silliman's Blog.

But I don't see any grand "great developments" that I can point to, mostly just individuals who are working on good poems. I'm glad that the era of high theory has finally passed, though I'm not sure that the reactionary neo-Romanticism that I see around is such a great thing (it's always been there, of course).

I think people are trying to write more book reviews, taking them very seriously as ways to make obscure (or soon to be obscure) work available to readers. Aaron Kunin and Andrea Brady stand out to me as exemplary poet reviewers -- they take ideas seriously, but they are not simply writing to fill in some void in a thesis paper. They do research, and write concisely and publicly about their enthusiasms -- can't go wrong that way.

There's so much distrust about poetry, within and outside of the various circles, and I think decent prose about poetry could help create a healthier atmosphere for the exchange of ideas about, and appreciation of, the art.

One of the current received ideas about art is that we are living in an anything goes culture, i.e., that post-modernism is precisely the potential assimilation of all art forms and the subsequent exhaustion of the avant garde. Is there still a purpose to avant-gardism? What do you see as the possibilities or potential uses of formal innovation in poetry?

"Formal innovation" and "avant-gardism" are not necessarily synonymous, and I don't really care much for the latter term, thought the former seems to me the crux of the whole game. I.e. find the forms that are most exciting to exploit in our own time, regardless of whether they have that ironic or utopian or constructivist sheen that mark them out as being of the "advanced" guard. Certainly, the innovators behind musical trends such as reggae or techno (in their respective times) were aiming to create something exciting and unheard of before, not to figure out how to advance the theories of Schoenberg or Cage.

I think poets who consider themselves avant-garde these days are just fooling themselves, frankly. Mostly, they are creating things that fit quite snugly into an historicized perspective of twentieth century innovation, and are not opening up new territories for the appreciators of art. The most avant-garde of our American poets were quite often trying to do something they thought was very natural -- Williams in getting the "American grain" into his poems, or Pound trying to preserve the best of world culture in his images and meters. It seems to me that the formula for true "avant-gardism" is not available to us anymore -- the conservative side of things gets lost in an effort to make something that feels "postmodern."

But postmodernism is dead anyway, it's been replaced by "new media," which doesn't have much of a theory for itself either. But now I'm getting ahead of myself...

Can you say something about the idea of authorship in terms of your use of borrowed texts, collaboration, etc.?

I don't have any very strict ideas about this. I think some of the best things I've done online have relied almost entirely on bringing together elements that I didn't create.

I bet I could write great poems that way too, but I confess that I would feel a little fraudulent doing so. Even when I assemble poems out of scraps of my own writing (I used to do this quite often when I didn't have much in the tank) I feel a little fraudulent -- must be the last dregs of my own brand of Romanticism, wanting to have the final poem kicking around in the first draft that I wrote in an "inspired" state, rather than undercutting inspiration by collage editing.

As for collaboration, I've had some success doing it, but unlike in movies or rock bands, where each player has a special skill that they contribute, I'm not often in the situation where it makes much sense to work with other people. Usually, I take someone else's text and create a piece out of it with some input from the writer, but I haven't yet written something collaboratively and then set it collaboratively.

How did your Circulars project develop, and what do you see as its role in terms of the current cultural lanscape?

Circulars has been dormant for a long time now, so I don't think it has any role in the present landscape.

At the time, I was hoping that it would ride a wave of intensifying dissent in the country and somehow catalogue it, while at the same time offering a new way for poets to situate themselves culturally in terms of protesting the war -- those panels at St. Mark's for example seemed a little dated to me rhetorically and otherwise.

The project was just something that I thought of during a night of insomnia -- I don't work in groups very well, so I contacted a number of poets to contribute to the site, but in fact I did all of the programming, and the majority of the content. It did grow over time, and certain people really made contributions that skewed it very nicely, but it was too much for one person.

What projects are you currently working on?

A longish series called "A Book of Poems," which is 32 digital poems (including video, Flash pieces, some straight text pieces, etc) which I hope to get done by May. I'm hoping this could be a didactic piece, also, which addresses some of the issues you raise above.

Also editing down all of my critical writing over the past decade for a book to be published by Salt. I've been learning video production here at Brown, and also taking up playwriting -- I guess the goal would be to shoot some sort of inexpensive feature.

What do you know about Albanian poetry, or Albania in general?

Very little about either I'm afraid to say. I've just Googled it to see if there was anything that would touch off any associations, but none are coming to mind. But certainly I'd like to visit!