Maine Statement

[I was invited to the University of Maine, Orono to give a poetry reading and informal talk about arras.net. Australian poet John Tranter of Jacket fame was the other reader slash speaker. I didn't actually get to read the piece below, but that didn't bother me as I had only spent about an hour writing it. It's pretty silly, my New American mode, but I think there are some good points made therein.

One thing that came up was the vanity press aspect of blogs as a whole -- Steve Evans was particularly concerned with this issue, as he had been thinking of starting a blog but couldn't get over how self-centered it seemed -- but though he didn't quite reconcile this issue, he noted as I did myself that the "blog community," people who spend time reading each other's blogs for whatever reason, seemed an important aspect to consider. One got the sense that there was a communal impetus toward responsible forms of communication with this sort of network of interested reader / writers / commentators.

Well, I'd probably be inclined to shut down my own blog if the only thing I could think to do with it was to post my own writing, but that seems to be what I'm doing so far! I'll figure it out... but for now here's this thing.]

There is certainly no grand theoretical gesture that I wish to make that has led me to create a website, to create works of “poetry” through the use of software and programming languages, or to engage in public dialogue via listservs and blogs. Usually, I’m not quite sure why I do it, and in my quieter moments, when I think of the books I could have read, the movies I could have seen, the poems I could have written, during the time I spent programming, I grow depressed, confused, I don’t know where I am anymore, I can’t remember a single phone number and I find that there is nobody around anymore to help me eat, pay my bills or put on clean socks. On top of that, I find my shoulder is filled with Patrick Rafter-like aches.

The digital arts are very young – there is no high tradition associated with them, there are no Bressons or Benjamins, no Shermans or Stravinskies, no Calvinos or Cunninghams. Those of us who have spent time looking at digital art are aware of several artists and artist groups who are destined to be acknowledged as geniuses and pioneers, but for the most part there hasn’t accrued that musty odor of middle-class respectability around artists such as Mouchette, turux, Aurelia Harvey (entropy8), jodi, Yong Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Jeremy Blake, Giselle Beiguelman, Lisa Jevbratt and Mark Napier – just a handy few that leap to mind – not to mention digital “poets” such as Stephanie Strickland, John Cayley or one of my personal favorites, William Poundstone.

There is a good chance this may never happen – it rarely happens for poets, certainly not of our ill-bred ilk, though it has happened to "poetry" – but this “middle-class” respectability is what invariably makes it possible to brag about one’s acquaintance with the films of Tarkovsky at a cocktail party and not of one’s acquaintance with LyingMotherFucker.com.

James Schuyler wrote in his statement for the New American Poetry that “anyone in New York knows the big thing now is painting” (or something like that), but I don’t think anyone is saying that poets all know that the big thing now is digital technology – not outside of Toronto, at least. Which, of course, is fine, this leaves the field open to those of us – John and myself and others like the ubu/alienated crowd – to make of it what we will, even while being mostly ignored by the “other” digital literature, hypertext fiction, who have been more concerned with a “poetics” of the internet but not the poetry – we’ve heard that before! – or poetry that we can associate with any tradition of poetic forms, such as the sonnet or the sestina.

Where digital poetry – let’s loosely call it that – meets with poetry that traditionally is disseminated on the page or in performance, whether as a play or reading, is probably somewhere in the realm of the poetry of “facts” – poetry that uses found materials and source texts, but also the poetry of “situations” in the, ah hem, Situationist sense, which is to say poems that might not be poems at all but call attention to the social forces, whether political or architectural, at play in the creation and experience of the art work itself -- a poem as linguistic gesture rather than formal artifact.

This isn’t to say that the lyric, or the poem of personal sentiment, has no role in something called “digital poetics” but that it doesn’t need anything that digital technology has to offer – lyricism on a blog, for instance, comes off as being exhibitionistic, while the artful marginalia of John Wieners has the resonance of gospel. But a poetry of facts can be exponentially more powerful when allied with the encyclopedic, disorganized yet rigid structure of computers, especially the internet.

But importantly, this poetry of facts can be strongly tinged by personal affect, a prime example being Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, which pulled most of its distinctive vocabulary from a dictionary of African American slang and yet is composed of tight quatrains. Pound’s Cantos would be another obvious one, as would Browning's long poem The Ring and the Book, practically a documentary based on a box of trial records he discovered in a pawn shop. I would even count the poems by Ern Malley, the "hoax" poet, which thrown together based on whatever was on the desk at the time, as successful to the degree that lyrical strategies came into play.

In fact, I would argue, a poetry of facts, including a poetics of disinformation, becomes even more reliant on a strong, true lyrical sensibility the more it opens itself to the possibilities of algorithm, of seemingly limitless information, idioms, etc. One could then view -- with some reservations -- the form of an internet site such as arras as something of a poetic form.

My sense is that the internet becomes a “field” in much the same way the page become a “field” for Olson and Duncan, and that the properties of this field must be somatically acquired – a sense of timing brought into the nerves, a sense of audience intuited as strong as one might have at a public roast, and a sort of linguistic understanding of the applications and programming languages involved – before any really interesting work can be done on it. The white page has thus evolved into the placeless, ahistorical terra nullius of the http protocol, which isn’t too bad if you have the coloniser’s instinct of a computer geek and choose to become the code warrior's version of a polymath. Releases into cyberspace thus become analogous to the strike of the typewriter across the page, with a similar sort of vulnerable permanence.

In terms of artistic mandates -- and any strong web site has one, as should any art project -- I think atomizing language, making it purr or bubble, or propagating scandals, whether in the name of Malley or Mayakovsky, are not enough – to be strident is good, but stridently uncaring and solipsistic, is a waste of precious attention, especially if the idea is to further the art, or to be an artist at all.

This statement is merely a rough way of explaining why I haven’t abandoned poetry “on the page” for digital literature, and also might suggest why the field of “digital poetry” is relatively undeveloped, and that’s because, in my mind, many of the practitioners today have sacrificed a lyrical sensibility for a robotic one, on the one hand, or a terroristic one on the other, forgetting that the cyborg – a feedback loop between human and machine – is implicated in the tradition of poetry, in both what it writes and codes.

Posted by Brian Stefans at October 21, 2002 01:04 AM