Slought Statement

[I didn't actually read this at the "Digital Fever" event yesterday except select sentences and the second to last paragraph. It's very me-oriented as Kenny, Darren, Aaron and Craig were there right next to me so I assumed they's speak for their own projects. I wrote it less than an hour so it's pretty basic.]

My own activities, in regards to “archiving poetry in digital media,” have been at this point three-fold at this point: editing the /ubu section of .pdfs of Kenneth Goldsmith’s ubu.com site, putting up .pdfs of magazine runs, literary criticism and other oddities (such as Bruce Andrew’s political writings) on my own site, arras.net, and posting poems and poetics essays, along with news articles and tasteless political poster art, on Circulars, a site created to provide a means for poets to speak on issues of American involvement as “policing” the world and its rapid approach to adopting a philosophy of exaggerated military prowess to influence world politics.

The /ubu series has so far had one run, and includes both reprints of out-of-print (or, accidentally, simply hard-to-find) books that I gather, through my Spidey sense, will be of some interest to the community -- Kevin Davies first book Pause Button, from 1992, for instance, seemed a natural fit given that his last book Comp. was such a big hit, and Madeline Gins’ book What The President Will Say And Do, with its poignant, mischievous wit, is, besides being a lot more approachable than a lot of her recent work with Arakawa on Reversible Destiny, a great example of taking a perverse prism on social and linguistic realities that is both compelling, utopian in its affect, and directly engaged -- in terms of the apostrophe -- with previous administrations (in her case, Nixon / Ford / Carter).

There are also new titles in that series, of both drama (Richard Foreman, Mac Wellman) and poetry (Jessica Grim, the Scottish poet Peter Manson, whose manuscript, Adjunct: An Undigest, which was floundering in the U.K., inspired the entire series). This kind of range is not often covered by small presses who are not in an economic position to reprint titles that even upon initial publication were entirely marginal; it’s something New Directions could, and did, do in its time, but which doesn’t seem an option for, say, Roof, Edge, or O Books (though they do publish some reprints, just not regularly). The cultural capital that accrues around fine typesetting -- it seems one of the more common features of my "generation" is that we've all done some significant work in Quark, and handful are actually professionally trained (Goldsmith in the visual arts, hence the beautiful cover designs of /ubu) -- goes a long way in giving these maverick publications and air of confidence and importance, not to mention beauty -- the don't look like "small press" books, and though the romance of the samizdat edition is lost in that, there is a slight humor in how good you can make things look even though, until they are printed, they are immaterial.

The .pdfs on arras.net are usually just pet projects that I find interesting, but also take on literary criticism -- I’ve published the entire run of Steve Evans’ Notes to Poetry, a series of e-mail critical writings that caused a stir the year of their circulation, 1998. I’m about to launch Poli Sci: The Political Science Writings of Bruce Andrews. Back in my grad school days, I suspected that this body of work would shed some light on how Andrews thinks his poetry operates in the “world” -- he’s probably the only Political Science writer who actually incorporated his poetry in his conference papers -- as I was impatient with the idea that poets were too light headed and theory-minded to think about anything else effectively but poetry. The thirteen essays I have online, the last written in 1984, are all he wrote for the field he teaches in at Fordham University.

Circulars is a multi-author blog -- several of the stories were posted by Darren Wershler-Henry, who, among other things, digs up incredible items regarding the phenomena of digital resistance (including hacktivism and digital detournement), thus adding a peculiarly anthropological element in what I originally conceived of as a “protest” site of sorts, an announcement board for events, a platform for poets to articulate -- in what I was hoping would be unconventional, but engaging manners -- the anti-war/pacifist movements aspirations, and to collect the unabashedly something -- chatty, caustic, frank, vulnerable -- brand of social critique characteristic of the blogs.

My sense was that -- with the peculiar sets of knowledge that so many different poets had in the community -- whether it be Darren with his digital edge, Scott Pound who is now teaching in Turkey, Carole Mirakove with her eyes on the alternative media lists, her “Mirakove Relays” are a regular feature of the site), Ron Silliman and Rodrigo Toscano with their work in the labor movement, the English poet Keston Sutherland with his Cambridge brand of Marxism, and the various satirists out there like Stephen Vincent with this “Gothic News” items -- we could have a very distinctive site that represented a sort of “alternative Zeitgeist,” a site that gave a lot of the bad news but would also have a propulsive, multi-vectored perspective that, if anything, would reflect an image of an active, not necessarily political, community “mind” at work. I also hoped it would “train” some poets in web phenomena as, after all, a lot of what I came across was quite new to me, too.

Creativity regarding the present political situation is, to my mind, in desperate demand -- there is certainly enough alternative media, talks of direct action protests, etc., but the aspect of pleasure, in creativity, in critique and dissent is lacking, and I somehow think the protest movement (what do we call it now?) will never really grow to incorporate some vital elements without this creative edge to it.

Well, you get the picture...

Basically, what I want to say, in the light of these three activities, is that I don’t like to think of anything on the web as “archiving,” but as some form of activism -- I call it “tele-active” activity, using a term from Lev Manovitch to describe those art works where, for instance, one sits behind their desk in New Jersey and, communicating with a robot arm in Kyoto via the internet, grows a geranium in Japan. My sense is that what we do on the web has to have some sort of dynamism to it -- has to aspire, even if it is only a dream, to alter the avenues of distribution, cultural capital, etc., rather than simply to “make something more available.” I think of the web as a sort of carnival -- to use a word from Bakhtin -- or a sort of heteroglossic text, a la Dostoyevksy’s Brother’s Karamazov or a play of Shakespeare’s, in which many voices are actively, urgently, even opaquely play off or against each other, or even in synch. The end might be the same -- formatting something, running it through Adobe Distiller, putting it online -- but the philosophy (I speculate) leads me to make unusual decisions, or at least, this aspect of carnival makes it interesting to me. Were everyone to start posting beautifully formatted .pdfs online all the time it might just become boring.

I am very much aware that the province of the web is mostly a place for educated, mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly Western, people, but nonetheless I have to believe that what gets out there will some how make it’s way “into the world” via a printer, passed on like the days of yore, and that someone -- just one person is enough, I feel -- will have their perspectives altered (as mine were when I first came upon Ezra Pound’s books in a Jersey City library) because of the distinctively corrosive illuminations of poetry. And it’s amazingly public -- I’ve never received a cease-and-desist order form the Times for a poem I’ve written, a minor incident in the run of internet censorship of “hacktivism” but somewhat alarming for the tradition of United States poetry, which -- fortunately or unfortunately, depends on what you want to do -- can be safely ignored.

Posted by Brian Stefans at April 11, 2003 11:23 AM