New Directions in Digital Poetry

C.T. Funkhouser

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781441115911
• eBook ISBN: 9780826443618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

As poets continue to use digital media technology, functionalities of computing extend aesthetic possibilities in documents focusing attention on crafting verbal content. Utility of these machines and tools enables multiple types of compounded articulation (combinations of verbal, visual, animated, and interactive elements). Building larger public awareness of the mechanics of digital poetry, New Directions in Digital Poetry aspires to influence the formation of writing with media in literary society of the future, specifically as a record of a particular technological era.

Emerging from these studies is that digital poetry as a WWW-based, networked form happens 'in stages', 'on stages'. Few works require singular responses from viewers - both composition of works and viewing them are processes involving multiple steps and visual scenarios. For anyone interested in the interplay of poetry and technology, this book provides an informed look at digital poetry in its contemporary state. In the process of performing "close readings, " Funkhouser makes suggestions and provides methods for viewing works, for audiences perhaps unfamiliar with mechanical and semiotic conventions being used.

1

Poetic mouldings on the Web

They are all laid out before us: the genuine post-modern text rejecting the objective paradigm of reality as the great ‘either/or’ and embracing, instead, the ‘and/and/and’¹

JANE YELLOWLEES DOUGLAS

The creative task of digital poetry often involves an artist observing and making connections between separate but poetically associable entities and then using technological apparatuses to communicate to an audience through compelling presentations. Jim Andrews’ online digital poem Arteroids, for example, borrows its stylistic cues from a 1980s video game called Asteroids. For years, I have introduced students to this work, perplexing them with an assignment unlike anything they have experienced before: a video game featuring fragmented language proposed as poetry - or poetry designed as a type of game without competitive structure. Upon study they begin to understand how digital poetry functions as something other than poetry presented on a computer, involving processes beyond those used by print-based writers, and that poetry made with computers has unusual qualities - representing something inventive and worthy of engagement.

Students in the Senior Seminar on Literature, many of whom are familiar with the original game, appreciate Andrews’ work from a variety of viewpoints.² Their responses reflect how they access literature through novel perspectives located well within the domain of contemporary culture, and enjoy and learn through the provocation of receiving crafted language amidst non-traditional methods. The engagement becomes exciting due to atypical demands foisted upon them as they explore and discover ways to understand the experience.

One recent student in the course clearly understood distinct poetic attributes of Arteroids and identified the artistic function presented through its language: ‘I noticed two levels of meaning in the words: the first was that the words themselves represented the context of the player and/or what the player was doing or feeling. …On a second level, the words when put together in random context made phrases that not only made sense but related to the poem: ‘Destroy poetry’, ‘create poetry’, ‘make me what I am into another’, were phrases relating to what I was doing as a player to the ‘arteroids/words’.³ In this regard, Andrews’ work (as well as other examples of digital poetry) may teach its viewers something similar to what Dada did: that a string of phrases appearing to be nonsensical on the surface in fact contains meaningful poetic logic. An accumulation of fragments, taken as a whole, can assert profound recognitions. Another student working to cultivate a literary background observed the work from an alternative perspective, receiving a different type of learning lesson:

I am slowly growing to develop a substantial appreciation for poetry and ‘dullness’ is one of the things I tend to struggle with. I was indeed battling different colour variations of the word ‘Poetry’, which I found to be symbolic, like I was actually carrying out the goal of making poetry suffer; physically the game started to get more stressful as I was surrounded by words that were related to prior forms of poetry and it was almost like an assault. As I continued to play I became less involved with the words and more engrossed with destruction and survival.⁴

Here the student looks for and finds something exciting within Arteroids, despite distractions presented. She begins to see and sense poetry as a concept requiring action, and experiencing Andrews’ piece engages her; the activity and concept of poetry becomes personified through the game, and serves as a reinvention of the form.

Comments such as these show how a digital poem can have multiple personalities, and that different viewers see and attend to dissimilar attributes emanating from within the same work. Digital poems can be self-reflexive with regard to what the reader does and what the poem does, and also ignite other types of cognitive activity through its multi-sensory layering. Most students find ways to value the vivid experience of Arteroids - that they do more than just ‘stare at the computer’ and that they can, given Andrews’ design, create their own custom word base with which to populate the game. Approaching composition interactively, in the form of a simple game with a quirky soundtrack and variable database, impresses them because it completely changes the act of reading (or writing) a poem and creates an ambiance previously unknown to poetry. Unique settings and multimodal expression for artworks proliferate as digital technology and networks develop.

Foreground

Noah Wardrip-Fruin defines digital literature as ‘a term for work with important literary aspects that requires the use of digital computation’.⁵ As such, it takes on many forms (as works presented on PCs or mobile devices, as installations, as performances), and presently exists as a creative possibility for artists around the world. Communities of different types of digital writers have blossomed. One of its major subsets, digital poetry, to its credit, cannot be singularly defined. Authors of digital poetry engineer artworks featuring a wide range of approaches and styles (forms) of construction rarely presented as straightforwardly as poems composed for the page. Digital poetry can be seen as a type of organism, as an approach to expression having properties and functions determined not only by the properties and relations of its individual parts, but by the character of the whole parts, and by relations of parts to the whole. Thus far, in its relatively brief history, an ever-present variability has proven itself as a primary attribute of composition (and thus presentation). Digital poetry, as a literary and artistic form, is an equivocal organism, with many identities or iterations. As an expressive form, it matters not only as a free-ranging serious practice, but because it invites vibrant, transformative multimodal engagement for its practitioners and audience alike.

This book gives an account of processes involved with experiencing and understanding digital poetry, a genre complicated by the variety of forms it embraces. My analysis focuses on the World Wide Web (WWW), at present the public’s predominant point of intersection with digital poetry, where audiences privately absorb and/or interact with texts. The WWW offers an unprecedented venue for the circulation of digital poetry, some of which depends on the network in order to function. Writers and artists create with computers in ways that do not simply document the poetic forms of bygone eras: they are reinventing the possibilities for poetry. Computer processes, still relatively new to the world and artists engaging with them, adorn poetic features unavailable to previous generations of literary artists. The intimate, yet often impersonal, location of the network often demands negotiation of an exorbitant amount of information, which tends to obfuscate the encounter.

Digital poetry may faintly - and not so faintly - remind us of various types of historical approaches to writing or verbal articulation. At times we see contemporary enactments of previously established approaches to vibrant artistic expression drawn from multiple forms (e.g. multimedia collaborations at Black Mountain, or Fluxus), although these mediated combinations rarely yield a clear-cut presentation of materials. Many titles do not reify poetic forbears; highly calculated, complex digital poems on the WWW achieve previously unattainable literary effects.

Digital poetry appeals to me because it offers forms of artistry inviting (and uniting) processed interconnections between sound, image and language. Further, while variably inscribing each of these components, digital poems avoid simple iterations of them - permitting their use, often accentuated with degrees of randomness, fracture, and even poetic disconnection between media. Literary work, on the network, excitingly transpires on multiple registers: on thematic levels, by using artful language, and through responsive technical achievement. Advancements resulting from technology innovate to profound degrees: practices discussed below intentionally present poetic alternatives to the WWW’s general ontology of promoting products and serving up data at rapid speeds. These endeavours result from cultural predicament, as a foil to operative conditions now predominant on the network.

Interconnection insinuates a whole made of parts, or hybridity. Hybrid approaches to the construction of language, with or without media, requires use of fragments, as in choosing letters and phonemes to make words. Digital literature, generally speaking, exhibits fragmentary authorship - its penchant for fracture and decentralization are proven, and multimedia poems partake of this tradition. Considering this subject, we must acknowledge that by definition this implies something broken into pieces, whose parts may never fully reform. Artworks employing atomic (or, culturally speaking, post-atomic) techniques engage with such conditions, often repudiating complete sensibility. Even the most heavily disjointed works, however, provide ways for readers to make stimulating connections. If a work’s contents are not, and cannot be, fixed, we can, even if momentarily, ‘fix’ or build potentially profound understandings of these works on an individual basis (if not within larger, all encompassing categories); patient, observant perusals offer rewards.

While synthetic in essence, and brittle in terms of longevity, digital poetry’s fluid states prevent us from considering works as being plastic. Yet because they never harden, works of digital poetry always maintain plasticity in presentation on the WWW. They exist in a state of being moulded, receiving shape, made to assume many forms - often seeking qualities that depict space and form so as to appear multi-dimensionally. When biological organisms with the same genotypes have the capacity to vary in their developmental pattern, in their phenotypes, or in their behaviour according to varying environmental conditions, scientists say they have plasticity. While the organic component of digital poetry primarily involves human input in production and consumption, recognizing plasticity as an aesthetic foundation establishes a valuable metaphor for generally qualifying the results of electronic writing to date. A given, though gradually increasing, number of formal foundations exists for authors to work with, yet titles abundantly vary due to technological flexibility. We have, in digital poetry, both aesthetic dependability (overt foundations) and deep bendability.

Attaching significance to the medical connotations of this metaphorical aesthetic sensibility sheds further light, I believe, on what digital poets add to the parameters of literature. Plasticity refers to the capacity for continuous alteration of the neural pathways and synapses of the living brain and nervous system in response to experience that involves formation of new pathways and synapses and/or modification (or elimination) of existing ones. As readers of digital poetry, we must ourselves become mouldable, capable of reshaping ourselves and our expectations on a text as a whole depending on what we encounter on the screen. These artworks require reformed conceptions, extending parameters and dimensions of reception beyond those we ordinarily use to absorb or experience expression.

The great extent to which authors choose to render plasticity complicates processes of reading. Innovative poetry has always challenged readers who seek straightforwardness, but use of media compounds the intricacies of expression. Beyond making literally difficult-to-read works via material obstruction or speed of presentation, authors commonly implement unconventional, disconnected syntax and phraseology; verbal elements found in these works rarely present ordinarily arranged language. Engaging with digital poetry requires more from readers, who face multimodal, human-to-machine transcreations where texts initially presented in one state transform into others. These assets assist in elevating contemporary titles to poetic realms, but decentre the text proper’s authority. As poetry becomes a networked form, its poetics explodes and singular measurements of its pliancy resist finite definition. Digital writing, on and off the WWW, does in part borrow processes and combine methods from the past. What emerges sometimes corresponds with efforts by artists whose unmediated inclinations resisted convention through openness to form and abstraction, with vibrancy and difficulty now added due to technological foundations and the breadth of range in these new practices.

My 2007 book Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995 provides a detailed account of how artists (and programmers) used computers to foster the new genre of digital poetry,⁶ illustrating how computers gave poets new modalities with which to present language-based expression in various types of activated, visual, interconnected forms before the WWW existed. At the time, I felt it was important to engage with research in this area because descriptions (and understandings) of the types of poems appearing on the WWW rarely included fair references to the works which preceded them in the literary continuum. Prehistoric Digital Poetry illustrates how most of the mechanical groundwork for digital poetry was already established by the time the WWW became prominent. The genre’s fundamental building blocks and textual parameters - cohering as generated, visual and hyper texts - were essentially solidified by the time the first webpage was ever made. With its versatility and capability to bring the disparate forms of expression together, the WWW marks the place where expressive digital forms synthesize, become more widely circulated, and with the increase of demographics and technological advancements, a flexible genre - partially associated with its written counterpart - forms. At the juncture when the WWW appears, the prosody of digital poetry already includes text generation, flexible and collaborative language, interactivity, intertextuality, and applications of various visual and sonic attributes. More than a decade later, different conditions for presentation exist, yet principal elements of the genre remain central, even if progress and innovation occur by way of works drawing directly (i.e. instantaneously) from the network for content.⁷ In terms of historical trajectory, recognizing that most digital poems appearing on the WWW in its first decade did not specifically rely on the network is important; these works do not depend on the WWW, but benefit from it as a publishing platform and the manner in which the WWW’s attributes enable presentation of multimodal works. Instead of being formally distinct, the building blocks of composition begin inextricably (if variably) to merge with one another within a single title. The genre has not so much expanded as it has evolved to fuse its disparate characteristics and perpetually invents alternative approaches by which to stage and facilitate its plasticity.

For accessibility and focus, this book concentrates on publicly accessible work, made with contemporary technologies and circulated on the WWW. In contrast to Prehistoric Digital Poetry, the majority of subject matter remains available; anyone with an Internet connection can view these digital poems. That said, a few programs I studied and wrote about while composing this book have disappeared, and may be gone from public view forever - a significant factor of digital textuality. Eventual hardware, software and network modifications (e.g. ‘upgrades’ that squelch capabilities of previous versions of programs) make inevitable the extinction of certain, if not entire swaths of, works. Unfortunately such departures can happen quickly and unexpectedly. For example, two works profiled in the case studies below, Erika and Google Poem Generator - emblematic of types of poems produced during the WWW’s first decade - no longer appear on the network.

The present study partially surveys the initial phases of digital poetry on the WWW. Hundreds of worthy digital poems have been authored, of which I discuss a few, covering a fraction of what has been produced. To write a complete history of digital poetry since the WWW became its primary textual staging area, given the proliferation of creative expression and development of progressive formations on the network, would proceed endlessly. A comprehensive survey analyzing every significant title would entail more pages than a book could hold. Instead, I take up a new objective by directly, pragmatically addressing the matter of, and processes involved with, viewing and grasping the varied and sometimes interactive works gathered under the rubric of digital poetry.

Given its plasticity, one of electronic literature’s foremost challenges, understanding poems designed for presentation on computer networks, requires guidance. While pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Chapter 1: Poetic mouldings on the Web
• Chapter 2: Encounters with a digital poem
• Chapter 3: Case Studies 1: continuity & diversity in online works
• Chapter 4: Case Studies 2: digital poetry early in the twenty-first century
• Chapter 5: Case Studies 3: poems of the Web, by the Web, for the Web
• Chapter 6: In stages, on stages: attentions in digital poetry
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index