Not Born Digital

Poetics, Print Literacy, New Media

Daniel Morris

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501316715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

Not Born Digital addresses from multiple perspectives – ethical, historical, psychological, conceptual, aesthetic – the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics, the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the human voice, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry. The premise of Not Born Digital is that the innovative contemporary poets studied in this book engage obscure and discarded, but nonetheless historically resonant materials to unsettle what Charles Bernstein, a leading innovative contemporary U.S. poet and critic of "official verse culture, " refers to as "frame lock" and "tone jam." While other scholars have begun to analyze poetry that appears in new media contexts, Not Born Digital concerns the ambivalent ways page poets (rather than electronica based poets) have grappled with "screen memory" (that is, electronic and new media sources) through the re-purposing of "found" materials.

1

Medium as Messenger: Hannah Weiner Anchors the Social Poetics of 1986 in Weeks

There is a delicious irony in selecting Hannah Weiner’s Weeks (1990) as subject for the first chapter in my study of how contemporary US poets have, however ambivalently, appropriated new media, often via procedural methods, and for what I call “dirty” conceptual projects, to envision cultural memory, collaborations, archives, and autobiography, reframed under the sign of poetry, in small press formats. Here’s the irony. As is the case with Weeks, published in West Lima, Wisconsin by Xexoxial Editions, the dozen or so other hybrid genre books Weiner published in her lifetime from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s appeared in eccentric, limited editions. Put out by independent presses, the books were often quite lovingly typeset, designed, and printed on quality paper in runs of 300 or 400 copies by Weiner devotees in far afield places such as Providence, Vermont, Australia, and Wisconsin. However attractive to behold and pleasant to the touch, these original volumes were hard to come by—or even become aware of—when published decades ago. Today Weiner volumes remain, if paradoxically less difficult to find, thanks to online shopping sites such as Amazon that link bibliophiles to used and antiquarian bookstores all over the world, valuable because rare commodities, thus prohibitively expensive for all but dedicated Weiner aficionados, some of whom benefiting from a university S&E account to purchase such strange and beautiful things. In front of me as I write these words I have in my possession, for example, WRITTEN IN/THE ZERO ONE, printed by Pete Spence’s Post New Publications in Victoria Australia in an edition of 350 in 1985, which I snagged, via an Amazon connection, from a Bay Area antiquarian bookseller, Moe’s, for around $40. Another volume I own, Sixteen, a pamphlet really, of about fifteen unpaginated sheets, handset and printed in Windsor Vermont in May 1983 in an edition of 375 by Awede publisher Brita Berland, went for around $30. Silent Teachers/Remembered Sequel (Tender Buttons Press, Providence), a slender volume of 70 pages, typeset in Dennisport, Massachusetts and printed in a comparatively robust run of 650 copies in 1993–1994, similarly fetched around $30. I am grateful to own these books, to pick them up from time to time, to feel the quality of the paper of the cover page between my fingers, and to leaf through the pages, but the reality is that without the web revolution, which began to pick up steam in the years around Weiner’s death in 1997 (Amazon.com and SUNY Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center, for example, both went online in 1995), most Weiner publications would be unavailable to most readers. Left unpublished in manuscript form at the time of her death, her many other writings would be out of reach to almost everyone without the digital access EPC provides to archival research undertaken by a young generation of scholars such as Patrick Durgin and Marta Warner, encouraged by their teacher at SUNY Buffalo and Penn, Charles Bernstein, to examine the Weiner archives housed at UC San Diego. EPC features a robust multimedia (synaesthetic) webpage devoted to Weiner, curated by Durgin and Bernstein. Her EPC page includes links to a treasure trove of audio/visual/textual materials—videos, telegrams, taped interviews, manuscripts, critical essays, and reviews, even Weiner’s 1974 Radcliffe Alumni questionnaire, her 1960 Radcliffe yearbook photo, and films she made with Barbara Rosenthal: Rock-Bye-Rock-Lobster and Colors and Auras. My point is that, ironically, web sites such as EPC may well be the consummate environment to simultaneously archive, broadcast, and enact the synaesthetic and multidimensional qualities of Weiner’s cultural materials. Liminal texts that blur the boundaries between audio, visual, and verbal compositions, her page poetry, after all, was always synaesthetic—an iconic photograph by Tom Ahern from 1978 shows Hannah Weiner smiling with the words “I see words” written on her forehead. Her prosody attempts to transform words on a page into a dynamic space that represents multiple voices interacting through her play with vertical aspects of the line. By “vertical aspects of the line,” I mean Weiner—who suffered from schizophrenia and understood herself to be clairvoyant and telepathic—graphically represents the immediacy of words she saw and heard by placing some voices as superscripts above the line, some as subscripts below the line, and also by working with typographical features such as italics and capitalization to represent distinct but related voices as, quite literally, typographical characters. In a review of Hannah Weiner’s Open House (2007), Durgin’s decisive effort to edit and publish a representative sample of Weiner’s work—so influential to Language and post Language poetries, as well as to contemporaneous New York School, conceptualist, disableist, feminist, post-ableist, and ethnopoetic writings—, Joyelle McSweeney notes:

[Weiner’s] own prose, occupied as it is by the voices of hallucinated “silent teachers,” continually tests and knocks against the visual boundaries of text as it attempts to create an audial-visionary experience no conventional prose could hold. The Internet, with its capacity for assemblage, co-authorship, and multiple media may be the best mode for hosting Weiner, who made the hosting of corporeal and non-corporeal collaborators the mainstay of her art. “We have unknown collaborators,” she wrote in an early piece.¹

At once proto and post Language poet, we notice how Weiner, once more upsetting chronological literary historiography, appears most vividly to us in 2015 as a precursor to new media oriented poets such as Katie Degentesh, Tan Lin, Kenneth Goldsmith, and K. Silam Muhammed, but also as remediated and, in telepathic fashion, recalled from the dead as an electronically induced spectral figure by post-Language authors such as Durgin and Werner, who have reimagined archival knowledge as a digital endeavor and act of community-building, friendship, and inheritance.

In what follows I will address Weeks as what Durgin, whose collaborative text with Hofer, The Route (2008), I treat in Chapter 8 as influenced by Weiner’s post-ableist poetics of interdependency, refers to as displaying a “radical modernist poetics” that construes witnessing as “a participatory engagement with the present triggered by the mutual witnessing of a textual event” (Post Ableist Poetics, 1). In Weeks, Weiner anchors her fifty-week diary based on her experience of sitting in front of the TV set in her Manhattan apartment in 1986 while transcribing a cacophony of pithy, if disturbing, tidbits gleaned from local and national news programs. That said, one can’t imagine “Hannah Weiner” as an entity distinct from the ambient buzz of broadcast’s talking heads. An inchoate zone of consciousness, Weiner shapes (and is, reciprocally, shaped by) a mesmerizing onslaught of transmissions announcing what news anchors and reporters have framed as notable happenings going on outside the poet’s apartment.² As Thom Donovan contends in his essay on Weiner’s “intense autobiography,” an authorial persona develops in her work, but “writing is not a transparent, narrative means of making self or person appear retroactively” (2). Instead, Donovan posits writing as the “very means through which the person/self comes into being in relation to a social milieu. Through intense autobiography the ‘body’—that container demarcating human personhood and rights—becomes a site of experience and experimentation where the limits of the self are related, if not often contested, in relation to a public, community, and/or social discourse” (2). Her repurposed news broadcasts—Kenneth Goldsmith would regard them in Uncreative Writing as “naked” material suitable for reframing as conceptual poetry—may be read as a displaced self-portrait of media’s varying affect and disorienting ambience as filtered through Weiner’s idiosyncratic rendering in diary form.

In Weeks, Weiner implicitly registers her mercurial persona—screwball, ironic, sensitive to human and animal suffering, urbane, hopeful, despairing, culture-vulturish, elegiac, pop, apocalyptic, commemorative, sentimental, paranoid, vulnerable, and self-conscious about her elliptical creative endeavor—through an unpredictable display of telemediated headlines that resemble, après le lettre, the World Wide Web. “Weiner is the original Facebook comment stream,” writes Donovan. “She is social media before such a thing could come into existence” (2). Following Donovan, I read Weeks as a televisual precursor, not only to The Route as a new media example of a text that is what Bay Area poet and curator Laura Moriarity would refer to as “A Tonal” in its contradictory and liminal relations to self, body, style, other, language, tone, meaning, and world, but also to procedurally driven Flarf texts such as Mohammed’s Deer Head Nation (2003) and Degentesh’s The Anger Scale (2006), as well as to web-sourced conceptual works such as Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013). Reflecting on the intersection of cultural memory and personal identity by examining language in its materiality in a way that cultural theorist Bill Brown would refer to as an example of “thing theory,” Weeks anticipates archival-sourced texts by poets I will discuss in Chapters 5 and 6: Andrei Codrescu and Susan Howe.

Like The Route, the correspondence between Hofer and Durgin, Weeks is, in an obvious sense, collaborative. It combines Weiner’s taking up in diary form nearly a year’s worth of TV news with grainy photographs of broadcasts by her friend, the artist Barbara Rosenthal. In a less obvious sense, I consider Weeks to be a collaborative text for two other reasons. First, Weeks blurs distinctions between author as maker and her task of cultural translator. Like a telepathic medium, Weiner receives messages from public media and then reframes them in peculiar ways under the sign of poetry. Second, Weiner’s text is an example of reciprocity in that she is a conceptualist working with “found” information broadcasts in ways that foreshadow Goldsmith’s poems based on American disasters sourced from online resources. As with Marta Werner’s reading of Weiner’s The Book of Revelations, Weeks is collaborative in its interactivity between poet as proceduralist and her immersion in an ambient informational atmosphere. The border between the white noise of television news indelibly blurs into Weiner’s floating zone of awareness:

Hannah Weiner knew that thoughts are not our own. She knew this, but she still tried—harder than any other poet of her brief day save, perhaps, Jack Spicer—to enter into those thoughts that came to her from outside for as long as she could. In this condition, we might imagine Weiner alone and vigilant at her desk, open to the relentless flow of the manifold data of the world and recording words as they appeared on bodies before her and in the air thickened by them.³

Weiner’s imagining of the authorial self in Weeks combines proceduralism, autobiography, and historiography in ways that are communitarian in spirit and global in scope.

Recalling the genesis of Weeks in a piece from HOW(ever) [1987], Weiner states it was “taken at the beginning from written matter and TV news and later almost entirely from TV news” circa 1986, after, the poet reports, she no longer saw words on walls, typewriters, and faces.⁴ In his “Introduction” to Weeks, Weiner’s close friend and literary executor, Charles Bernstein recalls that the text was “written in a small notebook, one page per day for fifty weeks. Each page of the book is the equivalent of a single week, with each day taking its toll in about five lines.”⁵ Noting how Weiner reworked TV news in a homespun manner, at first by hand in a diary gifted to her by Rosenthal, then by transcribing handwritten transcripts into manuscript form with a typewriter, and finally by shaping a synaesthetic collage with Rosenthal’s photographs four years after the initial remediation took place, I am less interested in placing Weeks in relation to prior clairvoyant works in which she mediates “found” language as telepathist, and more concerned with exploring her creation of what poet Carolyn Forché in “Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness” (1993) defined as a “social” poetics: “Poetry of witness presents the reader with an interesting interpretive problem. We are accustomed to rather easy categories: we distinguish between ‘personal’ and ‘political’ poems . . . We need a third term, one that can describe the space between the state and the supposedly safe havens of the personal. Let us call this space ‘the social’ ” (17). Following Forché’s definition of the term, Weiner offers a “social” poetics, synaesthetically, and in real time—rather than merely recollects from a detached aesthetic posture—local mayhem and global disaster by upsetting the binary distinction between “public” and “private” space. (The fact that Weeks stemmed from the gift prompt of a notebook by Rosenthal, the friend and colleague whose photographs accompany the text, by itself speaks to the social nature of the project.)

Commenting on Forché’s identification of the “social” as a third term that hovers equivocally between the categories of “personal” and “political” poetry, Nicole Cooley states, “Here, at this juncture, I would situate the poetry of disaster, in the ‘social,’ the space of community where we might find new understandings of what poetry can do in the world” (Cooley, Poetry.org).⁶ A native of New Orleans who teaches creative writing in Queens, New York, Cooley is reacting to her own confusion as poet, person, and instructor about how to cope with the emergencies of Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the terror attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001 that affected her poetics in ways that challenge the assumption of difference between subject matter and lyric response and a distance between witness and victim: “These two disasters altered the way I think about poetry and its relation to disaster. Does disaster render language inadequate? What is its relation to the language of poetry in particular? What was the answer to the ‘official’ truth of 9/11 as it was told to us in those early days after the attacks? And in the weeks after, when the United States began to bomb Afghanistan?” Bernstein has questioned the communicative—and, by extension, the social—function of Weeks. “In its extremity,” he writes, Weeks “represents the institutionalization of collage into a form of evenly hovering emptiness that actively resists analysis or puncturing. In Weeks, the virus of news is shown up as a pattern of reiteration and displacement, tale without teller.” His formulation of Weeks as a “tale without teller” does not adequately measure the reciprocal and paradoxically original quality of a text that relinquishes authorial control, but simultaneously offers what Durgin, in his essay “New Life Writing,” called “the interdependence of proprioceptive elan and conceptual austerity, lived experience and proceduralism” (10). Rather than erase subjectivity, Weeks troubles conceptions of personhood. She mashes up, without erasing, inner and outer realms in a text that is paradoxically lyrical and post-humanist. Intensely, even obsessively, intimate, Weeks nonetheless reflects and absorbs global political crises including the fate of Refusniks in the Soviet Union and revolutionary change in Guatemala and El Salvador. She digests national tragedies such as the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, revelations of the Iran-Contra scandal, and the onset of Crack cocaine—“Crack had its genesis in the Bronx in 1984” (45)—, and AIDS as epidemics, environmental calamity, and stresses characteristically faced by vulnerable New Yorkers such as housing shortages, police malfeasance, unsanitary water, food, and air, and transportation problems. Weiner’s poetics are “social” in the unconventional sense described by Cooley and Forché and in the “A Tonal” manner defined by Moriarity.

Recalling the indeterminate relation between personae and cityscape as objective projection of authority in William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s Maximus, New York City in Weeks is a self-reflexive geography of suspicion, risk, and terror. Weiner’s insecurities in part stem from news of unsolved crimes against vulnerable citizens—“The murder of an elderly woman in the Bronx has some people frightened” (50)—, shoddy police work exacerbated by limited funding—“The East Side rapist might have been behind bars much sooner if NY police had the la...