Maine Statement on Digital Poetry

Hi Brian.

I'm glad to see the idea of a digital poetics being questioned and
analyzed, and I have to say you voice a lot of the same issues I have
with the whole field. I work on the internet as a visual artist but have
also published books of poetry, and I actually see the two activities as
being in dynamic contrast to one another, in that I can not write poetry
while thinking about a piece of visual art, and I cannot think about
visual art when I write poetry.

Even the coding of so-called "analog poetry" can be so difficult at
times. For example, picking up something like the Wasteland, a poem that
doesn't seem so difficult in hindsight, I realize how how little sense
it made to me until I went through it once with a highlighter and a
notebook and an expert to explain certain structural matters I never
would have figured out on my own. The thing is, is the Wasteland can be
seen as a search engine of sorts, as if TS Eliot had a search parameter
and printed the results off of google. Presto, the Wasteland!

The main difference, of course, is that Eliot molded the poem from these
materials, and into a document that was personal and, dare I say it,
"literary", a word that really doesn't mean much more than having "a
certain something." The problem with most of the worlds hypertext is
that it is comfortable with robot poetry; with the idea of- as you put
it pretty eloquently, "atomizing language", which I take to mean a focus
on the generated messes and structural limitations of the robot soul
[and the limits of language itself] But is poetry about the erasure of
humanity; or is it about the constant erasure and resurrection of
humanity? I always assume the latter; what lacks in code poetry, so
often, is this idea of resurrection, of union.

I don't know if you've been following the list lately, but I am going to
take some crap for the upcoming paragraphs. :)

One of my favorite voices for poetry is the voice of the Sufi
traditions- Rumi and Hafiz are probably the best known. A look at a lot
of Sufi poetry at first glance look like lyrical love poems; poems about
men and women and, sometimes, sex- union. The myth of God as a creator
is always tied to something we are separated from and long to return to.
In the case of our machines, all code poetry is essentially about the
idea of machine intelligence; when you get down to it- we're looking at
a whole backwards projection of these myths, and inversion of the soul
that poetry has traditionally expressed. We're not looking at the
reunification with our original source, we're looking at children we
have to push away. And to look solely at code, we're missing the one
bond between ourselves and machines and humans and God, which is the
nature of reunification. The majority of code poems are not cyborg, in
my opinion. They're pure robot- a union between man and machine is what
we want to see but we never do. And I think that this is the reason much
code poetry is so devoid of humanness- it is devoid of the warmth that
springs from hope.

Netochka Nezvanova is probably the most famous of the code-poets,
alongside Mez. In the case of NN's best writing, there is a definite
sense of humanity trying to break through the code. in the case of Mez,
you have a clear personality come out through the code; you know- Mez
uses the code, the code doesn't use her. If we look at this from the
perspective I see poetry in- one colored heavily by the myths of return,
that is, the myths of "reunification with God", a theme that runs
through poetry from Shakespeare to Rilke to Eliot to Bukowski and the
beats.

If you let a machine run its course, you are bound to find limits in
what it can do. These limits are fixed and permanent states of the
machines condition. There's no escaping the original codes. The images
of a "dying robot" are usually the same- the smoke coming from its head
and the constant repetition of a word, "error" or what have you. What a
pathetic display it is to see something like a dying robot, a machine
incapable of eliminating a fixed routine. In code poetry we find that we
can have these machines running rampant, or we can have humans working
to make this code malleable. But any malleability within code can
destroy the need for code itself, making the whole practice vulnerable
to a sense of futility.

I don't know from the "avant garde poets" but it has always seemed like
the best [at least, the most "successful"] poetry sees the world as if
through Gods eyes, with a compassion for things as perfect and still.
Code poetry is the eyes of God as ourselves. We're the myths; and as
much as I hate to quote Beaudrillard, ever, when we have a copy the
original becomes redundant. In the post modern sense, code poetry is
really a poetry that marks the end of God and the beginning of the
literature of our selves as God. And the poetry is not seeing our
creator through our imaginings of what it might see; (ourselves, perfect
in its reflection) but rather; a poetry dedicated to machines we know
are imperfect and limited- machines we've created ourselves, more than
likely, so that we can forget the uncertainty of an unverified
perfection. [God.]

That's just a couple of thoughts on the subject after having read your
email late this evening, after two days of zero sleep. :) I hope it gets
some ideas rattling in your head the way your post did with mine.

Cheers!
-e.








Brian Stefans [arras.net] wrote:

>[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.]
>
>
>
>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
>[Tranter] and myself and others - 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.
>
>
>
>
>____
>
>A R R A S: new media poetry and poetics
>http://www.arras.net
>
>Hinka cumfae cashore canfeh, Ahl hityi oar hied 'caw taughtie!
>
>"Do you think just because I come from Carronshore I cannot fight? I shall
>hit you over the head with a cold potatoe."
>
>
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>

You are quite conservative in what you yourself wish to create and call poetry, Brian, and will
not acknowledge as poetry work that doesn't go to school with you in some Ivy League cocktail
party jacket pipe smoking notion of poetry among uboyids. If you're going to be young and
talented, be a little more adventurous and keep your critical manacles away from work that
scares you. I'm tired of your haughty insistence on the supremacy of poemy poems.

ja

> rock on, jim!!!
===i've enjoyed some of your work in the past, brian…but i tend to shy away from discussions of "digital poetry"….for one thing, said discussions tend to revolve around a few key and uninnovative workers (much like the above-ground underground of langpo!)…i agree w/ jim…be more adventurous….i'd like to see poetry merge w/ net art, would love to see a poetry that operates with variables, one that relies less on mouseOvers and more on the inherent variability of computer=mediated works…thus far, i've seen damn little of it (& none on arras…though i've seen things i do admire there)…
bliss
l

10.21.2002

Re: Maine Statement on Digital Poetry
"Jim Andrews" <[email protected]>




You are quite conservative in what you yourself wish to create and call poetry, Brian, and will not acknowledge as poetry work that doesn't go to school with you in some Ivy League cocktail party jacket pipe smoking notion of poetry among uboyids. If you're going to be young and talented, be a little more adventurous and keep your critical manacles away from work that scares you. I'm tired of your haughty insistence on the supremacy of poemy poems.
ja

> > rock on, jim!!!
> ===i've enjoyed some of your work in the past, brian…but i tend to shy away from
> discussions of "digital poetry"….for one thing, said discussions tend to revolve
> around a few key and uninnovative workers (much like the above-ground underground of
> langpo!)…i agree w/ jim…be more adventurous….i'd like to see poetry merge w/
> net art, would love to see a poetry that operates with variables, one that relies
> less on mouseOvers and more on the inherent variability of computer=mediated
> works…thus far, i've seen damn little of it (& none on arras…though i've seen
> things i do admire there)…
> bliss
> l

Yes, computers are programmable. This is what distinguishes them from other machines and what
gives them their wide-ranging flexibility. Flexibility to the point where there is no proof that
the structure of the mind itself is different from what can be programmed.

To tap this flexibility of the computer, to create art and poetry that *at least is aware of the
sea change range of possibilities* that are opened up by programmable computers and
pseudo-global communications networks that depend on computers and exploit their flexibility,
this is where adventurous digital poetry and art is/can/will do unprecedented and amazing work.

Though of course you don't have to be a programmer to do the above, either. It's the intensity
of the engagement with language that marks strong digitally poetical work.

To relegate programming to a soulless activity at odds with the spirit of art may sound good to
some, but it sounds like an old mistake to me. How do we extend our humanity to the proportions
implied by new media? For those intensely involved in language and the digital, moving out from
traditional literary poemy poem practice into an exploration of many arts, media, and
programming offers ways toward intensities and transformations of language that threaten to
actually communicate beyond dinner-jacket-jury-speak.

ja
http://vispo.com

ars poetry is a bucket of slop whose de/compositional chemistry can be
remaindered to 80,000 representational varieties multiplied
through the exact number of people who experience it as a local spatial
affect. If one cultivates an experience of the poetic, a field for the
irruption of the aesthetic,
(however you define those constructs)
the poetry and art of the other is moot, wholly consumed by the only frame
you will ever know, you, which as you may know is more like
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUuuuuuuuuuuuUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu UU
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
uuUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUuuuuu

Solipsism is cognition.. which could also be written.. poetry is cognition..
art is cognition.. shit is cognition. Look to IS as the ultimate poem, the
ultimate statuary hovering in the void.. You may believe in transubjective
states, and the separacy of communication.. but cognition lays down across
all of us as a continuum and we are all its communication, a single
communication from a single event.. IT.
When you think about how radical space and time really are, why would you
ever need to think about ?WHAT? "poetry" or "art" ?IS? ever again..
BE in the DOING, and DO in the BEING.. bee in the dewing, dew in the
beeing…

like a chickenscratch on eternity
the artist and the critic die a single death
while the dolphin sports and sings

dolphin of a universalsolipsisticognition

www.hevanet.com/solipsis

>
not only that, jim…to even see the activities as different is (to take your logic one step further) to disavow any involvement w/ one's own brain…not to say that the brain itself can be soulless (of course, it's a cliche that the intellect has no soul)….
i dunno…for one thing, many of the artists mentioned here aren't that heavily involved in interactive art…most are re-doing cinema, and those that are using interactivity are using it as a "bell and whistle" as opposed to something allowing communion w/ the user…which means politically the whole thing still stands….the author is a special being, has full control of the voice of the father…has authority…
also…the STYLE of this…my my, someone wants to be frank o'hara, don't they?
bliss
l

(this is all in the spirit of debate, which we need….)

> not only that, jim…to even see the activities as different is (to take your logic
> one step further) to disavow any involvement w/ one's own brain…not to say that the
> brain itself can be soulless (of course, it's a cliche that the intellect has no soul)….

Pretty much all undergraduate students of Computer Science study some of Noam Chomsky's work.
Most people know that Chomsky is a Linguist, but not too many know that he was originally
trained in Mathematics. He made some fundamental contributions to Computer Science via his
observations about the structure and properties of grammars. Computers have to parse language
quite a bit using the rules of a language's grammar, and Chomsky's work is relevant here. We all
know what he has done since then. He is not so much known for his work as a Linguist now as his
being a conscientious objector and critic of abuses of power, particularly in the west, and even
more particularly by the United States. And it is the language of power he pays particular
attention to in the media. "The manufacture of consent" being his most famous description of how
power industrializes discourse, how power machines consent.

I bring him up because he is really an inspirational figure not only to activists around the
world but also to many of his colleagues in Linguistics and Mathematics. A large part of the
'frame' of his life has been concerned with issues of language. In Linguistics. In Mathematics.
In politics. And in media. It is language and its powers and properties that he has dealt with
so passionately all these years, as a subject unfolding with great relevance to our time. The
foci and intensities of language are not the sole domain of poemy poets.

When we look at the role of language and the machine in what Chomsky has studied, or what Godel
accomplished, for instance, we sense that language has become a field of study and relevance
even in mathematics, never mind computer science, and that the most intense involvements in and
contributions to language shifted some time ago from poemy poems to this other kind of
perspective on language and the machine. It is, uh, the era of atomic language, perhaps, like
the previous era was of nuclear physics.

A moritorium on programming, literary or otherwise, is not exactly going to happen any day now.
A luddite approach to it is not progressive. One may legitimately wish to be conservative of
poetry's intensities of language while pressing on with discovering/creating the human
dimensions of language and art amid the machine. Because it isn't going away and, instead,
society is becoming increasingly mathematized and computerized, with no end in sight to this
process. Prometheus didn't put the fire out for fear it was too dangerous for humans. Who would
unknow what they know? And who does not want to know more? There is as much threat concerning
the 'loss of our humanity' via failure to grapple with this as there is in seeing what we
become, intensely, in the meantime and with blood running through these technological extensions
of our humanity. So that poetry informs the machine, not simply the other way around.

ja
http://vispo.com
http://webartery.com