Digital Technology and Innovative Poetry Tom Jenks
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Digital Technology and Innovative Poetry Tom Jenks Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Edge Hill University, December 2017. Acknowledgements For Sarah, Alex and Mina. With thanks to the following for support, encouragement and conversation: Joanne Ashcroft, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Wayne Clements, Ailsa Cox, Sarah Crewe, James Davies, Lyndon Davies, Nikolai Duffy, Stephen Emmerson, Patricia Farrell, Steven Fowler, Peter Jaeger, Chris McCabe, Alec Newman, Ian Seed, Chris Stephenson, Philip Terry, Scott Thurston, Gareth Twose, Catherine Vidler, Nathan Walker, Joe Walton, Samantha Walton and the Poetry and Poetics Research Group at Edge Hill University. With particular thanks to Robert Sheppard and James Byrne. Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 3 Chapter 1: Appropriation ...................................................................................................................... 12 An Anatomy of Melancholy .............................................................................................................. 13 Appropriative, allegorical and conceptual writing ............................................................................ 23 Contextualisation and summary ....................................................................................................... 51 Chapter 2: Transformation ................................................................................................................... 59 The Tome of Commencement .......................................................................................................... 60 On Liberty, Repressed ....................................................................................................................... 65 Constraint-based literature, procedural writing and deletionism .................................................... 69 Contextualisation and summary ..................................................................................................... 103 Chapter 3: Combination and generation ............................................................................................ 108 Various combinatorial and generative works ................................................................................. 109 Combinatory and generative literature .......................................................................................... 120 Contextualisation and summary ..................................................................................................... 149 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 153 Statement of Poetics ........................................................................................................................... 159 Works cited ......................................................................................................................................... 163 Appendix 1: website statement for An Anatomy of Melancholy ....................................................... 192 Appendix 2: five preparatory grids for On Liberty, Repressed ........................................................... 193 Appendix 3: slotted structures for ‘oXology’ ...................................................................................... 198 Appendix 4: Droids preparatory texts using phonemes ..................................................................... 199 Appendix 5: Droids preparatory texts using phonetic transcriptions of birdsong ............................. 204 Abstract This is a thesis investigating the use of digital technology in creative writing, with a focus on innovative poetry. Three research areas explore this through theory, practice and reflection. These are preceded by an introduction to digital poetry, including an overview of the field. Chapter 1 describes the use of digital technology in appropriative writing, using digital methods to collect and re-organise text from social media to produce two books. Appropriative, allegorical or conceptual writing is discussed in relation to these books and more generally. This discussion includes reflections on the ethics of appropriative methodologies, with reference to writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. Chapter 2 explores the possibilities of digital technology for procedurally transforming existing texts to produce new ones. Two creative projects are discussed, the first using spreadsheets to transform by mechanistic word substitution and the second using databases to transform by reduction and ‘writing through’. These are contextualised and discussed in relation to the work of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, the Oulipo and others. Chapter 3 investigates permutational and combinatory works and the use of machine methods to introduce programmatic randomness. A range of online works are described premised on aleatory selection from lists. The poetics of chance is discussed in relation to digital and non-digital combinatory works including Raymond Queneau, Alison Knowles and Nick Montfort. The human-machine dynamic is viewed as collaborative rather than competitive, with the machine envisaged as an adjunct to rather than an alternative to human practice. Processual methods are regarded as having most value when combined with non-processual and non-schematic elements. Originality is considered as a valid concept for procedural works, residing at the level of ideas and design. The procedural works discussed in the thesis are contextualised within a broader personal poetics of inclusivity, playfulness and humour. Key words: digital, innovative, poetry, poetics, Oulipo, conceptualism, generative, procedure, process, writing 2 Introduction Computing, in the sense that we now understand the term, began in the mid-1930s, when Alan Turing (1937) described what is known as the universal Turing machine, the theoretical foundation of the modern computer. It was not until the early 1970s, however, that smaller devices such as the Hewlett- Packard HP-35 calculator (1972), "a fast, extremely accurate electronic slide rule", became available and what is termed the “personal computer revolution” began (Fitzpatrick, 2006). The years since have seen huge advances in digital technology. Moore’s law, named for George E. Moore, states that computing power doubles roughly every two years, whilst devices become physically smaller (Riha, 2014). A comparison of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) which co-ordinated the 1969 moon landings and the Apple iPhone 5s, released in 2014, provides an illustration. The iPhone 5s is 1,300 times faster than the AGC, has a memory 16,777,216 times larger but is 0.02% of its weight (Riha, 2014). A machine several thousand times more powerful than that which took human beings to the moon and back can literally fit in your pocket.1 Marshall McLuhan (1964, p. 3) states that any technological change cannot but impact upon society and human consciousness. Digital technology is now so embedded in daily life as to be almost unavoidable. Literature has not been immune. Len Deighton’s Bomber, widely regarded as the first novel produced using a word processor, was published in 1970 (Kirschenbaum, 2013). Almost all books sold today are written and typeset using a computer. The online book retailer Amazon reported in 2012 that sales of digital books bought to be read on its Kindle electronic reader had overtaken sales of paper books (Malik, 2012).2 1 This may not be all for the good. Susan Greenfield (2012) argues that “we could be sleepwalking towards a future in which neuro-chip technology blurs the line between living and non-living machines, and between our bodies and the outside world”. For William Carr (2008), our intelligence is flattening “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world”. Stephen Hawking (cited in Cellan-Jones, 2014) warns that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race". 2 More recent statistics, however, suggest that this may not have been a permanent shift (Wallop, 2015). 3 In addition to the rendering and dissemination of texts, digital technology has also been used as part of the creative process itself, albeit in a manner, as Alain Vuillemin (2002) notes, that is not always linear and is characterised by surges and lulls. Christopher Funkhouser (2007, p. 37) identifies Theo Lutz’s Stochastiche Texte (1959), produced by a program written on a Zuse Z22 that used random numbers to create texts from Kafka’s The Castle, as the first example of digital literature. We could look back further still, to 1952, when Christopher Strachey used the Mark One “Baby” computer to produce love poems in Manchester by, as Nigel Bunyan (2009) describes, "entering hundreds of romantic verbs and nouns into the new machine… to create a stream of light-hearted verse”. This is a creative thesis, concerned with how new works of literature can be produced using digital methods, either in whole or in part. It is not my aim here to offer a comprehensive history of digital literature. That is already being done by others. My own digital experiments, however, reference and are informed by work already done in the field. It