REPROGRAMMING THE LYRIC: A GENRE APPROACH FOR CONTEMPORARY DIGITAL POETRY
HOLLY DUPEJ
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by Holly Dupej
By virtue of submitting this document electronically, the author certifies that this is a true electronic equivalent of the copy of the thesis approved by York University for the award of the degree. No alteration of the content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are as a result of the conversion to Adobe Acrobat format (or similar software application).
Examination Committee members: 1. KateEichhorn 2. Priscila Uppal 3. Stephen Cain 4. Caitlin Fisher 5. Marcus Boon 6. Barbara Crow iv Abstract
Reprogramming The Lyric: A Genre Approach for Contemporary Digital Poetry explores the consequence of reading contemporary digital poetry with lyric genre theory.
Using theories of posthuman and digital subjectivity (Haraway; Hayles) and studies on digital culture (Turkle; Benkler), the readings in this thesis generate a distinct version of the lyric subject, reflecting the realities of existing in the digital age. Building an analysis based on both close textual readings and broader considerations of creation and reception, each chapter focuses on a text or small group of texts in which digital technologies have contributed to the writing process. The works addressed include Rachel Zolf s Human
Resources, Michael Magee's MyAngie Dickinson, Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-
Henry's Apostrophe, Patrick Herron's Proximate and William Poundstone's "White
Poem." By combining literary theory and digital studies, this thesis proposes an approach to recognizing the lyric tradition within digital innovation. V
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract iv
Introduction: Digitizing the Lyric Genre 1
Existing Approaches to Digital Poetry: The Avant-Garde Precedent 10 Scope of Study: Second Generation Digital Poetry 14 Problems of the Genre Method: Alternatives to Taxonomy 21
Chapter 1: The Cyborg Lyric: Complicating Boundaries in Rachel Zolf s Human
Resources 36
The Human/Machine and Lyric/Experimental Divides 43 Bodily Divisions and Re-Writing the Origin Story 50
Agency and the Socially Determined Nature of Language 54
Chapter 2: Writing with the Search Engine: The Lyric and Mainstream Culture in
Michael Magee's My Angie Dickinson 60
Angie to Emily: The Lyric Plays as Well as Works 63 Identity Play Online: From Abstract Theory to Lived Experience 71
The Carnivalesque Laughter of Flarf 79
Chapter 3: Searching for the Lyric in Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry's
Apostrophe 86
Social Production and the (Lack of) Lyric Subject 90 Lyric Brevity: Constraining Entropy 95 Apostrophe and the Lyric "You": I-Thou and the URL 99 Chapter 4: The Onscreen Lyric: Translating Genre Across Media 107 Lyric Interiority: Externalizing Thought 109 Immersive Reading Spaces: Speed-reading and Multimedia Distraction 117 Conclusion: Tradition and the Permanence of Edifice 131 1
Introduction
Digitizing the Lyric Genre
In the introduction to New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories
(2006), Adalaide Morris recognizes the potential for digital poetry1 to portray the human experience of the digital age, yet quickly dismisses the lyric as a viable option to address these concerns: What can new media poetics tell us about thinking and writing in a world increasingly reliant on databases, algorithms, collaborative problem-solving, instant retrieval and manipulation of information, the play of cutting, pasting, morphing and sampling, and the ambient and nomadic aesthetics of a networked and programmable culture? How are these changes in the processes of thinking and knowing altering structures of subjectivity and patterns of emotion that were once the providence of the lyric poem? (15)
As Morris observes, digital poetry - the diverse category of poetry written with digital technologies like hypertext, poetry generating software, onscreen animation, databases,
and search engines - creates the opportunity to explore the conditions of "thinking and knowing" in contemporary culture. Morris's conclusion, however, that such issues were
"once the providence of the lyric poem," insinuates digital poetry should not - or perhaps
cannot - be interpreted as lyric, even though the genre forms the obvious link between
poetry and the subjective experience that Morris describes. Although the lyric has been
Poetry written with digital technologies has a variety of labels, including new media poetry, e-poetry, online poetry, and cyberpoetry. For the purpose of this study, the term digital poetry will be adopted as a means of emphasizing the unique properties of information in its digitized state, without necessarily associating the topic at hand with Internet-based practices or new media displays. 2 assigned numerous definitions2, the most common use of the term indicates a short poem in which a single speaker expresses, very often in the present tense, an internal experience such as a thought, emotion, or perception (Abrams "Lyric" 146). In other words, the lyric expresses exactly the kinds of "structures of subjectivity and patterns of emotion" that Morris suggests may appear in a digital poem.
Investigating the potential to connect a literary tradition with contemporary human experience, the following thesis explores the possibility of reading digital poetry using lyric genre theory. Considering the status of lyric subjectivity and other genre conventions provides an opportunity to consider the conditions of writing and existing in the digital age, but the opportunity is not without significant challenges.
Morris's dismissal of the lyric is symptomatic of a more general framework prevailing in the poetry community, which positions the lyric in direct opposition to experimental texts, including those using non-conventional digital writing methods. This opposition, which Mutlu Konuk Biasing describes this as "the ideological poetry wars"
(5), is one of the major challenges facing the lyric approach in this thesis. As Biasing explains in his study, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (2007), since
Modernism, a significant population in the poetry community has characterized the lyric as outmoded, apolitical, bourgeois, and, at times, the very antithesis of innovation (6).
Admittedly, terms like innovative, experimental, and avant-garde are problematic from the outset, especially when differentiating them from a "mainstream" practice that often adopts "experimental" techniques. Nevertheless, the terms will continue to be used
2 Later in the chapter I discuss the history of the lyric and its varied definitions at greater length, including less conventional interpretations of the genre. 3 throughout this study as a shorthand for poetry that has been perceptibly influenced by the pioneering work of the New York School, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement, Black
Mountain School, concrete poetry, and other schools operating outside of mainstream poetry in the twentieth century. Since Modernism, the innovative poetry of these and other factions has been defined, at least in part, by the degree to which the text problematizes what are assumed to be the defining characteristics of the lyric genre: grammatical syntax, musical language, the unproblematic speaking "I," and the static positions of the reader and writing subject. Instead, experimental poetry, for the purposes of this study, avoids the singular voice (if a voice can be discerned at all) and uses techniques like fragmentation, parataxis, or an emphasis on the material signifier.
Because the techniques that define innovation are so diametrically opposed to lyric convention, experimental forms like digital poetry are often assumed to continue the anti- lyrical practices of their avant-garde predecessors.
Further emphasizing the disharmony between digital poetry and the lyric, digital environments may be particularly unsuitable to the genre. Even though Morris acknowledges she is assuming a limited Romantic era definition, she suggests the
following aspects characterize the production of lyric poetry:
the ideology of a single author, a rhetoric of self-examination, self-justification, and self-restoration, an idealization of the mystery of one-of-a-kind art objects, and, not least, control of the distribution of artifacts through pedagogical customs, copyright protections, and expensive variorum print editions. (19-20)
Theorists of digital culture have generated a substantial body of literature demonstrating
how digital technologies create precisely the opposite opportunities. Yochai Benkler's
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom 4 (2006) and Don Tapscott and Anthony William's Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration
Changes Everything (2006) demonstrate how the Internet transforms the "ideology of the single author" into collaborative projects, peer production, and collective intelligence.
Instead of "self-examination, self justification, and self-restoration," in networked environments the focus shifts away from the self and toward the multiple, distributed identities among communities. Both Harold Rheingold's The Virtual Community (1993) and Sherry Turkle's Life On the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995) are also seminal texts demonstrating this communal nature of online existence. Rather than "the idealization of the mystery of one-of-a-kind art objects," Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media (2001) explains how new media art idealizes pastiche and "database aesthetics," which valorize cut-and-paste recycling of existing cultural objects. And, finally, the computer screen creates new opportunities to reinterpret literature outside of the stable codex interface, as the proponents of hypertext theory attest (Jay David
Bolter's Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing [1991];
George Landow's Hypertext 3.0 Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of
Globalization [2006]). These considerable inconsistencies suggest that poems operating
within digital environments are even less suited to the lyric genre than their avant-garde
predecessors.
To address the seeming disharmony between lyric convention and digital
experimentation, the following pages construct a lyric genre model more suitable for the
digital condition. Using theories of posthuman and digital subjectivity (Haraway; Hayles)
as well as studies on digital culture (Benkler; boyd; Turkle), I connect the lyric 5 subjectivities of digital poems to the conditions of existing in the digital age. In addition,
I consider how the digitization of information alters other lyric conventions, including brevity, musical language, and structural forms. Considering both works in print and on the screen, the study approaches a diverse set of texts to consider the implications of writing lyric poetry with digital technologies.
By applying a lyric reading to markedly experimental texts, this study follows a line of recent scholarship that has attempted a similar reconciliation between the two seemingly incongruent forms of poetry. Studies on the feminist experimental lyric have been especially important in establishing a strategy to read lyric subjectivity outside of
Romantic era paradigms. In, for example, American Woman Poets in the 21st Century:
Where Lyric Meets Language (2002), co-editor Juliana Spahr (who co-edited with
Claudia Rankine) introduces the collection as "revisioning of the lyric tradition" (1). In the revision, the Romantic model, which creates an "intimate and interior space," is rejected in favour of a more publicly engaged form of poetry (1). Instead of being a genre that retreats into interiority and thus lacks public or political engagement - which would be inappropriate for the postmodern age in which Spahr is writing - Spahr describes how the lyric subjects of such poets as Rae Armantrout, Barbara Guest, Susan Howe and Lyn
Hejinian "comment on community" and "move lyric away from individualism to share, connective spaces" (11). The expression of these interconnective spaces is often initiated through the avant-garde techniques of "fragmentation, parataxis, run-ons, interruption, and disjunction ... the avoidance of linear narrative development, of meditative 6 confessionalism, and of singular voice" (Spahr 2). In other words, the poets in this collection demonstrate a way of writing lyric subjectivity through avant-garde practice.
A similar tactic occurs in Linda Kinnahan's study of feminist experimentalism,
Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry and Contemporary Discourse
(2006). The book features many of the same poets included in American Women Poets, and, as well, many of the same expressions of fragmented, multiple identities through disjointed syntax, visual experimentation with the text, and shifting pronouns. Through
such techniques poets may explore "alternatives to the banishment of the personal T"
(xii), as Kinnahan describes it, and in the case of the feminist lyric, use those alternatives to generate identities outside of male-centered language traditions.
As both Spahr and Kinnahan demonstrate, despite the use of avant-garde techniques, and in fact in cooperation with them, the experimental feminist lyric offers
considerable meditations on identity. Instead of being "a genre authorizing the self s
primacy" (Kinnahan 9), the lyric can be laboratory for more complicated notions of
selfhood and community. Both American Woman Poets and Lyric Interventions
demonstrate that neither avant-garde nor politically-minded writing precludes an
engagement with lyric concerns.
As Marjorie Perloff observes, there is a definite need to reevaluate "the larger
poststructuralist critique of authorship and the humanist subject" on which experimental
practice has been based ("Language Poetry" 406-407). The argument derives from
Perloff s essay, "Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman's Albany, Susan
Howe's Buffalo" (1999), in which Perloff revisits the major works of poststructuralist 7 theory that have played a central role in avant-garde poetics, including Roland Barthes's
"Death of the Author" (1967) and Michel Foucault's "What is an Author" (1977), as well as the discussion of the death of the subject found in Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Observing the overt influence of these texts on experimental practice, Perloff states:
One of the cardinal principles - perhaps the cardinal principle - of American Language poetics (as of the related current in England, usually labeled 'linguistically innovative poetries') has been the dismissal of 'voice' as the foundational principle of lyric poetry ("Language Poetry" 405 emphasis original).
Since the original conception of Language writing, the opinions on the function of voice have markedly shifted. Even some of the most adamant Language writers have since subdued their once absolute opposition to an author's influence. Pointing to the 1998 publication Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (edited by Charles
Bernstein), Perloff cites Ron Silliman's contribution, which considers the conditions of the speaking voice in contemporary poetry and in culture more generally. Significantly,
Silliman questions some of Barthes assertions in "Death of the Author," particularly
Barthes's refusal of "history, biography, psychology" (Silliman "Who Speaks" 365). The allowance and even expectation for the biographical influence demonstrates a perceptible shift in attitudes toward the writing subject of experimental texts, prompting Perloff to consider, "perhaps it is time to reconsider the role of the subject in lyric poetry"
("Language Poetry" 411).
No longer can Barthes's "Death of the Author" be assumed unquestioningly, nor can his assertion that "writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity the body 8 writing" (142). The efforts to reconstitute the lyric subject in experimental practice suggest "the body writing" does not in fact undergo a complete erasure, but instead, a repositioning, refocusing, and rewriting of its origin story. Perloff, Spahr, and Kinnahan are by no means alone in their efforts to reconsider the lyric outside of its historical baggage. They do, however, represent an established precedent for reading the lyric in terms compatible with experimentalism. The reconciliation only requires a revision of the notions of subjectivity - a revision much like the notions of digital subjectivity adopted for this study.
Where the studies listed above have used postmodern theories of subjectivity to read the lyric subject, this study adopts a comparable body of literature to address the implications of subjectivity in a digital culture (Haraway; Hayles; Turkle; Benkler; boyd).
As appropriate as these theories of digital subjectivity may be for the purposes of this study, I acknowledge it would be entirely elitist not to recognize the relatively small percent of the world's population to which digital subjectivity applies. The conditions of subjectivity I consider in the chapters to follow are by no means universal. As proponents of the digital divide will attest, there remains a significant and potentially damaging disconnect between the availability of service in developed societies and the limited services - if they are present at all - in developing nations. A study conducted in
2006 (Chinn and Fairlie) found only one personal computer per one hundred people in
Sub-Saharan Africa; in South Asia that number was 0.5 (23). Even within developed nations, the digital divide between urban and rural populations is a considerable concern.
Recognizing these issues, I acknowledge the forms of digital subjectivity being adopted 9 for this thesis do not represent the countless other entirely valid ways of living on this planet outside of the networked information economy. To suggest the digital lyric somehow holds a primacy above other equally valid forms of subjectivity would be, as
Perloff points out, generalizing about human subjectivity as naively as the Romantic era's notion of the "common man," with all the dangerous rhetoric of what is not "common"
(Poetic License 2-3). The investigation that follows does not suggest the digital subject is common; rather, it is in common within this poetry.
By incorporating theory from cultural studies and the social science - that is, theory outside of literary studies - this study continues a long-established tradition of using interdisciplinary bodies of literature to approach new media. In New Media Poetics
Morris also recognizes the "dual scientific and artistic lineage" of new media studies, pointing to, as an example, The NewMedia Reader (2003) (14). In this collection edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, the authors come from the diverse fields of literature (Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, William S. Burroughs) cultural studies (Jean
Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Raymond Williams) and posthuman/computer studies (Sherry Turkle, Donna Haraway, Douglas Engelbart and
Ted Nelson), among others. Combining creative works, empirical research and theoretical texts, The NewMedia Reader offers an interdisciplinary method of contexrualizing and historicizing a still-emerging field.
In laying out the context of his own study of digital poetry, Loss Pequefio Glazier recognizes that the field of digital media studies has always relied on an interdisciplinary approach to address the interrelated concerns of computer science, sociology, science 10 fiction, and literary theory (7). Among the foundational texts Glazier cites are Marshall
McLuhan's Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (1967) and The Medium is the
Massage (1964), Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (1994), and William Gibson's
Neuromancer (1984) (7). Gibson's novel is prime example of how the artistic imagination, particularly in science fiction, is often called upon in explorations of how technology can and does affect human beings. Hayles's work has been especially prominent in this method, using what she calls "tutor texts" as grounding for her theoretical concepts in both How We Became Posthuman (1999) and Writing Machines
(2002). So too, in this study, the artistic imagination tests, redirects, and affirms the scientific and theoretical inquiry of other fields.
Surveying the Existing Literature: The Avant-Garde Precedent
By adopting lyric genre theory, the following study departs from the established pattern of theorizing digital poetry. As Morris observes, critics of digital poetry, when they involve literary theory at all, "tend of invoke strategies developed to read the texts of avant-garde or experimental poets" (13-14). Such strategies make a great deal of sense, the history of digital poetry being undeniably rooted in both the specific techniques and underlying theory of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Three major connections to the avant-garde are frequently employed. First, the visual and kinetic poetry found on screen is naturally approached as an evolution of concrete and visual poetry — a genre that often evoked the movement of animation through the sequencing of static images. Second,
3 Visual/kinetic poetry refers to the graphical representations of poetry "foregrounding the visual aspects of language at least as much as the verbal" (Funkhouser 85). Experiments with animated words and letters have existed since the late 1960s (Funkhouser 85). 11 digitally automated writing4 entails a surrender of authorial influence that naturally extends many of the author-diminishing objectives of Surrealism, Oulipo (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle), and chance operations. Third, hypertext literature has been firmly entrenched in the poststructuralist tradition of Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva, a body of theory that often informs experimental literary practices. Surveying the existing literature on digital poetry, these same three connections reoccur frequently. The pattern occurs most prominently in the text from which I derive these three categories: Christopher
Funkhouser's Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms 1959-1995 (2007). In what is undoubtedly the most comprehensive survey of digital poetry to date, Funkhouser traces the history of experiments with computers and poetry from (as the title suggests)
1959 to 1995 (significantly his examples were created before the advent of the Web).
Funkhouser acknowledges that the connections he makes to twentieth century experimentalism, as described above, have been established since the first book-length study on digital poetry: Glazier's Digital Poetics: The Makings ofE-Poetries (2002) (18).
As Glazier notes, experimental poetry has a long history of appropriating technologies in ways unintended as their original use (the use like the mimeo, for example) and it is therefore a natural consequence that digital poetry should be interpreted as an extension of these practices (2).
4 Computer-generated text is the oldest form of digital poetry, existing since the late 1950s (Funkhouser 37). By using existing computer programs, or coding instructions from scratch, the poet constructs a text by automating certain procedures that would otherwise be done by a human hand/mind. For example, the program may automate the selection or ordering of words. Because the process often involves randomized output or aleatory motivations, computer-generated texts are often compared to automatist, procedural or Surrealist practices - any literary theory which justifies a diminished agency of the writer. As attested by Glazier's title, his study focuses on the act of making digital poetry, rather than the textual and technical intricacies of specific poems. This kind of theoretical approach, rather than literary analysis of specific works, is also the approach taken by
Brian Kim Stefans in his 2003 publication Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics. Using his personal experience as a poet and programmer, Stefans's combination of creative and critical approaches offers unique insights, the most notable of which for the interests of this study are his direct references to the lyric. In his essay "Stops and Rebels: a Critique of Hypertext," Stefans acknowledges, "the genre that I have been writing about most in these footnotes has been the 'lyric' because it is invested in the projection of a 'self onto language and the world" (Fashionable Noise 148). The few occasions throughout the book where Stefans discusses the place of self, agency, and the place of the lyric in digital poetry will become central to later discussions. For now, his specific mention of the lyric can be considered an isolated incident.
The collection New Media Poetics, from which Morris's introduction has already been cited, offers three approaches to writing about digital poetry. Two out of the three sections of the book address the contextual concerns of creating and dissemination digital texts ("Contexts") and the consequences of those text's reception ("Theories"). As the introduction notes, the section offering literary analysis, "Technotexts," largely hinges on avant-garde theory (13-14). The same can be observed in the 2004 publication POesls:
The Aesthetics of Digital Poetry, which was developed from a collection of papers at a
2001 symposium in Berlin. Ranging from broad theoretical pieces to focused readings, as the introduction affirms, "for our purposes," the discussion on digital texts "means, if you 13 will, that the individual threads of the poetic avant-garde have been taken up once again to be rewoven in new and progressive ways precisely when they had seemed to end" (9).
The reliance on the avant-garde is also observable in both Cyber Poetics (2001) and Open Letters of Lines Online (2000), two special issues assembled by the journals
Object and Open Letter, respectively. Both collections offer diverse discussions, ranging
from the cultural and material considerations of disseminating poetry online (Dworkin;
Jirgens) to the analysis of specific poetry generators (Bok; Parrish; Hennessey).
Consistently, the writers call upon the avant-garde in their discussions, including
comparisons to: Language poetry (Hennessy's "The Sweetest Poison, or the Discovery of
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry on the Web"); concrete poetry (Goldsmith's "From
(Command) Line to (Iconic) Constellation"); and sound poetry (Spinelli's "Analogue
Echoes: A Poetics of Digital Audio Editing"). Although there are other scattered
occurrences where digital poetry is the topic of discussion, including Bruce Andrews's
online essay "Electronic Poetics" (2000) and Kate Armstrong's "Feeds and Streams:
R.S.S. Poetics" (2007), these discussions tend to be descriptive accounts of a single
approach to writing with digital technologies.
The works listed above have undeniably demonstrated the value and necessity to
contextualize digital poetry within the history of the avant-garde. At the same time, by
relying on the avant-garde, these investigations are limited to a very brief period of recent
poetic practice - avant-garde, according to the OED, has only been in used to refer to the
arts since 1910. For the most part, then, the writing on digital poetry has neglected any
comparison to poetic practice or theory since the twentieth century. To address this 14 oversight, the following study generates readings based lyric genre theory extending as far back as ancient Greece, and as far forward as Stefans's discussion of the lyric and computer generated texts. Before establishing exactly how this genre model will be constructed, first, a few considerations on the scope of this study need to be addressed.
Scope of Study: Second Generation Digital Poetry
Although digital poetry has existed since the 1950s, this study focuses exclusively on the digital poetry of the Internet era. Making up a very distinct category, both in the technologies used and the cultural attitudes and behaviours underlying the practice, the poetry of the Internet era provides a number of important opportunities not afforded by its predecessors. The texts considered in this study are part of a category that Hayles has coined, "second-generation electronic literature." She formally defines the term in the
Web supplement to Writing Machines (2002): "electronic literature, generally written from 1995 onwards, that combines verbal text with graphics, images, animation, and other multimedia components" (Hayles "Lexicography"). Unlike "first-generation digital writing," which refers almost exclusively to works of hypertext literature created from
1985-1995 (Hayles "Lexicography"; Morris 12), the digital poetry written after 1995 departs from the page-like structures and writing methods of paper-based publication.
For the purposes of establishing historical context, the literature and its associated theory written before the second-generation era is important to acknowledge. Unlike the
second-generation, the literature of the first-generation era was a fairly cohesive body of practice, almost entirely united by a common reliance on the hyperlink. The practice was also centralized by a number of institutional supports, including the popular commercial 15 software Storyspace, released by Eastgate Systems. Eastgate not only provided the environment for writing and organizing non-linear narratives, but also generated audiences by marketing some of the products developed with their software (Glazier
136). The much-discussed Afternoon, A Story (1990) by Michael Joyce and Patchwork
Girl (1995) by Shelly Jackson are two examples of Eastgate publications that generated a great deal of initial excitement about the potential of the hyperlink. Since this initial enthusiasm, however, critics have come to believe that the radical potentials of the hyperlink were largely exaggerated. Espen Aarseth's Cyber text: Perspectives on Ergodic
Literature (1997) is particularly critical of hypertext's potential, questioning it as an
"ideological category" distinct from writing in paper media (79). Storyspace, argues
Aarseth, is based on the way information is presented on the page, and in some ways offers less freedom than the codex affords (Aarseth 77). Whereas a book allows a reader to flip to any part of the text at whim, the hypertext interface (at least in Storyspace) allows access to only the pages made available by the links on screen (Aarseth 77).
Echoing Aarseth's observations, Hayles notes in Writing Machines that the aesthetic of hyperliterature is suggestive, rather conventionally, of a page-like structure (37). As well, although the digitization of the link may be revolutionary, the non-linear reading process is no different than the way an encyclopedia may be accessed non-sequentially or, to use a literary example, the way a reader might find multiple reading paths through a William
S. Burroughs cut-up (Hayles Writing Machines 37). Bearing these criticisms in mind, the use of hypertext, for the purpose of this study, is considered like any other poetic 16 technique; its effect is determined by a specific application, rather than a radical change in a reader's relationship to the text.
In contrast to the first-generation, second-generation digital literature comprises of isolated experimentations involving diverse uses of technology. This situation is partly due to the unique technological environment of the Internet age, in which new technologies have facilitated the possibility for non-programmers to create sophisticated works. One of the most important technological developments for digital writing in the
Internet age has been the accessibility of more capable and user-friendly software
including Macromedia Flash, Shockwave, JavaScript, and QuickTime. These programs have generated greater participation in onscreen visual experimentation, which was once hindered by the arduous process of programming in frustrating and primitive coding
environments5.
In addition to software programs, another technological development of the
Internet era is the establishment of scripting languages like Perl or Python. Gradually
replacing the difficult to learn programming languages of earlier eras, these scripting
languages greatly increase the speed at which programs can be written (Ousterhout 26-
28). Scripting languages also allow for "mash-ups," meaning programmers can combine
pieces of codes from multiple programs (when their source code is available). The
5 As an example of this meticulous coding process, in 1984 and 1985 bpNichol wrote a suite of kinetic poems, First Screening, using the primitive coding language Apple BASIC. This highly restrictive programming environment allows for the movement of letters and words, but only by coding the position of that word in each individual frame through a set of grid values (Huth). The fluid and graceful motions achieved in Nichol's poems are actually the products of a painstaking process of repetitively entering coordinates (Huth). 17 resulting program merges ("mashes-up") the functions of different Web services or programs, without the programmer having to code each individual line. Often these mash-ups involve another technological achievement of the Internet era: Web-based language tools. Powerful search engines, translating programs, and databases significantly expand the amount of textual material immediately available to the poet. As
Internet technologies entered the writing landscape, second-generation digital literature emerged, characterized by increased graphical, interactive, generative, and multimedia components.
As Prehistoric Digital Poetry attests, the kinds of graphical (visual/kinetic poetry) and generative (digitally automated poetry) experiments facilitated by second-generation technologies have actually existed since the 1950s and 1960s (Funkhouser 7). The underlying methods - animation and automated writing - are not entirely new. Yet the technologies unique to the Internet age (scripting languages and Web-based tools) do create distinct opportunities, most notably the possibility of interacting with a community of language users. Search engines, for instance, provide the poet with access to the superabundance of Internet text. As well, scripting languages, with their ability to link code from various sources, facilitates projects of collaborative authorship. As I will argue in the following chapters, poetry written with digital technologies of the Internet era often emphasize the influence networked communities have on defining and articulating the lyric subject.
In addition to aesthetic and creative consequences, the technologies of the Internet era also have profound cultural implications. Although there are countless studies on the 18 ramifications of Internet technologies, Benkler's The Wealth of Networks succinctly describes the basic premise:
Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. (1)
As Benkler's many examples throughout his book demonstrate, in the networked information economy, the individual need not be a passive consumer of information and culture. From the author of a Wikipedia article to the amateur journalist blogger, users encounter participatory models of content creation online, significantly altering the relationship between individual and cultural production. To disconnect digital writing from this larger context misses a valuable opportunity to situate the literature within the signifying systems of an entire cultural transformation.
Benkler's phrase "enabled by technological change" brings up an important concern about technological determinism. Although the ensuing discussion often claims that technology changes or enables changes in social conditions, the observations are not intended to be deterministic. To borrow a disclaimer from Jay David Bolter and Richard
Grunsin's Remediation (2000): when technology or one of its synonyms is used as the grammatical subject of an action verb ("new technology creates a change in x"), the term is merely a shorthand for an extended definition of technology, including the social, economic, cultural, and individualistic influences that make up its existence (78). I never intend to suggest that technology determines the nature of subjectivity, but merely that it
acts as an instrument of self-identification, which may influence behaviour or attitudes. 19 This delicate issue of technological influence also concerns my method of literary analysis. Although the technologies used in the writing process never determine the text entirely, it is assumed that they can generate the possibility for literary effects. Thus, the process of composition, including the technological devices used, is central to the analysis in the coming chapters. In many ways this approach reflects what Hayles calls
"media-specific analysis" (MSA), a term which she defines in Writing Machines:
Understanding literature as the interplay between form, content, and medium, MSA insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those embodiments interacts dynamically with linguistics, rhetorical and literary practice to create the effects we call literature. (31)
Recognizing that "literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print," Hayles argues that the analysis of digital literature should consider the unique material conditions of a text (Writing Machines 31). In addition to a more traditional literary analysis, MSA also considers the influence of coding, software functionalities, Web-navigation tools, animation, sound, and interactivity (30). In the same way one might approach structures like line breaks, text position, and book design, the technical functionalities of a digital text create signifying systems that are inseparable from content. Therefore, as is the case in traditional poetry, the same technique may be used in many texts, but it has a unique relationship to the content of each poem. Hence, although the uses of poetry generators and search engines arise in multiple poems considered in this study, what is said about the technology in one context might not apply to the other.
The texts to which I apply this analysis were chosen to represent a range of practices in digital poetry. First, the works vary in their material structures: works appear 20 on the page, the screen, and as hybrids of the two. Second, they vary in the nature of their
digital content: the technologies used in the writing processes include search engines,
poetry generators, hypertext, and onscreen animation; these technologies sometimes
determine all and sometimes only part of the text under consideration. Although the
relatively small number of works that I examine does not comprehensively represent all
the possible methods in digital poetry, the breadth does explore the possibility of a lyric
reading in a variety of different applications.
My first example is Rachel Zolf s Human Resources (2007), a text published in
traditional codex form. The digital technologies for this text, including a poetry generator
and online language tools, construct only parts of the text. In contrast, the textual material
of my second example, Michael Magee's My Angle Dickinson (2006), derives entirely
from the digital technology the poet has adopted, which in this case is the search engine.
Another search engine text was selected for my fourth example, but it represents a
drastically different composition process than Magee's. Bill Kennedy and Darren
Wershler-Henry's Apostrophe (2006) is constructed entirely by an automated program
that not only harnesses the power of the search engine, but also automates the
arrangement of its findings. Apostrophe also has an online component, providing a
change of medium with significant consequences. Finally, departing entirely from paper-
based publishing, I also consider onscreen visual/kinetic and interactive poems. Poems in
this category include a category of cinematic presentations, such as William
Poundstone's "White Poem" and Stefans' "Dreamlife of Letters," as well as interactive
sets, such as Patrick Herron's Proximate or Leevi Lehto's Get a Google Poem. The 21 variance in these texts invites very different lyric readings in each case, yet the analyses remain connected by a common approach to the lyric genre.
Problems of the Genre Method: Alternatives to Taxonomy
By undertaking the lyric as a subject matter, this study assumes not only that the genre can be adequately defined, but also that such an exercise proves valuable when applied to digital poetry. These assumptions are easily challenged by a number of
observations about the multiple, sometimes contradictory manifestations of the lyric through literary history. As Spahr recognizes, "the lyric is not and never has been a
simplistic genre, despite its seeming innocence" (1). Hence, any definition of the lyric requires a substantial amount of justification to address this complexity, including a
direct acknowledgement of number of direct oppositions to genre theory. By borrowing
from some of the previous attempts to define the lyric, I establish a genre model here in
such a way that allows lyric traditions and contemporary experimentation to engage in a productive dialogue. Demonstrating both a continuum of, and departure from, tradition,
the genre model I argue for creates a means for innovation to speak through convention.
Throughout its millennia-spanning lifetime - from Plato to Postmodernism - the
lyric has undoubtedly undergone substantial transformations in both its material form and
cultural function. Even at a given moment in its existence, critics have often disagreed
about the parameters defining the genre. Prompted by these challenges, some critics have
gone so far as to deny the usefulness of the term lyric itself. As an example, in Rene
Wellek's survey of selected approaches to the lyric genre, "Genre Theory, the Lyric and
Erelebris" (1970), he states as part of his conclusion: "one must abandon attempts to 22 define the general nature of the lyric or the lyrical. Nothing beyond generalities of the tritest kind can result from it" (252). Mark Jeffreys makes a similar claim in his
"Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of Genre in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics" (1995):
Among the lyrics of the Greeks, the Renaissance genre theorists, the Romantics, and the New Critics, for instance, the overlapping set so characteristics have no common core, and any proclaimed core would exclude many familiar lyrics and offend many poets and academics. (203)
These statements express a valid concern about the frequent re-definitions of the lyric, which are too many to mention exhaustively, yet too important not to mention at all.
To strategize a feasible approach to the vast body of lyric theory, we may consider an assertion T.S. Eliot makes in Three Voices of Poetry (1954): "the very definition of 'lyric' in the Oxford Dictionary, indicates that the work cannot be satisfactorily defined" (15). Setting aside his overt rejection of the definition for a moment, it might be useful to consider how an authority like Oxford defines the genre, and how the elements of this definition have been treated by some of its major critics.
The Oxford Dictionary defines the lyric as:
Of or pertaining to the lyre; adapted to the lyre, meant to be sung; pertaining to or characteristic of song. Now used as the name for short poems (whether or not intended to be sung), usually divided into stanzas or strophes, and directly expressing the poet's own thoughts and sentiments, (emphasis added)
I have isolated a number of distinct parameters: the association with the lyre, the relation to music in general, the condition of brevity, a structural organization of language, and the expression of the poet's thoughts and sentiments. Although an extensive review of the lyric genre would be outside the scope of this thesis, a brief look at some of the varying treatments of these parameters demonstrates the difficulty of adopting a genre model 23 relying solely on a set of strict conventions.
While the lyre no longer bears much, if any, relevance in contemporary
definitions of the genre, the lyre was once the primary criterion defining the lyric. In
"Genre and the Literary Canon"(1979) Alistair Fowler observes that the lyre was such a
key determinant at one time that the elegy, being accompanied by the flute, was deemed a
separate genre (104). Although such a distinction no longer bears any relevance, the
instrument does represent a time when lyric poetry enjoyed a much different public
function than it typically does in today's poetry communities. In W.R. Johnson's study of
the ancient lyric, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (1982),
he describes how lyric songs accompanied by the lyre served an important social function
as the entertainment for festivals and ceremonies. Because this form of the lyric was
meant to be sung in public, musical language was a natural consequence, as was a style of
voice befitting of public address. The ancient lyric, exemplified by the poetry of Pindar,
Sappho, Horace, Simonides, and their contemporaries, established a direct relationship
between the poet and its audience, which, Johnson argues, has since disappeared (The
Idea of Lyric 6-8). The ancient lyric's emphasis on performance becomes a significant
point of comparison in later discussions, particularly a section in Chapter Three
discussing the implications of the Flarfist Collective and its commitment to public
performance and the entertainment value of poetry. As well, in Chapter Four, Johnson's
observations about the relationship between poet and audience are considered in relation
to Apostrophe's use of the device of apostrophe. Johnson's claim about "the virtual
disappearance of the lyric 'You'" (The Idea of Lyric 8) hardly fits the second-person 24 tense of this work, suggesting a return to a traditional poetic convention that may have significant relevance in digital environments.
Apart from the lyre, other musical elements such as rhythm, rhyme, metrical structure, repetition, and other aural patterns feature prominently in definitions of the lyric. Although these musical qualities have been present in the lyric since the ancients, it should be noted that the emphasis placed on these technical structures has varied significantly. In Roman literary theory, for example, both Horace and Quintilian categorize entire genres according to verse form. In their scheme, iambic verse is given its own genre, a distinction that would hardly coincide with the ways metrical measures are considered today (Fowler 104).
Even today, there is significant disagreement about the nature of musical language. An extreme argument like Amittai Aviram's "Lyric Poetry and Subjectivity"
(2001) gives a primacy to music that overrides all other parameters of the genre:
What sets lyric poetry off from other kinds of verse, then, is the placement of focus, relatively speaking, primarily on qualities of song—that is, precisely, on the game of tension and paradox between the sense and the sound that both expresses that sense and distracts us from it. Whereas the "spoken" verse of epic and dramatic poetry allow us, in distinct ways, to pay relatively more attention to the events of the story, lyric poetry keeps its focus, relatively speaking, on the musical game it plays, not only in its metrical rhythms, but in its orderings, forms, and arrangements. It is for this reason that we commonly associate lyric poetry with imagery, emotion, or a certain mood: we can wonder at such effects precisely because we are aware that they are effects of words with charming sounds.
Aviram emphasizes the importance of lyric's aural qualities to such an extent that he argues lyric subjectivity is not a "useful concept" compared to the qualities of song. 25 Music also plays a central role in Northrop Frye's thematic study of genre,
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957). For Frye, the lyric is defined by its "rhythm of association"(270), a term referring to the metrical patterns of the mind. By Frye's definition, metrical structures, repetition, stanza divisions, and other musically-based organizations of language differentiate the lyric from other genres. The "oracular, meditative, irregular, unpredictable, and essentially discontinuous rhythm" (271) created by the patterns of language leads Frye to suggest that the lyric's musicality structures the
otherwise unwieldy language of "babble" in the subconscious (275). As appropriate as
Frye's interpretation is for some incarnations of the genre, the assertion can hardly be
supported in the context of the postmodern lyrics discussed by Spahr or Kinnahan. In the postmodern lyric the poet often purposefully disrupts the musicality of language to create
disjunctive, stilted, unmetrical effects in language. Likewise, in a number of the digital
works discussed later, musicality is thwarted by the aleatory mechanisms of search
engines or poetry generators, which often create startlingly disjunctive language
combinations. Yet as Spahr, Kinnahan, and Perloff ("Language Poetry") demonstrate, the
disruption of musical language can serve to articulate, rather than deny, lyric expressions
of identity.
The characteristic of brevity is another lyric convention about which critics tend
to disagree. Frye observes the almost absurd issue of defining lyric length:
There was a purist in the Greek Anthology who maintained that an epigram is a poem two lines long, and that if you venture on a third line you're already into epic. But that seems a trifle inflexible. At the other extreme, there is a popular tendency to call anything in verse a lyric that is not actually divided into twelve books. Perhaps a more practical approach would be to say that the lyric is 26 anything you can reasonable get uncut into an anthology. ("Approaching the Lyric" 31)
As superficial as the characteristic of length may seem, brevity has been connected the lyric's more substantial characteristics of intensity and immediacy. W.R. Johnson, for instance, argues brevity is an essential quality of the lyric because it necessitates a concentration of both subject matter and language: "lyric poetry cares very little for breadth and width, everything for depth and height... compression, intensity of feeling, and complexity and subtly of reflection" (48). Historically, fixed forms have been one way of facilitating linguistic compression. Forms like the sonnet, villanelle, or sestina not only confine the length with a fixed number of lines, but also create patterns to intensify the language chosen through repetition and/or constraint of syllables.
Elder Olson interprets brevity differently in "An Outline of Poetic Theory"(1952),
in which he suggests, "the particular nature of lyric poetry is related, not to its verbal brevity, but to the brevity of the human behaviour which it depicts" (2). In other words,
Olson sees lyric brevity in terms of experiential duration rather than physical length. This view evokes a rather typical lyric episode, in which the poet's thoughts unfold on the page in real-time. Abram's famous "Structure and Style of the Greater Romantic Lyric"
(1965) typifies this kind of scene: Abrams describes how the poet of the greater Romantic
lyric, prompted by an aspect in the landscape, enters into a meditation on his current
situation, in such a way that recursively ends back on the landscape and the current
moment in time that initiated the movement to interiority (527-8). The specifics of
Abrams's description are unique to the subgenre of his discussion, but the short and
isolated moment in time he describes exemplifies the kind of experiential length that 27 Olson suggests. Yet Olson also points out there are important exceptions to the short lyric, including Shelley's Adonais (17). The possibility of breaking the convention of brevity, while maintaining distinctly lyric qualities, is essential for the discussions later in this thesis. Some of the digital poems in this study embrace a form suggestive of condensation and brevity (MyAngie Dickinson, Get a Google Poem, parts of Human
Resources), while others subvert it entirely (Apostrophe).
The last parameter, the expression of the poet's own thoughts and feelings, has already been challenged in the discussion of the postmodern lyric. Spahr, Kinnahan, and
Perloff have all applied the lyric label to texts that have exhibited a complex representation of subjectivity, extending past an expression of the individual toward more
shared, interconnected systems of identity. Often these representations of identity deny any transparent expressions of thoughts and feelings that can be easily attributed to the poet. The coming chapters further complicate the author's role, demonstrating how
aleatory methods in digital poetry distribute some of the writer's agency to the digital technologies constructing the text.
The approaches to the lyric described above are only a slight fraction of the
countless definitions in existence. As well, these examples derive solely from an English-
language tradition, and intentionally set aside considerations of other language traditions
like Arabic and Chinese lyric poetry6. Yet the inconsistencies demonstrated even in this
limited survey indicate the difficulty of succinctly defining lyric in way that could apply
6 Because all the poems I consider in this study are written in English, they logically fit into a literary history based on similar English-language poems. I do not deny that the rich histories of the lyric found outside of Western culture could provide productive comparisons. They are, however, outside the intended scope of this thesis. to all the incarnations of lyric poetry throughout history. One way to address this problem would be to follow Perloff s example, as set out in her introduction to Poetic
License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodern Lyric (1990). Perloff affirms, quite simply: "no definition of the lyric poem ... can, in short, be wholly transhistorical" (18).
Perloff uses this assertion to depart from more traditional approaches to the lyric, like the ones suggested above. Instead, Perloff reads the poetry of Susan Howe, Ezra Pound,
Steve McCaffery, and Gertrude Stein as "culturally-specific" versions of the lyric. As satisfactorily as Perloff s standpoint may serve such a study, the approach of complete historical relativism is contestable. Such an approach makes it difficult to draw historical affinities among texts, which is a strategy with considerable value. As Eliot famously argues in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," although a poet is often valued for innovative techniques that differentiate the work from the tradition in which the poet is operating, "if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously" ("Tradition and the Individual"
14). By addressing only contemporary manifestations of the lyric, the analysis will
inevitably neglect the very condition of writing, in which:
a historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order (Eliot "Tradition and the Individual" 15).
Disconnecting lyric poetry from its past overlooks the historical influences informing any
poet's work. PerlofFs historical relativism may also be contested because, as Jeffreys observes,
"the very act of writing about lyric ... necessarily trades, implicitly if not explicitly, on an assumption of the transhistorical definability of lyric" (196-7). A transhistorical definition of the lyric attempting to reconcile its contentious issues (verse forms, relation to music, length, among countless other minor determinates) would indeed, as Wellek argues, result in nothing but "generalities of the tritest kind" (523), and yet, as Jeffreys notices, to discuss the lyric as a genre immediately assumes a category of literature with some continuity.
To address some of the problems associated with genre theory, the following study borrows from the ideas developed in William Elford Rogers's The Three Genres and the Interpretation of Lyric (1983). In response to criticisms against genre theory,
Rogers makes a valid distinction between the criteria of a "good method" in the sciences and the same kinds of criteria found in the humanities (Rogers 16-17). By Rogers's interpretation, the criteria for evaluating a genre model should not assume the scientific model, which defines "good method" as one where universal law subsumes individual phenomena, resulting in models of predictability (16). Instead, the criteria should derive from the humanities, in which objects of study are valued for their complexity and uniqueness, even when considering their participation in traditions (Rogers 16-17).
Rejecting the notion of definition in its positivist sense, Rogers argues that genres should not serve as rigid taxonomic categories, but as self-reflexive "interpretive models" (19).
By avoiding taxonomies and introducing a self-reflexive quality to generic interpretation,
Rogers argues that his approach satisfies even the most fervent attacks on genre theory. 30 Benedetto Croce, as one example that Rogers cites, offers an aesthetic theory famously condemning the uses of "artistic and literary kinds" (27). Yet even Croce acknowledges,
"to establish words said phrases is not to establish laws and definitions. The mistake only arises when the weight of a scientific definition is give to a word" (28, emphasis original).
Rogers proceeds to survey approaches to the lyric that abandon specific conventions of the lyric in favour of what Rogers calls a "metaphysical approach" (30).
Because these approaches depart significantly from the approaches to the lyric already mentioned, they warrant a brief mention. Hegel's Aesthetica, for example, divides literary kinds by the qualities of "subjectivity" and "objectivity." Quite simply, whereas the epic is an objective representation of events, the lyric utterance comes from the subjective reflection of experience and knowledge. For another example of the metaphysical approach, Rogers discusses Emil Staiger's "Time and the Poetic Imagination." In this essay, Staiger adopts Heidegger's assumption that time is "the essential ingredient of all reality" (132), and consequently, classifies genre according to temporal parameters. The epic, being a mode of presentation and act of telling, is associated with the present
(Staigerl33). Drama, relying on the tension of what happens next, is connected with the future tense (Staiger 133). Finally, the lyric, Staiger argues, strongly relies on the communication of emotion, and therefore inevitably requires a process of recollection rooted in the past (133-6).
After surveying various approaches to the genre, Rogers constructs his own some what metaphysical model, where the lyric is defined as the reciprocal relationship 31 between mind and world (69). Although Roger's defense of the lyric is useful for its distinction between the interpretive, rather than taxonomic, function of genre, this study departs from his views on the issue of generic convention. Whereas Rogers believes a discussion of genre conventions inevitably leads to a descriptive rather than interpretive genre model (28), this study upholds the value of analyzing conventions or codes of genre for what they can reveal about a work's relation to literary traditions.
Answering the question, "where do genres come from?" Tzvetan Todorov responds, "quite simply from other genres" {Genres in Discourse 15). Basing his theory of genre in the notion of discourse, Todorov's Genres in Discourse (1990) suggests that genres evolve from transgressions of tradition, or, in other words, "by inversion, by displacement, by combination," of genre codes (Genres in Discourse 15). Even in those places where a text contravenes the expectations of genre, then, the genre is still active in the text:
The fact that a work 'disobeys' its genre does not mean the genre does not exist. It is tempting to say 'quite the contrary,' for two reasons. First because, in order to exist as such, the transgression requires a law - precisely the one that is to be violated. We might go even further and observe that norm becomes visible - comes into existence - owing only to its transgressions. (Genres in Discourse 14)
Todorov's theory suggests specific genre conventions play a fundamental role in identifying a text's relationship to tradition, as well as to its inevitable cultural- specificity. When conventions are maintained, they obviously place a text within a continuum of a literary pattern. When conventions are subverted, the action implies a reason why that convention is no longer relevant in a society; it is a way of commenting on the traditions of the past in ways that highlight the unique conditions of the present. 32 Attending to genre codes, then, creates a context to connect the innovative and even radical techniques of experimental poetry to its literary past.
Smaro Kamboureli's On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long
Poem (1991) proposes a similar approach to Todorov's genre theory. Although the book's subject matter is the Canadian long poem, the book, as acknowledged in the preface, is also about reading genre in general (xiii). Kamboureli provides a useful model for reading generic conventions as a negotiation between the inherited conventions of a literary past and the emerging identity of a new form of literature. In the case of the long- poem, this negotiation occurs between the traditional codes of the mother country and the emerging forms of a new national identity:
The poet at first works with the symbolism ingrained in the mother country while ignoring the semiosis of the new country. I take the symbolism of the mother country to refer to the overdetermination of meaning that culturally fixed codes inscribed on literary tradition. That meaning owes its success of continuity to the homogeneity it attributes to its referential relations. It is precisely this correlation of continuity and homogeneity that necessitates a gaze fixed on the past in order to authenticate, and authorize the codes of the present. (21, emphasis original)
Kamboureli's description of the poet using genre conventions (either upholding or subverting them) as a means of authorization emerging codes suggests genre codes are in a unique position to legitimize the "literariness" of experimental techniques.
Kamboureli's description of "colonial poets caught at the crossroads of the present (new) and the absent (past, old) worlds" (21) carries significant resonance for the situation of digital poetry. Like the colonial poets, poets of the digital age find themselves at a crossroads between literary traditions and the inevitable need to alter those forms to suit 33 the present culture. Like Kamboureli, this study uses genre as a way of investigating that intersection of established literary practice and innovative forms.
Instead of suggesting a strict definition and compulsory set of conventions, the genre model in the following chapters allows each text to create its own unique relationship with the lyric tradition. As Frye suggests:
The purpose of criticism by genres is not so much to classify as to clarify such traditions and affinities, thereby bringing out a large number of literary relationships that would not be noticed as long as there were no contexts established for them. (Anatomy of Criticism 247-8)
With the intention of establishing such a context, the following chapters use genre to connect digital poetry with relevant literary projects from ancient to postmodern poetry.
Throughout the discussions, lyric subjectivity and other lyric conventions not only reflect a continuum of literary practice but also, through their uniquely digital manifestations, comment upon the conditions of existing and writing in the digital age.
In Chapter One I use theories of posthuman subjectivity (Haraway; Hayles) to address the lyric/experimental hybrid in Zolf s Human Resources. Using the boundary- blurring theory of the cyborg (Haraway), the reading investigates the productive possibilities of complicating the categories of experimental/lyric, human/machine, and individual/collective.
Chapter Two begins an inquiry into search engine poetry, with an examination of
Magee's My Angie Dickinson. I argue that Magee's popular culture-infused lyric comments on, and in some ways reverses, a serious and scholarly approach to poetry.
Specifically, the chapter addresses Magee's parody of Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson (1985), the consequences of constructing a lyric subject using a search engine, and the book's connections to the Flarfist Collective.
Chapter Three focuses on another text written with the help of a search engine but demonstrating a noticeably different method of composition thanMyAngie Dickinson:
Kennedy and Wershler-Henry's Apostrophe. I read the text's transgressions of lyric convention for what those subversions reveal about the conditions of writing in contemporary environments of networked digital information. Using Hayles's paradigms of absence/presence and pattern/randomness (How We Became Posthuman 26-27), I argue that the distortion of the lyric subject is symptomatic of the changes to subjectivity in digitized information spaces.
Chapter Four uses media theory (Bolter and Grusin; Manovich) to address how the lyric genre may be affected in the transfer from page to screen. The discussion addresses two common assumptions about new media environments, both of which suggest the screen medium is inherently incompatible with the lyric genre. The first of these assumptions asserts that the enactment of "interiority" is impossible on the screen, where the surface-level and distracted qualities of the medium disallow meditative depth.
The second assumption is that the screen denies the immersive space necessary for reading literature. Using specific onscreen poems as examples, I demonstrate both the validity and potential challenges to these claims.
The poetry addressed in this study, despite its distinctly digital content, continues the lyric's longstanding engagement with questions of subjectivity, and the consequences of representing that subjectivity through poetry. The resulting dialogue between literary 35 past and cultural present engages with the varied possibilities of what it means to write, think, and exist in the digital age. Chapter One
The Cyborg Lyric:
Complicating Boundaries in Rachel Zolf s Human Resources
Although the term cyborg has been applied generously to almost any case where synthetic technologies are fused with organic human life, cyborg theory offers a more complex interpretation of the term by considering how the mind/machine union alters the very concept of subjectivity. As Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1991) famously defines it, the cyborg is "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (149-150). Yet for Haraway the cyborg not only represents the merging of human and machine, but also a distinct opportunity to re-imagine human subjectivity, and the subjectivity of feminist theory more specifically, through the complication of boundaries, categories and origin myths.
The cyborg is found at the boundaries between human/machine, body/consciousness and material/immaterial. Yet the "border war" that Haraway describes never ends in decisive victory. The premise of Haraway's chapter is not only "an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries," but also about the "responsibility in their construction" (150).
In other Words, the categories of identity, embodiment and reality may be problematized, but they never disappear entirely.
The cyborg creates a potential to re-imagine subjectivity outside of a humanist tradition - that of the bounded, unified and knowable self. And yet the cyborg still insists that those categories partially determine the subject - even in the systemic social and 37 cultural differences that infiltrate the language itself. The dual role of upholding and challenging the categories of identity make the cyborg a particularly useful theoretical tool to address the collapsed boundaries between human and machine, self and other, and experimental language and lyric convention found in Zolf s Human Resources.
Because some of the text in Human Resources is constructed with poetry- generating software and online language tools, while the rest of the text derives from the writer's mind, the writing subject is quite literally a "hybrid of machine and organism."
This fusion generates a particularly troublesome text for categorization. The non- traditional writing methods incorporating digital technologies often result in non- transparent language, which indicates a highly experimental text. At the same time,
Human Resources is also highly invested in the communication of "plain language" (Zolf.
4) and themes of gender, sexuality and culture - all of which are suggestive of projects traditionally associated with the lyric tradition. Of course, the categories of
"experimental" (also "avant-garde") and "lyric" are problematic from the outset, and to suggest any kind of homogeneous definition of these terms would inevitably prove inadequate. In fact, the following discussion explores the necessary complication of these categories, and in so doing suggests the useful overlaps between the two. In the cyborg spirit of blurring boundaries, Human Resources represents an amorphous hybrid that complicates the categories of human/machine, individual/community and lyric/experimental poetry.
Before delving into Human Resources, it is useful to first recognize that Zolf s use of computer technology follows a long line of "cyborg-esque" experiments merging 38 human and machine, and these experiments have generated a body of literature discussing the role of human subjectivity in digitally-automated writing. Often these discussions have suggested the very opposite argument of this chapter: they say that by surrendering agency to the machine, digital writing escapes the limitations of human consciousness and, consequently, de-humanizes the writing process. In contrast, this chapter demonstrates the distinct "humanness" of automated writing, as it manifests in the lyric undertones of the book. In other words, the chapter demonstrates that digital automation does not necessarily entail an erasure of the human writing subject, and can, in fact, serve to amplify human identity and authorship.
From the very beginnings of computer-generated poetry, there has been a fascination with yielding the role of the human writer to the machine. Funkhouser identifies the first computer-generated poem as an experiment carried out in 1959.
Working on a now archaic Zuse Z22 computer, Theo Lutz generated a program using a random number generator to select subjects from a database file. These subjects were then strung together using logical constraints, so that the output would abide by the grammatical rules of English (Funkhouser 37). Even from this early example, the basic principle behind computer-generated poetry is evident: the inspiration, agency or just plain work that is usually attributed to the writing subject is handed over to the automation of the program. Charles Hartman has articulated the situation quite effectively, citing Coleridge's definition of poetry as "the best words in the best order," to suggest that writing poetry can be seen as a process of selection and arrangement of words from the dictionary - a process Hartman sees as potentially mechanicizable (66). If "the artist's job" is "to compose, to place together in meaningful arrangement a number of independent elements" (Hartman 29), then, this line of reasoning suggests, poetry generators can perform this role, thereby supplanting the mind with machine.
Demonstrating this kind of mind/machine replacement, Christian Bok's "The
Piecemeal Bard Is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics" (2002) reconsiders the role of the writing subject in RACTER'S The Policeman's Beard is Half-
Constructed (1984). RACTER is a computer program designed by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter to produce linguistic output independent of human interference. As
Chamberlain describes in the introduction to The Policeman's Beard, the program is capable of conjugating verbs, identifying the gender of nouns, and stringing together selected words through "syntax directives." Thus, the program mimics the language patterns of human speech or writing - without a human actually being involved.
Bok explores what relation this automation has to the writing subject, calling upon the theories of Oulipo and surrealism, and of other writers engaging with similar notions of "automatic" writing. At one point, Bok cites RACTER's line, "our thoughts revolved endlessly in a kind of maniacal abstraction, an abstraction so involuted [...] that my own energies seem perilously close to exhaustion" (Policeman's Beard 120), and suggests the line generates a strong temptation to attribute its expression to a lyrical subject (Bok 12). "The machine" writes Bok, "does seem to express an individual compulsion, taking credit for the intellectual deficiencies of its own monomania" (12). In such an interpretation, the machine itself becomes the lyric subject, demonstrating, as Bok suggests, "the fundamental irrelevance of the writing subject in the manufacture of the written product" (11).
The assumption that human consciousness - or at least, human language usage - can be programmed into a machine is the founding premise for the entire field of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) (a field in which RACTER has often been placed). Much like the programs ELIZA (designed to mimic a psychoanalyst's responses) and PARRY
(designed to mimic the output of a schizophrenic), RACTER takes part in what Alan
Turing famously describes as the "imitation game" ("Computing Machinery and
Intelligence" 433). Turing describes this hypothetical experiment, the basic structure of which can be described as follows: a human judge engages in a conversation with one human and one machine; the identity of each is concealed via the communication of text messages. If the human judge cannot accurately distinguish between the linguistic output of the human and machine, the machine is said to be "intelligent."
Consistent with AI's premise of human-mimicry, RACTER attempts, in a way, to get the machine to speak. Or, rather, as Barthes describes in "The Death of the Author,"
AI aims for a process where "it is the language which speaks, not the author" (143).
Barthes suggests that the opportunities created by the field of linguistics provide a means for de-humanizing the process of language from one of subjective expression to one of objective patterns: "linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors" (145). The writing/speaking process operates within a set of logical 41 constraints, but the individual human role in the process, Barthes suggests, is inconsequential. Thus, as the proponents of AI would suggest, language can be programmed to speak for itself, independent of human agency.
Although attempts to "make the language speak" independent of a human enunciator is a compelling and important research objective, the complete replacement of mind with machine is debatable. As Hayles famously argues in How We Became
Posthwnan, concepts of communication that rely on disembodied intelligence overlook the inherent materiality of the communication process. "In the push to achieve machines that can think," Hayles writes, "researchers performed again and again the erasure of embodiment... All that mattered was the formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns" {How We Became Posthuman xi). Often overlooked in these informational patterns, these "formal manipulation of symbols" (How We Became
Posthuman xi), are the ingrained effects of lived - embodied - existence. As Hayles argues throughout her book, the human body and its interactions with larger cultural forces in the world are indivisible from processes of generating information. As theorists from gender studies, postcolonial theory, and postmodern theory have established, the biological and cultural construction of gender, race, and class has a substantial effect on the information circulated in a society (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 4). On a more personal level, the body also has a part to play in the proprioceptive experiences of interacting with material technologies (hand on keyboard, reading from the screen, the headgear of virtual reality programs) (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 27). 42 The concept of "embodied identity" has not been entirely overlooked in the literature pertaining to digitally automated poetry. In a significant use of Hayles,
Katherine Parrish examines the human influence on the writing subject of digitally automated poetry ("How We Became Automatic Poetry Generators: It Was the Best of
Times, It Was the Blurst of Times" [2002]). Parrish questions the idea that writing can be completely automated, and suggests instead that a text generator always operates in a distributed system of agency where "the cyborg can never leave the body behind," and
"neither can the individual activity and intention of the writing subject truly die in algorithmically generated poetry" (44). To demonstrate this concept, Parrish uses her own automated text experiment, MOOlipo, which experiments with the scripting language of MOO spaces (an online text-based virtual reality designed for the interaction of multiple participants). As Parrish explains, she programmed the script to take the input text provided by the user and submit it to a series of constraints (which Parrish associates with a kind of Oulipo-inspired experiment) (43). After the constraints are carried out, the program then places the text back into the mouth of the avatar (45). Curiously, the program can cause the avatar to speak even without its user being in the room (in other words without being logged-on). The process may suggest a kind of disembodied consciousness, and yet, Parrish argues, the body of the writer is always implicitly present; the original design of the program and its functions are very much tied to a human author with a physical existence that influenced the coding (45). Thus, the output of the program is simultaneously defined by the textual input (which can be generated by anyone in the
MOO room), the constraints, and lastly Parrish, the coder herself, who always performs a 43 degree of agency through her ever-present algorithm (Parrish 45). Instead of approaching text generators from the question "who/what" is in control (poet/machine/chance),
Parrish suggests it is more appropriate to think in terms of a "distributed agency across author/programmer/algorithm/ text & reader" (46).
Even where the writing is "determined" and "automated" by the algorithm, then, the complete eradication of human agency is a difficult, if not impossible, feat to accomplish. Even RACTER's program had to be written by a human mind: which words are chosen for its "source files" or which logical constraints (verb conjunction, gender, etc.) are used, are all human decisions pointing back to a human programmer and, more importantly, the programmer's assumptions about how the language works.
The distinction between AI and cyborg theory is crucial: where AI attempts to make the machine speak devoid of human influence, the cyborg initiates a more symbiotic relationship between machine and organism. This merging, rather than replacement, of human/machine categories is type of effect achieved with the digital technologies in Human Resources.
The Human/Machine and Lyric/Experimental Divides
Much like the automated output of MOOlipo and RACTER, some of the poems in
Human Resources are generated through digital automation. Zolf uses a Flash-based poetry generator created by Lewis LaCook to create a lyric voice that defies easy categorization. The effect is partly the consequence of the design of the poetry generator itself: the user enters nouns and verbs into dialogue boxes, which are then manipulated by the algorithm to form unpredictable, disjunctive combinations (LaCook "Flash Poetry 44 Generator 3.0"). Unlike artificial intelligence, where the machine or perhaps the language itself is thought to "speak" devoid of human actors, this particular generator can be manipulated in such a way as to magnify the human behind the machine, as is the case in the following poem:
lesbian, writeing [sic] you is like loesing [sic] the shit, only worse. While Jew voids the money, I write over a narrow Jew. Because of these excesss [sic] acquire as if money were a Jew for acquireing [sic], you should write your lesbian, while shit acquires. (15)
The passage clearly resists any transparent expressivity; there is no indication as to whom the "you," "I," "Jew" or "lesbian" may be referring. Although the phrases are more or less grammatically intact, the voice resists any intimate confessionalism; the ambiguity of the referents resist any clear communication of thought or emotion ("Because of these excesss" - what excesses? "you should write / your lesbian" - how does one write one's lesbian?). Despite the lack of transparency, the language contains undeniably charged markers of identity. "Jew" and "lesbian" are particularly personal identifiers evoking culturally and sexually based minority status. Where the poetry generator could have been used to de-humanize the writing process, the words chosen for the input of this poem clearly points back to a human consciousness preoccupied with specific concerns.
The style and form demonstrated the passage above are not, however, representative of all the poems in Human Resources. In fact, the text constantly shifts between differing voices, structures and styles, in a hybrid that should be acknowledged 45 before proceeding any further. The lineated poems created by the poetry generator are interspersed among the less conventional prose poem. As well, throughout the text bulleted or enumerated lists appear including ones listing "How to write for the Internet"
(73), "Where to look for inspiration" (33), or a "Shopping list of motivators" (19).
Curiously, the poetry generator's output, with its rather lyric-looking lines and shorter length, evoke a more conventional structure of poetry than the human-written experimental forms.
The poetry generator's syntactical construction (or lack of it) is also not representative of the entire text. In the sections written by Zolf, simple declaratives often make the speaking subject quite evident: "I'm totally medicated as I type" (5); "I won't remember that avant-garde chaos frees the writing machine's choked circuits" (65); "My head's spinning in reverse 360s just to close the loop with you" (7). In these examples, the "I" is clearly expressed. Other times, the disjunctive syntax offers no indication of the
enunciator:
Stink boston beach ridiculous sexual nine6five of money repulsive. Bills and coins fingered by infinite unwashed hands painting the tricks. Filthy lucre - some of the lucky end up 'rolling in it,' making 'piles' of 'money up the ass.' Commodity form is not a simple state of mind — you need reader involvement, which means getting a reaction, not giving a recitation on what two W64 good Q64 out is time 66 death sixty-six. Money makes words into alien things and psychology + communication = salesmanship. (40)
In the passage above there are moments where the language is quite musical ("fingered
by infinite unwashed hands") while other times the language lacks any transparency and
turns into mechanical utterance of codes ("W64 good Q64 out is time 66 death sixty-
six"). Merging clear prose with the non-transparent use of numbers (nine6five), codes (W64, Q64), and symbols (+, =), the text straddles the boundaries between lyric and experimentalism to create a hybrid befitting of the cyborg: "there is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their
construction and deconstruction" (Haraway 181). As Haraway's statement suggests, the
categories of lyric and experimentalism do not disappear in Human Resources, but the
divisions between the two do remain ambiguous.
In addition to the poetry generator, another digital technology used in the text is
the Gematria of Nothing7 (GON). The GON is based on the sacred Gematria numerology
system, which assigns each letter in the Hebrew language a numerical value (positive or
negative). By combining these values, words and phrases generate their own numeric
value, which can then be used against the values of other words and phrases in a
relational comparison. In Human Resources adopts these values and presents them in
superscript: "Change(G46)" (16) or "Couldn't bear the anxiety, couldn't write(G"5) (12). As
the book progresses, eventually these codes settle down beside the text: "labyrs power G7
ghoul philology" (66), suggesting a signifying system on equal terms with language
itself.
Even though the GON is determined by a system beyond the control of the
writing subject, it still functions as a tool of human self-expression. Specifically, in a
manner appropriate to the cyborg the GON expresses a blasphemous and ironic
cooptation and belittlement of a sacred system. While the Gematria is a sincere and
sacred numerology, originally designed for the interpretation of Biblical texts, the GON,
7 Found at www.mysticalinternet.com. 47 on the other hand, is described in the author's notes as "a bizarre Christ-, crow- and express-laden attempt to co-opt the serious practice of Hebrew numerology and apply it to select English words and phrases" (93). The GON, at least according to the Zolf, is a profane distortion of a culturally and linguistically significant tradition. The reason why
"the author co-opts GON for HR purposes" (Zolf 93) is never explained, however, to adopt a tool that takes a serious sacred system and turns it into "a bizarre Christ-, crow- and express-laden" co-optation suggests a sense of irony or at least irreverence in the decision. In effect, using the GON exhibits the sense of irony so central to the cyborg project, an irony that allows the cyborg to engage inr and distance itself from, the subject matter at hand. As Haraway writes, "irony is about humour and serious play" (149).
Irony, in other words, both works (performs a political function of voicing dissent) and plays (engaging in the humour of the topic). This "rhetorical strategy and a political method" (Haraway 149) become central to establishing the tone of Human Resources.
Both blasphemy and irony are appropriate descriptors for a text that frequently juxtaposes sacred language with corporate speak. Generating "contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes" (Haraway 149), the sacred and corporate coexist in opposition
without necessarily critiquing each other in a way that would generate a moral lesson. As
a few examples: "don't take any I say as 'gospel' we want to use language that reflects
today's realities" (21); "retention investments needs to know the keen relations among
capitalist spirit, Brand Bible and anal stage" (24); "Jabes the atheist says Jews can't help
writing about God. Nor can we help writing about being Jewish(Q709) home-maker retard
from e span of ruth toe" (22). In the final selection, we can recognize the simultaneous overlapping of style and subject matter. Starting off with simple, transparent syntax
("Jabes the atheist says"), the line erupts in to the nonsensical ("home-mater retard from e span"). The sacred subject matter of "Jews", "God" and "ruth" is contrasted with the everyday and sometimes brash language like "retard." Yet the discord is not expressed in a manner suggesting that one ideological outlook (capitalist or sacred) is more legitimate than the other. In the flat, corporate tone of business correspondence (captured in catch- phases like "language that reflects today's realities" and the transformation of "retention investments" into the grammatical subject of the sentence) seems to accept the reality of both subject matters as a given.
In the discourse surrounding Human Resources, the ironic tone and specific identity markers of sexuality and culture have been interpreted not only as a distinguishable lyric subject, but a subject representing the author herself. Despite
Foucault's assertion in "What is the Author" - that the author (in biographical and psychological sense) should be replaced with the "author function" - literary criticism continues to assume an author, who, in most cases, refuses to be dismissed as "dead."
Instead of just answering to the concerns of the "author function," including how a text is distributed ("where does it come from; how is it circulated; and who controls it?"
[Foucaultl38]), the biological and psychological interpretations are evident in the reviews of the book. As one example, I can point to the online version of George Elliott
Clarke's review originally published in the Halifax's The Chronicle Herald. In the very first sentence introducing Zolf, Clarke describes her as a "Jewish-Canadian writer." In fact, Clarke uses language, as reviewers often do, that attributes the speaking subject of the poetry to the author: "Zolf suspects that even the plainest words — from government documents and business press releases — will lapse (or spill) into poetry, perhaps indecipherable, but still poetry." A similar connection between the author's life and speaking subject is pronounced in a review on K. Silem Mohammad's blog {Limetree}.
He writes: "the book comes partly out of Zolf s own experience as a marketing and employee-relations copy-writer, so it's not hard to figure out where the palpable overtone of disgust and contempt comes from" ("Rachel Zolf, Human Resources"). The connections to her biography are entirely appropriate, considering even Zolf herself brings up this personal experience when discussing the work. In her interview with Rob
McLennan in Drunken Boat, Zolf explains, "Human Resources comes out my ongoing curious and strange experience writing marketing and employee (hence the title) copy part-time for a living" (McLennan "An Interview with Rachel Zolf). Elaborating on this explanation, Zolf continues:
As poets, we all make deals to survive, and mine involves expending a lot of words in selling things, particularly financial products. So I make money selling money with words while having this curious other identity as a poet with a bank balance in the negative (in more ways than one). That paradox was my jumping off point for an investigation through poetry of the philosophy and psychoanalysis of money, capitalism and communication. (McLennan "An Interview with Rachel Zolf)
This moral conflict over artistry and survival is identifiable in many of the poems. Zolf s discomfort with the corporate system becomes apparent in her description of an anecdotal scene where, "white, middle-aged HR women, bicker over whether capri(W25031)odessey polypeptide pants are acceptable, how to spell 'beachwear' and how best to deal with
'militant' employees asking to work less overtime" (14). Even in the deadpan 50 observation, "don't own a car but expend many a lubricating word on transmission-fluid theory" (58), there is plenty of opportunity to see potential connections between biographic experience and the poem's content.
Earlier in the interview, Zolf relates another autobiographical story:
I had dropped out of university a couple times by then because I hated writing essays and being marked. At the time, I even hated the sentence, spouting off about the tyranny of subject-verb-predicate and such. I guess there was a budding poet in me that I hadn't met yet. (McLennan "An Interview with Rachel Zolf)
If a reader were to recognize the phrase "tyranny of the subject-verb-predicate" also appears in Human Resources (55), this autobiographical connection counters Barthes's famous assertion that the "modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text" (145).
Or, as Barthes states it in another manner, the author supposedly no longer "nourishes" the book and no longer "exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child" (145). Quite the opposite, the human author behind Human Resources "nourishes" the text with markers of identity, including a cultural background, sexual orientation, and participation in capitalist culture. In the connections Zolf makes to biographic experience, as well as the choice of specific digital tools (GON), and the input text used in the poetry generator, Human Resources reveals a human origin.
At one point in the "What is an Author," Foucault argues that it would not matter if someone discovered the cottage that tourists now visit in Stratford was not in fact the home of Shakespeare (122). The author's name would function in the same way. If, however, it were revealed that Shakespeare had not written some of the works attributed to him, the way his name functions in our discourse would change dramatically (122). If 51 Foucault's principle about biography was applied to Human Resources, I doubt the assertion would hold. If Zolf had a different sexual orientation, cultural background, employment experience, or gender than the one represented in her lyric subject, the interpretation of her author function would not be, as it is now, a voicing of her own experience. Instead, critics would be interpreting Zolf s name as an author who speaks for communities not her own - a much different and more problematic category of authors who speak for the other rather than for the self. If contemporary readers really do dismiss the question "who is speaking," then this dismissal does not succeed in quelling the temptation to attribute the words on the page to a human origin. Even when those words partially originate in a non-human entity, as they do when digital technologies are used, the evidence of the human behind the machine entices autobiographical connections. Between machine, author, and speaking personae, if the author really is dead, in Human Resources its multiple corpses have yet to buried.
Bodily Divisions and Re-Writing the Origin Story
If the author resists disappearing in the cyborg lyric, so too does its body. In fact, the images of the body occur frequently in Human Resources, as demonstrated in the following passage:
Heads or tails, the more you copper allocated struggling shit the more face you save, and don't forget to close your mouth when giving birth - things can reverse theses when you 56 285 open up. Like the child in the 583 2560 1 mirror stage in love with the image of money, we resist recognizing the hunger of the other. (82)
These bodily images, particularity those parts marking erogenous zones, are typical of those found throughout the text. A few examples of these reoccurring references include orgasm (4, 12, 56), vagina (16, 23, 28, 48), breast (8, 28), breath (6, 8), mouth (28), cunt 52 (36,48), cock (36,48), anus/anal/ass (36, 55,24, 82). Not only do these unapologetically bawdy/body reference imply a cyborg trait of being "resolutely committed to ... intimacy, and perversity" (151), but the references also speak to the bodily boundaries that play a central role in the subject formation of Western societies. As Haraway notes, bodily boundaries have always been a strategy to mark and categorize difference, and to thereby gain power by creating an "other" (177).
There is a curious contradiction between the references to the body that appear in
Human Resources and goal of the cyborg to overcome the "origin stories" of Western traditions. "An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense" Haraway writes, "depends
on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother
from whom all humans must separate" (181). One of the most troublesome places the
myth of original unity manifests is in psychoanalytic theory. We can note that Lacan's
first stage of subject development, known as the territorialization of the body, hinges on
many of the same bodily divisions appearing in Human Resources. Essentially, the
territorialization of the body differentiates the erogenous zones (penis, vagina, mouth,
anus) through the mother's special care and tender touch in those areas. The process is
one of imposing boundaries - dividing the body into parts, where, in reality, there is only
a unified whole.
As Kaja Silverman observes, the Lacanian model based on original unity conveys
troubling heterosexual assumptions about a subject's relation to its body and to others
(132). The desire for the complement, which propels the Lacanian subject, is motivated
by a loss of the original whole (the other sex latent in the self). This translates into a 53 system where the only "natural" desire is for the bodily "complement" of the subject
(Silverman 152). The unavoidably heterosexual assumptions latent in theory imply only the male-female relations exhibit the desire of the "natural" human experience. The myth of original unity, dependent on the discrete boundaries marking gender and heterosexual desire, is precisely what the cyborg is poised to oppose.
The problems of the Freudian school are not overlooked in Human Resources:
"Okay, so good Freud. Blame the excesses of parsimony and homosexuality on an unregulated anal babyQ91 stupid boy joe father stage" (Zolf 24). It would seem, however, that the cyborg voice of Human Resources resists the total erasure of the origin story and instead relies on the very identifying markers and bodily terrorialization that have always been used to mark the other. If "the cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense" (Haraway 151), then the perpetuation of traditional body/sex markers suggests the cyborg may still be haunted by the theories of Lacan and Freud.
The feminist experimental lyric has often struggled with the issue of representation and the perpetuation of phallocentric codes. As Kinnahan suggests, the tactics of using a clearly articulated speaking "I" and clear markers of identity (labels of culture, race, gender) have historically served to give a public voice to the once private experiences made invisible by a white-male-dominated literary history (4). At the same time, these tactics, most predominantly seen in the confessional lyric, create a problematic use of the "language of the oppressor." As well, resistance arises when universal definitions are assumed for the categories of "women's experience" or 54 "African-American woman's experience" or "lesbian woman's experience." The labels may make these categories visible, but the tendency to essentialize the diversity of these groups into a single type of experience complicates the political goal of representation.
Likewise, in Human Resources, when clear identity categories are expressed in the language, they enact a problematic negotiation between visibility and over-simplifying identity categories. The pleasing coherence of identifying labels ("Jew" or "lesbian") and the shorthand for categories of the body ("vagina" "mouth"), create an opportunity to use those semantically charged terms, those reflections of the self, to make visible marginalized categories. At the same time, the impossibility of assuming a homogeneous definition of any such labels threatens to "speak for the other." Haraway tells us that
"cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other" (175). So too in Human Resources, the lyric subject is not constructed from "original innocence," but a retelling of origin stories using those same boundaries that once defined it as other.
The result succeeds in making such boundaries visible, as problematic as that image may be.
Agency and the Socially Determined Nature of Language
The discussion on poetry generators above has already touched upon issues of agency in relation to the human/machine binary (which one has the agency to control the language, and does it matter?). Another set of questions regarding agency arise in Human
Resources when the text explores the degree to which language is both socially 55 determined and individually uttered (the balance of between langue and parole, to use
Saussure's terms).
The tyranny of writing, as it often manifests in the socially-controlled practices of communication, is an ongoing theme in Human Resources. Frequently the lines refer to ways in which one is told how and what to write: "the tyranny of the subject-verb predicate" (55); or, how Adrienne Rich used "the Communicating Bad News template"
(38). The absence of creativity in the writing process is even more pronounced in the context of corporate communication agendas, which are articulated in the nonnegotiable lists of instructions like: "How to warm up your motor and find you Big Idea" (11),
"How to write a title" (27), "Where to look for inspiration" (33) and "How to write persuasive body copy" (45). These "how tos" of the writing process imply an almost oppressive power teaching, or more appropriately, programming of the writer to create output as perfect and predictable as a software program.
Unexpectedly, the very digital tools that are used to demonstrate the socially determined nature of language become tactics to increase the individual agency of both writer and reader. The case is especially true in the use of the language search engines
Word Count and Query Count. Much like the Gematria engine, these programs generate numerical values for words: Word Count ranks the most frequently used words in the
English language, while Query Count, a program inside it, ranks the words most frequently searched (queried) in Word Count. Using the same pattern generated for the
GON values, the numbers are incorporated into a cryptic coding system. At first, the values are easily dismissible when they appear as superscripted tags on the words. Later, 56 these codes descend to the level of the text itself, and eventually the letters denoting the search engines disappear entirely and the words are replaced by numbers, without indication of their origin:
Ambiguities of the human conditions are a threat to surfeit 1267. Sonnet's sublime orgasmic 447 one of the iterations of the houses. I hold them on the page, Valery's face a void queued up for release. Hat's off, this won't be floated 65 without dissemination. (83)
The numeric codes require new interpretive strategies: does the reader return to the search engines to decode the values? Or do they function as "unreadable" signs without referents? What are we to make of the parallel codes? What does it mean, for instance, when we see a phrase like "economic (W383) love (W384)" (70)? If the 383rd most commonly used word in English is "economic," and this is immediately followed by thw word "love," one interpretation of this sequence could assume that English users collectively value these two concepts equally - with economic valued slightly more than love. The "economic (W383) love (W384)" sequence marks a curious moment of distributed agency. Who wrote this sequence: the Word Count engine, the author who finds and frames it as poetry, or the entire community of English language speakers who collectively determine how often these words are used? The boundaries of authorship are not so clear. As Saussure asserts, "speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive the one without the other" (244).'
Saussure also points out another dualism inherent in language: "speech always implies both an established system and an evolution: at every moment it is an existing institution and product of the past" (244). The temporal aspect of language is especially important to the values generated by Query Count, which shift hour by hour while users 57 query different words (Zolf 93). Consequently, the Q-codes at the time of writing will more than likely be different than those at the time of reading. Resisting all stability and simultaneously enacting multiple referents, the Q-codes are a literal embodiment of what
Hayles calls the "flickering signifier" (How We Became Posthuman 26). The term refers to a fundamental change in the nature of information when it is digitized. Unlike the physical inscriptions of print, the ease at which text can change on the screen result in an unstable condition for the text where "no simple one-to-one correspondence exists between signifier and signified" (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 25-26). For the Op codes, the flickering signifier is quite literal; the physical signifier offers multiple and constantly shifting referents. This is not to suggest the categories of "sign" and "referent" no longer exist. The Q-code is still a sign to some degree, and it is possible to form a reading strategy to reestablish the connection between signifier and signified (a return to the Query Count, for example, where the codes can be inputted to find alternate referents). The categories are, however, complicated and no longer universal - not every reader will decode the encrypted lines in the same way. Hence, the very same too that could be used to highlight that language usage is out of the control of any one individual, is used here to grant individual agency in the decoding process.
Because the Q-codes reflect the collective action of all the Word Count users,
(their individual decisions of what words were important to enter into the search engine), the values offer insight into the collective psyche of the English speaking population engaging with the tool. Such is the case in a curious poem that calls upon the Query
Count values, and what is possibly a found poem of the ranking itself: Mass affluent consumers' key satisfaction drivers aspirational by most common queries of most-common English-words engine: fuck Ql sex Q2 love the shit god i penis cunt a ass jesus dog Q13 pussy hate bush John me hello vagina america bitch cat dick you war yes he like and cock no damn david gay man computer money word mother michael poop Q42 happy mom asshole orgasm he mike apple peace help one hi car bob fart cool it chris microsoft crap woman what good is death hell conquistador iraq james house mark butt corn girl paul home dad work but of beer nigger andrew torn tit tits usa anal baby stupid joe father kill mary school sarah smith Q100 re-scoped the gestimate - the generic one month is longer than 30 days. You can control the reader's reaction without changing the facts (36)
Because the Query Count ranking has shifted since the time this poem was written, it is impossible to verify if the words following the colon were ever a verbatim listing of the ranking. Yet the codes interspersed in the passage (Q13, Q42, Q100) keep pace with another poem where the Word Count ranking is listed (34) - which is, verifiably a verbatim listing, because these rankings do not change. The parallel suggests the passage above did represent the Query Count ranking at one point in time. If so, the recurring themes of obscenity, body, politics, money, and religion offer a blasphemous communal consciousness, not unlike the cyborg. It seems the words people find most important or most interesting to query create a motley collection of both sacred and profane, both political and personal. Interestingly, this collective unconsciousness of sex drives, religious interests, and political matters reveals a set of preoccupations not indicated by the most common used words in the English language, a ranking that starts with banal words like "the, of, an, in, a, to, that, it, is, was...". Not until language usage is embodied in the specific contexts of the real-world (or in Hayles' term "lifeworld") do these underlying drives emerge. 59 The passage above also contains word combinations that are adopted in other poems: "stupid boy joe father stage" (24) and "america bitch cat" (16). Quite literally, the author's writing is infiltrated by the voices of the community. The boundaries blur between what is individual agency in the writing and what is borrowed or determined by the communal forces of language. Furthermore, the algorithms of these programs also have a part to play in how the rankings manifest. As Haraway recognizes, "it is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices" (177).
Although the categories of author, community, and machine may still be visible, distinguishing between them may be more a matter of conjecture than fact.
If, as Haraway argues, "writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs"
(176), then the attention to cyborg poetry - both its successes and shortcomings - is a crucial site for understanding the potential of the cyborg as a political tactic, as well as an aesthetic metaphor. Human Resources's "struggle against perfect communication"
(Haraway 176) engages with the important task of deconstructing the essentializing narratives of identity, while still making those identities visible. The difficulties of such a task may not be entirely overcome in the text, yet its strategies do contribute to the on going explorations of what it means to exist - and to represent that existence - in the digital age.
Unlike Barthes's famous dictum that, "writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin" (142), the origin of the cyborg is never behind; but neither does it / naively revel in its own interiority. Nor can it, when the interior/exterior boundaries of 60 the self are obscured by the relationships with others and with technology. Blending
machine and organism, lyric and experimentalism, agency and determinism, the use of
digital technologies can actually emphasize, rather than eradicate, the complexity of the
human behind the machine. 61 Chapter Two
Writing with the Search Engine:
The Lyric and Mainstream Culture in Michael Magee's MyAngie Dickinson
According to the PEW Internet and Life Project, at any one time, around half of all Internet users are operating search engines ("The Popularity and Importance of Search
Engines" 2). Considering their omnipresence in online life, it is fitting that poets seeking to engage with Internet culture have, as one strategy, harnessed the power of engines like
Google, Yahoo, and Alta Vista. One of the most popular methods of search engine poetry is known as "Google sculpting." A Google sculptor will enter search terms into the ordinary Google interface, and then use the resulting search result pages to find interesting textual fragments. These fragments are then arranged or "sculpted" into poetry
("The Flarf Files"). Used as such, the search engine provides a portal to the plethora of
Internet text, making the Internet into a hyper-excessive, multi-authored "source-text."
As novel as the search engine may be for poetic composition, the method is undoubtedly part of a lineage of twentieth century avant-garde movements that sought to diminish the writer's agency. Google sculpting limits the kinds of "critical faculties" that
Andre Breton described, and avoids the myth of inspiration like John Cage's chance operations did. Like these avant-garde precedents, Google sculpting demystifies the process of writing poetry by making the work traditionally attributed to "inspiration" or
"genius" into the work of chance. Making the process of poetic composition even more inclusive, Google sculpting does not intentionally use source texts that derive from the / established literary canon or the poet's own work, but instead relies on language used by 62 everyday Internet communicators, be they individuals, corporations, or advertisers. It is
precisely this representation of mass culture, in both language and subject matter, that
characterizes a Google sculpted text. This is especially true in the case of one Google
sculpture that intentionally diminishes the distance between poetry and popular culture:
Michael Magee's MyAngie Dickinson.
Admittedly, MyAngie Dickinson could be interpreted as a mocking gesture, by
reading the project as a demonstration of the ridiculousness of trying to create a
"mainstream poetry" in today's society. As Dana Gioia argues, in a world where poetry is
primarily written for and read by other poets or poetry students, "poets and the common
reader are no long on speaking terms" ("Can Poetry Matter?" 9). Consequently, any
attempt to merge contemporary life with poetry is moot, considering such a connection,
even if successful, would fail to find a readership beyond the poetry community. To
emphasize the absurdity of such an effort may be more fitting if this chapter were to
adopt a more conventional interpretation of the flarfist8 ethos. However, I approach My
Angie as a text that offers a more serious mediation on the relationship between poetry,
the lyric, and mainstream culture.
Flarf'is a somewhat controversial term. As K. Silem Mohammad notes on his blog {Lime Tree} flarf has been used to refer to almost any contemporary poetic practice, and at times has been used inaccurately as a synonym for new poetry itself ("Post-Flarf and Its Discontents"). The term was originally coined by the Flarfist Collective, a self-named assembly of poets that will be discussed at greater length later in the chapter. Since its initial christening, however, the "flarf label has been applied to projects well outside of the collective, but still demonstrating the flarfist aesthetic. This aesthetic is articulated by Katie Dangenish as works exhibiting "embarrassing, kitschy, trashy, or seemingly unserious content" ("A Review of the Anger Scale"). For the purposes of this discussion, flarf"(not capitalized) will be used to indicate this broader category, while the capitalized Flarf or Flarfist will refer to practices directly associated with the collective. If the traditional lyric is accused of being elitist for its representation of a privileged class with the education and leisure time necessary to write poetry, and experimental lyric is accused of being elitist for relying on dense and inaccessible theoretical justifications, then My Angie forgoes either of these tendencies in favour of accessible language, references, and a reliance on affect over theory:
My innermost feelings - Can Be - like Mike- But if the Future is Matrix - like - I can't wait to do some "bullet!" (39)
V
Using references from popular-culture and advertising slogans instead of historical
allusions, and forgoing a meditative tone (despite the mention of "innermost feelings")
for a lively expression of jest, the lines are representative of My Angle's basic character.
Although characterizing poetry as elitist may be based on unfair assumptions, the
increasing detachment between poetry and contemporary life is difficult to deny. The
intention here is not to prove the inaccessibility of poetry, but to emphasize the strategies
Magee undertakes to create a form of the lyric that takes exception to the claim that
"poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to arid for the general culture" (Gioia "Can
Poetry Matter?" 5). By consciously resisting elitism and inaccessibility, My Angie speaks
like, speaks to, and perhaps even speaks for, the general culture of the digital age.
This chapter focuses on three ways My Angie reduces the distance between poetry
and mainstream culture. First, I'll consider the book's parody of Susan Howe's My Emily
Dickinson, and Magee's reversal of its serious sociopolitical approach to lyric poetry.
Second, the discussion will turn to the lyric subject. Specifically, the lyric subject will be
read in relation to the online phenomenon of role-playing, a contemporary practice that transforms the dense theory of subject-formation into lived experience. Third, I will look at the book's connection to the Flarfist Collective and their inclination to expose the absurdities of poetry's existence in contemporary culture. Together these aspects create a lyric embracing the language and references of mass culture, resulting in a poetic project as inclusive and participatory as the search engine itself.
Angie to Emily: The Lyric Plays as Well as Works
Magee's title immediately evokes Howe's My Emily Dickinson, an experimental hybrid of scholarship, criticism, and personal treatise on Emily Dickinson's life and poetry. In the tradition of Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael (1947) or Louis Zukofsky's
Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963), My Emily is a text, as Perloff describes it, "in which one poet mediates so intensely on the work of another that the two voices imperceptibly merge" (qtd. in Collis 13). My Emily is made up of intertextual fragments of Dickinson's poetry, letters, and literary influences, which are held together by Howe's insightful
commentary on their connections. Reflecting the work of a studious archivist and personally invested admirer, My Emily provides evidence of the devoted searches Howe
conducted through archives of Dickinson's life. Magee, it should be noted, also engages
with the work of Dickinson, and also does so through a method of search and recovery.
Yet Magee's method and justification for this engagement with Dickinson deliberately
contrasts Howe's serious work of scholarship. Although Magee's text clearly comments
on Howe's book in many respects, the term parody is not an entirely accurate description
of the relationship between the two books. Instead of mocking the serious scholarly work
of My Emily Dickinson, Magee's text offers a viable alternative to Howe's intellectualism and political aims, and, m the process, suggests a way to honour Dickinson's work based on principles of affect and entertainment rather than scholarship and identity politics.
One of the most significant ways the two texts differ is in their approach to methodology. For both Howe and Magee, the issue of method is a serious matter to clarify. In the foreword to My Emily, Howe initiates a scholarly approach for defining methodology. She explains the specific details of her archival process, including the use
of shorthand and symbols throughout the text (such as the use of "L" to differentiate
Dickinson's letters from her poems), and the exact collected works she cites from (MED9
5). Although Howe was outside of institutional academia at the time of publishing and
published with a non-academic press (Collis 65), her exacting methods provide a sense of
legitimacy to her project, on par with scholarly research.
While Magee also discusses his methods, his explanations reveal a greater sense
of arbitrariness than Howe's deliberate, justified decisions. In a process Magee describes
as "intuitive searches," he used search strings consisting of bits of syntax from Emily
Dickinson's Collected Poems, plus - or "+" in Boolean language - the phrase "Angie
Dickinson" (4). The choice of the later term - a rather arbitrary decision, as we shall see
- is a central tactic to the book's irreverent stance towards poetic subject matter. Angie
Dickinson is the name of a Hollywood actress, who is most famous for her role as the
sultry Sergeant Suzanne "Pepper" Anderson in the 1970s television drama Policewoman.
Magee's justification for choosing Angie Dickinson suggests a rather flippant decision
making process. He explains the decision was based on a "hunch" that the search term
9 Citations from My Emily Dickinson will be indicated with the short form "MED". "would throw up an unending steam of interesting Googled material" (4). Although
Magee never mentions it, Angie Dickinson is also a fascinating choice for her somewhat contradictory status as both an empowering female role model and a docile, male- pleasing sex object. As an example of this contradiction: she impressively became a sex symbol after the age of forty for playing an intelligent, strong-willed character on television, but was also famous for saying things like, "I dress for women. I undress for men" ("Angie Dickinson" IMDB.com). She also had visions of being a writer, until she won her first beauty contest and pursued that career option instead ("Angie Dickinson"
IMDB.com). For Howe, Emily Dickinson's uncompromising devotion to her craft, and reclusive life of solitude becomes part of the attractive mystic of the poet. In Magee's method, the celebrated personality of the book becomes a woman whose artistic accomplishment did not extend past popular culture, and whose writing career ended before she ever started it.
This is not to say that Magee is not also invested in Emily Dickinson. In a process
Magee describes as "a fine stitching together, the mouse replacing the needlepoint," the bits of language selected from Magee's searches are incorporated into structural forms suggestive Emily Dickinson's poetry. The poems frequently use quatrains or forms of a similar length and rhyme schemes, as well as Dickinson's characteristic shifts between long dashes. In effect, Magee constructs poems with the recognizable qualities of
Dickinson's style and structure, but filled with the familiar content of contemporary culture:
My chest - was Tender - from the dye pack - Top Buttons were Undone The actual tunics Violent - exotic — Remote control touchscreen - "I dress for women," she bellies - "and undress for Men" - (22)
The structure of the poem merges Magee and Emily into a single writing subject, in a manner suggestive of Perloff s description of My Emily citied earlier, where "two voices imperceptibly merge." The unconventional capitalization, lack of titles and frequent use of slant rhyme confine Magee to a particular style of writing. Yet the evidence of
Magee's own contemporary experience (in a world consisting of "dye packs" and a
"remove control touchscreen") characterizes the voice with noticeably different content then a Dickinson poem.
Although both My Emily and My Angle engage with the poetry of Emily
Dickinson, their stated intentions for doing so reveal contrasting aims. Howe's book is an earnest homage to Dickinson's work, expressing a sincere desire to redress injustices created by scholarly criticism and editorial decisions. Howe is cognizant of the immense effect that editorial practice can have on rendering a text more docile. She refers specifically to the damaging practice of omitting the alternate words provided in
Dickinson's handwritten notes, as well as the decisions to order the poems in such a way that alters the relationship between them (MED 5-7). These concerns are symptomatic of
Howe's motivation for writing in general, which she articulates elsewhere in the
impassioned statement: "I wish I could tenderly lift, from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted - inarticulate" ("There Are Not Leaves" 328). Because she
was published posthumously, Dickinson herself is one of those "anonymous, slighted"
voices that Howe intends to illuminate. Thus, writing about poetry is justified by redressing systemic power imbalances: who has the power to determine the
"authoritative" Dickinson text? Who has the power to determine what it means?
Although Howe is writing about poetry, she validates her project based on sociopolitical responsibilities beyond the world of literature.
Before demonstrating how Magee contrasts these political aims, it is worth noting that Howe's connection between poetics and sociopolitical concerns is an important justification, more generally, for engaging with lyric poetry in the postmodern age. The phenomenon is demonstrated quite clearly in an anthology already mentioned in this thesis, American Woman Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. In introducing the anthology, Spahr feels the need to justify the assembly of lyric writing in the postmodern age, especially to a reader of experimental poetry. "Some argue," writes
Spahr, "that the lyric's intimate and interior space of retreat is its sin" (1). Spahr even makes mention of Adorno's famous statement, "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" ("Cultural Criticism and Society" 34), as though the very act of writing poetry about selfhood and identity needs to be justified in a culture preoccupied with more significant concerns. Spahr ends up countering the dismissal of the lyric by using similar justifications as Howe does for her project. Spahr argues that the poetry assembled in the anthology creates a socially and politically engaged body of work (11). Magee's resistance to any such political projects are, then, not just an opposition to Howe's text specifically, but an opposition to an entire strategy used to justify the existence of lyric poetry in contemporary culture. Although Magee also provides a humane goal for his book, the framing of his aim and the justification for writing lyric poetry are far less weighted with serious issues of power. In the foreword, Magee describes his desire to evoke in his readership "that combination of shock, bewilderment, excitement, pleasure" first felt by readers of Emily
Dickinson's poems (4). His reference to the "historical attempts to render [Dickinson's poems] more placid" (4) certainly suggest a historical injustice similar to Howe's, however, Magee's explicit aim to affirm "the rarely mentioned fact that Emily Dickinson is one of the funniest poets ever" (4) implies a much different motivation for his mission.
Instead of redressing power inequities that have affected publishing practices and critical readings, as Howe does, Magee's intentions involve the reader's emotional experience.
Specifically, Magee is concerned with conveying the enjoyment of reading Dickinson's poetry. Magee's justification for writing lyric poetry is, in other words, to make
Dickinson's readers appreciate her poetry for its affect, rather than intellect.
Magee's observation about the oversight of Dickinson's sense of humour certainly holds true for Howe's reading. Instead of concentrating on affect, Howe takes a much more cerebral approach to the poet's style. Speaking of "My Life had stood - a
Loaded Gun -" Howe describes Dickinson's writing as "the plain style of Puritan literary tradition" with no "complications of phrasing" (MED 35). This style, however, is precisely what Howe sets out to complicate, demonstrating how "each word is deceptively simple" (MED 35). The rest of My Emily is used to demonstrate the complicated intertextual connections "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -" has with a diverse history of writers, from a Puritan minister to Charles Dickinson. Howe's systematic unearthing of textual references transforms the reading of the "deceptively simple" poem into a complex scholarly exercise.
A similar exercise to unearth the origins of a seemingly simple language could be initiated for My Angle. However, Magee's mimicry of Dickinson's intertextualism is a far less scholarly undertaking. In much the same way Dickinson "pulled text from text"
(MED 29), Magee draws from textual fragments to construct a collage of cultural artifacts. Yet Magee uses a distinctly less literary set of source texts; instead of uncovering the master philosophic and literary authors of the Western tradition - as
Dickinson does - Magee uses the language of Hollywood movie reviews, fan websites, corporate advertising, and other "low" cultural expressions of Internet communication.
MyAngie may have the same intertextual make-up that Howe demonstrates in a
Dickinson poem, yet the resonance are far more familiar to contemporary readership than, say, the Puritan narratives of the seventeenth century (which Howe turns up in her
"archeology"). Where Dickinson drew from "geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology" (MED 21), Magee draws from
the pop-culture stores of Internet prattle - not to say that the prattle does not yield
interesting and compelling poetic effects. Although Magee chooses some word
combinations that are hardly common ("Mermaid-obsessed underwear model" [11];
"Guatemalan Calico" [31]; "Shriek biscuit sector knack" [35]), the recurring themes of
celebrity culture, sex, and fame offer an accessible set of cultural references for the
television-watching audience. The names of John and Yoko (35), The Matrix (39), or
Dairy Queen (31) are more familiar to an average audience than, for example, the names 71 of Jonathan Edwards or Robert Browning. In effect, instead of "a mystic separation between poetic visions and ordinary living" (Howe MED 13), My Angie dissolves the mystic separation until the ordinary and poetic indistinguishably merge.
Although My Angie never derogates Howe's scholarly and politically-minded research per se, the epigraph does cite My Emily in such a way that demonstrates
Magee's subtle jest toward her project. The citation reads: "Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connections and connotation? Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence?" (Howe MED 11). Howe's serious use of the term "polices" loses its weighty political meaning in this context, where the word immediately evokes
Angie Dickinson's now kitschy role as "policewoman." The second quotation of the epigraphy immediately following the statement from Howe, further reduces the
seriousness of Howe's questions. It simply reads: "Hollywood is a verb." Cited from Ed
Ruscha, an artist associated with the Pop Art movement, this simple declarative issued after Howe's pondering questions asserts itself as though answering, definitively, the
issue at hand. Ruscha forgoes philosophical inquiry to assert his control over "questions
of grammar," as though subverting language's controls like the parts of speech has
already been accomplished - as an act of Hollywood, no less. Once again, the two
citations provide an example of how the book situates the concerns of poetry within
mainstream society. The alignment suggests such an overlap might be possible, even if
the resulting combination lacks a sense of political engagement. Connecting questions of
language and poetics to popular culture, and relying on the justifications of affect and entertainment, MyAngie suggests a lighthearted approach the lyric is as worthwhile as a scholarly and political one.
Identity Play Online: From Abstract Theory to Lived Experience
In its parody of My Emily Dickinson, Magee perceptibly shifts away from an approach of scholarship and abstract theory, and towards concerns associated with the lived experience of reader. This connection between poetic practice and lived experience also has significant implications for the lyric subject of My Angie, which, I argue, is representative of the way subjectivities are constructed in online environments. Much like the parody, the lyric subject transforms a practice associated with serious theory into a playful exploration of mainstream culture.
The specific aspect of mainstream culture that concerns the lyric subject is the phenomenon of role-playing in online environments. The purely textual and/or graphical environments like Multi-Dser-Domains (MUDs), instant-messaging software, and
Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG, like World of Warcraft), alter the possibilities for enacting the different aspects of one's identity. As Turkle's research in this area has demonstrated, the opportunities for exploring alter-egos and multiple aspects of the "self greatly increase when physical markers of identity (the style of dress, the colour of skin, the visibility of gender) are replaced with purely textual constructions (212-213). The indicators of culture, gender, and class, never disappear, of course. Yet they are made more malleable in digital environments, where one need only provide a description of an identity, assume a voice, or construct an avatar to explore the 73 possibility of "being" someone different. Like a famous New Yorker cartoon asserts, "on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."
As a consequence of this "identity play" online, the principles of often inaccessible scholarly theory on gender studies, queer theory, and postcolonial theory enters the experience of average individuals. These schools of thought have emphasized the inherently constructed nature of identity, even in what assume to be its "natural" and
"biological" aspects. Role-playing online brings these notions of constructed identity into
the lives of individuals outside of academic communities, creating a means for identity
theory to become identity reality. The phenomenon is most pronounced in Turkle's
investigations of gender online, in which her interviews reveal the kinds of gender
performances described in a text like Judith Butler's Gender Trouble - a text relying on
the theoretical foundations of Freud, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. Although few
participants would even be aware of Butler (and certainly never refer to her work in
describing their experiences), the theoretical premise of Butler's work - that gender and
sexuality is constructed through categories instilled on individuals through false
narratives of naturalness and normalcy, and these categories are not in fact stable or given
realities - reoccur frequently in the answers of Turkle's participants. Butler's ideas are so
prominent in Turkle's findings, in fact, that Turkle labels one of her subsections "Gender
Trouble" (212).
In online environments, individual users can experiment with the possibilities of
identity through the interaction with others. So too, in My Angie, the lyric subject can
explore a number of roles based on the interplay between the contributing authors of the 74 collection. Although multiple and distributed identities characterize any number of postmodern texts, My Angle and other Google sculpted texts are unique in the way those multiple subjectivities are constructed from the language of everyday communication.
Consequently, the now-established psychological framework of multiple subjectivities materializes through a process that quite literally relies on the lived experiences of people outside of literary and scholarly communities. The language, although fragmented, remains distinctly that of the non-poet, the language of individuals, corporations, and advertisers as it exists in the world outside of literature.
Magee has commented on the search engine's ability to reflect the language often overlooked as unpoetic:
One of the things which was a revelation to me was the quasi-oldSkool sounds of what I equate to either manic b-boy Instant Message ranting, or manic teenage (grrrl) IM chat (eg "I am soooooooo interested") - that mis was a kind of speech which was everywhere and which had an architecture of its own but was sort of unrecognized too. Flarf brings that to the fore in a way that seems much closer to the lived experience of having to scurry one's self-expression through/into THE MEDIA than any other web-based poetry I've come across. ("The Flarf Files")
To suggest the Internet text inMyAngie expresses "common language" is, of course, a grossly inaccurate claim in the macro view (the demographics of Internet users would suggest the substantial portions of the population are left out of online exchanges). Such a claim also has the tendency to evoke the dangerous rhetoric of Wordsworth's Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. In the Preface, Wordsworth justifies his decision to present "low and rustic life," by suggesting it represents "a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in state of greater simplicity..." (239). Magee's statement on the "unrecognized" language of Instant 75 Messaging and other media experiences does not reflect the patronizing tones often associated with representations of "lowbrow" or "low class" culture. Instead of speaking for these communities, the unmediated language of Internet text (unmediated in its fragments, not in its arrangement) lets the language, as Magee notes, appear much closer to way it does in "lived experience." In terms of representing the common language of the English-speaking community of Internet culture, the accessibility of the references and their wholly transparent language do replicate the familiar expressions of North
American society. Perhaps a more useful* less contentious statement in the Preface is simply an articulation of Wordsworth's desire to write with "language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way" (238).
In both Lyrical Ballads andMyAngie, the "interesting way" that common language is presented often arrives in moments when a rather uncommon elevation of artifice and poetic effect enter the poem. To phrase it plainly: the process is not entirely populist; the poet does have an elevated role to play as the writing subject, and that role is worth considering. When Magee selects and arranges the linguistic fragments, he is using a set of uncommon expertise, a fact that becomes evident as the linguistic output of multiple authors is constructed into distinct and recognizable personas:
If someone who has been - trained — threw Caution - to the "wind" and decided to - whisper - sweet nothings in my ear - what with my Angie Dickinson flip and all - well ... (9) Magee's skillful arrangement creates a number of resonances that could be attributed to
Magee, Emily or Angie. The phrase "has been," especially emphasized because of the hesitating pause proceeding it, could refer to either someone who existed in past (and is now dead, as in Emily) or to a "has been" in the Hollywood sense - a wash-up, someone who has made it big but can no longer attain that former level of success (possibly suggestive of Angie). If this individual is also someone who has been "trained," then was this training that of a poet (indicating either Magee/Emily) or an actor (indicating
Angie)? If this ambiguous "person who has been trained" is also the one whispering into
"my" ear, who exactly is the "my" receiving these messages? Could it be these refer to the "sweet nothings" of Internet text being whispered to Magee? That interpretation could make sense considering Magee does perform an "Angie Dickinson / flip" on the poetry of
Emily Dickinson. Nevertheless, the referents to the pronouns remain unclear. Multiple connotations exist at once, creating the possibility for simultaneous interpretations which all tend to pivot around one of the three writing subjects influencing the book. Angie contributes to content, Emily to the style, and Magee to the specific execution of the lines. In effect, the writing agency is distributed in a textual environment where
Magee/Angie/Emily "play the - disembodied - Voice" (14).
The expertise Magee exhibits in selecting and arranging his bits of found language are significant to defining his role as the writing subject. Although the search engine creates an aleatory method of composition, the poet remains in control of the text in a much more traditional way than My Angie's avant-garde predecessors. As an example, we can observe that Magee's process is almost a full reversal of writing a mesostics. In the writing of a mesostic, the author relinquishes control over which textual fragments will be selected from a source text - a source text that the author has deliberately chosen. In Google sculpting, the source text is what is decided by the aleatory method (the search engine) and the author has full autonomy in selecting the specific textual fragments. Both mesostics and Google sculpting create a hybrid of chance and choice, but Google sculpting grants the poet a greater degree of control over which text will enter into the poem and in what order that text will appear.
One way Magee demonstrates his autonomy in the text is through a careful crafting of subjectivities. As I suggested in reading of "If someone who has been - trained -" above, some of the poems in the collection seem to suggest Magee is behind the lyric voice. Other times, the voice shifts in a manner suggestive of the gender- transgressing role-play found in Turkle's research. At some moments the speaker seems to be distinctly female:
I looked at Myself and Thought "Jeeze, not bad!" A nun with a big heart - "Witch Hat Plaid"-(19)
A five foot seven inch Architecture of Sea Otters Floating up — to Me - from my bra (43)
Other times, the lines are suggestive of self-reflexive musings that Magee might be engaging in, to consider his own poetic practice: " My student "attacks the central ethos"
- / That, plagiarism, constitutes, a, particular, / Kind of cheating that - combines - theft /
& lying & Hunts its own pickle -" (39); "A Devious Couplet tries - to frame - / The 78 perfect Time to flash - His name" (24). Other poems resist the first person entirely and depend on the syntactical construction (or lack of it) to demonstrate the subject's jolted mental narrative:
Her wound apologizes — In public — Like a Sailor — Permeating the postwar years "Like a" throbbing — Hangover —
Excuse — to show His ass — in Public — Like a "Good Idea" — And this goes ON and ON and ON Like a courtier— (51)
In Stan Apps's reading of this poem, he suggests it "evokes a collective national moment
of television watching," with appearances by both Angie Dickinson (in the first stanza,
tipped off by the vaginal reference to "wound" and the timeframe "postwar years") and
Magee (in the second stanza, where the "His" marks a gender shift). Of course, this shift
in of "camera focus" is determined within the structure suggestive of Emily Dickinson's
poetry. Through stylistic inheritances, Emily Dickinson becomes like a director behind
the lens, an omnipresent even if silent presence throughout the text.
So far the observations about the lyric subject have emphasized the connections to
contemporary culture and to Magee's role as the writing subject. Yet the techniques
Magee employs also pay homage to Dickinson's poetry in considerable ways. I will
highlight a few of them here, only because it suggests Magee's technique of socializing
the lyric subject is not as new as it may seem. As Nancy Mayer observes in her
discussion Dickinson's lyric subject, Dickinson rarely retreated into interiority in the way
the Romantic era lyric subject did (par. 2). Instead of escaping the chaos of society to find 79 solitude in the landscape, Mayer suggests that female writers of Dickinson's era - including Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and Dickinson herself- tended to investigate subjectivity within social landscapes (Mayer par 2). In other words, the exploration of the self was conducted through the interactions of others, instead of isolation (Mayer par. 2).
Likewise, Magee's lyric subject is constructed through the interaction of other language users in a highly social process.
In another approach to Dickinson's lyric subject, Margaret Dickie goes as far to use a Nietzschean concept of "the surplus of individuality" to suggest Dickinson's lyric subject rejects the notion of the singular, coherent, perfectly defined self, as is often assumed by the Romantic era lyric (540- 542). Dickie describes Dickinson's lyric subject as one that "moves in and out of identities. She figures, refigures, and figures again. Now audience, now artists, she is a creature without a core" (548). The description could easily be applied to MyAngie in which the free movement through the consciousnesses of
Magee, Emily and Angie create a similar "creature without core."
Another aspect of Dickinson's style that has particular resonance in contemporary culture is her signature shifts in subject matter and style. As one scholar observes,
"dramatic and abrupt changes in focus, tone, and imagery, often between mundane and cosmic matters, are among Dickinson's best-known poetic techniques" (Short 773).
Embracing this fragmentary style, MyAngie rarely expresses what could be called a fluid thought process. Although Ron Silliman compares the disjointed fragments of Magee's poems to the "jump cuts" of Hollywood cinema ("I Know That Some People Are Going to"), the technique may not be as new as the comparison suggests. The connections 80 between the aesthetics of Internet culture and Dickinson's poetry suggest that Magee has found a form of lyric poetry that links a contemporary and historic style. It seems, despite the moment of history in which one is writing, "connections between unconnected things are the unreal reality of poetry" (Howe MED 77). Yet My Angie suggests that such an abstract theory of poetry can still connect to the realities of lived experience.
The Carnivalesque Laughter of Flarf
In an online review on his popular blog, Ron Silliman suggests that, "fifty years from now, when people are writing without irony of 'the classics of flarf,' one of the works that will turn up on that relatively short list will be Michael Magee's My Angie
Dickinson " ("I Know That Some People Are Going to"). To understand the tone of My
Angie and the ethos informing its practice, it is essential to acknowledge the contemporary avant-garde practice in which Magee takes part: flarf. Similar to other aspects of My Angie discussed so far, flarf diminishes some of the presumed distance between poetry and popular culture by embracing forms of literary production that may be deemed intellectually undemanding or even "trashy" (Degentesh).
According to the "Flarf Files" found online, the origins of the Flarfist Collective began when Gary Sullivan submitted an intentionally "bad poem" to the vanity press
Sullivan, Magee, Kasey Silem Mohammad, Katie Degentesh, and Maria Damon. Its practice soon grew away from its original premise, although the use of search engines and a general aesthetic remained intact. As Mohammad explains:
The initial aesthetics of Flarf went largely unarticulated, but they can probably be approximated by the following recipe: deliberate shapelessness of content, form, spelling, and thought in general, with liberal borrowing from internet chat-room drivel and spam scripts, often with the intention of achieving a studied blend of the offensive, the sentimental, and the infantile. ("The Flarf Files")
To demonstrate this aesthetic, I can easily turn to any number of instances in My Angle in which the poetry combines shock value, informal language, sexual innuendo, and politically incorret statements. Consider the following scene:
Masturbating on canvas above the arches, With a crucifix and - screaming - "Let's break out the Holy Water!" A curious self-revealing - A bottle of "little jesus"- Abandoned in a shopping - cart - Or insect/crucifix hybrid A Crotch - with - A Crucifix (61)
The overt sexual references in this passage might not be so shocking if they did not involve images that some would consider sacred. This irreverence for the sensitivity of the audience is further demonstrated in vulgar lines like, "his entire cock is a dirty rat"
(34) or "spanking, spanks, spanked hard" (29). Although they make for humourous reading at times, the lines are uapologetically audacious, and, at times, even distasteful.
Hence, the flarf spirit is achieved by an immersion in language not often considered
"poetic," but part of daily existence, just the same. 82 Although the use of markedly colloquial language may seem like an egalitarian approach to writing poetry, as Dan Hoy's argues, flarf s "uncritical use of corporate algorithms" entails substantially undemocratic implications. In his essay published in
Jacket Hoy points out that textual material of flarf draws from search results which are
"selectively hierarchical" and essentially undemocratic representations of the actual availability of Internet material. Because of filtration and ranking methods - which
Google never makes entirely transparent - the search results are affected by Google's capitalist agenda. Thus, the language flarf draws from is a rather distorted view of the
"truth" or "reality" of Internet content. Since Hoy's original article numerous challenges have deflated some of the robustness of his argument10. For the purposes of this discussion, we may observe that the expectation for the Flarfist Collective to take an ideological stand against Google's suspect practices is not entirely realistic. Search engines, including their possibly deplorable corporate agendas, are an undeniable aspect of the daily interactions with information and culture online. Flarf s engagement with
Google as a language tool is indicative of its ethos, which from the very beginning was set against exalting the practice of poetry as through it were separate from the activities of mass culture. Like the method of writing bad poetry and getting it published anyway,
10 Michael Gottleib's "Googling Flarf directly addresses some of Hoy's arguments. For instance, Gottleib points to Pop Art and Cubism to suggest the art world has a long precedent for co-opting of "commercial expressions." Gottleib also raises a valid distinction between the selection of tools the artist uses and the methods of its actual practice. In a satirical jab at Hoy, Gottleib asks whether coin-tossing in the I-Ching might also be interpreted as implicating poetry in the capitalist system. As Rick Snyder points out, "Hoy's article largely operates on the presumption that Flarfists are ignorant of the ways in which Web tools such as Google work." The use of Google does not necessarily mean the writer is ignorant of its corporate agenda. 83 the process of using Google can be interpreted as a way of laughing at the ridiculousness of the status of poetry and language in popular culture by knowingly participating in its absurdities - not boycotting it from afar and commenting on its atrocities in verse.
The tone of ridicule and general laughter brings up another important element of the Flarfist Collective: the considerable value placed on public performance, community, and reestablishing the social context of poetry. In a Jacket speacial issue featuring flarf,
Rick Snyder finds the Flarfist readings so important that he opens his piece with a description of one of their events:
This is what you should know - this is not like any other POETRY reading. I mean people heckle and wisecrack and shout and wear bunny ears and pee themselves while crying and screaming 'Awwwwwwwww Yeah!' and 'Cid Corman!' Bruce Andrews actually laughs in the audience. (Boyer)
Contrasting these characteristics to the more somber tones of Language and post-
Language poetry readings, Snyder concludes that Flarf readings have a stronger connection with Cabaret Voltaire performances than to contemporary avant-garde readings. Indeed, as Snyder notes, the Flarfist practice is comparable to Dada techniques in many ways, including the use of "chance procedures, collage, humor, and virulent social critique." The public performance creates "a form of entertainment and a source of pleasure, rather than as an adjunct to theories of discourse, identity, and power ... an art form whose content is not secondary to its performance" (Snyder). As appropriate as a comparison to Dadaism may be, the connection to performance reestablishes a much earlier link to lyric poetry, which traces its origins to an oral culture where performance was the only means of distributing poetry. As W. R. Johnson observes, the act of silent reading brought on by the printing press contributed to the disconnection between poetry 84 and its audience (7). Encouraged by a Puritan ethic based on the "individual and his inner light" and the "fragmentation of society and subsequent alienation of the poet," writing poetry became a specialized role, removed from any social context (Johnson The Idea of
Lyric 6-7). As Gordon Williams describes the transformation:
The [Greek] lyric poets wrote their poems for performance on specific social occasions like drinking-parties, celebrations of various sorts such as that held for returning victors at the games, hymns to be sung at temples during religious festivals, and many more... In all this, an account could be given of poetic activity which related the poet directly to the society in which he lived. But gradually, during the fourth and third centuries, the social occasions which, by their very nature, instigated poetic activity, died away and a new phenomenon appeared: the scholar-poet who worked as a literary expert in a great library like that at Alexandria and wrote poetry as a mere part of his activity. These poets took a step which was decisive for later poetry: they continued to write the same sort of poetry as earlier poets had done, but, instead ode having real social occasions for which their poems were designed, they treated the occasions part of the imaginative structures of their poems. So they wrote hymns without any thought of a religious performance; they wrote drinking-songs without parties in prospect; they wrote epitaphs without any idea of having them inscribed on a tombstone, (qtd. in Waters 8-9)
William's account traces a transformation from poetry's direct link to societal activity to one of abstraction. Of course, the Flarfists commitment to performance and festivals cannot reverse the situation, and yet it does signal a perceptible shift back to the ritualistic function of poetry.
In addition to the social functions of entertainment and celebration, poetry has also traditionally fulfilled a public role in political discourse. Snyder's description the
"virulent social critique" at these readings is not inaccurate. However, the political gesture is far removed from the work of a poet like Howe, who represent the serious work of an individual expert whose primary means of communicating is the book. In / contrast, with all the liberating power of Bakhtin's carnival laughter, the Flarfist 85 Collective, and especially their readings, demonstrates an act of collective ridicule against the dominant assumptions of poetry. Instead of emphasizing the intellectual and aesthetic concerns of poetry (the use of theory, and musicality of language), the focus in flarf is on its entertainment value or the often unrefined connections to mainstream culture. In the same way that the medieval carnival provided a safe space for subverting the repressive authorities of church and law, the communal organization of the Flarfist
Collective offers the safety of collective action, which is often necessary to rebel against the establishment. In My Angie, the lines that might incite this carnival laughter are often indicated on the page by mocking the contrived poetic language of lyric convention. The text apostrophizes with exaggeration: "Oh dream maker - / A Fateful and Fatal / Sexual encounter!" (19); "Oh, Heavenly Dog! Ah, Prom Night Roadie!" (54); "Oh William
Shatner" (50). In hyperbolic exaggeration of the artificiality of poetic language - language usually directed at a more serious addressee like a muse or deity, rather than a prom night roadie or Shatner - these lines provide a humourous combination of formal language and popular subject matter. When looking a slightly longer passage, the parody of poetic language is even more pronounced:
Nay - near superhuman said - Show me the Kournikova hate-mail - Show me the ways to button up buttons - That have forgotten they're buttons - Show me the Buzz that was — Show me the way - to be - Squishy Can Man! (37)
The contrived use of the word "nay," as well as the anaphora seem out of place next to the references of Kournikova and that final surprising phrase without any discernable connection to the rest of the stanza. The artifice is pronounced in such a way as to 86 generate a humourous discord between poetic language and the realities of popular culture.
I do not suggest Magee is arguing for a poetic practice that can be entirely representative or accessible to a common readership. Nor does Magee directly attack serious work of politically and scholarly-minded poets, so much as he offers an alternative. My Angie provides the possibility for valuing poetry outside of its intellectual and political possibilities by justifying a poetic practice based on considerations of its entertainment value and social function. If, as Sidney claims, the dual role of poetry is to instruct and delight, then My Angie simply leans slightly more towards the later role than to the former. It remains to be seen whether any of Magee's strategies could ever succeed in creating a poetry that speaks for the culture - a possibility I doubt when that culture dismisses poetry as viable form of discourse in the first place. Yet by breaking down at least some of the barriers between poetry and the existence of daily life, Magee's text does engage in dialogue with contemporary culture, speaking with it, if not for it. 87 Chapter 3
Searching for the Lyric in Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry's Apostrophe
The last chapter focused on a search engine text with obvious and immediate connections with the lyric tradition. A lyric reading of My'Angie Dickinson was a natural choice, given its use of Emily Dickinson's lyric structures and Magee's somewhat traditional role as an author who "constructs" a text mediating on identity. The same cannot be said for the topic of this chapter, nor can a lyric reading be initiated with quite so natural an application. Contrasting My Angie, Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-
Henry's Apostrophe rarely embraces the defining characteristics of lyric genre, and in many cases noticeably undermines them.
The text is so experimental, in fact, that some authorities in the poetry community have challenged its very status as poetry. In an interview in the journal Open Letter, avant-garde poet and scholar Christian Bok relates an experience in which the book aroused considerable controversy. While serving on the jury for the 2006 Governor
General's Award, Bok encountered an issue when Apostrophe's submission was held back from the jurors. The reasons for the delay were never disclosed, but the Canada
Council representative dealing with issue, in Bok's own words, "seemed to be intimating that the office couldn't decide whether or not the work was actually a legitimate book of poetry" (Percy 123).
Considering the method used to write Apostrophe, the reasons for challenging its legitimacy are evident - that is, if the criteria being used for such an assessment were based on more conventional definitions of poetry. These traditional definitions of the 88 poetic enterprise are precisely what Apostrophe succeeds in overturning, beginning with the role of the "poet" itself. Essentially, the Apostrophe authors take Magee's method of manually "stitching together" (Magee 4) textual fragments, and automates the process using a Perl script. After their initial conceptual design and code-work, Kennedy and
Wershler-Henry take no part in the process of selecting and arranging the text, meaning the actions usually associated with the human poet are surrendered entirely to the algorithm.
The program begins with a poem entitled "apostrophe (ninety-four)," which
Kennedy wrote 1993 ("wrote" meaning he generated the words with his human mind and body - nothing is automated yet) (Kennedy and Wershler-Henry apostrophe 286). The poem consists of over a hundred unrelated sentences, each beginning with the phrase
"you are." The first three sentences are:
you are a deftly turned phrase, an etymological landscape, a home by the sea • you are a compilation of more than 60 samples overlaid on top of a digitally synthesized '70s funk groove • you are the message on a cassette tape long after it has been recorded over (8)
The program manipulates these lines by extracting each phrase following "you are," and the using it as a search string in a commercial search engine (Alta Vista was used for some of the first poems generated, and Google for the rest) (Kennedy and Wershler-
Henry apostrophe 293). The program then enters the Web pages found in the search and forages them for any sentences containing the phrase "you are." If any are found, they are retrieved all the way to the period and placed in succession in the body of the poem, with the search string (the line from the original poem) as the title. Whereas the writing process of My Angle Dickinson is described as "Google sculpting," Apostrophe is better 89 described as "Google mining," because the process actually enters the depths of the pages and extracts the material without regard to sequencing (or "sculpting"). In effect, the book1 is an extended premise of Kennedy's original poem, yet unique in its massive sprawl of diverse voices, writing styles and content of Internet text, which appears without substantial editing2. The lack of an identifiable "poet" who is "writing" or
"composing" the language (in any traditional sense of those words, at least) challenges the very premise of the lyric genre: how can any a poem express a lyric subject without a poet actively constructing the markers of voice, thought, experience, and identity?
Further straining Apostrophe's relationship to the lyric, its methods also evoke numerous avant-garde projects of the past century, many of which harbour distinctly anti- lyric sentiments. Apostrophe's automated writing process, for example, surrenders the agency of the writer with an aleatory mechanism comparable to the chance operations of
Cage or Jackson MacLow, or their precursors in Dadaism. The replacement of the author by machine is also significant, as it extends the project to diminishing the writing subject in a way suggestive of Language writing. Finally, the online version of the text, which creates a sprawling hypertext version on the screen, realizes the project of overcoming the structure of the book. The departure from the structure of the bound page is comparable to a shuffle text, or McCaffery and Nichol's vision of the "book as machine."
Apostrophe also has an online version (www.apostropheengine.com), but for the purposes of extracting stable textual examples, the book will be the source of all quoted material in this chapter. More details on the web-based version will follow. 2 The author's notes do acknowledge that in a few cases searches were re-run when initially no results were generated, or in a few cases, alternate versions were generated at a later date (Kennedy and Wershler-Henry Apostrophe 293). This can be interpreted as a form of "editing" the original found content. To risk reiterating the obvious, then, the connections to the avant-garde are numerous and easy to establish given Apostrophe's experimental methods.
Despite being aware of the text's experimentalism, upon first reading Apostrophe, and in subsequent readings as well, I was struck by the text's strong evocation of lyric effects: the feeling of a speaking subject, the intimacy of hearing sincere confessions, the transparency of language, the direct address to an audience, and the condensation of expression in each sentence. Yet with such a saturation of experimental tactics, I wondered whether a lyric reading of the text could be possible - or more importantly, convincing - given its underlying radicalism. More important still, I wondered what insight such a reading would yield for the lyric, for genre in general, or perhaps for
Apostrophe itself.
Once initiated, the strategy of reading Apostrophe as a gesture toward the lyric generated a surprisingly genuine revelation: in what seem to be mutilations of lyric conventions, the text asserts the inescapable realities of writing in the digital medium. Far from abolishing lyric convention entirely, the transgressions succeed in adapting the underlying functions of certain lyric conventions to suit the digital environment. The material conditions of digitized information changes the possibilities of thinking about the lyric subject, brevity, and direct address. As a result, a digital text will alter how these conventions manifest. Likewise, any critical approach must reconsider the established ways of measuring what constitutes the lyric - and poetry, more generally - in digital environments. 91 Social Production and the (Lack of) Lyric Subject
Apostrophe is comprised of a myriad of voices, ranging from the emphatic expressions of informal communication ("you are sooooo coming to this show with me"
[175]), to the lyrics to Ray Charles's "You are So Beautiful to Me" (128), to a long line of (you know) "you are a redneck if:" jokes (227). There are even moments of heartfelt intimacies: "you are so beautiful when you sleep • you are new, but I know who you are"
(184). These are but a few examples of the diverse authors constituting the Apostrophe text. Far from being an expression of an individual consciousness, Apostrophe can boast no single writing subject in the traditional sense, and offers instead what could be seen as an amalgamation of discrete lyric subjects (each sentence being the product of a different author). The traditional concept of the poet, as an individual genius working alone to construct a unique expression of the singular consciousness, is all but eradicated. Instead, the poet's role seemingly abandoned, the program presents a cold mechanical method of textual assembly that dehumanizes the writing process. This characterization of the text is, of course, only one interpretation, based on criteria for writing in a pre-digital world.
If we consider the ways in which the concepts of subjectivity and authorship
change in digital environments, Apostrophe takes on a far more human quality. As
Hayles argues, there is a fundamental change in the way subjectivity is conceptualized
when it is expressed through digitized information. To articulate this change in the status
of information, Hayles constructs a paradigm contrasting the dichotomies of presence and
absence (as information manifests in the physical world) with one of pattern and
randomness (as information exists in a digital realm). The presence/absence paradigm 92 quite suitably fits the traditional image of the writing subject, which sees the poet as a discrete entity from the outside world. The poet acts in isolation, retreating to a place where the body and mind is isolated from the outer chaos of society. Here, the subject expresses the inner life of the mind, as though that mind were a separable entity from the exterior world in which it dwells. In contrast, the digital medium, "a medium as fluid and changeable as water," is made up of information less bounded by the conditions of physical existence (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 26). Consequently, the information of digital environments is characterized by a malleable, unstable condition, where, as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thesis, "striking a key can effect massive changes in the entire text" (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 26). In the same way contemporary culture allows us to conceive of money in bank accounts rather than physical presence of cash, or DNA evidence replacing eyewitness accounts of a crime, information patterns, rather than the physical presence of matter, becomes the means of conceptualizing meaning (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 27).
The consequences of the pattern/randomness paradigm on subjectivity are considerable. Instead of the "self being conceived as a self-contained entity, differentiated from the outside world by discrete bodily boundaries, the individuals made up purely of information patterns partake in fluctuating "feedback loops" between self, others, machines, and dataflow (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 27). Actualizing this condition of digital subjectivity, Apostrophe accesses, and then manipulates the purely textual, purely digital information that make up the speaking subjects online. Like 93 the fluid movement between interconnected nodes in a data network, the distant voices find themselves side by side in a single system of digital data:
you are brothers in the same office in some banal level • you are a new owner, you may buy a house and have the kitchen remodelled before moving in • you are the funniest man I no and he hottiest 2!!! sloane. you are awesome!! Hope you like this collage!! It's the background on my MySpace page (73)
In this example, the sober tone of the first two sentences slips unexpectedly into the informal style of the last, complete with spelling mistakes and over-enthusiastic use of exclamation points. Although they remain discrete utterances, the authors are unbound by their physical location on the planet and their time in history. Unknown to each other, these fragments of autonomous consciousness are able to connect within a network of digital information in ways less possible in the material world. Hence, the lyric subjects of Apostrophe — that is, the authors of each sentence - reflect an environment where it is more appropriate to think of identity in terms of multiple connections with others, rather than isolated minds in solitude.
The interconnected nature of information signals significantly alters the role of the poet. The poet is less a constructor of the text than a facilitator of the environment in which multiple authors come together. In the working notes to Apostrophe, the authors introduce their project with a metaphor borrowed from Christopher Dewdney's "Parasite
Maintence," in which the mind of the poet is equated with a telescope ("Apostrophe,
Working Notes v.3 October 2001" 49). Envisioning the process of writing as one of receiving "signals," the poet becomes "data-harvester" of the "ambient signals that surround all of us" (Kennedy and Wershler-Henry "Apostrophe, Working Notes" 49).
Aided by the capabilities of digital environments, the task of the poet is not so much to 94 generate new material, as it is to manipulate the excesses of material already available to cut, paste, reorder, or perhaps just reframe as poetry.
Although the concept of pattern and randomness or "poet as telescope" may seem like an abstract aesthetic metaphors, the principles of interconnectedness and the social production of meaning has a tangible connection to lived experiences online. In Benkler's extensive survey of information technology in contemporary networked economy, he emphasizes the role individuals play in the social production of knowledge and culture.
Although there have been communal projects throughout history, digital technology and networked information systems have drastically increased both the scale and complexity of social production (Benkler 68). Examples include open-source coding, peer-to-peer networks (like Napster or Frostwire), the SETI@Home project, NASA's Clickworks, and
Wikipedia - all of which are platforms that thrive on the participation of its users. Unlike a pre-digital culture, in which content was monopolized by big media companies, in a digital culture, the subject is not merely a consumer in cultural exchanges, but one of many active content creators. Embracing this phenomenon of social production,
Apostrophe surrenders the control of the individual creator to the participation of the masses. Of course, in the case of Apostrophe that participation is involuntary (the text is extracted unbeknownst to the author). Yet the parallel still holds: the search engine, with
its ability to implicate the average Internet users into a multi-authored work, creates the kind of social production quite common in digital environments.
Although it seems paradoxical, the transgressions of lyric subjectivity that have
been discussed thus far unexpectedly satisfy what Adorno considers to be one of the key 95 aspects of the lyric genre: "the collective undercurrent" ("On Lyric Poetry" 46). As
Adorno argues in "On Lyric Poetry and Society" (1957), despite the seemingly insular nature of lyric poetry, the genre has always had an inherent social nature. Even when the lyric subject detaches from society and slips away from the social noise in order to hear more clearly the inner workings of the mind, the very act of retreating to interiority implies a context in which that escape would be necessary (such as the reasons for the poet to feel alienated from the society or the privileging of the individual in an ego- centered culture) (Adorno "On Lyric Poetry" 45-46). The key function of the lyric, says
Adorno, is to articulate the culturally-specific relationship between individual and society
("On Lyric Poetry" 46). To translate this principle for Apostrophe, the very need to destroy a discernable lyric subject comments on the cultural conditions warranting such an abandonment of the singular self. The transgression represents, in other words, the digital environment in which singular authorship is no longer the only viable means of producing cultural artifacts.
Stefans suggests that Adorno's theory of the social lyric makes the genre particularly suitable digital environments, where they lyric can become "an activity rather than cultural product" and "a machine that negotiates the individual with the world as represented by the references, the signifiers in language" {Fashionable Noise 150).
Instead of the elitist, bourgeois expression of privileged individuals with the access to the cultural capital to create poetry, the lyric is instead a device to articulate general conditions of being, knowing, and existing in contemporary culture. In addition to lyric subjectivity, the "cultural undercurrent" that Adorno describes can also be demonstrated in the other ways that Apostrophe transgresses the lyric, including the convention of brevity.
Lyric Brevity: Constraining Entropy
As Lev Manovich points out, the methods of assemblage, pastiche and collage are by no means new techniques in the art world, but the functionalities of digital media do make these methods possible on new scales (The Language of New Media 218). The functions of copy, cut, paste, and the modular nature of programming languages like
HTML means that vast amounts of material can be generated with minimal physical effort. Unhindered by many of the constraints of the physical world (the cost of paper, cost and time distribution, or the physical labour of textual construction), the Internet's very nature makes the excessive amounts of textual material not only easy, but economically viable as well. Consequently, these inherent qualities of digital information fail to promote the brevity and condensation of expressions usually associated with the lyric genre. As Stefans observes, "lyrics are usually characterized by tight, even recursive
(in the case of sestinas), structures, a formal quality that is readily appreciable by the reader who would have no time for longer poems - epics and 'life-work'-scaled otyects"(Fashionable Noise 148). Stefans proposes this "emphasis on condensed expression" may play an important role in "putting a stop to the forces of entropy" in digital environments, which would otherwise leave a digital text to lose the intensity of its communicative effect (Fashionable Noise 149). Although Apostrophe resists brevity in any conventional sense, I argue that the architectures in the text determining its length and form are suggestive of the way information is organized and structured in digital environments.
The excess, repetition, and sprawl made possible in digital environments are made evident on the online version of Apostrophe (www.apostropheengine.ca). The Apostrophe engine, as the authors have named the program, operates with the same basic principle as the book. The user can click on any one of the lines of the original "Apostrophe" poem, and generate results drawn from a current search (reflecting the content of the Internet at the time of reading/using). This "live" version of the poem means the text is always in flux; each time the reader visits the site, more than likely, a new poem will be generated.
In each new poem the lines become active hyperlinks as well, which again activates the engine to generate another poem. The reader can therefore click through innumerable possible reading paths, and in each case create a new sequence of poems. The resulting expanse of "you are" sentences is undoubtedly an exercise in excess, suggesting the
"entropic" loss intensity and effect, as the text spawls ever further.
Although "brevity" is hardly appropriate descriptor fox Apostrophe - even in its book form, which fills two-hundred eight pages with densely packed type - the concept of condensation does not entirely escape the text; the concision merely manifests in a manner more appropriate to the way information is structured in digital media. Curiously, this distinctly digital way of thinking of brevity is actually produced by an ancient poetic form: catalogue poem. The catalogue poem is an extensive inventory, a listing seemingly banal facts linked by a common category. The example the Apostrophe authors point to is
The Catalogue of Ships in Homer's Illiad (Kennedy and Wershler-Henry Apostrophe 98 286). As the authors explain, the tradition of the catalogue poem is committed to investigating the potentials of excessive lists, yet, despite its length, the form is unexpectedly one of compression {Apostrophe 286). The very nature of the catalogue poem is one of exclusion; the list may be long, but parameters are set to exclude more than it leaves in. Its role "is to be reductive, to squeeze all the possibilities to that a world of information has to offer into a definitive set" (Kennedy and Wershler-Henry
Apostrophe 286). In Apostrophe that "definitive set" is determined by a number of parameters. The content included in the catalogue must be Internet text, must be reachable by search engine, must appear on Web pages containing the search term, and must contain the phrase "you are." The number of sentences in each poem is also limited by a set number of maximum phrases (or maximum pages accessed, if that happens first)
(Kennedy and Wershler-Henry Apostrophe 287-288). The result is a selection - a reduction - of a larger body of available material. In this light, Apostrophe may be considered a filtration and selection tool, a machine abbreviating the total mass of
Internet text reachable by the search engine.
Similar to the interpretation of lyric subjectivity presented earlier, the distorted view of lyric "brevity" represents a larger "cultural undercurrent" of Internet communities. Particularly in those communities that aggregate vast quantities of information (Slashdot, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Digg.com), systems that organize and differentiate material are essential to making it of any use or meaning to its users. As the authors of Apostrophe, note in their afterword, "when faced with an infinitude of text [on the Internet], the choice of what to read - or write, for that matter - is both vital and largely arbitrary" (286-287). Determining "what to read" requires systems to determine the relevancy, accuracy, or just plain quality of information at hand. Hence, we see the architectures of information on the Internet like the peer accreditation system of Slashdot or Craigslists, or the organic networks that arise between commonly-themed blogs3. As
Benkler notes, these systems overcome a first-generation Internet criticism known as "the
Babel objection," which argued that the unprecedented "information overload" of the
Web would result in a chaotic competition of voices, in which no one gets heard except for the traditional powers with the financial and cultural power to differentiate themselves
(Benkler 77). In this respect, the architectures of information on the Internet and the catalogue poem fufil similar functions. Like structures of information online, the catalogue poem suceeds in sjtfting through a superabundance of material to make it useable (conveniently located in one place) and relevant (in its new frame as poetry), at least more so than when the information stood on its own.
In an interesting byproduct of its own design, the text of Apostrophe demonstrates its own exhaustibility. At one point, the program accesses a page containing
"Apostrophe," as Kennedy wrote it in 1993, and proceeds to duplicate the original inside its own adaptation (109). In another instance, the authors make a direct appearance in a
On Slashdot, user feedback ranks the top stories in a complex system in which the users are rated as well. If, therefore, a user tries to take advantage of the system or valdalize the content, users will give that user a low ranking and prevent his further participation on the site (Benkler 78). In a similar system of peer-enforcement, Craigslist forgoes administrative policing of the site in favour a system where users can flags advertisements that are fraudulent or against the site's stated rules. Lastly, the interconnection of blogs arises organically, as a natural consequence of bloggers who link to other blogs discussing similar interests (Benkler 253-253). Often these networks form communities where discussions are exchanged. garbled mix of the original poem: "you are being - 52 Object Wershler-Henry and
Kennedy page 5 plenty irrational • you are a self-consum - 53 Object Wershler-Henry and Kennedy page 6 - ing artifact" (189). Like informational "noise," as Hayles uses the term, the unintended interruptions to the expected patterns of communication create unforeseeable content in the messages (How We Became Posthuman 32-33). In this case, the message indicates that, even in the digital world, neither content nor subject matter is infinite.
Apostrophe and the Lyric "You": I-Thou and the URL
M. H. Abrams defines apostrophe in his Glossary of Literary Terms as, "a direct and explict address either to an absent person or to an abstract or nonhuman entity. Often the effect is of high formality, or else of a sudden emotional impetus" (182). As Jonathan
Culler observes, the highly contrived formality of the apostrophic address causes many critics to gloss over it in their analysis, or else ignore it entirely (60). Culler explains the prevailing attitude toward apostrophe assumes the device is "an inherited element now devoid of significance" or even "radical, embarrassing, pretentious, and mystificatory"
(Culler 60). When Shelley turns in his famous address - "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being ..." - apostrophe's discord with contemporary language usage is
evident. Shelley's line evokes a sense of what is almost discomfort with a form of poetic
speech that now seems forced and embarrassing to the modern ear. Yet the trope may
form some connection to the communicative acts in the Internet age, inasmuch as, as the
authors of Apostrophe note, "the trope of apostrophe is, like a Web URL (universal
resource locator), a form of address" (Kennedy and Wershler-Henry "Apostrophe, Working Notes" 55). In more ways than just this, Apostrophe takes a lyric trope once dismissed for its obsolescence and gives it new relevance for readers in the age of the
Internet.
Apostrophe, it should be noted, also has considerable relevance for the discussion of the lyric. The trope is, as Barbara Johnson describes, "a rhetorical device that has come to seem almost synonymous with the lyric voice" (26). Johnson's statement derives from
"Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion" (1986), an essay which the Apostrophe authors identify in their notes as the inspiration for Kennedy's original poem {Apostrophe 287).
Interpreting Johnson's description of the complex, and at times contradictory, effects of the apostrophic address, the Apostrophe authors propose a dual function for apostrophe that motivates their own interest in using the device (Kennedy and Wershler-Henry
Apostrophe 287). Because this concept is central to their aim, and to this discussion, I will quote directly from their succinct explanation:
Shelley's address - "O wild West Wind" - is also addressing the reader: you are the wild West Wind. As Johnson notes, this is a complex gesture. You, the reader, are now both responsible for the poem and yet somehow being spoken for, by a poet, of all people. It is this tension between responsibility and alienation that apostrophe attempts to capture. {Apostrophe 287)
The dual sense of responsibility and alienation are appropriate for a text living in and thriving on the Internet, an environment where those experiences are palpably felt. To see the where the sense of responsibility comes from, I will refer to the crux of Benkler's argument about the changes to the networked information economy. In a rather optimistic outlook on the situation, Benkler suggests that, unlike a pre-digital world, an individual in the Internet age has the means necessary to create meaningful content and distribute it to the world. Yet that empowerment creates an immense sense of responsibility for the content being created. Much like the problems of representation encountered in Human
Resources, the dangers of "speaking for" and misrepresenting or over-simplifying the experience of a group are considerable. Thus, as the Apostrophe authors suggest, when encountering text telling you who "you are" the experience can be one of connection, sympathy, and responsibility to the text, or, conversely, it can be an experience of disconnection, indignity, and alienation. Or, as is often the case in Apostrophe, the text can arouse a contradiction between a reader's connection to and alienation from the speakers in the text.
The effect of direct address varies sentence by sentence, but a reader can observe that some sentences create more of a sense of responsibility to the speaking subject than others. In the following selection, the potential sympathy for the speaker is perceptible:
you are damn right I would have done anything to have stopped the brutal carnage wrought upon innocent civilians; it may be disgusting to you, but it a heartbreaking for me to watch a friend, with his face half-blown away, racked with pain and dying as he drowned in his own blood (49)
As W. R. Johnson argues, all instances of "you" in a poem, even those are addressed to a non-human entity, "are indirectly referring to the reader of the poem" (3). In the passage above, the "you" instigates a direct dialogue with the reader, implying a context in which a longer conversation is taking place: what could the reader have possibly said before this statement to make the author confirm he/she was "damn right"? As well, the situation clearly refers to an incident of violence of some kind, but the exact details of the event are available for interpretation: is this speaker a soldier referring to an experience with war? Is the speaker a civilian who has experienced an act of terrorism? The interpretation will largely rely on the experience a reader brings to the text, making the connection between reader and speaking subject a highly personal one.
Although apostrophe may appear like an outward motion, an act pointing outside the self rather than in, Culler suggests the device is a means of affirming the identity of the speaking subject (60). The reason derives from the fact that the speaker of an apostrophic line calls attention to, not the content of the message, but the communicative act itself (60). Consequently, in the passage above, the apostrophic address suggests a context of communication; it establishes a speaker and listener, and perhaps even specific details about their identities. Apostrophe affirms the presence of the / in the poem, even when that /never appears on the page, for the simple reason that someone who addresses is indeed a "someone" and not just anonymous language on the page. The assumption that there are real people living real lives behind the words on the page grants the mechanically constructed string utterances a degree of affect.
Given the diversity of Apostrophe's material, the selection above is by no means representative the entire text. The highly intimate nature of the "heartbreaking" experience related above generates a greater potential for affect than, for example, the following selection:
you are to deal with Revenue Canada by correspondence only unless you are contacted by an official or employee of Revenue Canada for a personal meeting in which case you will be permitted to go on the premises (27)
The content and form of this sentence do not suggest an identifiable human author in the same way the previous selection. Instead of an emotional human experience, the sentence is more suggestive of a faceless bureaucratic or legal authority relaying objective information. Considering this information might not have any actual connection to the reader's experience (the reader might not be Canadian, and might not have any connection to Revenue Canada or even know what that is), the statement proclaiming who "you are" - who the "reader is" - might create a greater sense of alienation from the speaker than it does a sense of responsibility. Nevertheless, the sentence still indicates an
/ behind these words, even if that / is a nameless government authority.
The simultaneous effects of connection and distance generated by Apostrophe's sentences are not unique to this text alone. The condition is, in fact, connected to a more general experience of reading the lyric. If, as Johnson suggests, apostrophe is almost
"synonymous with the lyric voice" ("Apostrophe, Animation" 26), then this connection may account for some of the reason why Apostrophe retains an identifiably lyric "feel," despite its experimentalism. Indeed, one of the ways literary critics often conceive of the traditional lyric is through Mill's famous aphorism describing poetry as an "overheard" utterance. The second-person address in Apostrophe generates a similar circumstance of listening into conversations that are not necessarily intended for the reader. The "you" may indirectly refer to the reader of the poem, but when a statement appears like, "you are such a fighter and give inspiration and strength to so many" (225), the reader encounters evidence of an addressee other than himself/herself. Even though the "you" might indirectly refer to the reader of the poem in all cases, when that address to "you" is directly meant for another addressee, the reader is estranged from the original context of the utterance. Because a reader's sense of connection to the content of these sentences is contingent upon what the reader brings to the text from personal experience, not all the examples I have provided here will affect reader in the same way. The moments of self- recognition are obviously different for each person, yet there are some loose categories that might apply to a way most readers encounter the content. As one suggestion, the speaker might express a statement a reader wishes to hear: "you are the one who can learn • you are smarter than me" (224); "you are ready to be helped through this, I'll be right here" (226). Or, the reader may recognize the truth in less than complimentary assertions: "you are hard to work with" (228); "you are paying for the privilege of being lied to, conned, brainwashed and deceived; kept occupied with masses of trivia that conceals much subversive material" (234). There are also moments when the text catches the reader in the act: "you are making a critical error here which is that texts somehow have meaning outside of context" (232); "you are looking for earth-shattering news, this is not the book for you" (26); "you are reading so fast" (228); "you are still reading, get in touch, and I'll send you a fruitcake by way of appreciation" (136). Countless other experiences may apply, and may be unique to each reader, but as Kennedy and Wershler-
Henry note, in general, "apostrophe implicates the reader in the production of excess information" (Apostrophe 287).
In Three Voices of Poetry, Eliot comments on the observable decline in the category of poetry addressing an identifiable audience (3). Eliot divides all poetic utterance into three categories: first, "the voice of the poet talking to himself-or to nobody," second, "the voice of the poet addressing an audience," and third, "the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking" (2). Although Eliot
concedes these voices often overlap (19), he maintains the first category, the voice of the poet speaking to the self or nobody, has predominantly replaced the other two categories.
As W.R. Johnson observes when concurring with the argument of Three Voices, this
"meditative" form of poetry creates a "virtual disappearance of the lyric You" (8). If
Johnson's observations are even partially correct, and poetry after Modernism has tended
to diminish the I-You (or I-Thou) relationship, then a text consisting entirely of sentences
addressing "you" contradicts this trend. Curiously, instead of radical departure from
poetic convention, Apostrophe^ apostrophes signal a return, a resurrection of a once
irrelevant poetic form. Interestingly, the device of apostrophe itself involves "language's
capacity to give life and human form to something dead or inanimate," demonstrating the
"ineradicable tendency of language to animate whatever it addresses" (Johnson
"Apostrophe, Animation" 32). Simply by calling it into existence, Apostrophe gives new
life to apostrophe, making it manifest unequivocally on the page and in the discourse
surrounding the book (exemplified here). Furthermore, apostrophe accomplishes this
resurrection by granting an outmoded form of artifice a way of connecting to the
contemporary reader through the paradox of alienation/empowerment made familiar by
Internet communication. As a result, the once "embarrassing" experience of reading
apostrophe is made relevant and perhaps even familiar — maybe even more so than other
contemporary poetic voices.
Literary tastes have interpreted the device of apostrophe in divergent ways
throughout history. The use of apostrophe is, therefore, a reminder of how radically the perspectives on writing can shift alongside cultural perceptions. When Adorno describes
"the poem as philosophical sundial telling the time of history" ("On Lyric Poetry" 46), he describes the potential for a poem to call attention to the specific conditions of a given culture, including conceptions of authorship, cultural production, and poetic device.
Apostrophe may turn the sundial into a digital clock, but its function of "telling the time of history" still manifests in numerous ways. One way of attending to this unique contemporariness is by looking back, by placing innovative techniques within a context of traditions like the lyric genre. Although Apostrophe directly subverts the expected conditions of the genre, those transgressions generate a discourse on the fate of the lyric - and perhaps even poetry itself- in contemporary digital writing environments. Chapter Four
The Onscreen Lyric:
Translating a Genre Across Media
In The Gutenberg Elegies: the Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994), Sven
Birkerts unconditionally asserts that "being on-line and having subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations" (219). Indirectly referring to Birkerts and theorists like him, Linda Hutcheon explains a "prevailing cliche" in media theory, which assumes that screen-based interactive modes excel at only one view of the world: the view representing the material world beyond the self, or what
Descartes calls res extensia (14). What these media cannot portray more easily, according to these proponents, is res cogitans, "the space of the mind" (Hutcheon 14). Because the lyric has traditionally been associated with this "space of the mind," and "subjective experience of depth," the logical conclusion would be to assume the fragmented, surface- level and distracted character of new media environments is inherently incompatible with lyric poetry.
Instead of dwelling on the optimistic/pessimistic discourses surrounding the digitization of reading space, this chapter focuses on how the enactment of interiority, both of the subject and the reader, undergoes a process of transcoding and translation as poetry moves from page to screen. The two terms are borrowed from Hutcheon's A
Theory of Adaptation (2005) in which they are used to describe the transformations in both physical codes (letters, images) and cultural conventions (conventions of film narrative, for instance) that occur when works are adapted across media (16). Applying these concepts, the following chapter demonstrates how "non-literal" equivalents occur between the two sets of material signifiers (printed ink to multimedia functionalities) and cultural codes (reading culture to media culture). In other words, the analysis argues that literary techniques may manifest differently on the screen, but they can still enact the interior reflections and meditative reading spaces that characterize lyric poetry on the page.
Admittedly, comparing onscreen poems to the conventions of print may seem to perpetuate one of the common weaknesses of digital poetics. As Hayles notes in Writing
Machines, literary theory and criticism is "shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print" (29-30). Such criticism tends to rely on print conventions and even uphold them as primary, instead of developing a radically unique set of codes for the digital medium. By assuming a framework of translations, the intention is not to imply a hierarchy between the original effect on the page and its adaptation on the screen, as though the translation were somehow secondary and therefore lesser. Like Hayles, I acknowledge the need for media-specific approaches. Media studies pundits from
Marshall McLuhan ("the medium is the message") to Walter Ong (his study on the innate differences between oral and written culture) have established, quite definitively, that each medium's processes of creation, reception, and distribution create its own unique signifying systems. At the same time, as Bolter and Grusin argue in Remediation, because all media is the remediation of other media, the best way to theorize a medium is through the ways it can "honor, rival, and revise" other media (15). To consider media in isolation ignores the interconnected system of existing cultural codes that naturally inform the reception and subsequent theorizing of new media modes. If, as Benjamin suggests, the primary role of translation is "expressing the reciprocal relations between languages,"
("The Task of the Translator" 72) then one way of making the unique idiom of digital poetry audible is by comparing its expressive acts on the screen to those on the page.
Lyric Interiority: Externalizing the Processes of the Mind ,
The lyric has traditionally served as a space on the page where language and the inner workings of the mind come together. From Frye's description of the "oracular rhythm of the mind" (The Anatomy of Criticism 271) to Wordsworth's famous statement referring to the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (240), the lyric genre has been defined in terms evoking the performance of mental operations. Although Abrams's
"greater Romantic lyric" is only a subset of a larger whole, his description of the lyric subject's journey to self-discovery is worth noting as a concrete example of internal reflection:
The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory^ thought, anticipation, and the feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation. ("Structure and Style" 528)
The relationship to the landscape and the circular structure described above are unique to the greater Romantic lyric. However, the description captures how the movement of a Ill lyric poem is often propelled by thought and reflection, and can externalize the inner workings of the mind1.
As individualistic as the expression of a mind may be, one of the pleasures of reading lyric poetry - one that will have substantial significance for later discussions - is what W. R. Johnson describes as its "universal experience" (4). Adorno posits a similar argument, suggesting that one of the fundamental characteristics of the lyric is its ability to present universal truths in the form of individual experience, even though he qualifies
"not that what the lyric poem expresses must be immediately equivalent to what everyone experiences" ("On Lyric Poetry and Society 38). Like Adorno acknowledges, any claim to a real "universal" experience is unfounded. Nevertheless, both Johnson and Adorno do imply a valid connection between the lyric poem and its reader. Although the phenomenological experience of reading poetry is undoubtedly a subjective one, we can assume that one of the common occurrences in reading a lyric expression of interiority is the reader's moment of self-recognition.
In the previous three chapters, the reading of interiority was complicated by notions of distributed and multiple subjectivities. Unlike the Romantic lyric, in which the speaker retreats from society, subjects dwelling in the interconnected spaces of digital
1 A lyric expression based on the processes of internal thought is, as Abrams acknowledges, a uniquely Romantic construct ("Structure and Style" 534). A Pindaric ode, for example, would project philosophical, moral, or historical insights through the use of allegory and a "ceremonious bardic voice" designed for public performance (Abrams "Structure and Style" 543). My discussion uses the Romantic lyric as a basis of comparison not only because of its influence on subsequent lyric practice but also because it emphasizes the enactment of interiority that is the topic of this discussion. As well, because my comparison is between the screen and page, the oral lyric is outside the scope of this chapter. environments pursue a form of self-expression based in "feedback loops" with the outer world. As I argued in the case of poetry generators and search engines, when the subject interacts with the external world - with the machine and other language users - agency is distributed between all parties involved. The same condition of distributed agency occurs onscreen, creating a similar social and fragmented version of the lyric subject. Needless to say, this form of lyric subjectivity resists the linear progression of thought that I have been using to describe "interiority" thus far. Nevertheless, these poems do represent the mental processes associated with interiority; they just externalize those processes using techniques unique to the screen medium.
In, for example, Leevi Lehto's website Get a Google Poem, a participatory model of writing poetry creates a direct link between the poem and the reader's thought process.
As I suggested above, the speaker of lyric poem often acts as representation of the reader by conveying experiences that might connect to the reader's own life. Get a Google
Poem eliminates the "middleman" (the speaking subject) to make the reader immediately experience the mental experience instigated by the poem. In other words, the reading experience not only reflects but also enacts a contemplative mental process.
Upon first encountering the Get a Google Poem, the reader is presented with a front-page mimicking the Google search engine's clean minimalist layout: uncluttered text on a white background, Google's logo and a text input box to enter search terms. The familiar interface invites the user to enter a word or phrase, for the purpose of generating search results - the same premise of the Google site itself. The difference is, instead of generating a search result page, as Google does, the algorithm of Get a Google Poem parses the search results into disjunctive stanzas. The resulting output provides a collage of disjointed phrases, all of which are variations on the theme of the original search terms
- which are, of course, words chosen by the reader. Hence, the very existence of the poem relies on the reader's interaction with the interface, and, more specifically, the reader's process of thinking through and negotiating possible poetic subject matters. The decision of which words to enter is highly personal and subjective. Whether the search string ends up being something of interest to the individual, something trying to surface in the subconscious, or, as it is often the case, the reader's name, the output reflects not only something about the external world of language use but also generates insights into minds the readers know very well: their own.
Although the user has autonomy over a number of options (the maximum number of Google pages searched, the language of the search, "linebreak sensitivity": low/medium/high/maximum), the actual selection of the text remains out of the user's control. To a great degree, then, the reader is at the mercy of a number of external influences: Lehto who programmed the tool, Google's search algorithms, and an untold number of anonymous authors on the Internet, who wrote the words in the first place.
Undeniably, the language of the poem is not the reader's own, and yet the program does succeed in generating a poem that represents the reader. If language operates as a receptacle of culture and the self exists as receptacle of language, then Get a Google
Poem demonstrates how the interior/exterior divide is highly arbitrary. As danah boyd's research on social networking has demonstrated, this process of materializing the self through a community of speakers is a common strategy online. Looking specifically at Friendster and MySpace, boyd reveals how "writing community" through "friending" other users is a way of visibly performing identity on screen. The self is articulated not through an inner retreat and solitary meditation but through the expressions of others - you are who your friends are.
Despite the distributed agency in the writing, the process retains a markedly solipsistic character. The "Googlism" function is a prime example of this narcissism at work. Created by Paul Cherry and Chris Morton , Googlism self-identifies as "a fun tool to see what Google 'thinks' of certain topics and people" ("Googlism - About").
Although a user can submit any search term, on any subject matter, to create a Googlism, the tool is famous for a process where users submit their own names to see the instances where they have been mentioned on the Web. In the output of a Googlism, the name (or other search string chosen) is the first word of each line (like anaphora, if this were meant to be a poem - which is never explicitly indicated on the site). The name is then followed by "is" and the text drawn from the search results. As an example:
poetry is passion poetry is for real people poetry is a political act" poetry is complete nonsense poetry is a destructive force by Stevens poetry is the drug of choice poetry is a sudden process of verbal compression poetry is the sudden process of verbal compression poetry is powerful
2 Although Cherry and Morton originally created the Googlism program, the site is currently owned and operated by the Australian Company, Domain Activea. The corporatization of Googlism exemplifies a strong tendency for popular grassroots sites attracting many users to be co-opted by corporations, for the purpose of selling advertising space or collecting marking information. News Corp's purchase of MySpace or Google's acquisition of YouTube are two other examples. poetry is plucking at the poetry is for poets ("Googlism for 'Poetry'" generated 12 Feb 08)
Lehto hijacks the Googlism mechanism to create his own version of the program. In it, he replaces each "is" with a different transitive verb from Eliot's "The Waste Land." As an example, the search term "poetry" was submitted immediately after the above Googlism was generated, and the following output resulted:
poetry walks among passion poetry surrenders to for real people poetry plucks out a political act" poetry carries complete nonsense poetry strives for a destructive force by stevens poetry reaches for the drug of choice poetry waits for a sudden process of verbal compression poetry dies in the sudden process of verbal compression poetry comes up with powerful poetry comes to plucking at the poetry stays in for poets ("Googlism Google Poem for 'Poetry'" 12 Feb 08)
Ever so slightly, both the programmers of Googlism and Eliot enter into the writing process of this poem, further suggesting an exterior, rather interior reflection. Yet reading the resulting poem is a very personal experience if we consider that the exact output being read may never again be generated. Because search results change often, and the program uses live version of the engine, if a reader enters the same search string at a later time, the resulting poem will likely differ. Unless the poem is archived, navigating away from the page could mean the lines on screen will be lost forever, with only the reader's memory to witness its existence. While Abrams's greater Romantic lyric creates a situation where "the landscape becomes the catalyst for memory and meditation" (201), here the digital landscape can function similarly as a catalyst for memory and reflection, although a fleeting one.
The interactive design of Get a Google Poem is not the only strategy in digital environments to reflect an internal thought process. Using a much different technique, and highlighting a different aspect of online subjectivity, Komninos Zervos's "Life" represents the mind of a writing subject other than the reader. Specifically, "Life" portrays the mental "compartmentalization" that typically occurs when multiple technologies are operated simultaneously. As Turkle's empirical research shows, the simultaneous use of different software applications creates a multiplicity of "selves" that a user negotiates while moving in and out of each window (12-13). Turkle provides a concrete example of this phenomenon (13), but to update her details to include more current Web 2.0 applications (Turkle's references now obsolete Multi-User-Domain spaces): the individual may be multitasking by working on a political blog, while simultaneously writing an email to a parent, instant messaging a significant other, and playing an alter-ego in Second Life. In each application, the individual is enacting different personality traits, and possibly even experimenting with gender or cultural categories. Constantly switching back and forth between windows, the different and even contradictory aspects of the self are negotiated with rapid speed. So too in "Life," a reader is granted the capability to navigate between the four windows and four divergent ways of thinking about life.
"Life" splits the screen into four "windows," each of which contains a single word: love, routine, hierarchy and creation. Each word begins a fixed hypertext sequence made up of short burst of words, which are unrelated except for their connection to the window's theme. The hypertext links may be selected in any combination until the full run of one quadrant has been exhausted. In each window this entails the exhaustion of eight links, except ironically for the "creation" box, in which the poet seems to have been unable to muster enough creativity come up with an eighth link.
Although the linguistic structures of "Life" are disappointing, the conceptual layout is an accurate depiction of subjectivity on the screen. On a single screen, the computer user can transform the representation of the self to simultaneously embody a number of multiple selves. One moment the speaker is describing a predicament of being subject to hierarchy:
I have to send a note when I want to keep my child home from school
A click later the speaker is relating the monotonous routine of having "one sausage roll, one choc milk" everyday of his life. Embodying Hayles's "flickering signifier," this lyric subject is composed of the ephemeral digital signal, meaning "striking a key," or in this case clicking the mouse, radically changes the nature of the information the screen (How
We Became Posthuman 26). In "Life," this complex instability of the self is instilled with the simplest of layouts, suggesting the potential for the screen medium to materialize and externalize the inner workings of the mind, even if that mind is uniquely situated in a digital environment. 118 As Manovich argues in his online essay, "From Externalization of the Psyche to the Implant of Technology," technology has always served as a means of externalizing the mind. Often through a "visualization" or "enactment" of the mind's processes, technology can take the hidden intricacies of thought and communicate it others.
Onscreen poetry operates in much the same way Manovich describes film in his essay, by using techniques unique to the medium - in the case of film, techniques like jump cuts, close ups, superimposed images, slow motion, and flashbacks - to transcend the laws of physical reality and the restrictions of the page, and to depict the inner life of characters.
Even though Get a Google Poem and "Life" both forgo the linear thought process of the
Romantic paradigm, they both succeed in using the unique functionalities of the digital medium to communicate the inner workings of the mind.
Immersive Reading Spaces: Speed Reading and Multimedia Distraction
While the writing subject exists at one end of the "interiority" spectrum, at the
other end, the mental processes associated with the reading process create another set of
concerns for the lyric genre. The concentrated language of traditional lyric poetry typically rewards in-depth readings; the reader can uncover metrical or rhyme patterns,
insights into the diction, phrasing, or structure of the poem. In less traditional lyric poetry, elements like fragmented syntax or semantic complexities also necessitate a
contemplative reading space in order to consider the implications of these techniques.
The material conditions of reading from the page naturally afford these opportunities for
contemplation: a reader can control the pace of reading, pause, or choose to re-read
sections. These rather basic controls seem simple, almost given, until the medium is changed and these conditions of reading are no longer guaranteed - as is the case when poetry moves to the screen.
Electronic media create a number of challenges for creating the absorptive space necessary to read poetry. Of course, personal taste and interest will greatly affect how each reader encounters a text and whether or not it is considered "absorbing3." The observations presented here are merely meant to identify available tactics, some of them purely practical and others aesthetic, but in each case employing functionalities of the onscreen medium in ways that either encourage or discourage meditative readings.
To demonstrate some of the challenges of reading online, William Poundstone's
"White Poem" provides a useful example. The design of the poem is fairly simple: a cinematic presentation flashes fragments of lyric verse; each line appears, holds static for reading, and then, like a PowerPoint presentation, automatically switches to the next
"slide." The reader does not have any control over this movement, which is significant
considering the text is a Travesty, which naturally invites a slow and recursive reading process. A Travesty is the name is the name given to the output text of the Travesty
Because of the subjective nature of reading, the analysis in this section implicitly relies on an approach from reader response theory. Specifically, my analysis assumes the presence of interpretive communities, as Stanley Fish defines the term in Interpreting the Variorum. Although a reader is fully capable of having a unique experience with a text, at the same time, readers often share a common set of cultural knowledge that generates similar expectations in a text. In the case of digital poetry, the shared cultural knowledge derives from the common experiences in multimedia environments - the expectation to see hyperlinks, the ability to manipulate sequence with control panels, the multiplicity of stimuli. Not all readers will have the same experience with these technologies, but a common set of expectations, based on a North American technically literate readership, is assumed. As well, because the entire structure of onscreen poems remains hidden at any one time, the highly temporal rather than structural analysis of reader response makes it additionally appropriate. poetry generator designed by Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke. The generator manipulates a source text by splicing the content based on the frequency of a set of characters in the original text4. In an interview with Stefans in the Iowa Review Online,
Poundstone explains how he used the program:
My modus operandi is to pick a specific theme—in this case, whiteness, as in Emily Dickinson's lace-white Indian Pipe—and then assemble a large and diverse assortment of quotes bearing on that theme. (I keep a "commonplace book" so it's easy to search for every incidental mention of "white.") These quotes are input into the travesty program. The program outputs a kind of marvelous rant on the chosen theme, from which I pick the phrases I want to use in the poem. (Stefans "An Interview with William Poundstone")
Reflecting this complex process, "White Poem" is filled with engaging language from its source texts, which merits close readings:
the general bluish waxy appearance of whiteness - both found and murdered in pre-Raphaelite paintings
Then, too, she is seen - such whiteness! Certain accessory points of his virility
4 A site that hosts a free online version of the generator explains its process as follows: "suppose we're doing an order 3 travesty. Travesty analyzes the original text to find all the combinations of two characters (one less than the order) that appear in the text. It also constructs a table of all of the letters that follow those two-letter combinations and how often those letters follow the combination. Travesty then takes the first two fetters of the original text, looks up that character sequence in the table, and randomly selects the next letter according to the frequencies in the entry. It adds the new letter to the beginning string of two characters and uses the second and third characters in that string as the new two-letter combination to look up. This process continues until Travesty produces the requested number of characters of output" ("Poetry Links - Travesty Generator"). Like most texts constructed with aleatory procedures, the ambiguous referents and lack of continuity require the reader to actively participate in the construction of meaning. In
"White Poem," however, any attempts to make such meanings are thwarted by the pace of the animation. Unlike the interface of the book, where the reader can dwell indefinitely with the poem and see its entire structure at once, in "White Poem" the presentation only offers one fragment of the poem at a time. As well, the rapid speed at which the text changes prevents a slow and meditative reading. Although it is not impossible to finish reading the text before it disappears, the transitions require a hurried pace, almost scan- reading at times. The reader is denied the chance to slow down and consider the subtler aspects of layout, meter, imagery, or even what these fragments from the Travesty program might reveal about the usage of "white" in Poundstone's collected quotes. The
sense of frustration is emphasized further by a stilted chord that plays each time the text changes. The familiar notes are a recording of the Window's "error sound," a noise which
ordinarily signals that the user has made a request that the program deems impossible. In this case, it is the impossibility of accommodating of reading the poem.
It should be noted that although much of the text might be missed the first time
"White Poem" plays, the consequences are not dire; what comes around once in the
dataflow will come around again. Once the all the lines of "White Poem" have made
their appearance and disappearance on screen, the poem starts up again automatically.
The continuous looping of text is similar to a news ticker on the bottom of a television
screen, or the advertisement of an electronic billboard. Despite the chance to read the
poem again, the pace remains the same, and no controls are offered to alter the speed or pause the performance. Consequently, the reader is prevented from engaging directly with the content; the medium, by making itself known, creates a barrier in between. In this way, "White Poem" performs what Bolter and Grusin call the "double logic of remediation": a sense of "immersion" is created by the transparency of the medium, but simultaneously, its material qualities of the medium also create a sense of
"hypermediacy" (Bolter and Grusin 21). Whereas in print the reader may become unconscious that a book is in hand, in "White Poem" the medium never slips away.
Instead, by interfering with the reading experience, the medium constantly reminds the reader that this is a poem on the screen
The hypermedia/immersive dichotomy is played out to a much different effect another cinematic digital poem, a flash animation piece entitled "Text/Theory." Zervos designed the piece to act in a similar manner as "White Poem" - that is, with the appearance and disappearance of textual fragments in a fixed sequence. In this case, each fragment is either single word or very short phrases, which are each presented in a variety of three dimensional font styles and colours. The short and simple fragments are far easier to read then the lengthy lines of "White Poem." However, the speed at which they change is noticeably more rapid. The words blend into each other in quick progression:
"text - voyage - device - symbol - Old English - romantic - words - sentences - detour
— works —journey — Shakespeare — middle English — modernist — postmodernist — theory leaves..." Even at its rapid-fire speed, the words of "Text/Theory" are easier to absorb than they are in "White Poem" because of a number of tactics the poem employs. Not the least of these tactics is the soundtrack overlaid on the visual animation. Almost in synch with the changing words, a computer-generated, female-sounding voice speaks the text as it appears. Not only does the enunciation make the words easier to "catch" the first time around, but the lifeless voice, lacking any natural inflection, also provides a hypnotic and almost incantatory effect. This is especially true because of the sonic construction of the poem, which revels in the subtle shifts and repetition of sounds: "tespik - sex peak - text speak - text sex - text speak." Close attention is required to differentiate the words, which at times blend together into a single wall of sound, but the vocalization provides an opportunity to experience the enchantment of the line's musicality.
"Text/Theory" also facilitates a more concentrated reading by offering a navigation panel below the poem. Unlike a printed page, "Text/Theory" does not allow the reader to adjust the pace of reading. However, unlike "White Poem," the reader can control the starts and stops of reading. A reader can decide to pause a frame to inspect it more closely or contemplate its meaning. The status arrow can also be moved forward and backward, meaning that a reader has the option to return to a section already played, or to skip ahead. The control is comparable to, although certainly different than, the motion of flipping pages forward and back. A reader can find a particular point of interest, pause there, and consider it at length.
One of those aspects the reader might want to contemplate is the identity of the speaking voice of the poem. Much like the poems already discussed, the subject of
"Text/Theory" is situated between the interior mind of a writing subject and its exterior interactions with technology. In this case, that interaction involves a text-to-speech capability offered by Mac OS/X. Although the female speaking voice may sound immediately familiar to some Mac users, readers less familiar with the program receive a clue to the voice's identity at the end of the poem. Staged on a black screen without text, the last phrase uttered is: "this is the voice of Victoria." Victoria happens to be one of the names given to the voices of the text-to-speech program. Curiously, Komindos consciously chose a feminized voice over a variety of others (which may include, depending on the version of the program: Agnes, Princess, Bruce, Junior, Ralph, Bad
News, Bahh, Bells, Boing, Bubbles, Cellos, Deranged, Good News, Hysterical, Pipe
Organ and Whisper). Male voices were available, as were more mechanized or musical kinds, but the relatively human (although gender-crossing) Victoria was chosen.
As "Victoria" speaks the lines, the confusion between the pronouns becomes evident:
what he say what he say? He say, hey listen I speak, I write words speak, text speak
As the poem's asserts, "that i write is not I." Victoria may say the word "I" but can this refer to Victoria when the text is actually being generated by Zervos? Can a computer ever utter "I" without the word in some way referring to the human who programmed it?
These complexities in the speaking subject not only add another layer of interest, and another reason to "be absorbed" in the text, but they also represent the same kind of subjectivities seen in some of the poems discusses already; an inner thought process - or in this case, a writing process - is articulated through the exterior influences of technology and the voices it generates. The control panel in "Text/Theory" certainly allows a reader to contemplate the complexities of its content. However, granting the reader full control over the navigation of a poem is not the only way to encourage a close reading in a cinematic presentation.
Stefans's often-discussed "Dream Life of Letters" takes the very opposite approach and in fact limits the reader's power to control the poem. During the poem's performance, there are no controls to change the speed or direction of the presentation (no pause, skip, back, or status bar). If a reader wishes to return to a missed word or to replay a section, there are only two rather limiting options. The reader can close the application window
and then reopen it to start the poem again. The other option is to access the index where
segments of the poem can be played in isolation. In both these options, the reader is still
denied the option of pausing of the poem or returning to a single frame.
The controls over the reading environment may be lacking, but the poem still
creates an immersive reading environment through the design of the text's animation.
Morris quite appropriately classifies the poem as literal art, a term coined by John
Cayley to indicate poems that "feature not the stanza, the line, the phrase, or resonant
word but tumbling, morphing, graphical, and semiotic letters" (20). Letters form into
words and words dissemble into letters, using a variety of transitional animations. The
content itself is conceptually interesting because it originates from, as the introduction
explains, a piece of writing Rachel Blau Du Plessis contributed to a roundtable on
sexuality and literature. When Stefans was asked to respond to the rather opaque text5, he
5 The first sentence of Du Plessis's statement illustrates the lack of transparency and overall density that Stefans was working with: '"gin dear hiss delight' sad dough tea bellum me wansin moo van bo drip age tic tock 2 cum 'gender is the night' said Dodie did so by extracting all its individual words, arranging them alphabetically, then reassembling them in a series of concrete poems. These concrete poems became the basis for the animated Flash poem "Dreamlife." As the feminist discourse becomes mediated through a man, machine, and alphabetic constraint, once again a diffusion of the writing subject underlies the action on the screen.
Unlike Poundstone's design, "Dreamlife" proceeds at a pace that rewards concentration: single words unfold one at time, often letter-by-letter. Words evolve slowly, and take time to disappear through exit animations. The movement is unhurried and proceeds within the predicable alphabetic ordering structure that Stefans has set out for the text. Although I have just used "unhurried" and "predictable" do describe the poem, this is not to suggest the text is uninteresting. The visual detail of the piece encourages the reader to attend to the subtle meanings of its animations. As an example, the "I'd sequence" features a number ofl'ds parading from left to right, with the /, that active subject, pushing, prodding, and in some cases rolling its heavy d across the screen.
Turning to another section of the poem, thick bold print proclaims the word ink, before cascading a line of successive inks, eventually merging almost illegibly into the word inner, and then to inscription - as though the transformation from ink to inscription is not a straightforward one. Even though "Dreamlife" denies the free-movement usually afforded in multimedia environments, the poem presents conceptually interesting animation at a pace that its intricacies can be appreciated - but only if the reader devotes
Bellamy once in *Moving Borders*, page TKTK (to come to 2 cum. zzz gindra delite ides aye - ginestra scissors delays, hex you all in ties his duh nigh, to come)" (Du Plessis "Colloquium 4.2"). concentration to the experience. By forcing the audience to watch the screen uninterrupted, the poem denies the option to multitask or become distracted. The design demands concentration, almost more so than the flexible conditions of a book.
Cinematic presentation is not the only way to create an absorptive reading space for lyric poetry. In Patrick Herron's Proximate, a series of both static and animated poems creates what could be compared to a collection of lyric poetry. Linked by common themes and reoccurring personas, the separate poems gather forward momentum as they comment on each other and create the opportunity to contemplate the relationship between each page. Unlike a printed page, however, the Web pages deny the opportunity for non-linear reading. Fixed in a sequence with only one hyperlink per page, the poems have to load in the order Herron has laid them out. A reader can of course skip through pages or uses the "back button" to return to previous poems, but the sequential order remains the same, meaning a poem near the beginning of the sequence cannot be read against a poem near the end without linearly moving through all the poems in between them. The sequence allows for some control, but the screen evokes a distance between reader and poem by denying the "handling" of the physical objects of the poems themselves. ' '
The distance between screen and reader is a reoccurring theme in Proximate that is made evident from the very first screen. In this entryway to the poem, which acts as title page, the word proximate splits into three lines: the i is placed in between prox on the top and mate on the bottom. Already the notion of the "I" being separated out from the other words on screen is depicted visually. As the user moves the mouse over the title, the letter i slides towards the subtitle, "come closer," neighboring close to its right, then turns into ay to make the title read "prox / y / mate" or "proxy-mate." The morphing title offers a multiplicity of meanings connoting both closeness and mediation. Proxy can refer to a representative or agent with the authority to act on another's behalf. In the field of computer science, proxy assumes a different meaning by referring to a type of service that receives the requests of users and forwards them to other servers (its full name is
"proxy server"). Whether it refers to a human or machine, proxy suggests an entity mediating (creating distance) between the subject and its object of communication. At the same time, the full title, proximate, conversely indicates closeness or an immediate relationship between two concepts. Hence, the incongruent logic of all mediation as
Bolter and Grusin describe it: mediation requires close proximity, yet enviably create barriers that distance and alienate.
Despite the opportunity to consider each page at length, the poem often disrupts the a reader's direct absorption of content by making the medium clearly evident. In the second page of the sequence, a text input box requests you to enter "your name." By clicking the button to submit the entry, an expectation is generated to see the name appear elsewhere in the poem. This expectation is thwarted in coming pages when the speaker begins addressing the generic figure "(Your Name Here)," as though a technical glitch has prevented the reader from being part of the poem. The alienating tactic reminds the reader that this is an onscreen poem being read - this mistake could not have happened on the page. The lyric subject of the piece is closer to the Romantic era variety than any other addressed thus far. Curiously, the subject of such "humanist" expression self-identifies as a Web page - a "web page in love," no less. "0 1," the name of the speaker, continuously requests its addressee to "come closer." The request is accompanied by more intimate pleas to "touch me" and "kiss me." Yet the appeal for closeness, no matter how it is expressed, faces an inevitable answer - the very impossibility of ever establishing physical contact in virtual space. Can a Web page ever be touched, no matter how close a person may be to the screen? Even when editing a Web page, the contact is unavoidably mediated by mouse, keyboard, and electrical signal. As Benjamin argues, the question of distance may not be as simple as physical space alone, which has little consequence for creating a feeling of closeness and reverence, or, in other words, a feeling of aura:
We define the aura [of natural objects] as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. ("Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" 222-3)
Physical distance between the object and the onlooker is inconsequential in this description. The only important determinant of aura - that sense of reverence and absorption attached to a work of art - is the presence of an authentic original with a unique physical history. As argued in Benjamin's essay "Unpacking My Library," the book's unique material history (previous owners, publication history, cities it has dwelled in) contribute to a sense of almost mystical attachment to its "object-ness." The digital medium, having no physical original, nor history of physical existence, is denied the accumulation of a past. Consequently, the digital medium, according to Benjamin's theory, is denied the possibility of aura.
"Unpacking My Library" epitomizes the prevailing bibliophilia in Western culture, which denies the opportunity for other media to achieve the same status as the book. Comparisons between print and electronic publishing often reference the "bathtub theory of literature," also known as the "Bolter test," which concludes, rather unsubstantially, that any text that cannot be read in a bathtub or lying in bed cannot possibly be appreciated as literature (Bolter 4; Hayles Writing Machines 36). Although the Bolter test lacks the supportability that would make it a serious threat to further studies in electronic literature, it does articulate a prevailing psychological resistance to any works of literature that do no appear in conventional book form. Despite the observations Birkerts makes about the decline of reading in North American culture, the book maintains its cultural capital as the highest, most legitimate medium for "high art."
This is especially true when the book is compared to more visual and aural media like dance, theatre, sound poetry, or film. As film critic Robert Stam recognizes, both iconophobia (fear of image) and logophilia (the love of words) contribute to a systematic hierarchialization of media (58). The basic rule is: the more the work is made up of words, and words lucidly arranged, the more legitimate the art form.
Whether the love of books translates to the mythologizing of the physical history of the book, as expressed in "Unpacking my Library," or a fixation on the book's physical structure, as exemplified by Stephane Mallarme's "Book as Spiritual
Instrument," bibliophilia demonstrates that dwelling on the physical make-up of the medium (Bolter and Grunsin's hypermedia quality) does not necessarily prohibit an immersive experience with that medium. Even the extreme awareness of technology can prompt an onlooker to become immersed with reverence - an effect represented quite compellingly in a scene in The Education of Henry Adams where Adams stares up to the awesome power of the dynamo, awestruck by his own inability to explain its mechanism, but irrefutably feeling its effects. The technology itself can become the reason for absorption.
Bolter and Grusin point out that the perceived transparency of the medium is, for the most part, culturally-determined (72). What can seem foreign and highly artificial to a culture without experience with a medium can be acculturated into a natural, immersive experience through exposure (72-73). A community's reaction to a medium can become naturalized over time, as the "codes" of representation are learned (Bolter and Grusin 72-
73). When Birkerts describes the difficulty of a reader who "has to wheel and click the cumbersome mouse" (162), the claim is a subjective evaluation of what is to many a far more natural extension of the hand. Keeping in mind this tendency for perceptions to shift over time, the observations made here about technology and immersion are tentative, at best, and destined to alter as culture becomes more naturalized to media reading spaces. However, without suggesting that the immersive quality of any piece can be determined absolutely, there are tactics a poem can employ that either help or hinder reading off the screen. A medium is not, as some media critics have suggested, capable of representing only one kind of experience. Conclusion
Tradition and the Permanence of Edifice
Although Internet culture is undeniably committed to a paradigm of innovation, newness, and impermanence, it also offers valuable insights related to tradition.
Addressing the Supernova Conference of 2007, Internet theorist Clay Shirkey introduces his talk on sustainability and Internet technologies by talking about the sacred Iso Shrine in Japan. Despite the fact that this Shinto shrine has stood at the same location for thirteen-hundred years, Shirkey tells us, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has consistently denied the Japanese government's application for the shrine's status as a World Heritage Site. The reason is straightforward: every twenty years the shrine undergoes a reconstruction ceremony; the old wooden buildings are torn to the ground and new ones are erected in their place. In other words, the structures themselves are not thirteen-hundred years old, just the tradition of rebuilding them. The respect and legitimacy afforded by UNESCO's title is denied because the authorizing body fails to recognize the perpetuation of an ancient tradition within the newness of the structure.
While Shirkey propels the analogy in a different direction19, the principle of the
Iso Shrine naturally connects with a dual aim of the literary enterprise: reinventing
19 Shirkey's speech argues that the tools of social coordination afforded by Internet technologies (wikis, blogs, newsgroups) have greatly increased the ability for projects to succeed outside of commercial paradigms. Shirkey points to the Perl programming language as one example where a large-scale project was successfully developed and sustained without the motivation of profit or any other commercial support. He contrasts this situation to the C++ language developed by AT&T. C++, much like the company, has failed to survive as robustly as Perl. Instead of financial incentive, the dedication of traditions anew, while recognizing the role those new forms play in sustaining tradition.
This reciprocal relationship between present and past is not a radical insight to make about literature, ingrained as the idea is in such canonical works as Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" or Bloom's "Anxiety of Influence." A more striking parallel arises in UNESCO's refusal to recognize the Iso shrine as lasting edifice simply because it fails to fit conventional definitions of that term. Digital poetry has undergone a similar dismissal, based on a resistance to the legitimacy of its literary pursuit. As Hayles notes, some intellectual elite have dismissed electronic literature as "claptrap" ("The Time of
Digital Poetry"187). Sandy Baldwin articulates a similar observation in her foreword to
Funkhouser's Prehistoric Digital Poetry, in which she acknowledges digital poetry's
"true skeptics," assuring the readers "and they do exist":
In this view the computer is intrinsically unsuited for the creative act of writing poetry for a variety of reasons, ranging from the fact of its strict programming to the inverse fact of its lack of a structure for invention. A milder version of this position sees no real poetry yet written in digital media - all flash and no creativity, at least so far. (xv)
Compounding the problem, few established communities exist to counteract these disparaging attitudes. Kenneth Goldsmith observes that digital publishing is "lacking any real kind of broad-based, centralized institutional support" (i). Goldsmith points out that even the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), one of the first and most instrumental digital poetry aggregates, is staffed by only one professor and a few part-time graduate students
(i). Being connected to the University of Buffalo, the EPC is an exception rather than the the supporting community and the ability to radically rebuild are the key determinates of success and longevity in Internet culture. rule, because, as artist and critic Talan Memmott observes, "so much of literary digital practice happens outside of- or out of reach of- the academy's traditional literary values, formal genealogies, and histories" (304). As a consequence of this detachment, digital poetry lacks a centralized community to foster coherent theories and establish its legitimate "literariness."
Even within the community of digital poetry, there is significant disagreement as to the nature and value of writing with digital technologies. Its very name has seen considerable disagreement, having been called at one point or another digital poetry, e- poetry, online poetry, new media poetry and cyberpoetry. Stefans validly observes that digital poetry may not actually constitute its own category, or, conversely, it may not accurately be labeled as poetry at all {Fashionable Noise 43). As Wershler-Henry articulates it: "what we end up producing might not even be 'poetry' in any recognizable use of the word, unless we decide to retain the term as a way of creating some contention within the form" ("Noise in the Channel"). Despite the resistance to clumsy labels and taxonomies, the recent use of poetry generators, search engines, and computer programming by established poets suggests digital culture will inevitably infiltrate poetry, one way or another. The only way for digital poetry "not to exist" would be if it lacked the supporting communities that will witness its existence, and validate its practice through theory. To echo Wershler-Henry, a dialogue must "create some contention" to develop valid methods of approaching these words as poetry, if we are to maintain the label of "poetry" at all. The avant-garde theory typically employed to investigate digital poetry has certainly established a legitimate place within a history of experimentation. Yet, as Dana
Gioia observes in Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture (2004), the "now antiquarian assumptions of Modernism and the avant-garde reflect a culture without radio, talking films, television, video cassettes, computers, cell phones, satellite dishes, and the Internet" (6). As necessary and fruitful as the avant-garde approach is for digital poetry, new models are required to interrogate what it means to write and read poetry in a media-inundated and information-saturated culture. Logically, the same theories that help us to understand the social and cultural implications of digital technologies may also contribute to a firmer understanding of poetry that adopts those technologies. The genre model proposed in the preceding chapters, synthesizing lyric and digital theory, presents one of countless possible approaches to bridge the "literariness" of the poetic tradition with the "contemporariness" of digital experimentation. Ambitious as the undertaking may be for such a limited study, it is hoped that the framework of combining digital cultural studies and literary theory may contribute to the ongoing explorations for viable theoretical approaches to digital poetry. After all, the infancy of digital poetry can in many ways be compared to the infancy of film, which also saw considerable resistance to as an art form in its early days. Not until film theory established its own theory of media- specific codes (mise-en-scene, camera angle, auteur theory) did the medium gain any cultural capital (Naremore 6). As Stefans articulates the situation: "novelty meets with praise; praise provokes attack; and attack demands a theory" {Fashionable Noise 44). 136 Birkerts, writing in 1994, predicts the "life of the near-future," stating, "when everyone is online, when the circuits are crackling, the impulses speeding every which way like thoughts in a fevered brain, we will have to rethink our definitions of individuality and out time-honored ideals of subjective individualism" (220). Instead of lamenting this fact as though it were a loss of the essential human condition, the challenge to humanist visions of subjective individualism can contribute to on-going investigations of what it means to exist in current cultural conditions. As human beings interact with digital technologies, the very notion of identity transforms inside a process of negotiating the influence between self, others, and machine. Consequently, the poetry investigating human subjectivity in a digital age, like the poetry discussed in this thesis, engages with technologies in ways that emphasize the distributed agency among humans, technology, and the community of language users. Throughout the chapters these implications have manifested in diverse ways. The cyborg lyric of Chapter One suggested there may be opportunities to challenge the easy categories of identity that have traditionally dominated with discourses of the "other." The search engine texts of
Chapters Two and Three created opportunities to connect to contemporary readership and reflect the reality of writing in digital landscapes. Lastly, the onscreen poems of Chapter
Four provided insights into how the interior process of thought, emotion, and language may coalesce externally in media other than the page. If the suggestions seem overly optimistic, they are not intended to be projective or absolute. Admittedly, digital subjectivity entails the opposite effects as well: the digital divide establishes an identifiable "other" who, for reasons of systemic social and economic inequities, cannot participate in online life; the opacity of experimental digital poetry may alienate its readership, rather than increase it; and the representation of subjectivities on the screen inevitably involves losses as well as gains.
Whether the approach is idealistic or pessimistic, by considering the conditions of subjectivity in a digital culture, the poems in this study reflect the interactions between human and technologies that characterize current mainstream culture. Our "audiovisual culture," as Gioia describes it, suffers from a lack of these connections between poetry and the general culture, generating an environment "in which writing exists but is no longer the primary means of public discourse" {Disappearing Ink 10). Without suggesting that digital poetry has the power to reverse the situation, Morris proposes digital poetry does offer an opportunity to connect to a broader reading audience:
However resistant they may seem to interpretation, the interfaces of new media poems are likely to be more familiar to contemporary game-playing, net-browsing undergraduates man the sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles that fill their poetry surveys. (31)
Using a set of familiar signifying systems - from the interfaces of Web browsers, net applications, social networking sites, and video games - literary techniques might translate into forms more accessible to readers of the digital age. Whether the process involves tropes, themes, or ways of interacting with language, the accessibility of these ideas suggests the possibility - although distant - to reconnect poetry with readers outside of English literature and creative writing courses.
Inclusiveness is an especially appropriate concept considering the lyric has historically connected with the social context of its audience. From the public performances of ancient lyric songs or medieval bards, to the "expression of the common man" of Wordsworth, to the Beat poets of the 1950s, and all the way Stefans's description of the "machine that negotiates the individual with the world" {Fashionable
Noise 150), the lyric has a long history of wanting to speak to, in the idiom of, its audience. Even in this thesis the principle of inclusiveness reoccurs throughout the chapters: the communal influence on language becomes evident in the Word Count and
Query Count tools; the aesthetic of social production characterizes search engine poetry; and the participatory element of poems like Get a Google Poem offers direct contact between reader and poem. The content and form of digital poetry are undeniably contemporary in many respects. Nevertheless, by investigating the possibilities of subjectivity in the current culture, the poems in this study connect with the longstanding tradition of the lyric genre.
Like the authorities at UNESCO, the literary establishment needs to reconsider the criteria for assessing what constitutes a legitimate expression of tradition. To assume that tradition only manifests as the permanence of edifice, the preservation of specific blueprint specifications, invalidates other ways a work may dialogue with the past.
Digital texts like Human Resources, My Angie Dickinson, Apostrophe, Get a Google
Poem and Proximate undoubtedly alter lyric conventions in many ways. But by
considering how those uniquely digital alterations relate to the broader aims of the lyric project, the analysis can uncover how digital innovation continues, rather than simply
departs from, a literary history extending well before the twentieth century avant-garde.
The genre approach presented in this thesis is only a starting place for such
considerations, and the resulting observations only preliminary and limited. However, by combining literary and digital theory, the analysis begins to merge the gap between experimentalism and tradition - between how the works are uniquely "digital" but still remain "poems." The content and structures of digital poetry may be distinctly contemporary, but a lyric edifice remains intact. Works Cited
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