epoetica

I was planning to respond to the assignment for week 4, focusing on the ideas that I had been developing over the last several weeks.  I found postings by Lori and Zephyr, and my path, quite appropriately, forked away from what I had intended to write about to something new.

Reading Lori’s entry on Karpinski and Howe’s ,  which  ties previous discussions about three-dimensionality to the current one about chance, I was reminded of a work which I had forgotten about, but which I want to share: Brooke M. Campbell’s Choose Your Own Sexuality from .  Campbell’s piece combines poetry, biography, and history under the familiar form of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel to create a queer biography of Emily Dickinson.  Campbell’s piece takes seriously the implications of queer scholarship, shedding light on the general import of such work:  The author is often just as much what he or she is as what he or she isn’t and that creative works reflect this similar tension.  Decision-making is not simply the rational evaluation of two choices, rather they are heavily laden with cultural expectations, social frameworks, habits, law, and deep desires.  Though Campbell’s piece uses the familiar framework of binary choices, the fact that Campbell’s piece is based on actual historical events loads the choices up with the questions: “What happened?” and “What do we want to happen?”  The effect is not to simply fork the work, but to play in the imaginative spaces between the choices, to speculate about possibility.

A similar experience in narrative forking is Scott McCloud’s , a fairly straightforward, early, and lo-fi experiment in digital comic.  Inspired by Zephyr’s comment on Lori’s piece, I was inspired to revisit McCloud’s online comics, and found them to remain interesting, particularly because they employ forking in a way that allows the reader to view both “choices” at once.  [As a sidenote: McCloud’s does not explore forking formally, but it does a great job addressing this experience in the narrative.] .

Zephyr’s entry on “chance timing” shifted my focus towards another aspect of chance.  While Lori’s piece focused on chance as a process of unfolding in the present time, Zephyr’s piece considers chance as a process of recursion [The video, by the way, managed to push so many buttons–dread, fear, happiness, regret, sadness–what an accomplishment.].  So often in life, our experience of the variable is not a process of unfolding as much as it’s an experience of reflection.  What happened?  What did I do?  What might I have done?  What should I have done?  Chance is experienced is a process of reflection, in which we meditate upon how now might have been different.  Or why now is the way it is.

To bring this back to Neruda’s “Ode to Broken Things” is a challenge.  Thinking about Campbell’s Dickinson, for example, I might consider the fact that poet’s work is simply an expression of larger life experiences.  I could write a fork in which Neruda’s poem doesn’t exist.  Something never happened, he was never inspired, it was never written.  Or, I could introduce an internal variable to the piece: A shift in attitude or a shift in narrative structure.  Perhaps I could ditch the speaker’s apparent peace with the continual breakdown of things, and heap blame upon the “hands,” “girls,” “hips,” and “ankles.”  I could turn the poem towards anxiety, frustration, and anger.  Or, I could alter the proposed human action of the final stanza, “Let’s not put all our treasures together…”  None of which makes a great deal of sense or sound particularly appealing.

But to reflect upon the piece might simply be enough—to cling to the writer’s commitments, because those are the only ones that we have.  And, if I had to apply to look at how this insight might work in the field of new media, and I see it clearly addressed in by mIEKAL aND and CamillE BacoS.  A combination of texts in a variety of formats drawn together to meditate on the notion of lost knowledge, dead languages, destroyed formats, and vanished cultures.  From history’s dead ends, MotionText Ferment reaches for the living, as if to suggest that we are all just a hair’s breadth away from annihilation in this renewed era of burning books, cultural imperialism, war, and accelerated technological obsolescence.   Here, things aren’t broken by “invisible deliberate smashers,” but by deliberate forces.  In spite of this difference, both pieces are chances to see things differently.  Neruda accomplishes this through his writing, mIEKAL aND and CamillE BacoS accomplish this through theirs.  The strength of much good hypermedia spins on this potential to provoke reflection in readers—buttons, images, sounds, motion, time—all must function like words to promote this end.

And, to revisit the insights gained from Lori and Zephyr’s pieces, good hypermedia does not necessarily give us choices.  It gives us depth.  It allows us to experience richly.  Sometimes this is accomplished through a nonlinear processes, sometimes through linearity, but they always seem to provide windows into the nonlinear, subjective realm of the reader’s reflection.

I’ve long loved the aesthetic of Aya Karpinska’s/Daniel C. Howe’s three-dimensional poem space in . Although I’m not sure that there’s a substantial, thorough-going literary engagement here (lines such as “Eyes closed / I am / Anywhere” don’t particularly grab me), open.ended … entrances me. Here’s how the authors describe their work:

With real-time 3D rendering & dynamic text generation, open.ended attempts to refigure the poetic experience through spatialization & interaction. As visitors manipulate a joystick to control interlocking geometric surfaces, stanzas, lines, & words move slowly in & out of focus, while dynamically updating text maintains semantic coherence. Order is deliberately ambiguous & multiple readings encouraged as meaning is actively & spatially constructed in collaborative fashion & new potentials for juxtaposition, association & interpretation are revealed.

And not surprisingly, given what I’ve been writing over these weeks, these beautiful little poem-spaces seem to come right out of a dream William Carlos Williams might have had – I wrote last week:

He has activated “blank” space and in this way turned it into what Charles Olson would soon see as a field of energy—a pulsating, fluctuating space that girds the words, as if Williams wants the words themselves to pulsate but, given the limits of the bookbound page, he settles for the surrounding space of the page which is unmarred and open for any appropriation. Further, since “. . . to talk in the American idiom you can’t talk as Shakespeare used to talk, or Milton, or Eliot. You have finally to get away from this pattern of speech and invent another speech . . .”, how else to reinvent language but to do so negatively, taking advantage of the flexibility of the blank space of the page—space that can be shaped, again and again, to reshape in turn the language of Shakespeare, Milton, and Eliot? “I’ve got myself in wrong before the critics by attempting to bring in the idea of mathematics. Of Einstein. Not Einstein, we’ll say, but Einstein’s ideas. The uncertainty of space” (Interviews 45).

Or maybe open.ended is also the opposite of Williams’ dream? Like so many digital poems I’ve looked at, quite in contrast with Williams’ firm belief in the redemptiveness of the particular, the way in which the ground, the ground of history and language, forms us, open.ended seems to be in love with the pure, abstract spaces made possible by the digital – spaces that we may visit but that are seemingly completely independent of the messy, organic world. This abstract quality is only exaggerated with the interactivity built into the poem that not only puts the abstract poem in touch, literally, with the organic world, but that also introduces chance into the poem. The reader/user can move the poem-cube in any direction, moving around, on top, or inside the cube; the reader/user can also double click on any wall of words to “create” the poem as it is simultaneously being read by the authors. But I still argue that this digital poem, just like those by Simon Biggs (see, for example, his web-work ) gives us the illusion of chance, the illusion of genuinely participating in the unfolding of the poem. It’s not unlike a Choose Your Own Adventure book: true, you have three choices, but not only are they predetermined choices, but the predetermined choices also have a predermined outcome set out by the poet/programmer. Thinking about the version of Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes that’s published by Gallimard – here each line of the poem has been cut across the page so that the reader really can construct “cent mille milliard” readings of the poem – how could it be that a bookbound poem offers us genuine chance operations, options for the reader/user creation of a poem that are as close to infinite as possible?

Still! thinking about Williams…and this week’s topic of context is a perfect fit for this passage, tacked onto the end of Part II of “Book Two” of Paterson. In response to his interviewer claiming that certain passages from Paterson “sound just like a fashionable grocery list”, Williams responds: “It is a fashionable grocery list.”

Q: Well - is it poetry?

A: We poets have to talk in a language which is not English. It is the American idiom. Rhythmically it’s organized as a sample of the American idiom…If you say “2 partridges, 2 mallard ducks, a Dungeness crab”…it is, to my mind, poetry.

Q: …you agree that it is a fashionable grocery list.

A: Yes. Anything is good material for poetry. Anything. I’ve said it time and time again…In poetry, you’re listening to two things…you’re listening to the sense, the common sense of what it says. But it says more. That is the difficulty.

It’s as if you only need the ether of “poem”, you only need to “think poem”, and it is. Although I sound naieve even to my own ears, I can’t imagine it any other way - which is why I read the following letter at an event for a writer’s conference in fall 2006 - it was, after all a poetry reading - the venue itself, the attendees, girded whatever was read there and, I assumed, made it all “poem.” I received a handful of puzzled claps at the end.

Dear Owner. How do you do. I am a sudden letter and think whether it was surprised that it is also from I am sorry and Japan. I live in a place called Tokyo in Japan. If March 11 next year comes around, it will become 18 years old. Please hear it, although it becomes somewhat long. Thank you for your consideration. I finish the compulsory education in Japan, and 15 years old. I separated from the family, separated from Tokyo, went to a place called Hokkaido in Japan which is north most, and was allowed to study one season of work of a farmhouse immediately after graduating from a junior high school. One season is finished, and after greeting 16 year old, it is coming to Okinawa in the south in Japan now base and many living of an overseas man is also known, is a place called Okinawa known? The sea and empty are beautiful places to the extent that Japan cannot be thought, since it is a southern island. I am in an island called Izena of a detached building island. He wants to feel work of a tourist home corporally and to memorize it, and I have a talk heard and have you accept, furthermore it is the 2^nd year by this year. When needed for doing work of the farmhous of two years ago, he does not think that it carried out in the interest half. He wanted whether a thing called a natural partner is serious however and to have experienced corporally and to carry out various discovery, and I had you accept.personally and which was performed by having a lot. This time, as soon as it is thought of wanting to progress in front to a slight degree, or already brings close to its target just for a moment and cooks, it is in the state which it began to think and has been accessed. I may be hard to be transmitted and think that it is thought that it does not understand what is considered. But I came by 120% of feeling all the time, and I am still passing enduringly in the feeling. It is earnest. Although it is just surprised at first, I am always earnest and think seriously. I think that one way is progressed and that is must study that it is various until it makes a goal. But he does not do the thing which being refused is used and into which it breaks. It is the situation busily passed by two persons with the mother of the tourist home here everyday now. It is the place which promised itself when the first step which has been decided to be two years, and which had been considered at 18 years old was carried out and became 17 years old at last. Although it is the same accomodations as the work there, in me, it is different. Don’t I have me looked after there? I think that I want you to inquire. Thinking earnestly, putting in concentration and investigating English, it searched, and I wrote hard and was allowed to send a letter. Although it is trouble, I think that he wants a reply. I who have separated from my home from 15 years old have the conditions not changing. It is a live lumpif it sees from parents, although it may be that there are worries in my having myself feel easy most, I consider inside. Since it does not go to work but I am allowed to study, I want to do anything hard. Please consider neither a salary nor such field. It is also saying from me. Unreasonableness does not say. If the letter was opened, I appreciate for it by it. Since English weak was faced, it is glad. Thank you for your consideration. It did not end for a long time. I am sorry. I am sorry at a sudden thing. Family composition—Mother, Father, Grandfather, an elder sister, and younger sister (They are three sisters.) Favorite food is a banana and thick milk. Disagreeable food is chocolate and legumes. Special ability is badminton. He likes moving the body.