Innovative Poet-Programmers of the World Unite!
Review of Loss Pequeño Glazier. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002.
2. Innovative Poetries, Digital & Analog
Digital poetry, Glazier argues, offers the possibility for the next stage in the development of innovative poetries. But what marks poetry as innovative? For one, it "offers the perspective of the multiple 'I'" and, secondly, it recognizes the importance of the materials of writing to writing itself, an engagement with its medium" (22). From William Blake to Gertrude Stein to Charles Olson, certain poetries have engaged in this investigation into the materials of the poem. More recently-and closer to home for Glazier-are the works of Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, and Charles Bernstein. Here print has opened itself up to its materiality and offered that materiality itself as the true focus of the poetic drive. And then there's the emphasis on procedure. Fluxus, John Cage, Jackson MacLow, Emmett Williams-these and many other poets and movements opened up the poem to procedural generation as an attempt to counter or at least qualify the emphasis on the I in the making.
The computer, then, is the for extending these investigations. "As no understanding of digital media can be complete without considering innovative poetic practice, no assessment of contemporary poetry can be complete without consideration of works in digital media" (24). The materiality of writing in a digital medium is marked by the following attributes: the magnetic medium; its compactness and rewritability; its transmissibility; and its kinetic qualities. And this then raises a central question: "What can you do here-in this medium-that you could not do before?" (30). This means that ideally the Web poem (the digital medium Glazier explores) is a text that is not fixed but rather is in a constant state of change. Mobility, transitivity, manipulability, interactivity, programmability, hyperactivity: these are the qualities of Glazier's ideal Web poem, a kind of anti-text that moves from context to dystext.