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.
By George Hartley
3. Hypertext, Narrative, and Ideological Closure
Not all poetry on the Web, however, meets Glazier's criteria. Part of the problem is that from its inception hypertext was dominated by narrative theory and models. The hyperlink could transport the reader-interactor from one narrative block to another in seemingly random paths, and thus appeared to be offering a more open and democratic model of the reader as co-author. Hypertext fiction and poetry operating according to that model certainly offer something apparently new, but in many cases, Glazier argues, "the dawn of a new era is simply used to reinscribe old ideologies, the same set of plot progressions, and the same relentless expression of the mediocre, solipsistic 'I'" (169).
One of the most interesting moments in Glazier's book is his account of an encounter between Michael Joyce (figuring as the established authority of narrative-based hypertext) and John Cayley (figuring as the standard for innovative poet-programmers). In an online hypertext discussion list Cayley, in announcing and championing the release of Alire, a CD collection of new European e-poetry, praised the new work as something operating outside of the "domination of USA-Net-centric 'classic hypertext'" (157). To this announcement Michael Joyce responded by claiming in effect that hypertext as a mode of literature was already so marginalized as a whole in relation to print literature that such a claim of domination was absurd. What interests Glazier in this exchange is Joyce's tone, which Glazier reads as condescending and authoritarian. The point for Glazier is not how large the digital literature world may or may not be but the ways in which it is being shaped and the ideologies which are shaping it. These effects have real consequences for those poets who wish to engage the medium and to entertain the "indefatigable glee of the algorithm" (168). The way a social technology is defined in its infancy matters a great deal in its later developments. "I would like to suggest that the most useful way to consider hypertext is not as a generic medium (a compositional medium that instantiates a number of genres) but as a delivery medium; and that each particular form of practice is the exemplar of an underlying ideology" (91).
The link-node is one material and formal element of hypertext that Glazier examines. On the one hand, the link opens up the printed page to a variety of different possible navigational paths, the emergence of multiple linearities. One important development that the link contributes to is a particular type of reading: "the ability to read linked writings calls on skills of association and depends not on conclusion but occlusion, or an aberration of the eye, literally and homophonously" (37). The link also changes the status and function of the linked word; it now not only operates as one element of a contiguous string of words but now also signifies linkage as such. But the most interesting thing about a link for Glazier is its potential for failure, those moments when the links don't work, when the intended page no longer exists, when the page conveying an error message arises instead. This is as much a part of the poem as any other page the links take us to and becomes a part of the larger text we read.