The hypertext poem

When world gets word: & some principles of hypertext poetry

"For enlightenment, therefore, it is always the second look that is decisive because it overcomes the first impression. If things were generally as they immediately seem, investigation and science would be superfluous. There would be nothing to look for, look through, or look into." (Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 53)

How far from the poem's lyrical heart we have finally strayed is perhaps best seen in hypertext poetry. Not that interactive texts haven't been around nor that even authors from the past (such as Sterne, Joyce, Becket) haven't already anticipated significant aspects of the nonlinear form. The poetic heart's always taken a beating, even in print. At least since Robert Coover, Michael Joyce, Deena Larsen, considered its most famous practitioners, began working in interactive fiction since the late 80s, it's almost become commonplace to think of hypertext (and hypermedia) as a radical reworking of the traditional linear, topical text along the lines of such seminal works as, say, Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story.

While not exactly spelling the death of the author or destroying narrative homogeneity altogether, certainly a different rhetorical writing space has emerged from this changing author and reader relationship: as Jay David Bolter says in Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print, "hypertext authors have set about refashioning the rhetoric of the linear plot, calling into the question the notion that fiction should narrate events in a single, clear order." (129) Language is beginning to image a new world, and it's here, at this word and world gathering facilitated by electronic reading & writing, I locate the "hypertext". Tim Berners-Lee ,inventor of the World Wide Web, has recently spoken, for example, of a need for huge stores of Web data to be"reachable and manageable by Semantic Web tools." Words, images, graphics, recombined in an array of almost limitless trajectories, offer a textual site where the reader can materially interact with the world in a way that's considered only metaphorically possible in the traditional book. Lately even book authors, like David Shields, have imitated the "recombinant or appropriation" techniques of Internet composition to form narratives that comprise solely of materials purposely excerpted from other authors.

If hypertext replaces pen-on-paper technology, poetry's also been radically redefined (or more properly reset) so that our understanding of its scope and limits has had to accommodate the emergence of new radical verse styles such as flarf, sampling, concrete, kinetic & "machine modulated" and architextural poetry etc., styles that seem to flourish in a uniquely sympathetic digitized writing environment. Visual poet Geof Huth has told me, in a recent email correspondence, that interactive poetry as working exclusively within HTML is somewhat outmoded. It's legitimate to speak rather of hybrid types, using 'interactivity' in even broader ways than envisaged by hypertext pioneers (See Chapter 7, "Interactive Fiction" in Writing Space). I'll define "hypertext poetry" then as a type of interactive text either inspired by or harvesting all the resources of Internet technology or software design for e-writing. I've meshed my definition with that of Ted Nelson who as early as 1965 spoke of it simply as "non-sequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen." (Cited in Alex Wright" Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, 208). The most radical word and world interface conceivable.

Kenneth Goldsmith in a recent Poetry Foundation article entitled "Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo" has given what I consider a more contemporary characterization of the dolce stil novo of Web 2.0 interactive writing. The new style, as he says, is one that's been "grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry." If Goldsmith is correct and poetry's become the offspring of virtual language, the very legitimacy and propriety of literary work may have been called into question. Perhaps hypertext is a kind of generic term for any radical rethinking of the origins & technique of poetry writing, one that is, among other things, no respecter of tradition or authorial privilege.

As far as trends go this one seems destined to feed on the forces conspiring to make the printed book extinct. If iPad and Kindle, for example,are replacing the book, it's because "The world, and the future,"as  Internet Evolution writer Daniel W. Rasmus says, "are messy places, however, and something as big as the Internet deserves a deep understanding of the forces at play and the wide range of ways those forces could unfold under differing social, technological, economic, and political situations." Rasmus even going so far as to speak of virtual reality as a realm of "perfect prescience". Internet is seen as a nursery in which explosive forces of "free-floating language" collide randomly and with design to form new poetic galaxies, and poetry innovators as prescient language engineers reconfiguring the abc's of writing. And, of course, Christian Bök speaks of " a poet in the xenotext experiment [who] might become a breed of technician working in a linguistic laboratory." (from The Xenotext Experiment)

But what about poetry as a verbal interactive medium: is it  traditional writing set to new hypertextual (and hypermediated) conditions or a purely avant-garde creation? Is hypertext poetry just an anomaly of a burgeoning electronic communications phenomenon? I think the fairest answer is that interactive poetry (as defined above) is as messy as the world of technology it comes from, and just as circuitous, flexible and experimental. Poet, rather than circumscribing textual space, allows the reader to remake the world through the computer's oftentimes playfully interactive matrices: each poem becoming a world for not just two but potentially limitless number of participants who can literally change the poem as they read (Again Chapter 7, in Writing Space). Poetry's a "messy" world where poet can make claims to a special digitized type of "prescience", and this by virtue of a Web 2.0 language that's processual, spontaneous & ubiquitous to the umpteenth degree.

As I've been attempting to show, poetry and the world mirror each other. Art is a function of epistemology. Poetry as a distinctive type of e-writing reflects changes not just in the way we see & write external reality: the hypertext seems to have given us a different world altogether. Words, sound, and images, both hypertext and hypermedia form the new materials of interactive poetry, and a word and world interaction in which language resolves into a purely visual, iconic, and "programmable" system. Poets (like Huth, Goldsmith) and technical writers (like Tim Berners-Lee, Rasmus), both dealing in first principles or the basic algorithms from which their work arises, can almost speak the same language: media and means of expressions now practically indistinguishable. The Internet is envisaged as a kind of Lockean or Lucretian inquiry into the nature of language and reality but one where artistic work arises as a uniquely interactive collaboration. What are the 'first principles' of this new interactive art?

Interactive poetry may begin with the very smallest particles (after George Brecht and "Fluxus"): letters certainly but even parts of letters themselves.Principle 1 is that 'fragments' have the ability to produce significant artistic forms. In software such as Type is Art: An Interactive Exploration of theTypographic Form, aptly called an "interactive art project", poets, writers, graphics artists rearrange bits of letterforms that have already been (I assume very arbitrarily) classified by name and shape: for example, Ear is the character name for " the small stroke projecting from the top of the lowercase g". Language materials, the traditional thoughts & emotions of lyrical poetry, are actively reconfigured as pictographic representations of a world that, fragmented to begin with, the poet writes "by dragging, scaling and rotating" a given system of "21 distinct parts" variously extracted from the alphabet. Even traditional Lettristes poetics can be easily outdone now that letter shards have been defragmented on the computer screen. A technique that seems collagist to the point almost of being iconoclastic.

And out of the lettered fragments of all potential artistic work comes Principle 2: the creation of  networks of multiple artistic forms, replacing specialization & traditional elitist views of creativity with radical open-endedness. Word Circuits is an example of such a hypertext site designed "for poetry and fiction born to pixels rather than the page--writing that's digital down to its bones",showcasing new media fiction and poetry, hypertext fiction and poetry, and even a cybertext poetry. Its purpose, in the words of site director Robert Kendall, is to exploit all of the non-print avenues for innovative digital means of artistic expression allowable on Web 2.0:

This is a watering hole for new media poetry and fiction--indigenously electronic work that couldn't be realized in print. Hypertext is the mainstay here, but we also deal in more exotic forms of cybertext, which exploit such innovations as text-generating algorithms or animated text that moves and mutates on the screen. Welcome to the world of hypertextual, interactive, self-generating, kinetic, and multimedia poetry and fiction.

 Xylo, for instance, an animated poem featured in the Word Circuits Gallery, is a fully active multimedia poem using Flash technology. It's a kinetic, visual and aural panoply of moving letters and verse lines in which lines of text seem to spring out of  flashing letters, the poem gradually taking shape in each of the screen's quadrants. Letters change colour and shape, and move erratically over the entire textual space. For most of the hypertertext presentation the eye looks through what appears to be a roving rifle scope as if letters were being targeted (as in a video game). And since the poem itself at the end slowly fades & disappears, it's described in the Gallery as a "fleeting, evanescent text...[that] examines the nature of temporality." If the roving eye acts as cross-hairs, the act of creation is doomed to die the moment it's born, an interpretation consistent with a multimedia format. Interestingly, too, its Greek derivative xylo, used to form compound words to mean any wooden object, suggests the word xylon that, in a biblical context, may imply a wooden implement of torture. Now the reader considers the interesting way the broken crossbeams intersect the circle, both vertically and horizontally, to form a type of cross.

Interactive technology is polyvocal, heterogeneous and complex in general and possesses an inherent tendency to change the world and word relationship from which it began into an almost exclusively language and image one. Which transmogrification of the world of reality into images only lies at the core of Principle 3. The supremacy of the visual at the expense of a vanishing outer reality.  But image must be understood here in an important twofold sense (following  Jacques Rancière's The Future of the Image, pp. 6-7): the image as faint copy of its original in the world and image as the "interplay" of significant artistic forms, the sum of which is to disorient the perceiver or reassemble perceptual fields into pure artistic effects. Rancière explains the distinction as follows:

In the first place, the images of art are, as such, dissemblances. Secondly, the image is not exclusive to the visible. There is visibility that does not amount to an image; there are images which consist wholly in words. But the commonest regime of the image is one that presents a relationship between the sayable and the visible, a relationship which plays on both the analogy and the dissemblance between them. This relationship by no means requires the two terms to be materially present. The visible can be arranged in meaningful tropes; words deploy a visibility that can be blinding. (7)

 If we look at Jim Andrews's Vispo, for example, we see a perfect illustration of the tendency of interactive art to offer "a relationship between the sayable and the visible", the "visible" taken here as almost a metaphor for the radical heterogeneity of artistic representation on the Web. Visual poetry (Vispo) is a sort of umbrella term for all the ways multimedia allow us to look out on a radically new world of artistic work made possible by Internet technology: the range of visual 'seeing' extending from standard visual and sound poetry to "db Cinema ("interactive painterly cinema for the internet"), to interactive audio, visual music, and to animisms and pure langu(im)age creations.