Towards a poetry of rioting...

Me, I hate the crowd, the herd. It always seems to me stupid or guilty of vile atrocities...I have never liked the crowd except on days of riot, if even then!...On those days there is a great breath in the air—one feels intoxicated by a human poetry as large as that of nature, but more ardent. (Gustave Flaubert, cited in Hardt & Negri's Commonwealth)

Creating is...a hugeness, an excedence, something which unleashes a surplus of productivity. Now, precisely at a time when labour power is cognitive, the desire for artistic expression presents itself in all places; when the mass of workers transforms itself into a multitude of of singular workers, the artistic act invests the forms of life, and these forms of life become the flesh of the world (Antonio Negri, Art & Multitude)

I would never try to romanticize the recent London riots nor use the term 'poetry' as a radically new aestheticization of mob violence. Yet it is strangely tempting to do so. Marxist thinkers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Commonwealth make the usual sort of case for 'violent overthrow' & reorganization of society along the lines of a utopian notion of the 'common', even going so far as to say that violent acts of resistance, such as we've seen in urban uprisings everywhere, can be seen as a legitimate form of expression against the hierarchies of world capitalism. Mob violence springing almost spontaneously from a base of indignation (in the tradition of 'jacquerie revolts') can even be envisaged as a new sort of poetry of the future: "We might say, then...that we hate the crowd except in its days of rebellion, when it achieves a kind of human poetry." (245)

I like the forward-looking character of this new "human poetry". It's this notion of poetry of rebellion, while interesting as a contemporary poetics & even more interesting as a new, more significant 'avant-garde', that deserves attention. Not the traditional workbench materials of art but the streets have been turned into a collage of images of revolt and threatening mob rule. New media artist David Lewis-Baker, seeing the recent violence as "a surface reflection of a much deeper series of interrelated social and economic problems", has given artistic form to these deeper eruptive forces in his digital conceptual series entitled "London Riots" collages. Though the 'conceptual art' terminology's traditional (sounding even a little outdated), Lewis-Baker constructs from a uniquely new "geography of rebellion" (Hardt & Negri): the most spontaneous & violent type of art imaginable. YouTube has lately posted a video collage (comprising of BBC interviewer, West Indian writer & broadcaster Darcus Howe and background images of post-rioting Croydon) that's much closer to a sense of the "interrelated social and economic problems" than Lewis-Baker's.

I, too, like Flaubert, hate the crowd at its most stupidly violent and moronic but like Marxist critics I also fear & respect it. And ambivalence like mine about a poetry of rioting seems to have been exploited by media already.The Sun's infamous Wednesday, August 10 "Shop a Moron" headline is just as much new media art as a call to "name and shame rioters". As Jacques Rancière theorizes in The Emancipated Spectator, there is perhaps a "dialectic inherent in the political montage of images" like this one, with the potential to cause an  "inversion of life". The Sun's front-page presentation of the London rioters is, on the face of it, artistic 'collage' and a vehicle also for political debate about causes and consequences. But as art, and as art only, it links the outsider like me to a system that both causes revolt and yet is brazen enough to use public media to denounce it. In this new artistic regime you're guilty by viewing, but it is a first step towards the emancipation (or 'subtraction') of the spectator from complicity & oppression. Here's a new revolutionary sense of literary 'making' from which we'll be excluded if viewing eyes remain clouded by hatred, neoliberal prejudices and even a traditional poetics.

As a poet with eye on world events I have to see poetry even in places where the old familiar grounds are being wildly deterritorialized. Both the subject & means of artistic expression have been profoundly altered. Perhaps the traditional language of poetry itself, faced with the realities of aggressive new urban codes, infrastructures of inner city poverty, and handheld technologies (like the BlackBerry) wielded as instruments of mobilization & violence, is moribund. After all, language per se now shares the stage with competing images, feelings and practices of globalized life. Perhaps what the new media art reveal is the very image of the decline of language's cultural hegemony. Again, Rancière, in a discussion of the "intolerable image": "we need images of action, images of the true reality or images that can immediately be inverted into their true reality, in order to show us that the mere fact of being a spectator... is a bad thing." (87) As a poet I have to be particularly attuned to the "intolerable image"of street rioting, and see the attempt to describe it just as spectator (namely, via traditional verse) as a "bad thing": something that amounts to a paradox.

But the paradox (as the new revolutionary poetics goes) can be resolved in action itself. Only a poetry  codified in tradition is capable of sitting still long enough to watch the rioting: a position that, as we know, serves only to implicate its defenders & practitioners.The poet who preaches or theorizes only is, in other words, the most onerous, shamelessly removed from the rhythms of the suburbs, banlieue, & favelas, the storefronts and life in the metropolis, cowardly engaged in abstract experimentation only (too spiritless to change poetry from academic to real activity). Academic poetry keeps alive the oppressive hierarchies of language, thought & reality through its failure to engage with the lyrical forces of the common.To write is to dare to invert the conditions of life itself (Rancière), & always live immersed in the "poverty and precariousness" of the multitude (Hardt & Negri). In my previous post on John Berryman I've referred to this materialist dynamics of creativity as 'biolyrical'.

From the viewpoint of the spectator, the biolyrical can't help but offer up to the literary imagination only the "intolerable" either-ors: street protesters as front-page gangsters or cultural heroes, morons with a taste for gratuitous violence or the new avant-garde who use the streets, the technology of handhelds and the porous grid work of suburban London 'space' as the arena of a new poetics. It's a sort of 'bad faith' encounter with significant socio-cultural events that's to be overcome only through direct participation. As Antonio Negri says in a work devoted to examining in more depth the role of art in a new communist order, "the artist is...the symbol of realized subversion and of liberated freedom." (Negri, Art & Multitude, 52) It's a hope (both Negri and I share) that doesn't come without commitment to the democratic processes at work in cultural production & overthrow of the pernicious solitude of all academic theorizing (which Negri calls an "aesthetic illusion"). True art can only be done in communities, even when they occasionaly have to erupt into street violence.

John B. Lee's LET LIGHT TRY ALL THE DOORS read as a politics of poetry

But this "I" that accompanies the poem and that is produced in echo with its act is also the subjectivity of a traveller who passes through a certain territory, makes words coincide with things, utterances with visions, and implicates in this travel some relationship with the "we" of the community. (Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing)

I would purchase the rains of remember
I would purchase the stars of recall
and what to preserve in a poem
but the drenching of darkness with light (John B. Lee, "Being Human")

Poetry can't afford to be too fanciful when it's borne on the wings of the travelling poet, and it's usually a safe bet that (as the Rancière epigraph shows) a lot of interesting grey area is to come between the poet's imagination and the realities of  unfamiliar language, terrain & native customs. Poetry becomes a type of mediation. Any "I' that encounters difference in foreign places, trying to scribe properly the "relationship with the "we" of the community", is bound to be political. The poet is not immune to it. Misreading foreign places can be as pernicious as bad translation of their chief literary figures, and the poet must avoid both. Travel that results in writing is at best a problematical engagement with a potential source of inspiration of which language can give (if it's careless) only a superficially sympathetic account & image. Bad travel can make for bad poetry.

I read the work of one of Canada's most celebrated poets as a primer on travel-poetry in an active critical sense of a politics of both viewing and writing.Taking my cue from Rancière's The Flesh of Words, I see here in Lee a type of poetry that accounts for a genuineness in encounter with the Other. Do politics and poetry seem too antithetical here? Do we even need to use 'political' at all? Fortunately, yes. Lee wants to comment, naturally, on underlying structures of injustice as well as celebrating cultural diversities in a book of poems in which he's "walked the throngy labyrinths/of sellers' stalls/and tourist shops/in Seoul and Burgundy, Leon/and home " (8), but to do that he must draw a line beyond which the Westerner can't proceed and remain unintrusive & respectful at the same time. As Lee says in "Echo's revenge", "and thus there is a threshold in myself/I cannot cross/but once and once alone"(9) Lee cannot compromise that vital twofold sense of his work as a physical dwelling and potential storehouse of poetic impressions, not if he's to write a genuine travel lyric that is both a chronicle of life-events in distant lands and vision for global justice.

Lyric subjectivity and its horizon of community are established only at the price of a critical effort that separates the "wandering" of the poetic "I" from the poetic utopia of politics. The newness of the aesthetic community is also that of a dividing line that is maintained, always fit for transgression, between the universality of the aesthetic community and the archipolitical objectification of the link."(19)

Rancière refers (in his discussion of the wandering poet image in Wordsworth's Prelude), to the initial migration & impression-gathering of the poet through distant places as a "politics of the sensory", " a general aesthetic that expresses the laws of feeling, the conveyance of sensation in general." (19) In other words, feelings generated through an initial "wandering", always at first disparate and scattered, and attuned particularly to issues of social justice, cannot become a poetry without disclosing a democratizing (or perhaps 'globalized') impulse. It's in this sense a concern for the preservation of the integrity of that encounter through language (however that need to preserve is expressed, whether through poetry, translation or social activism ) that the poetry in Lee's book, and all poetry based on a primary poet-as-wanderer motif, is political. I'd like to consider to what extent Lee's poetry survives its own political impulses.

John B. Lee is a translator and traveller, and so the legitimacy of LET LIGHT TRY ALL THE DOORS as a politics of poetry established in travel has already been assured (to my mind) by his and Manuel de Jesús Velázquez León's bilingual Sweet Cuba anthology of Cuban poets from 1608 to 1958, one inspired and framed by the literary-nationalist figure of José Martí. The poet's heart is certainly in the right place.To travel (for the poet), going from Burgundy to Seoul to Bangkok, is to pay homage to language & the most diligent and sensitive uses to which it's been put in a national literature. Lee cannot be accused of bad viewing wherever he goes since he's already, in his poetic practice, met a vital prerequisite to good viewing through a preliminary work that honors a sanctity of language & Cuban poetic tradition rooted to place. Cuba and Martí become "archipolitical" influences in Lee's wandering poetics, both socialist impetus and muse, and this active principle of viewing and writing would not have come about without the primary labors of translation:

...the presence of José Martí at this stage of Cuban poetry transcended his role as a reformist and modernizer. That is why his poetry sets up the internal structure of this compilation and becomes that moment in which all the tones sketched during the protracted configuration of the national poetic consciousness take shape in a coherent and harmonic voice. As it happened socially and politically, in the poetic field Marti's voice was also prophetic of much of what was to come." (Foreword to Sweet Cuba, xvi)

But is translation in the sense of the "configuration of the national poetic consciousness" a suitable analogue for the way Lee wishes to translate travel experiences into original poetry? Though the "peripatetic" poet-wanderer motif, again, is established in the very opening of "Echo's revenge", it's only unevenly effective as a poetic principle, good where only single easily graspable objects are concerned but problematic in larger cultural domains. As one who cannot be unconcerned with customs & rituals, & with language as a record of  human history, he must see the difficulties in offering a topographical poetry to which he's necessarily a stranger. And to make strangeness palatable to Westerners is to deal in delicately precise shadings & a radically readjusted way of seeing for which Lee's not always prepared. In short, Lee's handled the shadings & interesting  nuances of fragments masterfully: it's the jump to cultural 'narratives' of the type we see in "Sex with a Second Woman", "Bad Men Come" & "Ghosts in the Mud" (particularly after "and thus beginneth the lesson") that is problematical. It's the politics of the piece running away with itself.

Again, Lee's "Echo's Revenge" is an exquisitely elegant statement of the paradigmatic encounter of language with travel that the poet fails to apply consistently throughout the whole work.

ii

last week
I was in France
this week, in Seoul
I've lived
the peripatetic summer
of a flibbedegibbet dragonfly
above a water flash
my life become
the shadow flutter
of a mortal thing
going "briefly briefly"
as I beat the ragged membrane of my wet wings("Echo's revenge" 4)

One sees that even in language as lyrically brilliant as this human agency, the "I' of "I beat the ragged membrance of my wet wings",  won't assert the primacy of poetic language for long. The temptation is to think here of the Benjaminian flâneur who samples cultural artifacts as he strolls, and expect not poetry but cultural criticism. It is language alone on its own terms, and a more heightened Parnassian view of the poet as weaver of delicate figural threads & tones, that is needed. Language cannot be just a repository of exchangeable cultural signifiers. It can only be the poet's own openness to the melancholic weave of light-effects everywhere unravelling into shadows that counts here as good viewing & writing: a pixiesh inner sense that removes the "I" from travel to marvel at a place's silent ethos  from which the poet-wander has been sadly excluded—"rucks of shadowed space"(3)—and sees Seoul here as a gallery not so much of things as the power of words to convey them imagistically, in a multisensual play of almost objectless impressions, in a "politics of the sensory" that can be "inhaled/like childbreath to a candlewish"(4).

there is a gallery I've seen in Seoul
within that current city
at a recent hour
wherein a sculptor sharing my name
has hung a pool of ice-blue cloth
come waterfalling
from a broken branch
it gathered gravity
then flung a spill across a patch of floor
like silence
in a photographic stream
it honoured
lingering and limned
with coolness-lovely folds
and rucks of shadowed space
too pale to contemplate
it held itself inhaled
like childbreath to a candlewish ("Echo's revenge" 2-3)

It's a necessary requirement that Lee very effectively meets but does not sustain. Since the foreigner really can't share in its material conditions, he adopts a creative distance in which to "imagine then with such a seeing blindness/all an unseen inner world you hold/against the tip of memory" ("Echo's Revenge 1). Here the poet's an Echo-figure rather than a strictly Western recorder of cultural history, trying to make progression into the work move along lines of a new aesthetics of travel that must be engaged and respectful at the same time: a case of being both there and not-there. A collection of "loosened stays" (5) & the poet's desire to bring forth a "myth/of unrequited calls". (4)

The book's first poem is its best because it's more a language of creativity than a tangible chronology, and one that handles things wistfully as only the poet "once and once alone"  should. What is established is a seeing conjoined to feeling: and what is seen primarily (just fragmented pieces of a human history to which John B. Lee's a stranger) can be translated into a melancholic shadow-play. This is the work's greatest figurative strength. Lee's clearly disavowed any connections to a rationalist (Cartesian) tradition of thinking restricted only to representations rather than the multiform, ephemeral edges the poet seems to prefer. In "What I Think" he says "if I were only a head/I'd want a philosopher's palm/to be fond of my mind/as child of a peach" (14), replacing a richer synesthesia for a straightforward sensory apparatus. Objects  are metonyms for a History that can only recorded at its most elusive borders, & the poet, condemned to seeing only distant "autumns...fastened there" (10), has to make up for language deficit by searching out artful substitutes in a new minimalist impression-gathering presented as foreign words & objects. A language of fragments to serve as conduits to an impermeable cultural whole such as in the following:

we pace a single square
of urban wilds
alive with light
we stand in fear of strangeness
we manage
to say dam-sa-ham-ni-da
as if we were grateful for everything
we say thank you
like the poor, like the mad
like the sorrowfully addicted
like the war-wounded
like the legless, the abandoned
the orphaned, the hopelessly homeless
the drunk-by-noon loser
the derelict, the exiled
the refugee, like Tarzan

and we ruffle the pages
of our little sleeping dictionary
like a lousy-feathered bird

and we say
the words ("Sleeping Dictionary" 15-16)

Lee's poetry at times looks like an archaeological dig and language a sieve for sifting through dirt to what's worth preserving. Among the symbolic pieces of an unapproachable past—poetic artifacts he writes into his travel poetry—are " a single helmet rusted/with a fatal hole" (6), "garden pots" (6), "rag of tin" (7), and even "coins and stones" (8) at market stalls.But it's here that a vital threshold is very likely to appear, and one Lee (as he's admitted) shouldn't have crossed: it's here, in other words, that the work is beginning to look too crassly political. Larger cultural wholes are a problem for vision trained on  things: they are like stolen temple stones that  he turns "over palm-upward in my hand" (17), lovely lyrical artifacts in themselves but not easily assimilable to ingrained habits of feeling . Even preparations for a son's wedding are an occasion for cultural dissymmetry and disharmony, because the ceremony can only be measured in terms of awkward fitting & a display of wasted fabric("Handsome in Hanboks" 11-12), an effect Lee may not have intended: because marriage in a foreign land cannot be properly abstracted from its constitutive ritual elements and made to look like part of a home wedding video:

the elderly seamstress
throwing her short arms wide
embraces my wife
about her bosoms from behind
taking her measurements
for the pink silk wedding garment
she is making for the marriage of our son
and his beautiful bride-to-be
and she is laughing like busy shop bells
at the ample endowment of western women
for she herself is small-breasted
as a girl
and as for me
she must leap up
like a child after apples (11)

 And a language that tries to remove itself from cultural difference, whatever the occasion & place, is doomed to turn eventually into nationalist sentimentality. As it does.

Transferring onto distant cities whole cultural artifacts from the poet's own childhood experiences (through a genealogy of  Canadian landscape poetry) is Lee's way to remedy this narrative defect. The poem "What I Think" stands as a solitary, almost caesural, moment in which poet pauses to make a sentimental display of his own childhood "orchard shadows" (14), "plastic helmet" (14), "toque": where poet-father frames his Korean experiences in a Canadian sensibility that's as out of place here as the ceremonial fitting of groom's father in "shining blue embroidered fabric".

what a little soldier I became
that Christmas my parents bought me
the plastic helmet
what a porkpie cool
what a toque
what a wet-wool balaclava
flavoured by cold
tasting like sucked mittens
and cold closets thinned by moths(14)

The result is an unnecessary duplication of poetic energies: expended once in purely imagistic terms for individuals and then again as a desperate search for familiar paradigms (like a Canadian childhood Christmas ) in which to locate & interiorize essentially foreign "laws of feeling". As if Lee were thinking of reverting to the layout of a safer, more disengaged type of poetry. If he'd followed his original impulses more closely, conveying (as delicately & skilfully as he does) the sense alone of the "blindfolded child in a game/of touch the trinket", dealing in delicate trinkets alone, the narrative could have avoided its disastrous fall into the later touristy preoccupation with illicit sex ("Sex with a Second Woman") and childhood prostitution ( "Bad Men Come"), or even the more awkward reportage of  tsunamis. The "touch the trinket" game has been trivialized to the point of comparing the terrifying experience of being swept away in tsunami tidal floods to tired Canadian folklore: "the bridegroom washed from the rocks/at Peggy's Cove".("Ghosts in the Mud" 31)

With the exception of "Thai Boxer", where individual "arms in the dark" (25), "gloves and foot wraps" (25) and "smoke light" (25) come the closest to a pure form of movement we'll ever find, several of the post-"Echo's Revenge" pieces seem to have failed as a work of  mediation: a structure of engagement with the "we" of community anywhere in the world that makes a poetry political. To act as recorder only of cultural shocks & metonyms of lost narratives— "to run my finger/on a rag of tin//or build back a broken nation/death by death" (7)—would have acted wonderfully as a demonstration of poetic truth but didn't. That purity of the fragment, marvelously conveyed in verses like "[a gallery in Seoul] held itself inhaled/like childbreath to a candlewish" (3) passed too joyously into cultural design, language, globalization, and issues of social justice, and lost itself in the exchange.

Dancing at Auschwitz: reflections on art's "intolerable image"

My reading of philosopher & art theorist Jacques Rancière lately has suggested some new inroads into poetry, some aspects of his post-critical thought on contemporary art seeming even to dovetail nicely with an examination of the minimalist ("pwoermd) poetry of Geof Huth. But it's done more than that. I've just read  Rancière's "The Intolerable Image" chapter of his The Emancipated Spectator, where he brilliantly critiques artistic representations of the most horrible realities imaginable, looking specifically at Oliviero Toscani's posters of anorexic models and Martha Rosler's 60s Vietnam War photographs,  the media depictions of Auschwitz, the Rwandan & Cambodian genocides, and  Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-winning "vulture stalking a dying child". He questions whether the intolerability of the image can form part of critical art, one where montage, collage and détournement techniques are understood as artistic channels for social & political critique. Do these venerable critical art forms run aground here?                                       

He wonders, in particular, if content of this kind can be separated from image, the former normally regarded as the true reality behind the image and the impetus for protest against the injustices & inhumanities that graphic representations disclose. Environmental activists oftentimes exploit the social activist potential of imagery. Rancière's own view is that the gap between picture and content's been closed: far from stirring the indignant viewer to action (or to thoughts of it), the image as picture, painting or poem reveals a tension at the heart of viewing itself. And if the question of the nature of the artistic representation in general leads to that of the nature of the intolerable in particular, the lines between spectator and object seem to have been blurred beyond recognition. It's not clear what Carter's image of a dying girl in Sudan can be: a political (a "call to arms") or its own unique thing as art, something to be passively viewed & registered aesthetically. Rancière refers to this inner-tension in art as "the dialectic inherent in the political montage of images." A discussion too complex to pursue here.

                                              Kevin Carter's "vulture stalking child"

My reading of Rancière also happened lately to have coincided with what I consider to be another example of  "intolerability of the image": namely, a recent YouTube video of an eighty-nine year old holocaust survivor Adolek Kohn who's seen dancing with his family to disco music (the song "I Will Survive") at the Auschwitz site where he was himself interned. Here's a video compilation of disco music & damce staged against boxcars, entrances and crematoria. The image certainly looks grotesquely inconsonant with reality (the Shoah). It counter-poses (a favorite verb of Rancière's) to the image of unimaginable suffering that of dance and joyful celebration of life. As he says, "We came from the ashes and now we dance."

Auschwitz is emblematic of this "inner tension" in art. But the viewer asks how the video can be articulated as art and even dared to be displayed to the public while, at the same time, feeling its appeal as one form of contemporary expression, almost on a par with any other. It's troubling that here "image" (joyful celebration) and "content" (mass extermination) can't mercifully collapse in on themselves, and strike the video out of our artistic consciousness.The fact that they can't, of course, is deeply problematical. Declaring the image itself to be unrepresentable in this way is to run the risk of adopting a too 'uncritical' position in regards to art in general. It's as though the intolerable content (anorexic model, vulture stalking dying girl, holocaust survivor dancing at Auschwitz) were something to be suspended in critical space, just one type of 'image' (of viewing) among a whole array of others.

 Kohn's daughter Jane Korman, the producer of the video, said her purpose was to "make some artwork that would waken people and make them think again about this past". She could have cited Roberto Benigni's portrayal in movie La Vita Bella or Claude Lanzmann's Shoah as similar types of artwork. Originally displayed in an Australian art gallery, her image of the intolerable is now offered as a legacy to a YouTube and MuchMusic generation who've been normally too "numbed", "desensitized" to the Holocaust event. Korman gives a more appealing  inverted 'image' of the hopelessness and despair that's been historically associated with Auschwitz: the unimaginable softened (more delicately aestheticized) for the young as song & dance. Otherwise "who would bring their grandchildren here?" asks Kohn.

Without holocaust survivor himself present, the dance video would be rightly condemned as a form of Holocaust-denial or -denigration and yet a very uncomfortable sort of acquiescence in the suitability of artistic form, promoted by a holocaust survivor himself, can be the effect of seeing Korman's video. What should be a clash of irreconcilable opposites in artwork doesn't here necessarily result in a single efficacious point of unbearable horror (perhaps the same that had led to criticism of Carter's picture & the photographer's own suicide). The viewer can choose to view it dispassionately, considering its artistic merits alone. And not condemn it as a lie only. Interestingly enough, the presence of  Kohn and family (as contrary to the claims of the Anti-Defamation League) is sufficient condition for viewing the video as "artwork" & a type of memorial in its own right. But has artistic expression been given a de jure pass on moral condemnation?  Does the inner tension of the image (the troubling dialectic between really two competing images of the horror of extermination) trump the fear that the video may dehistoricize the Shoah?

What Rancière would say to the Kohn video is, I think, what he's already said in regard to Lanzmann's Shoah, a lengthy passage worth quoting in full:

Representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the act of offering an equivalent-something that speech does just as much as photography [videography]. The image is not the duplicate of a thing. It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid. It is not a mere reproduction of what is out there in front of the photographer or the filmmaker. It is always an alteration that occurs in a chain of images which alter it in turn. And the voice is not the manifestation of the invisible, opposed to the visible form of the image. It is itself caught up in a process of image construction. It is the voice of a body that transforms one sensible event into another, by striving to make us 'see' what it has seen, to make us see what it tells us." (93-94)

Kohn's YouTube video leaves us with a silent tension between the visible horror of mass extermination and the unspoken  horror of art's ability to turn just about anything, however intolerable its image, into artistic expression: unspoken, or invisible, or unrepresentable because to say it would be too unpardonable an offense against human decency. There's this other 'image' lying within the horror of content (shoving aside the thing itself) that is a troubling nexus of competing ways of seeing the stalking vulture, anorexic model & dancing Holocaust victim. A troubling 'something' that's perhaps the product of a hypermediated age.

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.