"Spirit bear" (a Canadian solution to the environmental disaster in the Gulf)

I wish a Spirit bear (from the hanging tree)—
   wish it'd tear thru the mists,
and past otters and cold stray shields,
  straight to the groves

I spidery-browed and creased at the mouth
  honestly do!
From there fan out at dawn, to eye you &
  pray in the wind (by Tartan degrees)

"A crow's nest for rigs. The water's cold jade."
  Cindery claw marks
on the absent sands I'd help you find
  In '83 diamonds,

torn out, still gave their tears when dried
  and amply poured
Easy now to sort thistles, and crays floating
  to shore on prickly fours,

from the blue-nosed, true and free up here!
  Brown herons
now foamy and slowing in their own heat
  And shrimps, and odd shells

lying like flotsam near some cool Egyptian mud
  Take from here, me
not just the idea and eye and quartzite shawl
—sad, combative soil!—

but (again) a bear rustling, bright as maple,
  and a shield slowly
lowered and that will not rust in a dying gulf
  And the sands there—

may they burn pearls (of all the abyssal stars)
  and some appear
in one good mile of sea, at least. Looks up here
  like the ol' sermon,

  a southern gospel's typically shitty blue

Visual poetry, cont'd

Bob Grumman,

Dogma#1: a visual poem must consist of a significant graphic element significantly interacting with a significant verbal element. Dogma #2: a reader of the poem must experience the poem’s graphic and verbal elements simultaneously. There will come a day when neurophysiologists will be able to detect this simultaneous experience. Thereupon we will have an objective way of determining whether a not a given work is a visual poem–for a given person. (Bob Grumman, from Poeticks) 

As to my method, it will be that of children's guessing games, where the question is how two things resemble or differ from one another.(Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image )

Part 2

Again, intersections with Vispo? Yes, of course. And more. I'll even go so far as to call it a prefigurement since Baker (with Cage, Corman, Grumman, & Perlman) were in a very real way there from the beginning & continue to be there now: silent partners in a developing form that the digital revolution really only helped to bring to everyone's notice. A fact particularly true in regard to Bob Grumman. For all its strong pro-tech format, his SPIDERTANGLE: the_book, for example, is a particularly curious intermixing of  both Vispo and traditional pre-Internet visual poetics (a distinction which he denies): his superlative "Mathemakus" series, in particular, attest markedly to eclecticism and innovation both. But I'm inclined to believe Grumman's work, while displaying impressive digital virtuosity, the only feature that makes it decidedly Vispo (in my view), is essentially a celebration of older styles. I believe he can be appreciated not just as innovator but as a member of an artistic and intellectual tradition attuned to changing cultural landscapes. Interesting critique always accompanies creativity. But first a word on the nature of origins and literary appropriations in general.

Is Vispo a verbo-pictorial (with primary ties to concrete poetry) or purely technical creation? Lines between them have been blurred almost to the point of non- recognition. I've said before that means of literary production may have meshed so completely with artistic form after the Internet revolution that Web 2.0  has made it necessary— in regards to literary work— to speak of 'image' (after Rancière) rather than the purely visual: in fact, literariness these days seems to have suffered the same fate as commoditized Art, or is well on its way. Or, more interestingly, that product may be virtually indistinguishable from product-line: artistry from the directives of not just a commercial but an academic market place where writing curricula & the publishers (and academics) who propagandize acceptable styles through them are part of the same sales pitch. The recent AWP (Associatiation of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference, for all its claims to being a literary love-in, reveals writing for the trade show and clearing house it's recently become and attests (like nothing else can) to the way literary works cater for a growing bourgeois mainstream appeal. Seeing Vispo as both the putative form of a new Web art or Webism and the successor to all the preceding visual arts (as its post-avant practitioners seem to do) perhaps calls into question artistic integrity itself .

Tough talk, to be sure. But it's hard not to notice the Logo-brand style & presentation of most interactive art: for example, the Electronic Literature Corporation at Robert Kendall's "Word Circuits" site, Jim Rosenberg's  Frame Stack interface technologies and the generic Type is Art software from which Vispo artists everywhere freely draw. I could probably locate at least one dominant techno-brand in every Vispo site out there. It's beginning to look as if journalist-activist Naomi Klein was right. In an insightful 2000 work entitled No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies she makes a direct correlation (or certainly always the possibility of one exists) between corporate branding and the global and social injustices that underlie them. Logo oftentimes hiding a pushy brand name politics that dehistoricizes its opponents. Rancière makes a similar point about the appropriation of the neo-Gothic rural aesthetics of English theorists Ruskin and Morris by AEG design engineer Peter Behrens and German Bauhaus (Future of the Image, Chapter 4), saying of this mixture of pure and 'instrumental art'

that the one ideology is a convenient cover for the other. The reveries of artisans reconciled with the fine craftsmanship and collective faith of times past is a spiritualist mystification concealing a quite different reality: submission to the principles of capitalist rationality. When Peter Behrens becomes artistic advisor to AEG and uses Ruskin's principles to design the firm's logos and adverts, the neo-Gothic idyll reveals its prosaic truth: the production line. (101)

I'm not saying Vispo has unconscionably usurped traditional visual aesthetics, and through digitization, given it a new look. The evolution of visual art is a natural one, bound to make many shifts and salubrious adaptations. Nor am I claiming the critic's job is to demystify things that look suspiciously like corporate cover-ups in Internet poetry. Some (like Bob Grumman himself) have already wondered if it's even legitimate to make a Vispo/visual poetry distinction at all, saying it's a nick-name for a body of work that mixes graphics with language. But it does seem to me as if some people are profiting by a similar sort of "pure and instrumental" visual poetry amalgamation. And the preoccupation these days with 'naming' also interests (and worries) me for names (after Klein) oftentimes reveal hidden categorizations and the technologies that empower them. Geof Huth, perhaps conscious of the growing impurities in even traditional forms, has recently drawn an interesting distinction between "light verse visual poetry"  (example of clean visual poetry) and PowerPoint visual poetry of the US Army(example of dirty visual poetry). If Huth rejects my reason for the distinction, passing it off as a literary curio, he must admit that it's a very telling way for visual poets to speak about their own work.

It's the mixtures of Vispo practice (clean, dirty or otherwise) I'm interested in—all the slippages, shifts and creative dissonances evident in practice and the two distinguishable ways now of doing visual poetry online to which the one name Vispo supposedly refers. Vispo is where Art (and its theories) and a growing Webism co-exist; where the old forms seem otiose to the wildly diverse visual poetries and the growing number of software specialists-poets who now write them into being. Web 2.0, software-proficient and all too eager to erase any traces of old-school language identity theory, seems to have made an even greater parody of traditional mimetic poetry, of Art as chronicle of significant human experience.

I have  rejected the idea that Vispo is at best a so-called generic term for visual art: reasonably certain also that the gap beginning to widen between visual poetry rooted in Dada and Fluxus (among others) & a burgeoning Web version of it I've identified with Vispo (& said to be "digital to the core") threatens to make visual poetry of any description essentially "unpresentable". Art that cannot even stand to imitate itself. Just a wavering image, dissolving perhaps in the " original gap" (132) between genre purity and the "dirty" realities of artistic production Rancière says (in a different context) it's the fate of avant-gardists to witness to in their work. And if not unpresentable, then perhaps digital art's become bland to the point of having lost its own creative impulses: a cultural obscenity."It is the obscenity, " Baudrillard says in his essay 'The Ecstasy of Communication', "of what no longer has any secret, of what dissolves completely in information and communication." The obscenity of art reduced to a name (Vispo) or Webism.

If the original graphics-with-language ideal goes by the wayside, what's left? Anti-art may soon turn into anti-artist at the rate we're going, poetry surviving in name only, left in the end as some unsalvageable (irrecoverable) trace of a discarded hope. To be permanently erased from literary consciousness. There's a lot at stake in the tendency to reduce things to a name or look (Logo). And it's why if I choose to read contemporary Vispo, it must be work of the very best kind, associated not with techno-brands and Web 2.0 ideologies (which are legion) but authors who are too strong for any of that current radical decentering that's still in vogue. Forms do not crumble in Grumman's hands (as they do elsewhere). I believe a forcefulness of  personality will outshine the work itself so that if the latter ever falters, it may continue as an abiding authorial presence at least. Faithfulness to a non-Western sensibility and Baker himself will never make his work Vispo in any sense.  And nor does a penchant for mathematical notation & neologisms, what amounts to a complete  "Lexicon Grummaniacal" , ever keep Bob Grumman far from his own ties to tradition and intelligent design.

As I've said, if visual poetry continues along its present path it will suffer the fate of the "image". But Grumman's work is not purely Vispo, to be interpreted along the lines of, say, Jim Rosenberg's depersonalized "interface technologies" or Dan Waber's wildly multimedia Vispoets.com site; it's a lot of things that make it interestingly complex (Examples are from Grumman's Poeticks blog). Conceptual, by which I mean poetry in the service of a distinctively mathematical and neurophysiological vision (not visual); minimalist- and haiku-based, every letter and syllable skilfully set into place; a little traditional, as in the case of his "linguexpressive" Keatsian-style lyrics, sonnets and haiku pieces; and perhaps even polemical, experimenting as it does with new attitudes towards language & reality, even daring enough to write its own dictionary of artistic production or explore uncharted regions of brain topography. Grumman's succeeded, I think, in keeping a writing project free from the noisy & cluttered dissonance of wildly untrained styles. He never strikes me as self-reflective or self-aggrandizing as many Vispo practitioners do. The axis of established (minimalist & visual) form is always nicely balanced (never upset) by that of a pure and reasoned integration of poetics, theoretical psychology and digital technology.

Grumman is among the poets who attribute the effectiveness of poetry to the potential of language for radical rearrangement, with the result that work can look creatively rococo and, under the right digital conditions, even engagingly superartful. Attributes I give only to artists with feet planted firmly on solid artistic ground and imaginative heads suited to changing means of literary production. In his case, the "dissemblance" between genre purity and actual work never draws too much attention to each other, the elements of his craft always expertly combined and presented. To begin with, his typology (from what I've seen) is fairly simple, breaking poetry down into infraverbal (such as Geof Huth's pwoermds), linguexpressive (the latter including haiku, minimalist & sonnet forms) and the mathematical poetry (mathemaku) for which he's best known. Not afraid to speak of the nature of human creativity in purely psychological terms ( see his "Knowlecular Poetics" and "The Nature of Visual Poetry" pieces), hypothesizing that "neurophysiology will be the basis of all theories of poetics", Grumman is speculative as well as artistic. Transposing brain physiology into discourse on the nature of visual poetry can be seen as the attempt to give a materialist basis to art: making even the bare bones lettering & software imagery of digital writing (what I've called the first principle of digital poetics) reducible to an even more basic grammar of poetry perceptions in the brain.

A positive (not the usual reductive hypertext) poetics is what you get in Grumman: traditional, intellectual and dynamically experimental. As I've said, emblematic of Grumman's style is the mathemaku, a genre and mathematical notational mix that's also interestingly haiga in presentation (though it looks as though in the "Mathemaku in Honor of Andrea Bianco's 1436 Map of the World" the Basho haiku's been slightly inverted for effect).

                               “Mathemaku in Honor of Andrea Bianco’s 1436 Map of the World.”


The complex feeling, made up of image and a direct reference to haiku origins, of having to solve a problem and admire a visual artifact at the same time, makes Grumman's mathemakus artistic delights: the materials never drawing too much attention to themselves, giving them both experimental and aesthetical charm. The medieval lute "quotient" in the "Andrea Bianco" piece is particularly striking. A medieval age of Christian lutes, ecclesiasticism and an unenlightened world view as represented by Bianco's crumpled pond-shaped map, underscored by classical haiku, are all food for the "thinking eye" (Silliman). Reflection, mental alertness and simple pleasures of viewing are essential prerequisites of a Grumman visual.

Visual poetry

And then there's Ed Baker,

It is important to collect these writers because, as has been the case over and over in the history of literature, the best and most innovative writing, the writing that advances the art and that in the future becomes the classic and defining work of a period, is almost always the work of outsiders. (Dr. John M. Bennett, Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at Ohio State U.)

                                                                         all

                                                                         is
                                                                         just

                                                                         so

                                                                         let

                                                                         it
                                                                             (Ed Baker, from G oo d night)

Part 1

Ed Baker, Bob Grumman, Jeremy Seligson and all the contemporary practitioners of what I call a more classical visual poetry, have had to share the stage with Vispo for at least two decades now ('Vispo' being shorthand for a computer-generated type of  work that can be easily interchangeable with all (or any) of its other kinetic, aural and  textual hybrids). Though Baker himself resists any labeling, saying to me in an email that "as for me I reside in the I-just-don't-no" school The Nopo school!" I can't help feeling there are significant differences, if only one. And I'm inclined to believe that one lies in a growing discrepancy, fuelled solely by Internet technology, between the way visual art's produced and its genre status. Perhaps I'm a little dismayed also at how unevenly the two are being presented, visual poetry almost becoming synonymous with Vispo (which it certainly isn't).

I choose to speak of genre status as meaning primarily textual production and accompanying visual effects, two essential components of every single artifact. Visual poetry today, both the digital and traditional kinds, combine both in complementary and also more interestingly contrastive ways. With the result that two types of visual poetry seem to occupy the same writing space. While 'Vispo' can be stated in purely technical terms (media poetry and fiction"born to pixels rather than the page", as Robert Kendall says of his work in Word Circuits), traditional visual poetry (in my view) has to restrict itself to a purely verbal (and even pictorial) representation of technique & the classical forms on which it relies. Don Wentworth's Issa's Untidy Hut: The Poetry Blog for Lilliput Review is an example of an online forum for haiku-based poetics.Any discussion, therefore, of the differences between Vispo and classical visual poetry amounts to an understanding of what's always been a technology and culture bifurcation at work in every artistic production.

What's at stake (in my view) is the changing form & content of visual poetics itself as a result of Vispo. And whether, indeed, older models haven't been already relegated to an outmoded "bastarda gothic" in light of a computer-generated language of pure interactivity. Perhaps the same sort of fundamentally transformed notion of  literacy that took place after Gutenberg. Digital technology has only magnified the split between, on the one hand, original haiku-inspired art and accompanying visual representations of the surrounding world (perhaps a form more properly akin to 'Haiga'), with technology comprising of brush- or pen-strokes on a page, calligraphy, experimental typographic designs or even simple spacing. And, on the other, a text wholly derived from multimedia software whose themes & images, produced primarily by poet-technicians intent on exploiting all the possible applications of Web 2.0, say as much about production techniques as the nature of literary form itself.  The former oftentimes grossly overshadowing the latter. Jim Rosenberg's Poetries, a showcase of interactive & hypertextual ingenuity, is a case in point.

Perhaps nothing has better illustrated this growing technique and artistic integrity dissonance ("dissemblance" is a term Jacques Rancière might have used ) than the recent online controversy over the way editors Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier formatted the text of Larry Eigner's poetry in their The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner (Stanford, 2010). Blogger Steven Fama's made the impassioned plea for preserving the integrity of original text at all costs, enjoining editors never to "change the way the poems look on the page, in a way that greatly mars the poetry." He seems to have intuited a great loss to textual integrity in editorial decisions that are not responsive perhaps to the type of visual and typographic settings found on an Eigner page.

I wonder if the same sorts of concerns couldn't be voiced about traditional visual poetry? Fama's perhaps sounded a warning to those who would subordinate artistry to means of production. One we'd be wise to hear. Has there been, in other words, a tendency to conflate techniques of artistic production with art itself, a process abetted by the frenetic deployment of  a "hyper-mediatic type of work" (Rancière)? In short, if there are innovators empowered by their technological tools, then who are the cultural gatekeepers? Who are the real predecessors of Vispo whose textual pristineness has been compromised by interactive art ? A few (oftimes unknown) sources of much of what's empowered contemporary Vispo can perhaps be cited, primary among them Henri Michaux, particularly his influential Darkness Moves,  Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, inspiration for Pound's ideogrammatic style, and even the female avant-gardists Hannah Höch and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven from whom Baker says unequivocally the "Dada Guys...stole lots of 'stuff' "'.

I'm  tempted to separate Baker, Grumman and certainly even Michaux and the above-named sources from the digital work of contemporary Vispo artists like Geof Huth, Jim Andrews, Gary Barwin. But that would be to make things look too neatly compartmentalized, causing us to overlook the necessary overlaps that always do exist between tradition and innovation. Bob Grumman, for example, has recently told me (in email correspondence) that Geof Huth, among the most active practitioners of interactive poetics, could be characterized as both a "pen-master-a calligrapher, in fact" and a "very digital" artist. John Martone, owner of  tel-let, a site for a more traditional minimalist writing, can himself alternate gracefully between almost lyrical "dogwood & honeysuckle" verses and more contemporary "visual texts & essays". A careful (and sympathetic) reading of contemporary visual poetry must obviously resist simplistic categorizations and see it as a confluence of many interesting contrastive elements.

Baker's Things Just Come Through (Red Ochre Press, 2005) throws into relief the artistry of the classical style as against its more current digital formats: here technique and artifact result in poetry that's attributable directly to calligraphy, collage art and minimalist writing style. Carl Rakosi, looking at Baker's 1974 work The City, remarked on its "ability to express both vast and complex meanings in a few words" (from Baker-Rakosi mail correspondence reprinted with permission), a literary ideal to which Baker has remained faithful all his life. Dedicated to Cid Corman and offering "special thanks" to HaChungJeanne, Baker's 2005 work is one that homages tradition, friendship & visual artistry.The Korean Spring Orchid is its subtitle and centerpiece: it is also his friend Sophie Song , with whom Ed wrote the poem's English and Korean versions. A splendid work of artisinal craft and inspiration that issues out of  literary & linguistic disciplines.

                                                     Dedication to Cid Corman

Things Just Come Through could have been a handmade product: a delicate artifact, wispy & light, to be prized for its aesthetic and textural features. I own another edition that has the feel of a Japanese sewn wrap. Means of production and work (in limited editions) are barely distinguishable. Here's work not made to be retrieved like a Web 2.0 hypertext poem (even when it appears online) but offered as a model for imitation. And it assumes (as all cultural traditions do) a certain physical initiation into the practice and theory of finely illustrated poetry, making it both hand-crafted and visual work.

As for methodology, Baker's told me the translating and pen-work always followed the drawings and poems in English: the whole never to be seen as a work of translation only. Baker's book is visual literacy par excellence that can't, despite its accessibility, rely on any romanticized  "empathetic" qualities of pre-literate eras (as Ong likes to characterize them). The work is classical and spontaneous, each poem elusive and mysterious as a breath; and the poet, a craftsman indebted to contemporary masters Soetsu Yanagi (potter and art collector), Kazuaki Tanahashi (calligrapher)  and Hidetaka Ohno (artist).

                                                  "Korean Flower" poem & calligraphy

Baker has recently celebrated  Jeremy Seligson's new book Cherry Blossoms, his art & verse on the cover page, calling it "simple, clean, precise", & visible proof that "less is more". The praise is significant. Baker's used the "less is more" language in discussions with me about the work of colleagues & mentors like John Martone,John Perlman and Cid Corman, saying (in his impish way), "I do think that [they] have come to the same "less is more" attitude that Cid embraced INDEPENDENT of Cid maybe parallel to (?) [for] nobody writes/does as/what John M or Cid or me does-did-doing". And what they do is collegial, eclectic and disciplined. And what binds this community of visual artists together is adherence to a principle of exact, finely-crafted verbal economy that's maybe due (at least in the case of Grumman and Baker) to the restrictions of early xerox and mimeo technology as well as an interest in mathematics and electronic technology.

The traditional visual poet means something uniquely different. But what?  A question that, of course, can't make sense as long as there's the problem of just what to call it when it appears. Let's say it's art that's indistinguishable from work (or its own productive means), almost hostilely averse to names. Baker's Hexapoems, for example, is an I-Ching inspired work in which a hexapoem (a term Baker coined) refers to a  "six-line-poem using chance operationings", but it's a technique which he dropped in 1973. Though Grumman and Huth have referred to Ed's work as visual haiku ("visku") or even calligrams (after Apollinaire), Ed's also refused to call even his haiku-like work haiku at all, preferring to use a term like "shorties" instead.

He's quipped already about his own allegiances to the "Nopo" school, clearly showing his antipathy towards literary movements and the credentialed set in general: "just remember... nothing much ever happens in a crowd... nothing!"Beginning his career at the "same mimeo xerox typewriter place" as Grumman, (& familiar already with "oscilloscope images and working Sinusoidal Wave stuff" of his electronic technology training), he's acutely aware of production techniques and yet he also derides the fondness of contemporary avants for all things digital . When he works he's not afraid to get his hands dirty, maker not just of poems but of pottery,calligraphy, water colors and sculpture.Geof Huth has given a wonderfully detailed description of the art studio that is Ed Baker's entire home, from yard to front porch.

What is the effect on us of a Baker visual poem (or water color, sculpture, artifact)? Are there any points of intersection with Vispo at all? In his blog article about Baker, Huth makes the following important observation about the man's poetics, & perhaps about all significant artistic expression:

Early on in our conversation, Ed said something I had to write down: “Everything comes out of silence and goes back into silence.” The two nothingnesses: the time before life, the time after death. And we live between them, so, as we do, we try to make something of that time, we try to make. And that is what Ed does. He makes.

It is perhaps for this reason that Baker can't belong to any noisy literary crowds: the essence of creativity residing in the interregnum between  "two nothingnesses" . There can't be for him any sign-systems (such as reviewers like me have to use) to get in the way. If we replace language of the image by that of the visual, we might say, with  Jacques Rancière, Baker's creations reveal a "double poetics of the image as a cipher of a history written in visible forms and as obtuse reality, impeding meaning and history" (The Future of the Image, 11-12). Meaning a Baker poem, though easily placed within a certain literary American tradition (one that, in my view, follows in a line of descent from Oppen, Corman and Creeley), to be catalogued & explained, is primarily and unmistakably an artifact to be made and seen: primarily a "naked, non-signifying presence"(Rancière, 14) that beggars analytic description.

And seen and felt and even heard it certainly must be. Reviewer Joey Madia talks of the "house-building/carpentry" metaphors in Baker's Restoration Poems: "The sound of hammer on nail, of plane on plank and the smell of the wood and the land dress the words, which are sparse and carefully chosen." The bare bones bonze at work in a house of art. All the "cut-price mis-mixed paints" of Baker's art, the "found materials, with pieces of wood in intriguing shapes, with rocks, with pieces of material culture left behind as if trash" (as Huth says) are both the media and very tropes of his language.

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.

the pwoermd

Geof Huth's ntst: analysis and appreciation

Again, a gift of poetry from American visual, textual, aural and digital poet Geof Huth. I've just received a review copy of ntst: in the words of the PRESS RELEASE (3/3/10) by publisher if p then q, a collection of " 750 of Geof Huth's pwoermds; one word poems, visual plays, portmanteaus, abbreviations and cuts of regular words." The poet is introduced as writing in a tradition dating from 60s minimalist style of Aram Saroyan; and, even more interestingly, the poetry described as showing " the great maximalism of minimalism", by which he means the pwoermd gives both an "inside and outside" configuration. The essential 'paradox' of poetry in the fewest possible words: indeed, in the stand-alone word itself (as in the case of Huth).

Editor James Davies even offers a sort of literary framework within which to analyze (& appreciate) the poetry publications of if p then q, offering the public work that's "cutting edge" and clearly faithful to a "three tier" vision of writing to which the reader will hopefully be drawn at some point in interpretation. I'd like to offer a reading and appreciation of the one-word pwoermd in terms of 'the most in the least' paradox. And since it offers an outline suitable to my own reading of Huth's work, I will cite the publisher's "three tier model" in full:

• The first level is that the reader simply likes the poem (this could be that it works on a relatively simplistic, accessible level in part or in the whole) or that the work is aesthetically interesting - a comparison here is the minimalists.
• The second level of the work is that a reader may want to (is encouraged to ) 'dig' deeper and see the ideas through, without any need of specialist background knowledge - poetry or otherwise.
• The third level is that of a reader, who does have some prior knowledge to something contextual, allowing them an understanding of content or form. The audience who has gone through level one and two is prepared to research (because it's gone through level one and two).

In an earlier work of Huth's entitled &² an/thology of pwoermds, Huth himself justifies the one-word poem, eager to dispel the myth that writing style can be judged by virtue of size alone ("Why One Word is Enough: A"). There are, in Huth's estimation, three ways a pwoermd (however exiguous it looks) can bristle with meaning: as (i) a "single unmodified traditional word" relying on visual impact (tundra by Cor van den Heuvel), (ii) variations on a "the DNA of an original source word" ( groww by bpNichol), and (iii) a combination "of two or more words" ( ouzelfinesse by Emily Romano). Presumably all three types appear in ntst (though I haven't looked closely enough to say with certainty). If there is a minimalist credo here it's that language has the wherewithal to communicate in "the smallest of orts" ( & ) even a single letter sufficing to bear significant meaning.

If the pwoermd displays both "inside and outside", offering variations on a primary one-word form, perhaps it might also be true to call its inside "the tensions [that] exist within each word", as Huth also says in the introduction ( A) and the outside, "the page" or "garden" (after Ian Hamilton Finlay). Keeping the minimalist format as consonant as possible with the traditional expectations of poetry. "We can believe," according to Huth, "pwoermds are clearly works of art when we see they function just as traditional poems do." (O) It looks as if the pwoermd, very much a traditional poem, must also promote clearly defined etymological, typographical and visual purposes. The "great maximalism of minimalism" principle at work here.

I will randomly select a single page from ntst, and provide for the first three pwoermds I see a sort of traditional poetic interpretation (& appreciation). For each an analysis in terms of the way both individual pwoermd and any specific level of reading (as per Davies's "three tier model") can parlay into significant literary content. Reading poetry is here, I believe, as much aesthetics as poetics, relying on good literary instincts and a willingness, at the same time, to let each offering work on the eye unmediated by theory, and in the end remain what it essentially is— a lovely little artifact of language and art alone in its own garden.

To begin with, Huth is a visual poet and yet the pwoermd also seems to be an element of a wider textual design: namely, the page on which it appears. I consider the pwoermds on page 65, for example, as a sort of "text art" in its own right (the recto of page image below), a vertical (vertebrae-like) column that both supports and rests on nothing, and yet the whole amplifying a sense of stodgy resiliency, a verbal monolith of sorts. The page is also a site of traditional poetic meanings where, despite the predominance of writing 'space', the eye cannot fall too freely down the page. A writing space adaptable to text design and visual art: for it is here, especially in the case of cutting-edge minimalist poetry, that literary theory and the material act of writing cross paths.

 Huth addresses the text art & visual poetry distinction in a January 09, 2010 "dbqp: visualizing poetics" blog article. A distinction in which the textual artist is seen as dealing just with shapes on a printed page, without the "lifeblood" of meaning, reserving for visual poetry the "mysterious and magical" elements of true artistic expression. As he says,"[t]he visual poet is focused on text as lifeblood. The text artist focuses on text as a medium." I suppose the pwoermd is a bit of both: product of poetic imagination as well as a way to put "consistent and cutting edge" theory to the test. And now to Huth's page.

                                       thevolution

I'm tempted to read here at an advanced third-tier level, noting a fundamental "form and content" tension. On the outside, 'thevolution' is a fusion of two words with the 'e' serving to key possible meanings to pronunciation: a clear case of the union of thought and the materiality of the written (or rather spoken) word. But does meaning subserve speech (felt here as a distinctive 'vowel' sound-feature) or writing itself? The lack of textual spacing between 'the' and 'volution' doesn't frustrate linear reading too wildly. If 'e' is part of the article, & 'volution' is not too implausibly imagined as a concrete noun derived from the root word 'volute'[L voluta, fr. fem. of volutus, pp. of volvere to roll], the pwoermd reduces to the "spiral scroll-shaped form" (from Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary) of both the classical Ionic column to which it's etymologically akin, and the page's own verticality.

A specific, easily verifiable property that can be identified as referent.The first pwoermd caps the page like an Ionic capital but really only resting on an abstract textual space: perhaps a purposely ambiguous symbol of any notion of poetic firstness. Of the primacy of  form over content. If the 'e' slides over to form 'evolution', however, both pronunciation and meaning change accordingly: the portmanteau word being strongly felt as a presence despite the missing vowel. As though pronunciation (the ease with which the combined elements roll off the tongue) signaled a 'missing link' whose absence is only minimally felt, and this because of some overriding sense of 'organic wholeness'. There isn't here the bending of the rules of word-derivation (as in the case of 'volution'): 'evolution' is allowed to evolve carrying with it a suppressed silent marker of linguistic harmony. Almost a case of elision. Perhaps the point being that what is natural to speech will survive even if partiallymuted.

                                       complext

Tampering with linguistic DNA can result in a semantical reprioritizing of the world (and of our relationships to it) the likes of which have never been seen til the advent of minimalist writing. A single 't' addition to the root 'complex'( adj[L complexus, pp. of complecti to embrace, comprise, (a multitude of objects), fr. com- + plectere to braid) does not just mark gratuitous alteration of an otherwise complete word, organically safe & sound, at best a case of successful, "aesthetically pleasing" linguistic experimentation. What's at stake here (for me) is the semantic power of language in general or, to put it more more speculatively, the degree to which words can naturally adopt the self-transformative properties of the world, becoming a 'complex text' with the potential for significant variations. What looks on the "outside" like wanton variation on a root word is rather a seismic shifting deep "inside" language itself. It's the job of 'complext' to register that shifting and provide direction for detecting similar processes at work in word formation.

Perhaps all the forces ( from the root 'plexus' or "interwoven combination of parts") have lain hidden under layers of an all too familiar language usage. Huth's pwoermd is really an active linguistic blood and guts network distinguishable from ordinary words by its telltale 't' addition: 't' is a genetic marker for a new hybrid one-word formation.Perhaps it's both formulaic and combinatory at the same time: a sign of visible alteration attributable to lexical upheavals that like to push their way through to the surface of language. It's very much in the spirit of (but not the same as) Bök's xenotext project by which the pwoermd is a code that if deciphered will disclose deep "two-way interactions between letters and their more general DNA properties. In Bök's case a letter-nucleotide interaction that hopefully results in a genetically self-perpetuating poem!
                                       eduction

If we have to look deep inside DNA for the causes of a pwoermd's hard 't' ending, it might be possible to make a similar claim for softer vowel-prefixes like the  'e' in 'eduction', but recognizing that 'eduction' is, unlike the first two pwoermds, a "single, unmodified traditional word". Here the powers of word-formation, stemming from its root 'educe' [L educere to draw out, from. e- + ducere to lead] don't seem quite as cataclysmic. If by that we mean taking notice of the transformative powers arising from deep inside language, such as marks the  investigative practices of minimalist (Huth, Saroyan)  and the most post-avant conceptualist ( Bök )poets who aren't afraid to cross disciplinary borders.

Perhaps 'eduction' is a pwoermd manifesto of sorts, leading the reader away from the traditional writing space of poetry as comprising words only. By definition a pwoermd can never be just a word. It's maybe the reason poet Geof Huth has recently christened April "International Pwoermd Writing Month", and offers a much more comprehensive 'typology' of pwoermd-formation than that outlined above (In fact, I could very well have used the terms 'apheresis' and 'syncope' in my discussion of ''thevolution, a refinement made necessary by the form's growing appeal'). The scope is international; its spirit is both wildly experimental but respectful also of cultural & literary tradition. As he says in  the InterNaPwoWriMo blog,

For the third year, I'll be encouraging folks to write a pwoermd a day for every day of the month of April, and once again I'm looking for many participants, across the globe, and working in many languages. If you can write one one-word poem a day thirty days in a row, drop me a note so that I can keep track of you. ("So Begins InterNaPwoWriMo 3, Thursday, April 1, 2010)

"Rankor": a visual poem by Ed Baker

Wikipedia versus Britannica.com: some reflections on e-literacy, digital humanities and Salman Rushdie.

Since its inception in 2001 Wikipedia has been hailed, especially by its founders Jimmy Wales & Larry Sanger, as the source of  free, unrestricted and  "open-source" knowledge on the Internet: "the free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit." The champion of democratized media, Wikipedia stands by its record (the seventeenth most widely visited site) as among the Web's most popular, certainly most heavily networked and accessed, source of online content. It is unfiltered (meaning it's not vetted or overseen by credentialed experts in the field), free, and mainly user-generated: all the qualities of knowledge that's bound (it hopes) to appeal to the greatest number of digital users. A claim that Wikipedia founders & editors wear like a badge of honour.

But, as its critics continually remind us, Wikipedia is really a source of  shoddy, inaccurate and oftentimes discredited work, particularly pernicious in the way it tends to eclipse more legitimate knowledge-sources like Britannica. The Britannica corporation having to lay off hundreds of its employees in 2001 and 2002 as a result of its online competitor. The only way for it to avoid further losses was, of course, to go digital as well, pitching its role as a true cultural gate-keeper to those who might be seduced by the blandishments of its arch rival. Among its many claims is that "[e]ach article, picture and video is fact-checked by Britannica editors for consistency of style and language level: in general, that everything you see on this site is "expertly-written, fact-checked, professionally edited knowledge."

The integrity of the author, of responsibly researched and edited work and perhaps even of literacy itself is at stake in this debate on the status of free, user-generated knowledge: of e-literacy, in a word. But let's define our terms more carefully, not giving in to the temptation (as so many critics do) to portray complex issues in broad generalizations: as if the controversy could be, first of all, presented  as an either/or. As if it were a two-sided coin with the more traditional linear, sequential view on one side, destined to fade quickly unless presented in a more responsible digitized format, and on the other the looser hypertextual online variety cheered by its supporters as a more fluid, interactive way of reading & writing the world. If it's just a coin, the resolution will always amount to the proverbial toss in the air.

Consequently it is to the more interesting (and oftentimes unstated) philosophical, literary, and historical causes that we must turn to see the issue of e-literacy under its truer, more appreciably complex aspect. When, for example, have the most vociferous critics of e-literacy (like Andrew Keen, Sven Birkerts, Mark Bauerlein) ever really fleshed out terms like 'knowledge', 'reading', 'the book', 'the marketplace', or even the nature of 'human understanding'?  Something that Web theorists and practitioners, like it or not, always do when pressing their case for technology and pushing new product lines.

Take the example of cognitive scientists who study how "the hand movements of people using a mouse" reveal Heideggerian insights into the way people and their tools become one, leading to rather surprising conclusions about computer and self connectivity.  Insights bound to find their way into ways of making computers a more integral " part of you as a thinking, behaving thing.” Or the example of literary authors whose works consist of hundreds of fragments taken directly (& unabashedly) from other writers, as in the case of the recently published Reality Hunger by David Shields, daring in this way to question the notion of authorial ownership and control by an appeal to a social ontology of "online collectivism": substituting traditional, modernist principles of plot development & characterization for newer, bolder epistemological concepts of "metaness" and "mash-up".

Or consider the importance Culture and Communications theorist Ted Striphas gives to a Digital Humanities concept in a recently posted Culture Machine magazine call for academic papers, defining 'digital humanities' as a field of study "embracing all those scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology as well as being engaged in processes of digital media production and practice (e.g. developing new media theory, creating interactive electronic literature, building online databases and wikis)."  The term is a gathering ground for a new understanding of the 'human'. Researches (reminiscent of  the Frankfurt School of Adorno & Horkheimer) directed towards a liberatory type of digital-textual interconnectedness to guide all future technological studies.

Once again, let's define our terms carefully. Or the conditions of their origin and development. Is the view that e-literacy is the product of a decentralized, unedited and rampantly user-generated Web 2.0 the only defensible one out there? Has the traditional book really morphed into an outmoded 'other' beyond anything that can restore it to its former self? How do we interpret the sudden arrival of e-book readers (like Kindle, iPad, Nook) intended not just to replace the traditional "codex volume" (Striphas) but regroup older paradigms under a new text-compatible substitute? So that what we are left with, in Stiphas's words, is a view of the e-book that, according to his astute Marxian analysis of its relations to a target audience, consitutes a "form of appearance". Kindle e-reader (and its imitators)viewed here as a product of  historical materialist forces whose potential for corporate abuse becomes an almost built-in feature of e-reader technology and application.

 Again, which view of digital literacy wins the day? There's the romantic-nostalgic view of critics who long for a return to something like a world of linear, sequential 'reading' (the Britannica.com contingent) or that of more contemporary (Wikipedia-style) theorists with their own deconstructive (even anti-humanist) analyses of traditional literacy. We look on, even with a sense of astonishment, at events like American book retailer Barnes & Noble getting into the digital books market and wonder at the seismic forces that make this possible at all. We sense also that we may have turned a conceptual corner: forever unable to reinstate traditional notions of  literacy and reading itself, the book and even the market place, even if we wanted to. In the face of traditional print-based retailers vying for their share of a rapidly growing e-market, it is certainly time to talk cultural revolution along the lines of the displacement of orality by 'literacy' in the age of Plato or the Gutenberg premiere of movable type.

The New York Times (online) "Books" section recently carried an article "Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit" (March 15 2010) on born-digital archival material of author Salman Rushdie kept on display at Emory University (Atlanta). Visitors can gain access to file folders Rushdie used, even going so far as to edit first drafts on the author's own Mac computer: a uniquely author-spectator interaction the author of the article refers to as "access through emulation". But what was even more remarkable (to me) than the display of digitalized archival materials was the way the computer freed an author (living underground in 1989) from the tedium of incessant rewriting & editing and provided more time for thought, a contingency Rushdie says resulted in "tighter" work:

Mr. Rushdie started using a computer only when the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa drove him underground. "My writing has got tighter and more concise because I no longer have to perform the mechanical act of re-typing endlessly," he explained during an interview while in hiding. "And all the time that was taken up by that mechanical act is freed to think."

I can't think of any episode more highly qualified to attest to the emergence of e-literacy, at least as a cultural & historical phenomenon. The man and his turn towards e-writing serve as almost iconic moments. It almost looks like a serendipitous meeting of writing genius and a newly evolving means of cultural production thrust cruelly on him. Almost but it isn't. Here history, adaptive literary ingenuity & a new conception of writing itself, one sprung from the former as in their alchemical fires, combine to force a literacy revolution. In fact, the whole Rushdie tale of word processing by necessity and its legacy as a digital relic that can be still directly accessed in its original screen form give literacy its truest definition today.

I'll even cite the Rushdie case as the occasion for a possible resolution to the Wikipedia versus Britannica.com debate. Literacy resides as a lovable bookish ideal only in a writer's (or reader's) imagination: it's very survival, however, as an enduring form of literary transmission needs new materials and means of production, both provided by changing human history. It's necessary to pause at that author and writing technology intersection for the rise of e-literacy, in origin & development, resides just there. Rushdie's use of the computer is a representation of a whole network (perhaps the term's most legitimate use) of converging historical & cultural forces, with the former providing the latter with its necessary impetus. I believe literary imagination subserves events, content and even the most radical contingency.

 E-literacy, in a word, is a conceptual construct, tool of serious scholarly work, but it appears also as a vital cultural conduit for changing weltanschauungen stated primarily in historical materialist terms.The hand-maiden to technological history. Textual content that cannot be reduced to a pure relic (artifact) anymore, and which works by an "access through emulation" principle, to make the processes of creative writing stored in Rushdie's files real in a way that Dickens's original copies in the Victoria and Albert Museum archives can never be. What, in my view, e-literacy is really all about.