Poetics in a Networked Digital Milieu [1]
Eine Geschichte der Poetik, ein Hilfsmittel zur Orientierung kenne ich nicht.
[A history of poetics, a device for orientation I know not.]
–Wilhelm Scherer [2]
Preface
This research begins in an unexpected place. In 2006, while living in Radili’ko, a remote village located where the arctic circle intersects the Deh Cho (or Mackenzie River) in Denendeh (Canada’s Northwest Territories), I began to study contemporary poetry and poetics. This is an “unexpected” place to begin such an endeavour because, in one sense, Radili’ko lacked the resources one might imagine to be necessary to carry out such study. [1] For example, books.
There was no bookstore in Radili’ko – the closest one was over 300 kilometres away, as the raven flies, in Inuvik. The town’s library, housed in the Chief T’Selehye School building, had around 200 volumes, ones primarily intended for children and young adults, and a dozen general reference texts. Getting books in from elsewhere proved to be a difficult process – as flights to Radili’ko were infrequent and very costly, and the only overland routes from the south were navigable by trucks over an ice road for about four months each winter, and by boats and barges each summer along the river.
Yet, on Monday and Thursday afternoons once school had let out, visitors were able to use one of the library’s four desktop computers to access the Internet for periods up to 30 minutes. The connection, provided by an early broadband service over satellite, was dodgy and acted as if it were weather-dependent. Temperatures below –40 degrees Celsius seemed to halt the signal, perhaps freezing it in mid-air. A new user coming online was enough to shut down the entire network. Yet it was in that library in Radili’ko, during these thirty-minute intervals of occasional connection, in search of something to read, that I happened upon the digital repositories that are the subject of this writing.
Electronic Poetry Center, UbuWeb, PennSound
The media historian John Durham Peters describes media as “world-enabling infrastructures; not passive vessels for content, but ontological shifters.”[4] That discernment – something close to it, not as clearly articulated – is what I felt upon encountering the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), UbuWeb, and PennSound on the computers at the Radili’ko library. That I, from a remote village on the arctic circle, could freely access and download documents and media that I imagined existed only in a university’s special collections or museum’s archives 5000 miles away felt revelatory. It changed my conception of where I was and what was possible there.
Over time, that perception extended beyond my own individual context. As I used the sites more regularly, as I began to write and study and correspond with other people engaged with them and their materials, I wondered: How do the infrastructures of these repositories enable other people, other communities, other activities elsewhere? For whom is this the case? And how do they, in turn, impact the aesthetic communities and institutions from which they emerge and respond to? How do they alter the very idea of literature?
If my initial encounter with these three sites was a fortunate coincidence, my selecting them as the central matter of this work is not. Since the mid-1990s, the creators of these three repositories have utilized them as a primary means for extending the purview and program of poetics – the exploration and articulation of difference in modes of literary production – as a contemporary institutional formation. [5] In this process, they have established the digital repository, as an archival genre, to be the central medial platform for the the publication, dissemination, and storage of poetic works in a networked digital milieu. In creating access to collections of out-of-print and difficult-to-acquire compositions, these three repositories have profoundly reconfigured the space and time of literary production.
In generating new circulatory channels for works composed in an array of formats – including text, sound, and (moving) image – these repositories exhibit the fundamental intermediality of poetic practice like no prior platform for publication. [6] To this extent, these repositories incorporate characteristics of other vital means for the dissemination of works in literary and artistic communities – for example, the little magazine, the anthology, the reading series, and the program [7] – bringing together aspects of each in one venue. These three repositories, therefore, serve as an ideal set of objects for “charting out,” as Charles Bernstein describes it, “the relation of the digital to poetry and poetics” [8] in the early information age. [9]
[ASIDE: Now, in the particular setting we find ourselves in for this gathering, I realize these repositories are in need of no introduction. I imagine everyone here has used these sites, and have probably done so regularly for quite a while. I also know many folks here have materials of their own located on these sites and several have contributed significantly to their formation and development. For that reason, the introduction to each object I’ll provide here is short and specifically directed toward the concept I’m interested in extracting from each object for futher discussion.]
The Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) is one of the earliest digital repositories focused on poetry and poetics in the English language. In 1995, Loss Pequeño Glazier – in dialogue with Kenneth Sherwood and with the support of Charles Bernstein – initiated the EPC as a pre-Web Internet site using TelNet and Gopher protocols. Glazier designed the site to function as a hub that could support a virtual ecosystem for poetry and poets. Founded footsteps away from the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo (UB) and within the context of UB’s Poetics Program, Glazier’s central aim for the project was to create “a site for access, collection and dissemination of poetry and related material” in cyberspace. [10] The EPC’s focus on works of and information on the radical modernist traditions of twentieth century North American poetry stemmed from Glazier’s interest in those traditions’ formats for publishing (for example, the small press publication from hand press to mimeo, Xerox to offset), their modes of conviviality (such as conferences, readings, and talks), and the multimediality of their poetic practices (in that the poets often materialized their works, in addition to being texts, as performances, installations, image- or sound-based works). Trained as a computer scientist, an information systems technician, and a bibliographer, Glazier’s skillset allowed him to confront the challenging task of collecting and organizing such pluriform works in the then-emergent space of the Internet. [11]
UbuWeb, founded in 1996 by Kenneth Goldsmith, is a Web-based repository of text, sound, image, and video works related to historical and contemporary avant-garde aesthetic movements. Initially focused on materials emerging out of the internationalist movement of visual and concrete poetry from the mid-twentieth century onward, UbuWeb grew to feature media related to the various disciplines of literature, dance, video art, music, sound art, performance, and outsider art. Like the EPC, UbuWeb concerns itself with creating access to “hard-to-find, out-of-print and obscure materials, transferred digitally to the Web.” [12] Referring to the repository as a “distribution center,” [13] Goldsmith underscores the importance of establishing access through the creation of new circulatory matrixes for media. To much scorn and praise, Goldsmith has privileged the circulatory component of UbuWeb above other considerations – for example, above quality (of a work’s reproduction compared to its original) and permission (from the work’s creator in order to host and circulate it), and to a certain extent access meaning navigation of the site. To this extent, UbuWeb has been and continues to be instrumental in shaping open culture and media commons for information and educational resources today.
PennSound is an online repository of MP3 audio recordings dedicated to poetry and poetics. Initiated by Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, PennSound has significantly altered the status of sound as a “material and materializing dimension of poetry” [14] by collecting, organizing, disseminating and making available thousands of poetry-related recordings, and by anchoring the repository to an array of interfaces on- and offline. In the shear breadth of and wealth of audio recordings the repository has made accessible through developing new interfaces – a process that Filreis describes as “our format” [15] – PennSound has fundamentally altered the status of the phonotextual elements of poetic practice since its inception. [16] Assembled from numerous personal and institutional collections of poetry audio recordings – ones, generally, that prior to PennSound did not have their recordings in any kind of publicly-accessible form of circulation – the repository has established a new set of standards for not only creating access to literary audio recordings, but also for critically engaging and producing literary audio recordings.
Each repository is, as I will detail, an argument for a poetics; their entwined histories and cultural-technical infrastructures articulate numerous affinities, yet each is distinct for the way it casts in a new light certain critical terms for literary studies. [17] Approaching each in terms of its emphasis on, respectively, access, circulation, and format affords a detailed engagement with the aesthetic, institutional, and technological concerns of the digital repository, one that I hope will open up to a consideration of writing and language more generally in our networked digital milieus.
Toward a Media Historical Poetics
In the study of what writing is, has been, and might be, the field of poetics and the figure of the archive fuse together. Not confined to a singular narrative or trajectory, but a vast territory or “complex volume” of discursive articulations in which “heterogeneous regions are differentiated or deployed in accordance with specific rules and practices that cannot be superposed,” [18] the field of poetics and the figure of the archive are concerned with the assembling and organization of past compositions, the transmission of their inscriptions into the present, and the viable futures those traces make legible. If, as Kate Eichhorn argues, “[t]o write in a digital age is to write in the archive,” [19] what can digital repositories as a specific archival genre, [20] what can their form, materials, contexts, formats, protocols, and use teach us about about poetics today?
To respond to this question, I draw on media-historical methods and perspectives. As disparate as they might be, the theoretical touchstones of contemporary media history – from Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism “the medium is the message” to the discursive analysis of Michel Foucault, from the varied writings of the German “materialities of communication” scholars to actor-network theory, media archaeology, and contemporary media-historiographical methodologies of scholars like Lisa Gitelman and Jonathan Sterne – all have at least one thing in common. That is, they situate and subtend the analysis of content rooted in modes of textual interpretation within a more expansive framework that investigates the various aspects of cultural form.
[TALKING POINTS, so as to move through quickly: In this dissertation, as a methodology, I am developing a media historical poetics. Through a detailed exposition on the text and transmission of Aristotle’s Poetics, I lay out how a media historical component has been embedded historically in the discourse of poetics. Though at various moment the medial aspect of it has been emphasized (Aristotle, McLuhan, et al.), and in others the historical aspect has been emphasized (Scherer, Prins, et al.), the two rarely come into communion together.
Why is this a fruitful ground to explore? Because a media historical approach to poetry and poetics provides two important correctives: 1. to the lack of engagement with the fundamental intermediality of poetic practice historically, to its cultural techniques, formats, and iterative components; and 2. to the technological determinism of “media poetics,” which generally obscures or ignores issues concerning power and social difference in their analyses.
So, I want to state clearly that while I am attempting to underline the importance of the object of this research (digital repositories of poetry and poetics materials) equally important is its articulation of a methodology (a media historical poetics). With that in mind, I’m going to spend my final minutes highlighting what I see as the most important contributions of this research object and methodology – keywords, actually, that I hope will be helpful to a general consideration of material poetries in a digital age. END TALKING POINTS]
Access, Circulation, Format
In the decades prior to the EPC, the “accessibility” of a poetic text primarily referred to a work’s specific internal stylistic, often premised upon notions of “direct speech” and “self-expression” that a supposed “general reader” would comprehend rather immediately upon the encounter of reading. For example, take Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter” – published just prior to Glazier beginning work on the EPC – which both praises and seeks to continue the tradition of “past” poets and critics who “addressed a wide community of educated readers,” reporting their reactions with “scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies,” and who without “talking down to their audience” cultivated “a public idiom,” and who prized “clarity and accessibility” over “specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship.” [21]
In making available key documents of radical modernist poetic traditions – ones often out of circulation or difficult to track down, ones also deemed inaccesible in the prior sense of the term by writers like Gioia – the EPC underscored the obtainability of the text over its supposed (or ideological) intelligibility. This is an important paradigm shift for poetics in a networked digital milieu. It is one that materializes Friedrich Kittler’s speculation (concurrent with Gioia’s): “only that which is networkable exists at all” [Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt], a concept that Kenneth Goldsmith would appropriate fifteen years later with regard to UbuWeb: “If it’s not on the internet, it doesn’t exist.”[22] [NOTE: the discourse of “access.”]
As I remarked earlier, UbuWeb’s approach to access is premised upon circulation, which is prioritized over permission, quality, and navigation. In this, the repository as a medial object has remained perpetually in flux: due to legal issues (mostly concerning the infringement of intellectual property) the repository has needed to change the location of its servers every few years; it has been occasionally shut down; it exists on several mirrored sites all variously updated; what is publicly available changes day to day, month to month; and UbuWeb’s materials’ formats are regularly shifting so that they can more optimally be distributed.
The thematic of circulation provides an ideal framework for depicting UbuWeb’s mobile and mutabile existence, its texts and their composite form. This philological endeavour – the mapping of texts’ circulatory matrixes, their inscriptions and iterations, the delineation of the edges of cultural artefacts and the interpretive communties built around them – extends far beyond the context of UbuWeb to shed light on the materially embedded character of cultural expression. [23] [NOTE: I’m not saying this is by any means a *new* scenario for criticism, but that the condition of texts in these digital repositories calls for a renewed engagement with such methods and perspectives.]
Finally, I have a great deal to say about FORMAT as a keyword for poetics, but I’ll boil my comments down to this one: FORMAT is productive in that it connects the organization of a text’s chains of linguistic significations (what we more commonly refer to as form) with that text’s materials platform (codex, pdf, html, mp3, mp4, jpg, and so on). [24] The decision to construct PennSound using MP3s – shows how the repository’s conception of access and circulation are embedded in its specific format. [MP3 is far from being recognized as a “archival format,” in that it is “lower” quality, but what it does is circulate.] When Filreis refers to the various interfaces he has constructed with PennSound as a base as “our format,” he underlines the idea of format as both a “technical object” [25] as well as a “zone of activity” [26] with specifically designed protocols.
[FINAL REMARK: on format specificity – in recognizing the ways the organizers of these repositories have constructed them, the ways they have developed their access, circulation, and interface – this materializes the idea of the archive in a new and exciting way. On the repository.]
Notes
Image: Still from Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford’s “Egress” (2014).
[1] This talk is excerpted from the introduction to my doctoral dissertation “Poetics in a Networked Digital Milieu: Discourse, Infrastructure, Ecosystem.”
[2] Wilhelm Scherer, Poetik (1888).
[3] The community of 400 people was endowed with Elders who had learned and passed on traditional practices for the dissemination of cultural knowledge such as storytelling, beading, hide-tanning, and mapping the surrounding land so as to harvest its offerings, yet books were hard to come by.
[4] John Durham Peters, Marvellous Clouds, p. 25.
[5] Long note on this definition: Todorov, Harshav, Reed, Macherey, Eagleton.
[6] Dick Higgins (1967) defines “intermediality” as occurring at “a conjunction of overlapping media and genres.”
[7] See: Norris 1984; Clay et al. 1998; Kane 2003; Braddock 2012; Camlot 2012. [ADD TO THIS LIST.]
[8] From a dialogue that will be published at Appendix 5 in my dissertation.
[9] Galloway periodizes the information age as “not simply that moment when computers come to dominate, but is instead that moment in history when matter itself is understood in terms of information or code.” He continues: [T]he transformation of matter into code is not only a passage from the qualitative to the quantative, but also a passage from the non-aesthetic to the aesthetic – the passage from non-media to media. […] This historical moment – when life is defined no longer as essence, but as code – is the moment when life becomes a medium. (Galloway 2004, 111).
[10] Glazier 2002, 3.
[11] On the pluriform work, see Bernstein’s introduction to Close Listening. Also see Perloff on the “differential” text in New Media Poetics.
[12] “UbuWeb FAQ,” last access on 28 March 2018.
[13] “UbuWeb FAQ,” last access on 28 March 2018.
[14] Bernstein 1998, 4.
[15] From a dialogue with Filreis that will be published as Appendix 6 in my dissertation.
[16] Steve Evans (2012) defines the phonotext as a “threefold braid of timbre, text, and technology.”
[17] See Davidson, Bernstein, Perloff, Dworkin, Emerson, Stephens.
[18] Foucault 1972, 128.
[19] Eichhorn, 2008, 1.
[20] On “archival genres,” see Eichhorn 2008.
[21] Gioia, “Can Poetry Matter,” 1991: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1991/05/can-poetry-matter/305062/
[22] Kittler, F. (1993b/2003) Draculas Vermächtnis. Technische Schriften. Leipzig: Reclam. P. 182. Translated by John Durham Peters (2011, 26-7). Or, in the words of Kenneth Goldsmith, “if it doesn’t exist on the internet, it doesn’t exist.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/03/if-it-doesnt-exist-on-the-internet-it-doesnt-exist
[23] Here, I draw from Straw 2010; Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003; Lee and LiPuma 2002.
[24] Jonathan Sterne (2012) states that format “denotes a whole range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience, and workings of a medium. It also names a set of rules according to which a technology can operate” (7). Charles Bernstein (1992) distinguishes format as a “middle term” between medium and genre (134).
[25] See Kirschenbaum 2002. As a technical object, PennSound’s interface derives from a series of models and versions developed in order to organize phonotextual materials.
[26] See Galloway 2012. As a zone of activity, it emerges out of Filreis and Bernstein’s shared pedagogical visions as well as their engagement with and commitment to the modes of collective literary production developed within small press literary communities.