Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1403112221570.5219@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: to new-poetry
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 22:22:22 -0400 (EDT)
Just to clarify - there are a lot of poets in academia who are brilliant and edgy - it's more the institutional apparatus that surrounds them. I'm thinking of John Cayley's work for example, which is hardly traditional. But the apparatus stresses a canon, so for example, with electronic literature I've seen almost no discussion of IRC, MOOs, MUDs, BBS, or Newsgroups - all of which developed different 'wild poetics' that are of great interest. Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages and some other works cover text-based gaming like Adventure or Zork in a similar direction. The RFC (Request for Comments) early Internet papers contain a lot of traditional poetry (some of it reprinted in Pater Salus' book on the early Net), but the poetics in them extends elsewhere - not only in allusion, but also in dealing with underlying mechanics. Perl poetry (which can be quite traditional) falls into this area but then there are groups like Jodi whose codework is only revealed when the page-source in a browser is opened. Other people like mez come to mind, and she's also had academic exposure. The ELO's http://collection.eliterature.org/1/ and /2/ have a lot of amazing material in them. My point (I'm meandering) is that so much of this is based on digital (or in some people's minds post- digital) production and for that matter digital reading techniques, that new and differing academias are necessary to forefront this material for students - and this generation of students has grown up fundamentally with the digital. Instead, the poetry worlds, such as it is/they are, seem/s so often to still consider language poetry the avant-garde, that the older or traditional forms are still sufficient for/within the social. But then, sufficient for what? Certainly for expression, for a politics which might have a hard time dealing with Occupy. And in academia, just to clarify, there are a great many poets who are brilliant and edgy and struggle at times with the institution that supports them - John Cayley certainly comes to mind, who might be considered, along with mez, a loose cannon. A good example of this is the archeology of electronic literature, in relation for example to the Chinese 1000 Character Essay, or even the language games played in the Hebrew Bible. Nick Montfort's recent work with Pall Thayer and the Commodore 64 early personal computer comes to mind, and they currently have a show up at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery. The ELO and Jodi come to mind. I think of codework which always seems to extend elsewhere; I developed the term in an essay I wrote for the American Book Review. This was a print publication and the page-source was and still is identical with the page. I consider even now the poetics of Celan and Holderlin to be among the avant-garde; they recognize their insufficiency of form within the social. Cayley has done brilliant work between Chinese and translation, often dealing with the underlying mechanics of reading. I think this is also true of Dwarf Fortress. There are a lot of brilliant and edgy poets around.