Poetry has a long history of vigorous experimentation. Because it exists at the periphery of society (and at the centre of language in its self-conception), poetry is free to explore formal terrain that is not permitted to prose. Innumerable analog (print) poetic movements have contributed or anticipated to varying degrees the emergence of theoretical concerns active in contemporary digital poetics. The Dadaists, Surrealists, Lettristes, Futurists, Concrete poets, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and OULIPO movements have each, in their own way, provoked radical recalibrations of the page, text and semantics. The Lettristes and Concrete poets created vivid visual knots of text, which are ancestors of the current developments in 3D text display and dynamic mobile text. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets posited engaged texts that dealt with the materiality of language as technology, anticipating the current dominant theoretical paradigm of digital poetics . Algorithmic poetry (on a computer) was anticipated by the OULIPO group whose systems of analog writing constraints constituted a sustained engagement with generative algorithmic literature.
My own practical inclinations are not theoretical. I find some degree of affinity with the views expressed by a marginal splinter group loosely grouped under the title of PostLanguage poets who advocate a poetry disengaged from formal theoretics, a poetry that is allowed to evolve according to the inclination and tendencies of the artist instead of a set of systematic ideological forms. In the digital poetic realm, the online works at BornMagazine reflect this aesthetic foregrounding. The following section will explore theorists and theories which have evolved around language in computational contexts; this literature review will hopefully form a foundation from which to situate digital poetic work that does not initiate from a theoretical foundation.
Many language poems are computationally tractable. The central features: disconnected sentences, intentionally deconstructed narrative focus, hybridized spatio-temporal locations, and mixed lingo from different domains. One exemplary current digital poetics practitioner perhaps inadvertently replicates the LANGUAGE style using feeds from Twitter rss streams (tiny text messages that are migrating like starlings in public space among the pdas of conference goers). The patterned ecosystem of live realtime txts is mixed with video footage from a railway station, the twitter user icons, and flickr feeds. The writer is essentially replaced by the internet who steps aside and becomes information architect to the evolving dynamic undulant topological skin of data that is being twittered around. The effect is sporadically, like the best of LANGUAGE poetry, absorbingly hypnotic; the style is the same (disconnected sentences, intentionally deconstructed narrative focus, hybridized spatio-temporal locations, and mixed lingo from different domains ) In the digital work, the live feed (the page) work never repeats. It’s written by no one and everyone. Repetition, accumulation, variation and redundancy ricochet through the network. Language constructs itself. The digital poet is a voyeur of perforated space, The Waiting, hovering zones where humans nourish their appetites for absorbing anonymous patterns (L'attente, the waiting / Flussgeist 1 (2007) Gregory Chatonsky )
Labels: digital poetics, feed, language, rss, twitter, waiting
