PMC Logo

    Demystifying the Digital, Re-animating the Book: A Digital Poetics

    Lori Emerson
    State University of New York, Buffalo
    lemerson@buffalo.edu

    © 2005 Lori Emerson.
    All rights reserved.

    Review of:
    Loss Glazier. Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2003.

  1. There is no single epigraph that can suitably frame this review of Loss Glazier's Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. Loss Glazier's 2003 collection of poetry is simply too variable, straddling well-established print poetry practices (ranging from the work of the Objectivists to language poetry to so-called post-language poetry) and the still supple practice of digital poetry (ranging from generated, hypertext, kinetic, and codework poems). Even the book's representation of "Loss Glazier" is malleable as the author repeatedly puns on "loss" to the point of effacing Loss altogether--"Loss Glazier" is anything from simply "glazier at ak-soo" (27) to a "loss" who "is mired in some kind of rhyme / game" (44) and who "picks / city for final drawn out stanzas" to call it "Leaving Loss Glazier" (64). Just as confounding is the "real" Loss Glazier whose poems move between English, Spanish, and computer languages and who founded and directs the Electronic Poetry Center--a poetry resource equally committed to digital poetry, print-based contemporary poetry, new media writing, and literary programming.

  2. Likewise reflecting these hybridities and border-crossings, Glazier's 2001 Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries is, as the title implies, a critical work as well as a statement of poetics that ought to be read alongside Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. On the one hand Glazier's critical work is an important attempt to forge a thoroughgoing theoretical framework to account adequately for digital poetry; on the other hand his critical work is also fundamentally inseparable from his creative work. Taking after Charles Bernstein's A Poetics and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, his books comment on each other, quote from each other, expand on and digress from each other in ways that make it impossible to ignore the fact that Glazier's whole work to-date represents a lucid, coherent, and clearly articulated project.

  3. As Sandy Baldwin puts it in his review of Digital Poetics in Postmodern Culture, Glazier attempts to position digital poetry as a form of poiesis in order to broaden "the scope of poetic innovation and raise the question of 'What are we making here?'" Baldwin also claims that the value of Digital Poetics lies in its attempt to "grasp the textuality of e-poetry in the antique textuality of the book." Such an attempt means, first of all, de-mystifying the digital as either an ideal medium for those poets who still adhere to Pound's dictum to "make it new" or as a far-from-ideal medium which threatens to ruin reading and writing as we know it. Effectively sidestepping either extreme, Glazier combines the aesthetics and politics made familiar by Bernstein and Howe with a critical approach to new media art articulated by critics such as Espen Aarseth, Johanna Drucker, and Lev Manovich--all of whom look retrospectively at print texts through the lens of the digital--to argue that the digital shares an emphases on method, visual dynamics, and materiality with twentieth-century print-based poetry. For Glazier, a digital poet like Simon Biggs, for instance, uses to similar effect the same text-generating methods based on combinatory mathematics that are also used by print-based poets Louis Zukofsky, John Cage, and Jackson MacLow.

  4. However, what is new about digital writing, according to Glazier, is the materials and processes it offers--materials that make possible the ability to generate text from a vast and complex array of sources, to transform flip-books and concrete poems into kinetic poems, to create extensive hypertextual works and processes to make poetry that may now include computer languages, unix processes, and computer errors. As he puts it in an endnote to "The Parts," the title poem in the first of three sections comprising Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm: "In these poems, I was motivated by the new possibilities of the medium, driven by the difficulties of casting words in the pre-web digital environment, excited by their transmissibility, and influenced by the vocabulary of early technology: mark-up conventions, network protocols, and computer code--themselves ways of working with words" (97).

  5. Placing work at the heart of writing--and thus recalling the twentieth century's history of procedural and processual poetries--Glazier also dissolves any easy distinctions we might make about working with print and working in the digital realm--distinctions usually used to claim either that the digital is the natural outgrowth of the printed book or that simply using a computer to write poetry constitutes a genre, poetics, or method of writing. As such, what's particularly notable about Glazier's account of the "new" in new media is that it affords us ways to reconceive print in the light of the digital; both the web and the way in which a computer stores information demonstrate not only that the computer "writes" in parts, storing information through the hard drive, but also that all writing is made up parts of other writings: "printing it out is only parts of / it, sections somewhere framed / and amenable to being scribbled on // so that perhaps it's a matter / of clippings you assemble scrap book fashion strings // of form dispersed by light" (22).

  6. It is worth pointing out that it is this move away from a hierarchy of media, where neither medium is superceded and where there is a necessary codependence between the new and the old, that makes his work remarkable. Not only does Glazier's poetry enact and complicate precepts laid out in Digital Poetics, but he also includes digital accompaniments with both his critical and creative books such that a feedback loop is created between digital and print media--the print commenting and expanding on the digital commenting on the print and so on. This positions Glazier's work as a self-reflexive rendering of David Jay Bolter's and Richard Grusin's groundbreaking concept of remediation. For Bolter and Grusin, every medium is divided between two equally compelling impulses: the desire for immediacy (or the desire to erase media) and the desire for hypermediacy (or the desire to proliferate media) (19). As they put it, the desire for immediacy is linked to proliferation of media because each tries to create a revolution of presence or "presentness" that the other media was not able to achieve; each media presents itself as a refashioned and improved version of other media and so "digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise" (15). Undoubtedly the desire for immediacy underlies Glazier's effort to use digital media to work with words from the inside, to animate, enliven and make language present; the online version of "White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares" is a clear example of this as images are used to accompany (and so to intensify our experience of) an ever-changing body of text that, in having over five hundred versions, is unique for each reader. As Tristan Tzara might say, "The poem will resemble you. / And there you are--an infinitely original author of charming sensibility" (39). There's no experience more immediate than reading a poem written just for you.

  7. It is the version of "White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares"--now with "(An Iteration)" added to the title--that appears in the second section ("Semilla de Calabaza (Pumpkin Seed)") of Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm that best exemplifies the other aspect of remediation: hypermediacy. For Bolter and Grusin, immediacy inevitably leads to hypermediacy as the attempts at presence lead to an awareness of media as media. As such, "White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares (An Iteration)" is not a static poem with a unified point of view but rather a print version (one among many possible versions) that comes after and comments on the "original" digital version. Further, with phrases like "Do you mind if I slip into something more comfortable? Like what? your public underscore html" (27) or "One small cup on the (World) Wide Verb" (29), we are made aware not only of the extent to which computer-related vocabulary has become familiar to the point of being transparent but also of the printed book's ability to comment simultaneously on itself and on the digital as media. For Glazier the book stages itself as the contemporary, not the predecessor, of the digital.

  8. "White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares (An Iteration)" also initiates the aforementioned disintegration of "Loss Glazier" as a coherent self and locatable author--a theme that is taken up more thoroughly in the final section entitled "Leaving Loss Glazier." While twentieth-century avant-garde poets have shown us that the author as a coherent entity is not inherent to print, this medium has long been used in the service of coherency and stability and we are most certainly made aware of how digital media bear the possibility of renewing and expanding the possibilities inherent in print. That is, with lines such as "I con, I can, I cheat icons. As a shortcut I speak through the ventriloquist" (28) and "I will now toss gloss of Los Angeles, Los Alamos." (28), Glazier's inter-media poetry works to unsettle easy assumptions about either medium: a unified author is no more inherent to print than a fragmented author is inherent to the digital.

  9. The poems in "Leaving Loss Glazier" chronicle the rise of Microsoft as a monopoly and how the development of "panoptic software and manipulative word processing programs" (99)--paralleled, of course, by the ongoing colonizing efforts of Anglophone culture and language--works to reinstate coherency and stasis. As Glazier puts it in "Olé/Imbedded Object," "Wherever you go, / there's an icon waiting for you." Moreover, like the language of capitalism that can turn a Greek goddess into a brand of running shoes in the span of a few years, these operating systems work at the level of language such that "the language you are breathing becomes the language you think" (57)--for example, "ever think how your life would have been different if in 1989 you'd stuck to WordStar instead of switching to WordPerfect?" (64). How better, then, to stage "a showdown" than by using the language of, say, Windows 95 against itself? Glazier writes:

    Windows offer slivers of context as a frame for commercials as content. This might be the ideal path for the Web, according to many developers, a place you catch glimpses of information as you view windows plastered with ads . . . If you have the right attitude towards directories you will never flail. After making your choice, left-click the Next button or pass go . . . Artists tend to left-click while Republicans tend to the right. (60-61)

    Likewise, there's no better way to counteract the rapid shift toward a linguistically homogenous American than to commit "Tejanismo"--the deliberate hybridization of Spanish and English and, perhaps, even computer languages: "HTML as the world's dominant language. As in, contact glazier at ak-soo. Well, I bet it has something to do with Nahuatl. Po cenotes. Act of Tejanismo" (27).

  10. However, it must also be noted that by the end of the book the word-play exemplified by "Leaving Loss Glazier"-- a section fraught with puns as is typical of both Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm and Digital Poetics--becomes perhaps too typical, the puns bearing more amusement value than performing the kind of multi-leveled work that Glazier seeks to install as a centerpiece of his writing.

  11. Nonetheless, Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm stands alone in the yet-to-be established field of digital poetry and poetics; it is as unique in its seemingly effortless weaving together of competing philosophies, media theories, languages, and cultures as it is provocative in its refusal to position itself as the print-record of a digital revolution with "Loss Glazier" at the helm.

    12. Department of English
    State University of New York, Buffalo
    lemerson@buffalo.edu

    Talk Back

    COPYRIGHT (c) 2005 BY Lori Emerson. READERS MAY USE PORTIONS OF THIS WORK IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT LAW. IN ADDITION, SUBSCRIBERS AND MEMBERS OF SUBSCRIBED INSTITUTIONS MAY USE THE ENTIRE WORK FOR ANY INTERNAL NONCOMMERCIAL PURPOSE BUT, OTHER THAN ONE COPY SENT BY EMAIL, PRINT OR FAX TO ONE PERSON AT ANOTHER LOCATION FOR THAT INDIVIDUAL'S PERSONAL USE, DISTRIBUTION OF THIS ARTICLE OUTSIDE OF A SUBSCRIBED INSTITUTION WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM EITHER THE AUTHOR OR THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS IS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN.

    THIS ARTICLE AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE. A TEXT-ONLY ARCHIVE OF THE JOURNAL IS ALSO AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE. FOR FULL HYPERTEXT ACCESS TO BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO PROJECT MUSE, THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS.

    Works Cited

    Baldwin, Sandy. "A Poem is a Machine to Think With: Digital Poetry and the Paradox of Innovation." Postmodern Culture 13:2. </text-only/issue.103/13.2baldwin.txt>

    Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 1999.

    ---. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002.

LINKS: Non-Graphical Users See Top of Page