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Demystifying the Digital, Re-animating the Book: A Digital
Poetics
*Lori Emerson <16.1bios.html#emerson.bio> *
/ State University of New York, Buffalo/
lemerson@buffalo.edu
© <#copyright> 2005 Lori Emerson.
All rights reserved.
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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.
/ Department of English
State University of New York, Buffalo
lemerson@buffalo.edu /
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Works Cited
Baldwin, Sandy. "A Poem is a Machine to Think With: Digital Poetry
and the Paradox of Innovation." Postmodern Culture 13:2.
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.
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/Last Modified: Thursday, 22-Sep-2005 15:35:55 EDT/