Digital Poetics: Getting Somewhere

February 25, 2010 at 12:14 am | Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

The real shame of last Thursday’s incident (other than the panicking and the terror and all that) was that I found myself, for the first time, really feeling like the class was moving in a good direction.  Not that we haven’t had good classes, but I could feel, in a very tangible way, my feelings on digital poetry shifting.  I had been called out for yet another ornery tweet whining about self-referential or otherwise superficially meta-leveled digital work, and I was stumbling through an explanation of exactly what bothered me.  We’ve talked about digital work as a critique of the norms of non-digital work.  This makes a lot of sense.  What I find interesting is that a digital piece MUST be a critique of these norms.  Not that a non-critiquing (as in, a piece that is not a critique of norms) piece would be bad, but that a digital piece, under all circumstances, performs these critiques.  They are unavoidable.

Alright.  So the critique of norms is a necessary part of the digital piece.  It cannot be avoided.  Which means that I can stop seeing these critiques as somewhat obvious and annoyingly pointed elements of the piece’s content.  Because they’re not thrust in there by the artist, either intentionally or unintentionally.  They arise out of the piece’s elements.  I can stop whining about critiques as content, because they’re not content.  In fact, the content is not the content.

The form is the content.

This isn’t a tremendously new idea.  It’s a little full of myself, and a little shortsighted/lame/altogether bland that I just threw it up there as its own paragraph.  It’s staying.  We talked about McLuhan’s idea of “the medium is the message.”  That’s roughly what’s going on here, although medium is specified a little more to the poem’s actual form.  This isn’t the revolutionary part, if there even is one.  What intrigues me is the attempt to talk about form as content.  In my last post, I thought about different types of digital literature, and how they are somewhat equivalent.  “Nio” and “Birds Singing Other Birds Songs” are essentially the same piece, down to the level of their content details.  That is, the act of navigation requires the same interactions with the form of the piece.  They’re two skins on the same application, to do my best to use computer-y terms.

If the form is the content and they’re the same formally, did I just call them the same piece?  I think I did.  I’m a little worried about what this means, because they’re not.  What this means to me is that analysis of content doesn’t have to go very deep.  “Hey, Nio plays catchy music.  Awesome!” is sufficient to me.  Erin didn’t like Nio, but apparently there’s a large and convoluted artist’s statement that goes along with it, which I didn’t read until after I tried the piece.  And all I got out of it was a large and convoluted “huh?”  One strike against artist’s statements, I suppose.

Anyway, am I claiming that Birds and Nio are the same piece?  I want to wriggle out of this issue.  I like saying that they’re formally equivalent, and I like saying that form is content in the digital piece.  So they must differ in a way that isn’t strictly form or content.  Let’s go with experience.  The experience of the two (which is largely determined by form and surface content, but not necessarily a simple function of these two parts) is a lot like the tone of a poem.  In the class I teach, I’ve been talking about tone lately.  I use tone as a rough catch-all for “what makes a poem awesome.”  Recent synonyms we’ve tossed around have been volume, weight, and authority.  There’s something to the language that’s working.  That’s (roughly) tone.

The experience of… um… experiencing Nio and Birds is very different.  Let’s end here.  They’re not the same poem because they’re not the same poem.  The first rule of tautology club…