Which brings us to the words, and something that I do want to complain about.  The more I think about it, the more I don’t want digital poetry to have words.  I know I’ve talked about digital poetry not being poetry.  Not out of a conservative/formalist bitterness at innovation, but because the label of poetry forces us to bring preconceptions to the table that aren’t helpful.  Taking that a step farther, why words?

The text of page 4 contains:

“the ends so you just turn centered / in an infinite image loop / onscreen.”

This refers to the action of the page.  Here, the text becomes a sort of caption or subtitle, describing the piece.  I don”t want the piece to be described.  I can see it.  Text directly applicable to the piece doesn’t add much.  It’s like a writer’s statement embedded in the work.  At the same time, some description or clarification is necessary, because this text isn’t really legible on top of the image.  I like this use of text better.  Illegibility is intriguing to me.  Take (I think it was Flanagan) Flanagan’s “House”.  We talked about the difficulty of reading there.  I think the answer to “why words?” can be found here.  The digital poem takes the word and moves it into another space.  It is, in a sense, no longer a word.  At least, if a word is defined by one’s ability to read it.

So there.  Words in digital poetry provide a more concrete example of illegibility than images that are difficult to decipher.  If there’s an image of water, but you’re not sure it’s water, is that illegible?  Maybe.  But there’s a middle ground.  There’s no middle ground to the legibility of words.  Either you can make out what the word says or you can’t.  This idea could even be extrapolated to legibility of syntax/meaning, although a middle ground would slip in there.

So I like illegibility.  I just don’t want to hear about illegibility when I finally get around to making out what a piece says.

The process can be seen as part of a digital piece, in that the code is the process.  We’ve debated whether or not the code is part of the finished product.  I leaned towards no, but I can certainly understand the argument.  This week’s reading had me asking similar questions, specifically with regard to Jordan Davis’ “Three Poems on Demand.”  I like these poems, and they strike me as pretty coherent.  The website mentions something about the process, that they were “written in response to web searches that led to Jordan Davis’s defunct blog.”  That’s a weird and vague description.  I can’t actually figure out what it means.  Let’s assume that some of the language was generated by a nebulous process.  My stance on generated poems is simple.  They succeed if they succeed as nongenerated poems.  For me, this applies to any poetic process.  The poem should stand on its own.  At the small press fest, I found myself a little underwhelmed with one of the readers, whose poems were all erasures of Emily Dickinson.  They weren’t bad, but if I didn’t know they were erasures, I wouldn’t have liked them much.  Which, according to my standard, means I didn’t like them much.  Then again, maybe I was just pissed that Christine Hume had been moved without any announcement.

On the other hand, what would it mean for process to matter?  For the process to be a part of the finished product?  The most intriguing thing here is how this would impact non-generated, non-”process” poetry.  This is difficult to define, because all writing has a process to it.  But my writing process is very much “sit down and write some stuff.”  There isn’t the same act of generation.  Can we start including the “normal” or “default” process as a process?  Or is it something else?

There’s a pretty hilarious/awesome video of Goldsmith’s that’s essentially a documentary about himself (he spends the whole time talking about how awesome he is, very tongue in cheek.  Everyone else in the video worships him.  I’m a little jealous.)  In this video, Goldsmith says that he can’t imagine anyone reading his own work.  This makes sense, especially with some of the more dense pieces.  I remember something that was essentially a list of words alphabetically, but it was done in more of a phonemic/sound sense.  All the one syllable words that start with an Ah sound, all the two syllable ones, etc.  Reading that sort of thing would be awful.  Also, Did I use phonemic right?  Let’s pretend I did.

Goldsmith says that he likes to have a thinkership, not a readership.  I like this idea.  I like it a lot.  We don’t need to sit down and read “Day.”  The content of “Day” have very little impact on our “reading” of it.  We think about it as a concept.  So, what I’m getting at is, what difference does it make if “Day” exists or not?  Do we need the actual piece to talk about this concept?  Could Goldsmith’s “thinkers” carry on thinking after hearing about an idea to take every word from a copy of the NY Times, or does the specific piece have to exist?

In his essay, “Conceptual Writing,” Goldsmith defines conceptual writing as uncreative writing.  This strikes me as intriguing, if not quite accurate.  Maybe it is.  I don’t think it’s an insult as much as a straight definition.  Creative writing is concerned with things like craft and execution.  The concept or idea is often secondary.  A common mistake students make in approaching poetry is to yell over and over, “what does it mean?”  With conceptual writing, the meaning or concept is the entire piece.  It actually is un-creative writing.  The piece becomes all meaning.

I guess this may come across as a little harsh.  But I think it’s a legitimate question.  If a piece is a concept, doesn’t that concept still exist without the piece?

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…

The most interesting method of approaching pretty much any piece of art, at least to me, is to treat the approach as an act of navigation.  This lends itself best to any non-immediate form.  It’s more difficult to navigate a sculpture or painting, which are “immediate” in that the whole piece is there right away.  This isn’t entirely true, as a painting will draw a viewer’s eye from one place to another, but a poem or film is more non-immediate in an obvious way.  The reader/viewer navigates the piece, either at their own pace or at a pace dictated to them.  I’m interested in classifying this act of navigation.  Off the top of my head, I can think of three types of navigation:

Forced navigation, as in a film.  Many of the pieces we study are essentially films.  They are a clip played at a pace that the user has no ability to control.  Examples include “The Dream Life of Letters,” “Broe Sael,” the work of Young-Hae Chang, and a whole slew of others.  I’m wondering in what way techniques used to study films are inadequate, if they are.

Linear, user paced navigation.  The most prominent example here would be a hypertext.  I’m thinking of any piece where there is a set number of elements for the user to view, in an order determined by the viewer.  Or, any piece with a beginning and an end where the navigation is controlled.  A film where the speed of the clip can be controlled by the viewer is one example (think that totally awesome “watch your nation spread and take over the world” feature at the end of a game of Civ4.)  “Spawn” complicates this sort of idea.  It’s a set number of screens that are navigated by the user, but the act of navigation is extremely difficult.  Sometimes you just can’t get to the black dot you want to see.  I wonder if Flanagan’s “The House” fits in here.  The multidimensionality of navigation complicates the idea of a beginning and an end, but the piece is controlled (to a degree) by the user.

Last, we have a clearly definable class, like the film.  Pieces where elements are enabled by the user to be added to the “stew” of the piece.  “Nio”, Piringer’s Soundpoems, and “Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs” are good examples.  Here, we have elements that the user can enable or disable, that impact a loop that the user views / listens to.  I don’t mean to say that these pieces are all the same, because they aren’t.  But, to borrow a math phrase, they’re isomorphic (someone should call me on my abuse of this word.)  They’re equivalent down to the details of their elements.  If you change the visual and audio impact of each element (and their presentation) in “Birds”, you have “Nio”.  At least, once the different number of elements (and number of elements that can be enabled at once) is sorted out.  The navigational experience is the same, down to the level of content.  Formally, they’re equivalent.

What am I missing?  Obviously, a whole bunch of pieces exist in between these notions, and I’m sure a whole bunch lie wholly outside them.  Most interesting to me is considering the traditional literary work as a fourth class.  Your usual book presents a single navigational path to the reader, like a film.  But the reader navigates the path along his or her own timeline, rather than being forced to experience the piece at a constant speed.

But Nio doesn’t let you do that.  Nio limits you at six symbols.  When you try to add a seventh, one of the previous ones stops.  Here’s the interesting part.  The part that stops is random.

Instantly, we’re pushed past any limit of possibilities.  16 symbols, choosing 6, is a pretty large number.  8008, apparently.  But that’s still a limit.  There’s a set amount of permutations and possibilities for Nio.  However, this sort of randomization removes the limit, in a sense.  Not that it adds an infinite set of possibilities.  If you have one of those 5765760 combinations, and click another symbol, you’ll lose one of the 6.  This only really multiplies the possibilities by 6, one for each symbol you could lose.  The key here is that the result is no longer predictable.  We go from the certain (that a symbol represents a sound and clicking that symbol provides that sound) to chance.  Once in the realm of chance, we’re done being able to consider Nio as a set of predetermined states.

Now, Nio presents an interesting conundrum.  A number of digital poems follow the same pattern.  They present elements for the user to enable, and once enabled, a certain repeated effect is caused.  Piringer’s Soundpoems function like this, as does Mencia’s “Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs”.  They’re pretty much all variations on the same template.  Does this cause Nio to suffer from a lack of originality?  (Or maybe the others, I’m not certain which came first.)  Also, how do we evaluate different pieces that are the same “idea”?

I’m finding Nio extremely catchy.  It’s been looping in the background during this whole post.  It’ll be stuck in my head for a while.  My question is, is this enough to consider it successful?  For me, the answer is a rather resounding yes.  Even a Yes!  The piece is under no obligation to do something groundbreaking, new, and unique.  Instead, it’s under an obligation to be good.  If I love listening to it, it’s good.  Good is good.

Does a digital poem have to be interactive or shifting/shiftable?  Everything I’ve seen is either interactive, or shifting like Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries.  Could a digital poem even be a single static image/text relation?  I am leaning towards no, because that would be printable, and therefore able to be experienced on the page.  That being said, this makes me a little uncomfortable.  How about a series of static images?  Assuming that there’s no hypertextual links (the series of images exists in one preset order,) could such a piece be digital?  One could print out each image and present them in a series.  One of the definitions (I should point out, I’m anti-definition) that we tossed about is that a digital poem requires a digital presentation.

How should one treat illegible text in a digital poem?  Does unreadable text have textual value?  I guess a distinction here is important between text that moves too quickly to read (but would be legible if slowed or frozen) and text that is blurred or otherwise messy.  The latter fails to be text, for me.  The former, I think, is doing something, at least on the subliminal level.  Maria Mencia’s “Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs” comes to mind.  The birds are made up of letters, and for some of them, it is nearly impossible to read.  I would say the text is still doing something different from other symbols, but I’m not sure.

It’s beginning to dawn on me that digital poetry and non-digital poetry are separate entities, to the extent that text functions differently in each case.  At least, good digital writing does not necessarily carry over to non-digital work.  Look at “Spawn”, for example.  Most of the presented writing isn’t what I’d call conventionally “good” poetry.  This is a pretty common complaint among the writers in our class, that digital poetry would be much better if the writing were better.  I’m wondering how to define good writing in digital poetry.  Note that I’m not wondering how to define good digital poetry.  It’s like pornography.  I know it when I see it.

Consider the magnification “button”, the one that produces couplets on the right side that begin with the word “reduced.”  I could throw this on the page and call it an ineffective poem.  A debate on what makes good poetry would be valid here, but I’ll again invoke the pornography defense and claim that I also know bad poetry when I see it.  However, this doesn’t necessarily damn Spawn, just what would happen if we butchered Spawn a little.  Here’s where I propose something controversial and probably a little shortsighted.

Is digital poetry poetry?  I’m not so sure.  That isn’t to demean its status as art, or more specifically as literature.  I’m worried that calling it poetry brings in a set of presuppositions and assumptions that shouldn’t apply; namely that the text should function as good poetic text does.  In fact, digital poetry strikes me as an entirely different (but equally valid) form of literature.  By attempting to cram the field into the digital corner of an existing literary form, we’re really just doing it a disservice.

Now all we have to do is come up with a term for this new field.  Digirature?  Cyberiting?  I’m taking applications for the worst-sounding name.  E-stuff?  I like E-stuff.

“Rather than striving to progress by solving various puzzles and mysteries, the interactor discovers that the goal is not reaching the end (although there is a final screen providing historical context for the visual narrative), but rather the journey itself.”

I’m pretty sure this sentence, minus the first clause and the parenthetical, can be found on a poster in ANY middle school in America.  This demonstrates my frustration with new academic fields / artistic forms / things.  Lessons that have been drilled into us in countless forms (the general “life journey” of doing anything, movies, music, video games, books, etc.) now somehow become new and novel in digital literature.  Here, Hayles is discussing Donna Leishman’s Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw.  The piece can be found at:

http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/leishman__deviant_the_possession_of_christian_shaw/index.htm

I spent about ten minutes clicking around it.  That’s probably not enough time to get a full grasp, and it would be short-sighted of me to really rip into Leishman’s piece in any manner because of this.  So I’ll rip into Hayles’ assessment, instead.  Hayles claims that the piece “invites game-like play but without the reward structure built into most interactive fictions.”  I’m honestly lost by this.  The piece opens with a small city.  There are four or five large buildings.  When you mouse over them, sound effects play.  Some trees grow when you mouse over them.  Eventually, I found something clickable, that changed the screen and brought out more options.  I reached a book, which started to tell a story.  Throughout this, there were elements that made sounds or changed when moused over.

This is that reward structure, no?  When you discover how to proceed, you are rewarded by the next “page” of content.  Maybe because the content isn’t particularly linearly presented, this is different.  There’s not much of a coherent order, although the book section certainly suggests one.  Second, the form isn’t actually presented in pages.  The clickable element that changes the screen pops up a new building, or lets you see into a window, or opens a book on part of the screen.  It’s not that you “defeat” screen 1 and move onto screen 2.  Still, that’s not enough of a change for me to say that it resists a reward structure.  When you “solve” the puzzle of what to click, you move on.

As to the journey being the goal, I want to rant for a moment about how this can be found in conventional games.  In fact, a lot of the ideas that come up in digital literature already exist in conventional games, in my opinion.  Nonlinearity is all over the place.  There’s an intriguing gap between the “I” of the game and the “I” of the player; one that can’t be solved by referring to the player as the interactor and calling it a day.  Take Mario, for instance.  Original Super Mario Brothers.  Let’s take a single level.  This is as linear an experience as it gets, to Mario.  That is, intrinsicially; within the game.  Mario runs from left to right, jumping on a few things, grabbing a few powerups, and sliding down the ending flagpole.  His path is a line.  It’s the very definition of linear.

On the other hand, the next time you play, maybe your path is a little different.  Maybe you run under a platform with a goomba on it rather than stomping it.  Maybe you get hit more.  Or less.  Doesn’t really matter.  The point is; this linear path is different than the previous linear path.  That’s pretty much what a hypertext is.  A text that can be navigated by more than one linear path (keeping in mind that any path through a conventional hypertext is intrinsically linear.  You see a page.  Then you see another page.  Then you see another page… Then you see the last page, or at least the last one you look at).  Mario’s about as linear a game as you can get, and it’s already assaulting linearity.  Mario’s path is linear.  The player’s experience is not.  To blend the I of the game and the I of the player into a single “interactor” misses out on a whole slew of critical angles.  And that’s just Mario.

Something I will bring up a lot will be an argument for how conventional gaming already covers some of electronic literature’s space.  I don’t mean to degrade or downplay electronic literature.  I’m just trying to push it in directions that I consider new.

1) Interest.  A lot of the stuff in here I’m liking a whole lot.  Coding as writing, and the page as a projection of code is a pretty cool concept.  I wonder if we’re not just tying together two uses of “project”, but this seems strangely applicable to Olson and projective verse.  I feel it.

2) Hilarity.  Somehow, 2002 is ancient in internet terms.  Glazier spends a lot of time whining about NT, and the chapter on the architecture of home pages is priceless.  The 1997 white house homepage looks worse than this blog, and I pretty much intentionally chose a drab and ugly theme.  Glazier also talks about how different users would have difficulty downloading more intense elements such as images.  Really, quite funny.  Sorry to laugh at you, Glazier.

3) Outrage.  There’s a bunch of stuff in here that gets to me, but almost all of it comes down to innovation being defined as formal innovation.  That’s not the only form of innovation in poetry.  I’ll admit it’s the most apparent and easiest to define, and also the most relevant to e-poetry.  But that doesn’t mean that Glazier can get away with talking about innovative and non-innovative poetry, where the latter includes everything that doesn’t break down the line or the linearity of poetic experience.  I would argue that all good poetry is innovative, where innovation can be found in form, content, use of sound, image, tone, etc.  Treating all paper poetry as a single non-innovative subset is, for lack of a more eloquent word, dumb.

Oh, and I’m not okay with quoting your own poems in a critical work.  Given the small quantity of digital poetry, it’s a little more forgivable.  But only a little.