Reading Lori’s entry on Karpinski and Howe’s ,  which  ties previous discussions about three-dimensionality to the current one about chance, I was reminded of a work which I had forgotten about, but which I want to share: Brooke M. Campbell’s Choose Your Own Sexuality from .  Campbell’s piece combines poetry, biography, and history under the familiar form of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel to create a queer biography of Emily Dickinson.  Campbell’s piece takes seriously the implications of queer scholarship, shedding light on the general import of such work:  The author is often just as much what he or she is as what he or she isn’t and that creative works reflect this similar tension.  Decision-making is not simply the rational evaluation of two choices, rather they are heavily laden with cultural expectations, social frameworks, habits, law, and deep desires.  Though Campbell’s piece uses the familiar framework of binary choices, the fact that Campbell’s piece is based on actual historical events loads the choices up with the questions: “What happened?” and “What do we want to happen?”  The effect is not to simply fork the work, but to play in the imaginative spaces between the choices, to speculate about possibility.

A similar experience in narrative forking is Scott McCloud’s , a fairly straightforward, early, and lo-fi experiment in digital comic.  Inspired by Zephyr’s comment on Lori’s piece, I was inspired to revisit McCloud’s online comics, and found them to remain interesting, particularly because they employ forking in a way that allows the reader to view both “choices” at once.  [As a sidenote: McCloud’s does not explore forking formally, but it does a great job addressing this experience in the narrative.] .

Zephyr’s entry on “chance timing” shifted my focus towards another aspect of chance.  While Lori’s piece focused on chance as a process of unfolding in the present time, Zephyr’s piece considers chance as a process of recursion [The video, by the way, managed to push so many buttons–dread, fear, happiness, regret, sadness–what an accomplishment.].  So often in life, our experience of the variable is not a process of unfolding as much as it’s an experience of reflection.  What happened?  What did I do?  What might I have done?  What should I have done?  Chance is experienced is a process of reflection, in which we meditate upon how now might have been different.  Or why now is the way it is.

To bring this back to Neruda’s “Ode to Broken Things” is a challenge.  Thinking about Campbell’s Dickinson, for example, I might consider the fact that poet’s work is simply an expression of larger life experiences.  I could write a fork in which Neruda’s poem doesn’t exist.  Something never happened, he was never inspired, it was never written.  Or, I could introduce an internal variable to the piece: A shift in attitude or a shift in narrative structure.  Perhaps I could ditch the speaker’s apparent peace with the continual breakdown of things, and heap blame upon the “hands,” “girls,” “hips,” and “ankles.”  I could turn the poem towards anxiety, frustration, and anger.  Or, I could alter the proposed human action of the final stanza, “Let’s not put all our treasures together…”  None of which makes a great deal of sense or sound particularly appealing.

But to reflect upon the piece might simply be enough—to cling to the writer’s commitments, because those are the only ones that we have.  And, if I had to apply to look at how this insight might work in the field of new media, and I see it clearly addressed in by mIEKAL aND and CamillE BacoS.  A combination of texts in a variety of formats drawn together to meditate on the notion of lost knowledge, dead languages, destroyed formats, and vanished cultures.  From history’s dead ends, MotionText Ferment reaches for the living, as if to suggest that we are all just a hair’s breadth away from annihilation in this renewed era of burning books, cultural imperialism, war, and accelerated technological obsolescence.   Here, things aren’t broken by “invisible deliberate smashers,” but by deliberate forces.  In spite of this difference, both pieces are chances to see things differently.  Neruda accomplishes this through his writing, mIEKAL aND and CamillE BacoS accomplish this through theirs.  The strength of much good hypermedia spins on this potential to provoke reflection in readers—buttons, images, sounds, motion, time—all must function like words to promote this end.

And, to revisit the insights gained from Lori and Zephyr’s pieces, good hypermedia does not necessarily give us choices.  It gives us depth.  It allows us to experience richly.  Sometimes this is accomplished through a nonlinear processes, sometimes through linearity, but they always seem to provide windows into the nonlinear, subjective realm of the reader’s reflection.

My mom comes and brings a vhs recorded with Kelsey’s memorial service. Why do we call it hers? Ours, about Kels (’over my dead body’). None of us have ever watched it. I take it to school, turn off the monitor and dub it to DVD. Then watch it one night in my basement studio, lights off, lying on the futon, blanket on.

i didn’t know - and couldn’t be bothered to learn - how to rip right from the DVD. so i filmed it again on my (cracked) computer screen, mini dv camera balanced on a beer bottle and a stack of books - as am, often, i. an aesthetic was born: lo-fi, rascuache and hand-made-for-youtube style.

Editing. The more I clip and playback the further the distance between the white-faced 23 year old with the hollow eyes and skeletal shadows and the me that’s like, ‘hey Chris can you do me a favor? Film me dancing around and singing to billy idol? It’s kinda weird but it’s to edit over the film from the funeral… you know, ‘hey little sister, what have you done?’

i’m into all the the youtube tropes - the music videos, the narcissistic (self-conscious) metubes, the i.movie edits, the bedroom girls - and i can claim my interest’s academic (it is - somewhat - so i do) but the context (which is a separate theatre from the i set to screen these works in) also works to disable any academic reading ().

one of the most intriguing aspects of contexts such as youtube - such as livejournal, myspace, blogspot and so on - is the publicizing of ‘the private.’

death is a private affair. aren’t most affairs private? don’t they often start and end in public, though? i upload the evidence of my romance with death to explore the connections between ‘our’ fascination with voyeurism (personal, pornographic, violent or vitriolic), ‘our’ exhibitionist, group-therapy think-out, ‘our’ cathartic acts of record and replay.

to revisit death by video, to edit loss, reflects my process of memory and memorial, and speaks to and about the process itself. it repeats and it distances. reminds and cuts out. i work with little intention (just make something, anything, from this) - rely on chance encounters with timing, tuning, imagery. there are moments when two tracks (or more) align just-so, seemingly at random, and sense is made, momentarily. that sense-making, meaning-making moment, motivates the next motion taken.

how to describe a process? to play it, and/or play it out.

To refer to death as a creative process does not imply that it is attractive or even ‘artistic.’ We humans have an instinctual aversion to the sweet, sickly effusions that decomposition produces. Yet this stage is necessary before the cleansed, aesthetically comfortable ‘bare bones’ state can be attained…

Academic attachment became elusive - instead, we reverberated, echoing the emotions of loss and reclamation that we purported to investigate impassively, and performing exuberant grieving as playfulness infiltrated the pathos and sadness that had marked our individual mourning practices…

All we may expect of time is its reversbility. Speed and acceleration are merely the dream of making time reversible. You hope that by speeding up time, it will start to whirl like a fluid…

The imagination is scarcely any better equipped to appreciate reversibility than the person who has never slept would be to appreciate dreaming. And yet we experience in it that electrocution of time we call predestination. The signs exchanged in the process are instant conductors unaffected by the resistance of time. Certain linguistic fragments run back along the path of language and collide with others in the witticism, dazzling reversibility of the terms of language. In this they fulfil an unexpected destiny, their specific destiny as words, conforming to the predestination of language.

– Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

You can, with your little hands, drag me into your grave -
you have the right -
- I myself who am joined with you, I let myself go -
- but if you wish, the two of us, let us make… an alliance -
a hymen, magnifcent - and the life left in me I will use to…
- so not mother then?
ceremony - coffin - etc.
there we saw (the father) the whole material side - which lets us tell ourselves at need - ah! well yes! it is all there - no fear for me thinking of something else (the reformation of his spirit, which is eternal - can wait (granted but eternity through my life)
_____
father -
shape his spirit (he absent, alas! as we would have shaped him better present but sometimes when it all seems to be going too well - as an ideal - cry out - in the mother’s tone, she who has become attentive - This is not enough
I want him, him - and not me -

my first introduced me to on the , in april of 2004, more or less 5 weeks before the sang at .

hold onto that moment then - before but foreboding. i sat on the edge of the cliff in the sun and the wind and listened. for days before i’d been stricken with most horrible plummeting feelings of wrong/wrong/all wrong, stuck/angry/lashing out at him (on holiday) until i got the email (in the whitewashed shop) that kelsey was in the hospital and as i rushed heavily through the town to find him to tell him, i fit again (though cobblestoned) - it wasn’t me i felt but her. i felt better knowing why i’d felt so bad. and dad -
he tried to get a flight back to london that day, or the next, but couldn’t. so we drove to sagres instead. to the cliffs. each town in and out, fumbling with quarters for phone booths - how much has mobile technology changed since even then - the time difference, time lapse. somehow we came to a little cove. it was still the off-season. we were out of time, but i felt at home there. the algarve is roughly the same latitude as santa cruz, and there was something about the air there - and the ocean, though atlantic, pacific. so i was pacified, momentarily. suspended on the brink of the big sink (or swim).

and you his sister, you who one day - (this gulf open since his death and which will follow us to ours - when we have gone down your mother and I) must one day reunite all three of us in your thought, your memory
_____
- just as in a single tomb
you who, in due time, will come upon this tomb, not made for you -

Pr

Sun down and wind
gold gone, and wind of nothingness blowing (this, the modern void)?

With real-time 3D rendering & dynamic text generation, open.ended attempts to refigure the poetic experience through spatialization & interaction. As visitors manipulate a joystick to control interlocking geometric surfaces, stanzas, lines, & words move slowly in & out of focus, while dynamically updating text maintains semantic coherence. Order is deliberately ambiguous & multiple readings encouraged as meaning is actively & spatially constructed in collaborative fashion & new potentials for juxtaposition, association & interpretation are revealed.

And not surprisingly, given what I’ve been writing over these weeks, these beautiful little poem-spaces seem to come right out of a dream William Carlos Williams might have had – I wrote last week:

He has activated “blank” space and in this way turned it into what Charles Olson would soon see as a field of energy—a pulsating, fluctuating space that girds the words, as if Williams wants the words themselves to pulsate but, given the limits of the bookbound page, he settles for the surrounding space of the page which is unmarred and open for any appropriation. Further, since “. . . to talk in the American idiom you can’t talk as Shakespeare used to talk, or Milton, or Eliot. You have finally to get away from this pattern of speech and invent another speech . . .”, how else to reinvent language but to do so negatively, taking advantage of the flexibility of the blank space of the page—space that can be shaped, again and again, to reshape in turn the language of Shakespeare, Milton, and Eliot? “I’ve got myself in wrong before the critics by attempting to bring in the idea of mathematics. Of Einstein. Not Einstein, we’ll say, but Einstein’s ideas. The uncertainty of space” (Interviews 45).

Or maybe open.ended is also the opposite of Williams’ dream? Like so many digital poems I’ve looked at, quite in contrast with Williams’ firm belief in the redemptiveness of the particular, the way in which the ground, the ground of history and language, forms us, open.ended seems to be in love with the pure, abstract spaces made possible by the digital – spaces that we may visit but that are seemingly completely independent of the messy, organic world. This abstract quality is only exaggerated with the interactivity built into the poem that not only puts the abstract poem in touch, literally, with the organic world, but that also introduces chance into the poem. The reader/user can move the poem-cube in any direction, moving around, on top, or inside the cube; the reader/user can also double click on any wall of words to “create” the poem as it is simultaneously being read by the authors. But I still argue that this digital poem, just like those by Simon Biggs (see, for example, his web-work ) gives us the illusion of chance, the illusion of genuinely participating in the unfolding of the poem. It’s not unlike a Choose Your Own Adventure book: true, you have three choices, but not only are they predetermined choices, but the predetermined choices also have a predermined outcome set out by the poet/programmer. Thinking about the version of Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes that’s published by Gallimard – here each line of the poem has been cut across the page so that the reader really can construct “cent mille milliard” readings of the poem – how could it be that a bookbound poem offers us genuine chance operations, options for the reader/user creation of a poem that are as close to infinite as possible?

But I am interested in the critical moments of the piece? Can you identify a key turning point in the narrative of the work?  How is the turning point marked through formal decisions?  What is the content of this turn?  How would variance or chance change the piece?  

[Use any means or media to communicate your insights to the rest of the group.]

*

In “Book One” Williams is still working out a consistent spatio-temporal mapping of the speech and space of Paterson. For the moment, his solution, which he largely abandons by “Book Two,” is to use periods as in the foregoing quote to score certain blank spaces; the dots act as a textual version of a musical rest of a given duration and so re-enliven both the unmarked and marked white (though not empty) space of the page. Still, while “Book One” is indeed a complex of fragmented thought, speech, historical documents, and letters, his innovative use of the period cannot have satisfied him as at this point Paterson is still fairly formally rigid, structured as it is by blocks of left-justified text. A text that both represents and acts as a catalyst for the discovery of the varied, constantly shifting spaces/speech of a given place must necessarily be formally fluid yet aurally precise. As he writes a few years later, reflecting on “The Poem Paterson”:

It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the “thought.” To make a poem, fulfilling the requirements of the art, and yet new, in the sense that in the very lay of the syllables Paterson as Paterson would be discovered, perfect, perfect in the special sense of the poem, to have it—if it rose to flutter into life awhile—it would be as itself, locally, and so like every other place in the world. For it is in that, that it be particular to its own idiom, that it lives. (The Autobiography 392)

As we now know, it is in “Book Two,” “beginning with the line: ‘The descent beckons,’” that Williams decides that “the lay of the syllables” of Paterson can best be scored with the variable foot (Selected Letters 334). First, before we turn to this passage from Part III of “Book Two,” I would like to return to “The Poem as a Field of Action,” a talk Williams gave the same year that “Book Two” was published in 1948; here we find that the driving force behind his attempts to create a consistent variable foot is his realization that “[t]he only reality that we can know is MEASURE” (Selected Essays 283). Sounding strikingly postmodern here, he asserts that we can never have unmediated knowledge of a given place—we can only ever know the way by which we come to know which, in turn, is only ever a means of measuring reality. And further, given that Einstein shows us that measurements are not only relatively true but they are so only in relation to a constant (“Einstein had the speed of light as a constant—his only constant” [286]), poetic measurement should likewise be relatively true in relation to a constant—perhaps, Williams muses, the constant in poetry should be “our concept of musical time. I think so” (286). And, if time in poetry is not determined by a rigid meter such as iambic pentameter, then it is almost entirely determined by speech patterns and rhythms. Thus, not only must we “. . . listen to the language for the discoveries we hope to make” (290), but we must also accurately recreate what we have heard and/or catalyze further discovery of the language with a “well spaced” page. He writes in Part I of “Book Two,” prefiguring the poetic turning point in Part III:

Without invention nothing is well spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change . . .
. . . without invention
nothing lies under the witch-hazel
bush, the alder does not grow from among
the hummocks margining the all
but spent channel of the old swale (50)

Despite the spatial regularity of this passage, Williams is calling for nothing less than a culture-wide recognition of the fact that we only know the outside world (or that the outside world only exists for us) through measurement and further, since at least 1920, we can only measure or know the “relative positions” of the outside world. Simply put, “[r]elativity gives us the cue” (Selected Essays 340). More, the first two lines of the above excerpt—“Without invention nothing is well spaced” (emphasis my own)—also imply that, for Williams, relativity means perpetual innovation: as every speech event has its own space-time, so too then must every enactment of that speech event.

However, it was a passage from “Book Two” that brought Williams to the inventive spacing of the variable foot; this passage not only shows us Williams listening to the language, trying to translate what was heard into what is seen, but it forces us to listen to and observe the particular patterns of speech he maps down and across the page: [sorry–I can seem to get the spacing right–will have to fix it later]

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new
places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
since their movements
are towards new objectives (78)

Note how Williams’ revelatory move to break the line into a regularized tri-partite structure enables both a horizontal reading across the three rows and a vertical reading down the three columns of text—the structure insists on a particular rhythmical reading that is determined by the line-breaks. However, while Williams had some particular rhythm in mind (one that, because of the unique event that he is representing, cannot be scanned for patterns or taken up as a standard poetic form), presumably we recognize “the variable foot” spatially, as a line of text, rather than by the externally imposed metronomic beat of a metrical foot. Further, since a foot is now visually marked by a line, but a line of poetry in Paterson is properly made up of three feet that are, again, marked as lines, Williams’ variable foot therefore obviates the need for stanzas which insist on the reader treating the blank space between stanzas as empty rather than as a crucial space by which to more precisely score the poem. The passage above also engenders a pictorial reading given the eye rhymes binding one line to the next—for example the diagonal stacking of letters ‘e’, ‘a’, ‘o’, ‘i’ and ‘h’. But note too how the aural and visual echo in the opening two lines—“The descent beckons / as the ascent beckoned”—and how the lines subtly reinforce the fact that they constistute a reading/writing event. Because “the ascent beckoned” can be read as referring back “up” to the previous line, it effectively marks, instead of effaces or transcends, the passing of “real” earthbound time during Williams’ writing and our reading.

In a sense, he has created a three-dimensional poem whose three axes (two spatial axes and the temporal axis of speech or rhythm) are all constantly utilized. (All of the foregoing aspects of just these few lines of “Book Two” bring to mind Williams’ fascination with Whitehead and his hypothesis that Einstein’s theory of relativity means we ought now to think not of absolute measurements of space and time, or even of relative measurements of space-time, but of the relative measurement of the space-time of a given event—here, the event is that of two lines of poetry.)

Not suprisingly, however, the perpetual inventiveness that Williams called for early on in Part I of “Book Two” is not sustainable (and so in a sense Paterson is a record of his poetic successes and failures more than it is a record of Paterson itself). Only a page later after the passage quoted above from Part III, Williams’ inventive spacing approaches the limits of recognizability; any more innovative measuring/spacing and the poem will become, as I earlier quoted him writing in a letter to Kay Boyle, “a rhythmical blur,” (Selected Letters 132).

The descent
made up of despairs
and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening :
which is a reversal
of despair.
For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
what we have lost in the anticipation—
a descent follows,
endless and indestructible .
(79)

Formally, the only recognizable pattern to the excerpt above is the way the lines almost always break where a careful American English speaker might pause. Williams has even broken away from the neatness of the tripartite line; instead he has positioned his lines as steps that loosely move back and forth across the page and between the diagonal poles of “[t]he descent” and, ten lines later, “a descent follows.” Thematically, whereas “[t]he descent” on the previous page seems largely to refer to the text’s descent down the page, here, again as we move down the page and through the duration (read: space-time) of the speaker’s musings, “[t]he descent” is amplified to refer to the relentless struggle against abstraction (the ascent), the upwardly mobile drive for “accomplishment,” and the embrace of an unceasing excavation or acknowledgement of the historical, environmental, linguistic ground of particulars underlying Paterson/Paterson. Ironically, while such a descent into the messiness of particulars makes possible “a new awakening,” what we are in fact awakened to is the realization that the descent would not have happened in the first place without the experience of failure, denial, loss. Not suprisingly, then, as form is nothing more than an extension of content in Paterson (to paraphrase Williams’ literary inheritor Robert Creeley), Williams retreats from formal inventiveness and so straightens out the lines of Part III (which now coalesce around the left margin), and the part ends not with poetry but with a scathing letter written to “Dr. P” accusing him of having “never had to live . . . —not in any of the by-ways and dark underground passages where life so often has to be tested” (90). Failure, denial, loss.

*

In the later books of Paterson and in his letters and essays from the 1950s and 1960s, Williams only grows more insistent about his sense that “. . . the foot can no longer be measured as it was formerly but only relatively . . .” (Selected Letters 332). As he writes at the end of “Book Five,” “The measure intervenes, to measure is all we know, // a choice among the measures . . // the measured dance” (235). But it’s not until a 1961 transcription of a curious conversation between Williams and Walter Sutton that he explicitly addresses the spatial dimensions of this poetic measure or how he designates a given cluster of words as a foot if the verse is not measured accentually:

WCW: . . . the variable foot is measured. But the spaces between the stresses, the rhythmical units, are variable.

WS: You mean that there are feet, even though the feet may not have regular stresses, as in conventional verse?

WCW: Very definitely, I do.

WS: But you wouldn’t think of them in terms of stresses?

WCW: No, not as stresses, but as spaces in between the various spaces of the verse. I would say perhaps the confusion comes from my calling them the feet. (Interviews 38-39)

How to make sense of Williams’ explanation here? If the “spaces between the stresses” are variable, then what is the constant by which the stresses themselves are measured? How do we recognize a “rhythmical unit” as such if the surrounding context is constantly in flux? Williams, now nearing the end of his writing life, seems to have reversed the principle by which poetry had long been ordered; now, the poem is measured not by its words, sounds, or rhythms, but by the spaces surrounding the words/sounds/rhythms. He has activated “blank” space and in this way turned it into what Charles Olson would soon see as a field of energy—a pulsating, fluctuating space that girds the words, as if Williams wants the words themselves to pulsate but, given the limits of the bookbound page, he settles for the surrounding space of the page which is unmarred and open for any appropriation. Further, since “. . . to talk in the American idiom you can’t talk as Shakespeare used to talk, or Milton, or Eliot. You have finally to get away from this pattern of speech and invent another speech . . .”, how else to reinvent language but to do so negatively, taking advantage of the flexibility of the blank space of the page—space that can be shaped, again and again, to reshape in turn the language of Shakespeare, Milton, and Eliot? “I’ve got myself in wrong before the critics by attempting to bring in the idea of mathematics. Of Einstein. Not Einstein, we’ll say, but Einstein’s ideas. The uncertainty of space” (Interviews 45).

we start

we start again

we move in on it, towards poeticizing it, to shape the shape of it (but it bleeds/escapes embodiment)

the timeline moves (and movies) like a ribbon (anachronistically: film reels), i take her dv camera out one day and tape (billy has a word for these words, what was it? i must ask him when he returns) the drive out to the cliff (but you must wait for this, for me to upload/edit/upload and move back again (yet forward) in time to week one : timing (which is its context too, and atmosphere as well)

to here: which is where context exploded into realtime, into space (and escape):

Contextualizing (time and place)

“more soon”

After a month in the suburbs of St. Paul, I am happy to be back home in Adrian, Michigan.  Instead of getting too texty, I decided to go for a walk and take a picture of rustbelt decomposition.  Different from the creative destruction of the suburbs, the sort of industrial decline that characterizes Michigan tends to convey a certain feeling of heaviness, as through cities are just settling back into the ground from whence they sprang. 

(more…)

I bring this up because the comments people write on blogs, forums or send to me directly can be lumped into a few categories. 1. What drugs am I on (the sad cliche that equates drug use with creativity). 2. they dont understand it, but they like it and it makes them think 3. they hate it and find it arty (to the point of the occasional threat) 4. they like parts of it…but not all….and want to experience more

And these comments signal that one of digital poetry’s powers, its draws, its allure, is that it offers people who would normally never read poetry, a place, a foothold, a bridge to jump into the poem. There are, as Davin says, feelings they can access immediately via sounds, or movement, or interface, or play etc…. and once that bridge pulls them in…they can explore the more experimental bits….maybe not understanding, but at least feeling and thinking and experiencing…

hmm….that sounds good…if you want you can read some of the comments via a

I think our lovely Davin is on to something here. Poetry has always been born from and constricted by the print page, the linear textual form. And yet, as I have argued before, texts are not simply words. Everything is a text. Signs, motions, sounds, interactions, all things are texts, communicating creatures. And digital poems eat these many and nearly infinite supply of texts (experiences) to create a wholly new experience.

But then the question I pose to everyone here is….what makes a digital poem, an electronic poem…an electronic poem? Or to put it a better way…..why couldn’t we say that all net artworks, new media artworks are digital poems? If we extend the idea of text to all experiences and objects and signs etc…then all creative works could be construed as digital poems.  

Or do we say that digital poetry must either follow directly from a print poem..ie a translation of that print poem into movement and interface?  Or do we say that digital poems are simply another way of displaying, albeit in an interactive way, word based poetry?

Or maybe the difference is in the construction…how the artist/writer builds their creation.  Which brings

 us back to Davin’s point/question and feelings. Maybe the digital poetry is creating experiences whose components are those feelings, those images and imagery, those metaphoric movements.

Hmm……more to think about…..but what are other’s thoughts?