Thread: electropoetics

Taking recent writings-of-internet as test cases, Stuart Moulthrop demonstrates the folly of deploying modernist compositional models, even avant-garde theories of citational and conceptual poetry recently popularized by Kenneth Goldsmith and the Flarf poets, to read born-digital writing. Though it may be fun, it's ultimately futile to interpret the contingent output of an "interface in process" as a poem existing in a fixed, terminable state. Perhaps, then, interfacing with databases is becoming integral to not just electronic literature and digital poetics but all forms of literary study and practice?

Florian Cramer's essay reframes debates on electronic literature within larger cultural developments in writing and publishing. On the one hand, he shows the commitment of the field of electronic literature - as found in universities or in organizations such as the ELO - to a "literary" intermedia writing for electronic (display) media. On the other hand, he emphasizes a wide-ranging post-digital poetics defined by a DIY media practice rather than the choice of a particular medium, a poetics which is broadly orientated towards writing rather than literature. At stake in this opposition is the larger question of literary studies in a world of creative digital industries.

Just as Walter Benjamin declared that all "great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one," Brian Kim Stefans argues that all successful works of electronic literature are sui generis and invent their own genre. There can be a vocabulary for this invention, however, and Stefans sets out “The Holy Grails of Electronic Literature,” “Six Varieties of Crisis,” and the “Surrealist Fortune Cookie.” Through these concepts, he describes the formal challenges, reading experiences, and fundamental textual units of electronic literature.

Yra van Dijk calls for a return to the text, for a criticism of digital literature that moves past foundational work on the new form and seriously engages with the work itself. In Roberto Simanowski's Digital Art and Meaning and in the edited collection Reading Moving Letters, van Dijk finds a return engagement with deep meaning and with criticism as a site of intentional human experience, and not of heavy theory or machinic spectacle.

Rui Torres tracks the practice of intertextual borrowing or "plagiotropia" between the works of Portuguese experimental poets. Plagiotropia is a tangible and fecund practice in digital poetry, where poetic texts migrate and grow across media. Torres' arguments culminate in an examination of his own online combinatory cyber-poetry, which creatively re-writes earlier pre-digital experimental works.

Just when you thought you were used to electronic literature, this critic makes the case for "beyond the screen" with a review of Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla's book of the same title, focusing on "transformations of literary structures, interfaces and genre."

Maria Engberg reviews two books that describe the dialectical relationship between literary production, digital media, and literary reception from opposite ends of the historical and aesthetic spectrum. "Literary paleontologist" C.T. Funkhouser examines the born-digital poetry of the 1950s (and earlier), while
Johanna Drucker writes an eye-witness account of the contemporary encounter between print literature, humanities research, and "speculative computing."

In this piece - part introduction, part artist's statement - Whitney Anne Trettien reflects on her "combinatory" approach to the history of "text-generating mechanisms."

Sandy Baldwin investigates the manner in which a computer "ping trace" can be classified as a form of digital poetics, and discusses the underlying symbolic practices of both poesis and poetics that encompass coding and computation.

"Man Ray, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, themes of disorientation,
displacement, diaspora, defamiliarized language" and that's just the
d's. With such "little clues, like stitches coding a special
language," Maria Damen weaves an essay-narrative based on her Summer
2007 residency in Riga, Latvia.

Michael McDonough reviews Brian Kim Stefans' book of poetry Before Starting Over, asserting that Stefans is concerned with the redefinition of critical discourse in the face of the loss of the singularity of the work of art. Stefans is not out to substitute an ideology of surface and take our deep meanings away. He mines contemporary poetics with an encyclopedic attention while resisting dogmatic assertions.

Lori Emerson introduces a gathering of nineteen electro-poetic essays. This gathering brings together both
critics and creators of electronic poetry; as is usually the case in ebr, the 'electronic' does not exclude, but helps us to reconfigure and revalue poetic works in print as well as define what works in digital
environments.

Charles Bernstein. Keyword: speed. Speed as a morally coded concept. Speed as success. An ethics of speed. Speed-reading. Virtual reading. Cultural speed-up. Speed kills.

Douglas Barbour reads Marjorie Perloff's Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy as a notable addition to her oeuvre, another grab-bag of pertinent, impertinent, and always provocative readings of both a wide range of works and some of the social/cultural contexts in which we read them.

Søren Pold explores the ways in which Christophe Bruno's Iterature expands the notion of literary form and shows what happens when words are no longer only part of a language.

John Zuern considers the significance of the first volume of ELO's Electronic Literature Collection for the future of electronic arts.

Eugene Thacker resituates the work of Eduardo Kac, not as art applied to the life sciences, but as a form of bio-poetics, consistent with the electro-poetics that has been a longtime focus of critical writing in ebr. Rather than reduce the work to its material (in life-forms, or in text, or in code), Thacker identifies ways that language, form, and life intersect in works of bio-art.

For Angela Szczepaniak, Canadian poet Stephen Cain visually distorts language by blurring the borders of poetic language and national identity, which are often assumed to be much more clear and distinct than they actually are.

The collection of innovative writing Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative is, for Janet Neigh, also a refreshing example of innovation of the anthology genre itself.

Mike Barrett evaluates Steve Tomasula's The Book of Portraiture in terms of its place between tradition and artistic innovation in the 21st century.

In a reading of Christopher Nolan's films (with and against texts by Poe, Wittgenstein, Searle, and Derrida), Walter Benn Michaels examines the autonomy of the work of art.

Stephen Hawkins engages with the "web of counterintuitive, paradoxical, contentious and yet important claims" that he identifies in
Gilles Deleuze's Proust and Signs.

Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye introduce the collection of essays, appearing here in the electropoetics thread, from the Alt-x e-book The Illogic of Sense.

Niall Lucy enacts a writing that weaves critical and theoretical speculation, rock journalism, hagiography and autobiography.

Marcel O'Gorman offers a candid account of what it means to introduce the computer apparatus into teaching in the humanities.

Linda Marie Walker writes an involved meditation on the concept of the interface and its relation to place.

Jerome McGann addresses the so-called "Crisis in the Humanities" in the context of two of its most apparent symptoms: the digital transformation of our museums and archives, and the explicitly parallel "Crisis in Tenure and Publishing" that has more recently come to attention.

Linda Brigham reviews Katherine Hayles' My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts.

Eckhard Gerdes reviews Harold Jaffe's Terror-Dot-Gov: Docufictions.

1999 e-literature award winner John Cayley writes about Saul Bass of classic film title fame. A precursor to language arts innovators Jenny Holzer, Richard Kostelanetz, and Cayley himself, Bass may now be recognized as a poet in his own 'write,' important for a new generation of designwriters creating "graphic bodies of language," moving words and signifying images, in digital environments.

Gregg Biglieri reads "into" Actress in the House and revels in Joseph McElroy's syntax.

Ronald Sukenick on Extreme Fiction.

Rone Shavers argues that making readers aware of subjugation - the strategy of Harold Jaffe's False Positive - exposes little and hardly changes our relation to power.

Scott Rettberg introduces 'New Media Studies': a cluster of reviews, and a term (similar in its emergence to the term 'Postmodernism').

Over 800 pages, the New Media Reader does not exhaust its subject; it even sets the stage for a companion volume.

Rob Wittig looks at one of the earliest "Weblogs," and finds there a persisting model for serial e-fiction and an interaction no less compelling than the literary correspondence between Henry Miller and Anais Nin.

Komninos Zervos reviews the Hayles/Burdick collaboration, Writing Machines (2003), and reengages the cyberdebates (initiated in Y2K).

An argument against the collapse of categories by an author who has, yes, himself perpetrated a few codeworks.

Rita Raley on the varieties of code/text, as discovered in the object-oriented aesthetic of Mez, Ted Warnell, Talan Memmott, Alan Sondheim, and others.

Brandon Barr considers Loss Glazier's attempt at a hypertext poetics that moves beyond the link.

Lance Olsen reviews hypertext writing, past and present, by Robert Arellano.

Stacey Levine reviews Re.La.Vir by Jan Ramjerdi.

Stephanie Strickland unravels the crochet of categorizations used to contain data, and explores the texture and topography of a hypertext poetics.

Raymond Federman compiles a small manual of poetic pleasures.

John Matthias reflects on Humphrey Carpenter's biography of 1992, in light of earlier work by Auden and recent findings.

Stephanie Strickland asks how a poetics of hypertext can structure encounters with the world that are as resonant and co-participatory as quantum models.

From Zukofsky's "A" to Powers' Goldbug Variations, in search of a social ecology of the self-discursive text.

Stephanie Strickland on the translation of poetry from print to screen.

Harold Jaffe offers a narrative model for the millenium.

Bringing the queston of 'textuality' into the cyberdebates, and refusing the conservative oppostion between contemplative reading and gaming, Daniel Punday argues that critics should embrace spinoff culture as a model for electronic writing.

Artist Eduardo Kac writes on the attractions of the hologram as a malleable, fluid, and elastic medium for poetic expression.

The second ebr special to employ the concrete poems of Daniel Wenk, working typographical variations on the term, "electropoetics." Guest edited by Joel Felix, who in 1997 was an undergraduate Lit major at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

John Matthias reports on the state of British Poetry and its criticism.

Alan Shaw on the poetics of composer Harry Partch and the musicality of greek prosody.

From the start, the editors made it clear that the electronic book review would be about more than reviewing books.