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English Graduate Theses & Dissertations English

Spring 1-1-2016

The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-

Performance in Digital (And Non-Digital) Poetry
Aaron Jason Angello
University of Colorado at Boulder, [email protected]

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THE BROKEN POEM: EPHEMERALITY, GLITCH AND
DE-PERFORMANCE IN DIGITAL (AND NON-DIGITAL)
POETRY

by
AARON ANGELLO
B.A., Antioch University Los Angeles, 2008

M.F.A. University of Colorado Boulder, 2011

A thesis submitted to the

Faculty of the Graduate School of the

University of Colorado in partial fulfillment

of the requirement for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

2016
 ii

This thesis entitled:

The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-Performance in Digital (and Non-
Digital) Poetry
written by Aaron Angello
has been approved for the Department of English

Lori Emerson, Committee Chair

Julie Carr, Committee Member

Date

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we
find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards
of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.
 iii

ABSTRACT

Angello, Aaron (Ph.D., English, English Department)

The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-Performance in Digital (and Non-
Digital) Poetry
Thesis directed by Associate Professor Lori Emerson

The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-Performance in Digital (and

Non-Digital) Poetry explores a few ways in which digital poetry, poetry that is written in

programmable media and is intended to be read on computers or other digital devices,

is acting to tactically resist various forms of oppression through what I am calling

“breakage.” Breakage is, in this sense, an error or disruption in a perceived continuity.

For example, I look at digital poems that take advantage of the fact that, because of

software or hardware upgrades, they have a limited functional life. The poets’ embrace

of their poems’ ephemerality actively resists market forces, cultural or professional

demands on the poet to participate in processes of canonization, and the like. I also

explore the idea of “glitching poetic language,” in which existing texts are digitally

manipulated, digitally “broken” through a process in which the poet provokes errors.

This is a remix strategy with aleatoric results that shifts the reader’s focus from the

referential elements of the text, or the fragments of text, to an error, a break. I argue that

these poems, by breaking, challenge systems that support institutional racism, violence,

economic disparity, and other unjust social phenomena. I then explore poetic breakage

in live performance. I look specifically at the Black Took Collective, a group of

performance poets who utilize digital media in live performance to subvert expectations
 iv

that an audience might have regarding race, gender, and poetry’s place in the academy.

The final chapter is a demonstration of practice-based research and a discussion of the

role of this kind of research in an evolving English department. I offer two examples of

practice-based research in literary studies: Poemedia 2.0 and The Denver Poetry Map.
 v

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: THE BROKEN POEM ...........................................................................1

CHAPTER I: EPHEMERALITY, DIGITAL POETRY, AND TACTICAL RESISTANCE ...21

CHAPTER II: GLITCH-LIT: THE EMBRACE OF ERROR IN DIGITAL AND NON-

DIGITAL POETRY ............................................................................................................ 85

CHAPTER III: TO MUTATE IS TO LIVE: DE-PERFORMANCE AND THE BLACK

TOOK COLLECTIVE ....................................................................................................... 144

CHAPTER IV: PRACTICE-BASED RESEARCH IN LITERARY STUDIES: POEMEDIA

2.0 AND THE DENVER POETRY MAP ......................................................................... 203

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................. 257

APPENDIX: POEMEDIA 2.0 IMAGES........................................................................... 269

 vi

FIGURES
FIGURE
1. bpNichol First Screening “Reverie” .......................................................................................... 39
2. bpNichol First Screening "After the Storm" ............................................................................. 39
3. bpNichol First Screening "Island" ............................................................................................ 44
4. Talan Memmott "Lexia to Perplexia".........................................................................................56
5. Talan Memmott "Lexia to Perplexia" Obsoletics ...................................................................... 58
6. Alexandra Saemmer "Tramway"................................................................................................76
7. Jody Zellen "Seen Death" 1 ........................................................................................................79
8. Jody Zellen "Seen Death" 2........................................................................................................ 81
9. Jody Zellen "Seen Death" 3 ....................................................................................................... 82
10. A television ad for CK One Shock ............................................................................................... 94
11. Kanye West music video for the song “Welcome to Heartbreak.” .....................................................95
12 Screen capture of Glitchr on Facebook 1 ..................................................................................... 100
13. Screen capture of Glitchr on Facebook 2 .................................................................................... 100
14. Screen capture of Glitchr on Twitter .......................................................................................... 101
15. Example of Sappho’s poetry, as we know it today ........................................................................ 104
16. A screenshot of Jim Andrews’ The Idea of Order at Key West Reordered ....................................... 111
17. MUPS by Jhave ........................................................................................................................ 119
18. The final page of the final section of Zong! - the result of a computer glitch ................................. 142
19. A Skeleton projected on the domed screen during the BTC's preshow .................................160
20. The Black Took Collective at the University of Notre Dame ................................................ 172
21. The Black Took Collective: A Retrospective .......................................................................... 195
22. Inside Poemedia 2.0 .............................................................................................................. 216
23. A view from within Poemedia 2.0.......................................................................................... 218
24. Part of our workstation for Poemedia 2.0 ............................................................................ 220
25. A slip of paper given to audience members who attended Poemedia 2.0 ............................ 229
26. The home page of the Denver Poetry Map ........................................................................... 240
27. The Denver Poetry Map 1 ....................................................................................................... 241
28. The Denver Poetry Map 2 ..................................................................................................... 241
29. The Toronto Public Library's Toronto Poetry Map ..............................................................247
 1

Introduction

The Broken Poem

The broken poem is about the fracture, not the fragment. It is about its

brokenness. In the pages that follow, I investigate digital and print poetry that isn’t

doing what it is supposed to do – poetry that breaks, that glitches, that becomes

illegible. The phrase “supposed to do” is crucial to this study, and I go to great lengths to

explore and articulate what it means. “Supposed to do” is a system that appears static

but is in fact dynamic; it is a complex assemblage composed of relationships between

bodies, technologies, texts, and affects. “Supposed to do” is a simplified way of thinking

about what I, following Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and Brian

Massumi, to name a few, refer to as power. The broken poem, then, is necessarily

political. It is a micropolitical act of resistance within what appears to be an unalterable

system, a seamless, networked flow of information. Practically speaking, these poems,

by not acting as they are supposed to act, by breaking, are resisting the systems of power

of which they are a part – systems that maintain and enforce racial or economic

inequality, for instance. By breaking, glitching, or ceasing to function, they demonstrate

alternative ways of working within a system that presents itself as unchangeable, a

system that is often believed to be unchangeable.

Throughout this dissertation, I look primarily at digital poetry that was written

after 1980 in the United States and Canada. When I refer to a digital poem, I am

referring generally to a poem that is “a first-generation digital object created on a

 2

computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer” (Hayles Electronic 3). I do,

however, also write about print and performance poetry here. In Chapter Two, I spend

some time discussing M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! as an example of a printed poem that

has been digitally “glitched.” In Chapter Three, I write about The Black Took Collective,

a group of performance poets who incorporate digital media into their performances.

Although the poetry that I write about is not all “meant to be read on a computer,” it

does all emphasizes error and breakage, and that’s the focus here – that is what

differentiates these poems from other political poems.

Most foundational scholarly texts on the subject of digital poetry tend to focus on

the struggle to define and identify what a digital poem is, what it means, and how it

differs from print poetry. Loss Pequeño Glazier, in his 2002 book Digital Poetics: The

Making of E-Poetries, writes that he sees digital poetry as an extension of experimental

print poetry (25-26), yet it is the scholar’s job to define digital poetry and to differentiate

it from non-digital work. He poses the following questions in an effort do this:

What constitutes innovative practice in digital media? Is the dominance of

hypertext practice to be questioned in this field? What are the defining
features of the e-text, what is the relation of code to textuality, and what
new parameters do we need to read in this medium? What criteria do we
use to identify emergent works of lasting interest? Finally, we must see the
intricate interrelation between innovative poetic practice and digital
media. (30)

All of these questions were important in 2002, and certainly remain so today. It is useful

and can be innovative to consider the textuality of code, for example, and much

interesting work has been done in the area of critical code studies (Marino). However,

Glazier’s list of questions highlights a prevailing concern among scholars of digital

 3

poetry in the early part of the twenty-first century. They were trying to establish a genre

that is unique, that is separate from print poetry. Likewise, Brian Kim Stefans writes

that “[i]t is assumed that cyberpoetry [i.e. digital poetry] exists, though whether as a

subset of poetry or the larger sphere in which literature exists, we are not sure” (43).

Again, he is trying to define and categorize digital poetry. In 2007, Christopher T.

Funkhouser wrote that his “study seeks to reveal the development, range, and

construction of digital poetry, as well as what constitutes the genre, “and that “digital

poetry is not a singular genre or ‘form’ but rather a conglomeration of forms that now

constitutes a genre even though the creative activity itself – in terms of its media,

methods, and expressive intent – contains heterogeneous components” (1). Even N.

Katherine Hayles, whose recent work is crucial to this study, titled the first chapter of

her 2008 book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, “Electronic

Literature: What Is It?” and she spends a good deal of time exploring the ways we might

“extend the interrogations of the literary into the digital domain” (5).

I, on the other hand, am not particularly interested in (re)defining digital poetry

here. In fact, I’ve always felt that isolating digital poetry from poetry in general is not

particularly helpful. The border between the two is not as well-established as the

scholars I mention above might argue. After all, all poetic text is instantiated in a

medium, be that medium print or digital. The way one reads and interprets any text is

contingent, in large part, upon its medium, and even the medium of print behaves in a

certain way. Paper can fade, crease, tear. It has particular tactile qualities. It encourages

specific behaviors in the reader. That is why, as I mention above, I choose to include

discussions of print poetry and poetry in performance alongside discussions of digital

 4

poems in the pages that follow. I consider the possibility that breakage can occur in both

digital and non-digital media, and I argue that each poem that breaks “engage[s] in a

micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education” (Raley 1).

Unlike most scholarship on digital literature and digital poetry, this dissertation

is concerned with the ways digital poetry can act in a political way. Existing scholarly

work focuses on screen/surface manifestations of a text (Simonowsik 7), or on the

relationship of a text to the medium upon which it is written and read (Hayles “Print,”

Glazier Digital). These are, of course, valid and necessary facets of study in digital

poetics, and I read texts throughout this work in both of those ways: I practice close

readings and I practice media specific analyses. Where this study differs from current

discussions in the field of digital poetry is in its direct engagement with the politics of

the poetry. With few exceptions, critics working in this field are not directly engaging

the political role of these poems. I aim to amend this deficit by discussing digital poetry

that is directly engaging the politics of the medium upon which is it written and read,

and by extension, the politics of our lived experience.

Throughout this dissertation, I employ the notion of breakage as a way to

highlight the poem that doesn’t act as it is supposed to, as it is expected to, that glitches,

that becomes unreadable, that simply stops working. Gilles Deleuze, in an interview

with Antonio Negri, writes, “We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been

something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of

noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control” (“Life” 175). The work I

explore here does just that. It creates “vacuoles of noncommunication,” fractures in

 5

systems that are not supposed to fracture, and, in doing so, it reveals moments of pure

potential, of possible alternate ways of being.

Political Poetry and the Avant-Garde

When most people hear the term “political poetry,” they tend to think of poetry

that is political in content, and for good reason. There is a long tradition of this kind of

poetry. One might think of Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Shelley’s “The

Mask of Anarchy,” or the many examples of Whitman’s political poetry (“For You O

Democracy,” “O Captain my Captain,” “To the States,” etc.). Of course, there is also a

vast amount of twentieth and twenty-first century political poetry – too much to list.

Political poems by poets like Langston Hughes, Allen Gisnberg, Denise Levertov,

Adrienne Rich, Lorenzo Thomas, Muriel Rukeyser, Claudia Rankine, and Mahmoud

Darwhish are among those which continue to resonate with readers. These poets are

working in the semantic realm of the political; they write protest poetry, poetry in

support of political movements, against policy, against military action, and so on. These

poems can inform readers and, quite significantly, they can serve as rallying points for

those who share a common cause.

However, the political poetry with which this study is most interested is poetry

that is not necessarily political in content but is political in form. By form, I don’t only

mean the physical layout of a poem on the page or on a screen, although it certainly

includes that, but also I mean what the poem is doing, how it is working, beyond the
 6

words and their meanings. The poems that I examine here push the limits of what a

poem can do; they challenge what is expected of a poem. These poems break rules by

breaking.

Often, critics associate the aesthetics of digital poetry with the aesthetics of early

twentieth century, modernist, avant-garde writing. Christopher Funkhouser, expressing

a common sentiment among those who study digital poetry, writes that “[t]he aesthetics

of digital poetry are an extension of modernist techniques” (3). It makes sense.

Modernist writers actively challenged what a poem was expected to be by experimenting

with compositional strategies, sound, and visual elements of a poem, as have digital

poets since the 1980s. The typographical experiments that the short-lived Vorticist

movement used in their publication Blast over a hundred years ago (Lewis 11-12) is an

example of poetry pushing boundaries, of subverting expectations with regard to what a

poem was supposed to be. Their typographical play and their foregrounding of the visual

seem to be echoed in a number of examples of digital poetry (c.f. “Seen Death” Chapter

1). The early Modernist avant-garde wrote poetry that was not doing what was expected

of it. Because it was challenging the status quo, I argue it was acting politically,

regardless of whether it was political in content or not. The content was not primarily

the point (some of the political content in Blast is reprehensible). Rather it was the form

– the action of the poem – that was so instructive.

In his “Dada Manifesto” (there were many Dada manifestos), a piece he used to

introduce a reading at a public soiree in Zurich in 1916, Hugo Ball writes the following

about his poetry:

 7

I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional

language… I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the

words are other people’s inventions... A line of poetry is a chance to get rid

of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by

stockbrokers’ hands, hands worn smooth by coins. (Ball)

Ball’s poetic strategy here, to do away with “words that other people have invented” in

his poetry, is extreme indeed, but by referencing the “stockbrokers’ hands,” he is

indicating that there is a point to this work. The “sound poetry” that followed this

introduction, including poems like “Karawane” [1916], is shocking to many even today.

By doing something that poetry is not supposed to do, in this case, by quite literally

abandoning the semantic aspects of language, the poem was acting against expectation

and demonstrating alternative possibilities that exist beyond what appears to be our

truth, our reality.

This avant-garde impulse can be seen over and over again throughout the

twentieth century in the poetry produced by those associated with groups like Oulipo,

Fluxus, and the Language school. The poems produced by these and other groups were

responding directly to the a political culture that they wanted to change. One might even

call it an oppositional impulse.

Johanna Drucker has argued that the characterization of recent art as avant-

garde, particularly in the age of digital media, is no longer a useful one. The dialectical

way of reading the way art intervenes in politics, she argues, is outdated. She writes:

…it seems glaringly, even terrifyingly, apparent to me that the terms on

which avant-garde orthodoxy and its intellectual descendants have kept a

 8

rhetorical flame alive have blinded us. A flagrant, and even hypocritical,

connection exists between supposedly oppositional discourse and

repressive power structures in academic and cultural institutions. (Sweet

Dreams 9-10)

I agree with Drucker in a certain sense. Thinking of art, and more specifically here,

poetry, solely in oppositional terms does reinforce the structures and institutions it is

opposing. Oppositional resistance, in this sense, is a necessary part of those structures

and institutions. On the other hand, modern and postmodern poets in the twentieth

century did repeatedly produce poems that were not necessarily oppositional in that

they were a part of a dialectic, in that they were against something, but rather they

demonstrated that there is an alternative to the status quo. By doing what they were not

supposed to do, these poems are political because they reveal potential beyond the

status quo, beyond the dialectical way of thinking to which Drucker objects. The poems

themselves demonstrate a kind of immanent becoming; they illuminate alternative ways

of being in the world.

Influenced by Drucker, I tend, in the pages that follow, to avoid the term “avant-

garde,” and instead use terms like “experimental.” This is the term also advocated for by

Maria Engberg and Jay David Bolter in their article “Digital Literature and the

Modernist Problem,” in which they argue that a number of writers of digital literature

are “moving beyond” a dialectical engagement with the political, work that is “intended

neither to advance the medium nor to constitute a new kind of politics.” They

specifically reference the digital writer Jason Nelson and his literary games as an

example of one moving beyond what they call the “modernist problem.”
 9

In their desire to prove that Nelson has moved beyond the political in his work,

they write the following:

The dizzying and erratic design, called “anti-design” by Nelson,

nevertheless strikes the player/reader as playful, rather than menacing or

laden with corporate critique. The work has been called “as alienating as

modern art can get” by the press according to Nelson’s web page…

It seems to me that what they are in fact describing is quite political, not in the sense of

oppositional politics, perhaps, but in the way I am using the term; this is an immanent

politics. Lori Emerson argues that Nelson’s “anti-design” “work[s] against the clean,

‘natural,’ and transparent interface of the Web” (40). Because of its difficult interface,

Nelson’s work reveals the limitations and control imposed upon the user in “user

friendly” interfaces. It is critique, and critique is a kind of politics. Perhaps it isn’t

“menacing or laden with corporate critique,” in its content, but it certainly does unsettle

the status quo.

Breakage and Affect

The poems that I am concerned with here are poems that break. I am looking

primarily at digital poetry (although I do discuss breakage in relation to print poems

too) that, because of a text’s inextricable tie to a medium, breaks – it stops functioning,

it becomes illegible, it glitches – usually in a way this is entirely unexpected on the part

of the reader, the writer, or both. By doing what it is not supposed to do, it creates an

opportunity for the reader to experience the virtual, to experience “a moment of

unstructured and unformed potential” (Shouse).

 10

I borrow these concepts (virtual, potential) from Brian Massumi and his work on

affect. According to his definition, affect is not simply a synonym for emotion. In fact, it

isn’t really emotion at all. Rather, it is a non-conscious, physiological experience that

precedes a cultural, linguistic translation of affective experience into “emotion” or

“feelings.” Massumi, very influenced by his work on Deleuze, writes that an emotion is a

“sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward

defined as personal” (28), whereas affect is an “unqualified intensity” that is not yet a

part of the qualified level of experience – it has not been narrativized, has not been

defined.

For Massumi, affect is an experience of the virtual, “the pressing crowd of

incipiencies and tendencies, it is a realm of potential. In potential is where futurity

combines, unmediated, with pastness, where otusides are infolded, and sadness is

happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life)” (224). The experience

of affect, according to Massumi, is an experience of the virtual, of uncodified,

unqualified potential – a potential for new ways of thinking, of being, of relating to one

another. When poetry breaks and a reader/user experiences the break, that reader/user

has an experience of affect.

Undoubtedly, a lot of poetry deals in affect and is therefore, to varying degrees,

political. Poetry uses language to express experience beyond language. However, it

never does so as effectively as when it breaks. It taps into the virtual, it ruptures an

apparently seamless flow of information, an apparently static system of relations that

make up our reality. The rupture that is the result of the poem allows for the

reader/user/listener to experience that “pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies”

 11

that is, as yet, unqualified and uncaptured. It allows one to experience, with the

sensorium, the unknown.

Digital Poetry

Some poems, however, are more generative than others when it comes to

rupturing the interface and exposing the reader/user to affect. Some poems are doing

more, are breaking more rules. Some poems, quite literally, break.

N. Katherine Hayles has long advocated for a medium specific analysis of literary

texts. As I discuss in Chapter Two, she argues that the “immateriality of the text has

ceased to be a useful or even a viable fiction (“Print” 87). Every text is instantiated in a

medium, and that medium plays a significant role in determining the way the text is

read, and media break. The medium is the reason a poem can break, and digital media

allow for myriad avenues for breakage.

Throughout this study, I accept the necessity of media specific analysis as a given.

There are close readings of a number of texts here, but the texts are never treated as

immaterial. Materiality is, in Hayles’ words, “the interplay between a text’s physical

characteristics and its signifying strategies” (“Print” 67), and I try to pay equal attention

to both the medium and the signifying strategies of any given poetic text. Meaning, if it

is appropriate to use that word, lies in the relationship between the two.

I have decided to focus here, in large part, on digital poetry because 1) its

inseparability from the medium upon which it is instantiated is made incredibly

apparent, and 2) because the various digital media to which a poem is tied breaks
 12

relatively easily (or is relatively easily broken). A broken, or breaking, poem, I argue, is

remarkably effective at revealing, via the performative act of breaking, a bit of the virtual

beyond the interface. It demonstrates, and, more significantly, allows us to experience,

via affect, something beyond what we experience as our everyday world, with all its

unjustness, its problems, its inequality.

I’m not arguing that a poem can change the world. But I am arguing that a poem

might help us realize that the world can change.

Chapter Descriptions

Chapter One, “Ephemerality, Digital Poetry, and Tactical Resistance,” takes as its

objects of study three digital poems that are embracing their ephemerality as a primary

part of their poetics. The poems are dying, and, regardless of very real institutional

pressures, the poets are letting them die. I use the term “dying” somewhat playfully and

a bit dramatically, but I mean that most texts written in digital media have a relatively

brief period of time during which they can be run and read. As Matthew Kirschenbaum

has demonstrated in Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination,

information inscribed on digital storage media can be accessed, via a process of what he

calls media forensics, for a very long time. However, when I talk of a text’s ephemerality,

I’m referring to its effective accessibility. We can no longer read a Flash poem on most

browsers or mobile devices, for instance. Digital media are labile media, and a number

of writers of digital poetry are incorporating that lability into their poetics.

The chapter begins with a discussion of archiving ephemeral work. Over the past

several years, there has been much discussion within the field of digital poetics centered
 13

on questions of extending the lives of works of digital literature. In 2004, Nick Monfort

and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, writing on behalf of the Electronic Literature Organization,

published a pamphlet entitled “Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting

Electronic Literature,” in which they encouraged authors to take various steps, including

writing on open platforms, using plain-text formats like HTML and XML instead of

binary formats, commenting heavily in the source code, etc. I highlight this set of

recommendations because it is emblematic of a primary, anxiety-causing concern within

the field – a concern that arises, in part, out of am unspoken desire that digital poetry

act like printed poetry. But what if the poet wants to let the poem evanesce? What if a

significant part of the poetics is its ephemerality?

To answer these questions, I turn from literature to the field of contemporary art

curation and preservation. In the art world, archivists and curators are struggling with

very immediate concerns, ethical and otherwise, related to archiving works that have

been composed in ephemeral media, as many are. Should works of art that were made to

exist for only a brief period of time be somehow preserved? Or should archivists look for

alternative methods of documentation that will allow a work to cease to exist while still

preserving its memory? I look at some of the answers they have found to these difficult

questions, and I make an effort to apply them to digital poetry.

I look specifically at Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, a hypertext poem

composed in 2000, that doesn’t function on current browsers because they no longer

support certain JavaScript modes. Memmott knew perfectly, working in digital media,

that something like this was inevitable, and the poem’s obsolescence is incorporated
 14

into the text itself. The poet has since refused to “fix” or “update” it, in spite of, or

perhaps because of, its canonization in the field and all that that implies.

The two other digital poems I examine are Alexandre Saemmer’s “Tramway” and

Jody Zellen’s “Seen Death,” both of which equate their ephemerality with the loss of

human life. Saemmer’s piece is a narrative piece about the death of the poet’s father. It

remains accessible if the reader is using a computer and a browser that still supports

Flash, but a major piece the work, a line of scrolling text, is becoming unreadable. As

processing speeds of computers increases, so does the speed of the scrolling text. It is

nearly impossible to read now on most recent-model machines. Like the memory of a

loved one who has passed, we are watching “Tramway” fade before our very eyes. In

Zellen’s piece, a piece that utilizes images and text from media reports about the U.S.

wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the emotional response to the loss of the poem, I argue,

echoes the emotional response to the loss of life in the wars. It’s passing, fading as we

watch. The poem makes loss immediate.

Next, I look at error or breakage within individual poems. Chapter Two, “Glitch-

Lit: The Embrace of Error in Digital and Non-Digital Poetry,” applies the ideas behind

what has come to be known as glitch art to poetry. I look at ways in which poets are

provoking glitches in the media upon which their poems are instantiated as a remix and

compositional strategy, often with extraordinary results, both aesthetically and

politically.

The glitch serves to fracture what artists Nick Briz and Curt Cloninger call the

illusion of a “pure, transcendent signal” (23), and in doing so, it reveals the hidden

systemic workings behind an otherwise opaque surface. It reveals the existence of the
 15

interface. The glitch is the magician’s trick revealed; it shows the hidden wires, the trap

doors, the cards up sleeves. It can reveal “previously invisible technologies and their

effects” (Hill 28) in such a way that the user of the technology immediately understands

that the interface is what one sees, not what is actually going on. More importantly, “A

glitch reveals itself to be political when it reminds us that technologies are not neutral

tools, but rather symptoms of our worldview and cultural norms” (Briz and Cloninger

14). I push a bit further and argue that language itself, since it is always instantiated in

some medium, be it digital, print, film, audio, or the human voice, is a kind of interface

that can be glitched, can be broken.

A defining quality of the glitch is that it is felt, that it runs on human wetware. In

fact, glitch need not, or should not, be associated with a particular aesthetic. It is, I

believe, an experience of affect, and that is where its potency lies. As I elaborated upon

at some length above, the experience of affect is the experience of pure potential.

Unqualified affect demonstrates that there is something other than the codified system

of relations that appears to us as the way things are, as the way things are supposed to

be. The glitch is the break in the interface that allows for the experience of potential.

There are a couple of different kinds of glitches that I look at in this chapter: the

provoked glitch and the captured glitch. As examples of provoked glitches, I turn to Jim

Andrews’ “The Idea of Order at Key West Reordered,” and Jhave Johnston’s “Mups.”

Both of these digital pieces appropriate audio recordings of poets reading their poems,

and via processes that mutilate the appropriated texts, create glitched remixes. “The

Idea of Order at Key West Reordered” is a piece that appropriates a recording of Wallace

Stevens reading his poem and, virus-like, breaks it into fragments of phrases and words
 16

and randomly recombines the sounds until it is a cacophony that undermines the

poem’s original claim that the artist is the maker of meaning. “Mups” allows the user to

stack audio files of poets reading their work in such a way that illegibility increases until

eventually the individual voices become constant noise, tone, patterns of rhythm.

Eventually, the technology begins to fail, and the discordant barrage pops and jitters,

stops and starts, and fails. The user feels the glitch in their body, meaning beyond

meaning.

The chapter concludes with an in-depth examination of M. NourbeSe Philip’s

long poem Zong!, a poem that glitches an eighteenth century legal document about the

murder of some 150 slaves. Philip’s objective in composing the poem was to, in her

words, “tell the story that must not be told,” to find the voices that were silenced by the

text. Over the progression of the book, Philip increasingly mutilates the source text, first

breaking the sentences apart and rearranging the words, then breaking the words,

finding new words, words in African languages, and so on. She creates space between

fragments, between new-found words. And ultimately, an actual computer glitch causes

several pages to misprint and the text to become, in large part, illegible. This is a

captured glitch, and it is, to my mind, the most effective moment in the book.

The third chapter, “To Mutate is to Live: De-Performance and The Black Took

Collective” looks at yet another kind of breakage. This time, I am considering poetry that

is being broken within the parameters of live, multi-media performance. I’m calling this

“de-performance,” after a quote from Deleuze in an essay on theatre he called “One Less

Manifesto.” The quote is this: “We save ourselves, we become minor, only by the

creation of a disgrace or deformation” (243). This is a deformed performance, a

 17

performance that engages with a set of expectations and then proceeds to shatter those

expectations and to leave them shattered.

The Black Took Collective is a poetry performance ensemble made up of three

experimental, African-American poets: Duriel E. Harris, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Dawn

Lundy Martin. Their performances play with and subvert audience expectations relating

to performance, to poetry, and to race. This chapter takes as its primary text a

retrospective performance that the collective staged in 2014 at the University of Notre

Dame. In it, they not only read, or performed, their poetry, but they also utilized

multiple forms of media simultaneously, including several videos in which the

performers appeared projected on the domed screen of the performance space, layered

digital soundscapes, including the poets’ voices being digitally processed through

various signal processors and effects, and live writing.

The performance began with a kind of theatrical poetry reading in which a

number of almost clichéd tropes associated with black identity were evoked. Soon,

however, as voices speak over and interrupt each other, as performers improvise

observational text, as words turn into moans and screeches, as the videos screened

contradict each other and add to the cacophony, as the performers’ bodies are echoed in

the videos, the audience members’ expectations are disrupted. They are left in a place of

affective discomfort, a place beyond the codified order of ordinary language, a place that

represents in which they are experiencing unqualified affect.

In the end, The Black Took Collective employs de-performance in such a way that

they demonstrate what Deleuze calls “becoming minor.” In other words, they show us

that one can resist being defined by majoritarian through movement, through becoming.
 18

Through de-performance, The Black Took Collective shows the viability of “subtract[ing]

… the stable elements of power that will release a new potentiality … an always

unbalanced, non-representative force” (Deleuze “One Less” 242).

The final chapter, “Practice-Based Research in Literary Studies: Poemedia 2.0

and The Denver Poetry Map,” veers away from the traditional presentation of literary

scholarship and instead explores some possibilities in the area of practice-based

research. I look at two examples of my own practice-based work: Poemedia 2.0 and The

Denver Poetry Map. These are very different digital media projects, but my intention is

to demonstrate some ways in which each of them can contribute to the way we, in the

field of literary studies and poetry, think about literature and literary research.

Poemedia 2.0 was a poetry installation that put into practice the research

outlined in the previous three chapters. The piece consisted of approximately 300

printed poems hung at varying heights and forming a kind of sculptural text cloud

through which the audience is invited to wander and read. Video was mixed live and

projected onto the screens, while a live-mixed soundscape filled the space. Audience

members were invited to write text that was mixed into the video projection, and they

could also read poetry into a microphone, where their voices were captured and

integrated into the soundscape. It was a space in which bodies came together in a shared

space with a shared purpose. It was a space in which the borders between the individual

human body, the collective body, and technology were intentionally blurred, and the

porousness of those borders was perhaps, in some small way, revealed.

The three research topics that are explored throughout this dissertation,

ephemerality, glitch, and de-performance, were incorporated into Poemedia 2.0,

 19

revealing the ways in which that research might inform practice, and the ways in which

practice might illuminate the research.

The second is example is The Denver Poetry Map, a geolocative project in which

poetry is “pinned” to very specific locations on a digital map. The artifact, in this case,

provides the basis upon which new knowledge might be procured. How does a poem

affect a space, and how does space affect a poem? Does space affect the kind of poetry

being composed? Can the act of mapping poems subvert power structures that are

associated with traditional cartography and current digital maps like Google Maps? The

Denver Poetry Map, as a practice-based research artifact, can engage these kinds of

questions.

I discuss the map in relation to Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday

Life, and consider the possibilities of inspiring what he would call “tactical”

engagements with the city. I further consider the map in relation to Guy Debord’s

conception of the dérive – a way of moving through the city that “involve[s] playful-

constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and [is] thus quite

different from the classic notions of journey or stroll” (Debord). I go on to cite examples

of people using the map for what seem to me to be events very like the dérive or tactical

engagement with a city, events that include poetry walks during which poems are read

through a megaphone in public spaces as a group walks from poem to poem.

My hope is that these examples of practice-based work can add to the ways in

which research is conducted in traditional literary studies programs, can expand

pedagogical practices, and can teach us about the ways we read, write and think about
 20

poetry. Both of these projects take poetry out of the classroom, out of the book, and

situate it in the world. Context may not be everything, but it is a lot.

 21

Chapter I

Ephemerality, Digital Poetry, and Tactical Resistance

I could not see my way to dispute the transience of all things, nor could I
insist upon an exception in favor of what is beautiful and perfect. But I
did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is
beautiful involves any loss in its worth.
Sigmund Freud “On Transience”

This chapter is about the ephemerality of digital poetry and the ways in which

some poets are intentionally embracing its relatively short life, often for political

purposes. I focus on poetry written in digital media in the United States, Canada, and

Western Europe from the early 1980s through to the present, much of which is no

longer readily accessible. When I refer to “ephemeral” poetry, I simply mean that it is or

will soon become no longer available or legible to the general reader.

Alexandra Saemmer, whose work I examine below, writes the following about

what she calls “the aesthetics of the ephemeral” as applied to digital art-works and

literature, a creative approach in which the artist or writer knowingly allows their work

to “slowly decompose” with an awareness that its decomposition is “its fundamental

principle” (“Aesthetics” 479):

Even if the aesthetics of the ephemeral can be considered as the most

consistent approach to the digital arts and literature, and even if

obsolescence finally threatens all digital works (regardless of whether the

author has planned it or not), it so fundamentally questions the traditional

status of the artist that, for the moment, in the field of digital arts and

literature, few authors (mostly performance artists) have dared to adopt in

its most radical aspect. (“Aesthetics” 487)

 22

Saemmer is one of those few authors, as are most of the other poets I examine in this

chapter, poets like bpNichol, Talan Memmott, and Jody Zellen, who “question the

traditional status of the artist.” However, it’s not just an “aesthetics of the ephemeral”

that interests me, but a politics of the ephemeral as well. “[L]etting the work slowly

decompose” is a bold act in the face of pressures (institutional, economic) that artists

and writers face.

I begin this chapter with a look at prevailing concerns within the field of digital

literature that have to do with ways in which writers, editors and archivists can extend

the lives of digital literary work. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Monfort’s Acid-Free

Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature, written in 2004 and, a

year later, Born-Again Bits: A Framework for Electronic Literature, in which Fruin and

Monfort are joined by Alan Liu, Merrilee Proffitt, Liam R. E. Quin, and Jean-Hugues

Réty, are two digital pamphlets that are meant to provide writers and scholars of digital

literature with some guidelines for extending the lives of their works. They also

demonstrate a kind of anxiety, felt over a decade ago, that works of electronic literature

were already being lost.

I discuss Acid-Free Bits and Born-Again Bits to illustrate a prevailing mindset in

digital literature in which the focus on preservation is paramount. But can’t it be said

that all digital literature is in fact ephemeral? And can’t it also be said the some writers

are aware of this fact and are intentionally making ephemerality a significant part of the

work? Are some digital poets (I am focusing on poetry in the pages that follow),

intentionally and with full awareness, creating work in ephemeral media? Is it right or

even ethical to preserve a work that is intended to have a short life? These questions
 23

have been largely excluded from discussions in the field of digital literature. I, therefore,

turn to art curation and archiving, a field in which there has been some vigorous

discussion about how one should preserve ephemeral art, or indeed, if one should

preserve it. Jan Schall, Margaret Hedstrom, and Anna Perricci are all working in the

area of curation and archiving of ephemeral work, and they provide, I think, a useful

way of thinking about how or if those of us who work in digital literature should

preserve dying work. Hedstrom and Perricci advocate for the preservation of what they

call surrogates, a kind of documentation of a piece that maintains an archival presence

of the work, but clearly acknowledges that the piece is gone and the documentation is

not the piece. I also look at the work of artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a visual artist who

became quite well-known during the eighties and nineties for his ephemeral work

engaging the subject of AIDS. He wanted his work to exist and then to go away, both “to

be a threat to the art-marketing system” and, more importantly, to publicly engage with

the trauma of watching his partner “disappear day by day right in front of [his] eyes”

(Gonzalez-Torres 13), calling attention to human cost of the AIDS crises. I am looking

specifically at Gonzalez-Torres because I feel he is an illustrative example of a broader

impulse in contemporary art to work ephemeral media. Like some of the digital poets I

examine below, he was very conscientious in choosing to work in short-lived media.

Once I have established a foundation for thinking about how we might or might

not archive and preserve ephemeral works of art, I move to digital poetry. I begin by

looking at two representative pieces: First Screening, a collection of short, kinetic

poems composed by the Canadian experimental poet bpNichol and published in 2004,

and “Agrippa,” a poem written by William Gibson and published on a three and a half
 24

inch floppy disk inside an artist’s book, also called Agrippa, created by Dennis

Ashbaugh in 1992. I chose to look at First Screening because it exemplifies one of the

first movements in digital poetry. Like Geof Huth’s “Endemic Battle Collage,” published

in 1987, and Paul Zelevansky’s “Swallows,” published in 1985, “First Screening” was

written in Apple Basic and meant to read on an Apple //e. It can no longer be read in its

original form without access to a working, thirty-plus-year-old Apple computer. I look

closely at the piece, at indications that the poet was aware of and interested it the

medium’s ephemerality, and I discuss various ways in which it has since been “remade”

in an effort to extend its life. I then contrast First Screening with a brief discussion of

William Gibson’s “Agrippa,” a poem that was coded to run only once. I argue that

encoding “Agrippa” to run only once was intended to create a kind of mystique around

the poem that makes it somehow unique and valuable, a strategy that stands in contrast

to the ephemerality of “First Screening,” which is specifically tied to the life of the media

upon which it is read.

Next, I look at Talan Memmott’s “Lexia to Perplexia,” a hypertext poem

composed in DHTML and JavaScript and published in 2000. It’s no longer accessible

due to updated browsers and changing JavaScript protocols. I focus on this poem more

than any other in this chapter primarily because its loss is, I think, felt more than the

loss of so many other digital poems. “Lexia to Perplexia” has become central to the

developing canon of digital literature. It has been written about by several critics,

including N. Katherine Hayles (“Metaphoric Networks in ‘Lexia to Perplexia’,” Writing

Machines), and Lisa Swanstrom (“’Terminal Hopscotch’: Navigating Networked Space

in Talan Memmott’s ‘Lexia to Perplexia’”). According to Jill Walker Rettberg, who

 25

looked at 44 dissertations on the topic of digital literature published between 2002 and

2013, “Lexia” has been among the most cited works. Memmott made the medium’s

ephemerality and the text’s inextricability from the medium central themes in the poem

with the full knowledge that it would, within a relatively brief period, become

unreadable. Now that it has, Memmott refuses to update the code or to authorize an

update of the code. He “think[s] of its slide into no longer functioning as part of the text

itself” (“Interview”). I contend this is a political move in the sense that it is not doing

what it is supposed to do. I cite, separately, Rita Raley and the Critical Art Ensemble and

their discussion of tactical resistance within a “pool of liquid power” (Critical Art

Ensemble). For them, political resistance is not necessarily a grand, revolutionary act,

but it can also be manifest in micropolitical gestures, subtly shifting the ways in which

we relate to each other.

I continue the discussion of digital poetry’s political potential by looking at the

ways it can, through a process of mirroring, highlight the highly destructive practice of

planned obsolescence in digital media, the practice of designing hardware that is made

to break and must constantly be replaced. Luce Irigaray, Slavoj Žižek, Inke Arns and

Sylvia Stasse all have a similar ways of describing the use of imitation as a tactical tool,

as a way to highlight and reveal the social or cultural problems the artist or writer

wishes to address. I argue that “Lexia to Perplexia” and many other poems like it can, by

no longer functioning, highlight the fact that our machines are made to break.

I end the chapter with the discussion of two more recent poems: Alexandra

Saemmer’s “Tramway” (2009) and Jody Zellen’s “Seen Death” (2007). Both of these

poems focus on loss and human mortality. Choosing to work in ephemeral, digital
 26

media, “involves a crisis of meaning and a resulting value shift experienced as a

consequence of bereavement” (O’Neill 152) and can “speak a truth that may be too hard

to bear” (O’Neill 158). Both poems reproduce a sense of loss and mourning. They

analogize death and make it more immediate. Zellen’s poem, in particular, reveals this

“truth” in relation to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It places the reader in a

position to, perhaps, feel the loss of life in those wars more intensely than they

otherwise would.

Throughout this chapter, I will sometimes refer to digital literature and

sometimes to digital poetry. I consider these separate but related terms. When I write

digital literature, I am referring to a broad category that includes poetry but also fiction

and literary non-fiction. When I write digital poetry, I am specifically talking about the

sub-genre of digital literature that is poetry, although I know the line between genres in

all contemporary writing is a blurry one. This study is specifically about digital poetry,

and the pieces I examine throughout are, in my opinion, poems. Marjorie Perloff said

once, in the question and answer session following a lecture, that she defined poetry as

any art form in which language is foregrounded (Perloff). I agree with that. I think much

of Cy Twombly’s work, for example, is as much poetry as is the work of Robert Frost or

Wallace Stevens. Language is the focus. Poetry uses language to express those things

that language can’t express. The works I examine below foreground language in the

digital media, so, digital poetry. Also, though I don’t use the term, several quotes use the

term electronic literature or e-poetry. They correlate with their “digital” counterparts.

***
 27

The topic of ephemerality in digital literature and poetry has been at the forefront

of critical inquiry in the field of contemporary digital poetics for the past several years,

often in relation to achievability. Those who write (and those who write about) poetry

and fiction in digital media often exhibit anxiety about the fact that their work will

inevitably be lost, unplayable, or unreadable. Each software update, each development

in hardware, can provide myriad challenges for a born digital poem, and the writers of

these poems have been struggling with what they perceive as the “problem” of their

poem’s rapid and inevitable evanescence. One only need visit the Electronic Literature

Organization’s online anthologies, the Electronic Literature Collection, Volumes 1 and

2, to find a host of links to works that no longer function as they were intended to, if

they function at all. Deena Larsen, foundational hypertext author of Marble Springs,

laments on her website in reference to a series of 13 “kanji-jus” poems, or “short poems

based on the Japanese kanji or ideogram for the word itself”:

Note that the javascript in all of these has gone on to bigger and better

things. If anyone would like to help me upgrade these, I would be eternally

grateful. . . . Further, we mourn the loss of Cauldron and Net. (Larsen)

Cauldron & Net is an online “journal of arts and new media” that published a number of

prominent writers of digital literature and poetry, including Larsen, from 1999 until

2002. The website is still active, but many of the works are, as one would expect of

works of digital literature composed more than a decade ago, now broken. Larsen’s

complaint is representative of the anxiety many digital poets have been articulating for

some time now: a fear that these works are fading away before their very eyes.
 28

Recently, Matthew Kirschenbaum tweeted the following: “Seems The Iowa

Review Web has gone away – do any #elit folks know what happened? @markmarino

@dgrigar @scottrettberg @eliterature.” The Iowa Review Web was an online

component of The Iowa Review, a print-based poetry journal that is run by “faculty,

students and staff from the renowned writing and literature programs at the University

of Iowa” (The Iowa Review). In the early 2000s, The Iowa Review Web, an online

component of the journal, hosted a number of works of digital literature and digital

poetry, including work by Dene Grigar (“Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts”), Jody

Zellen (“Crowds and Power”), Sandy Baldwin (“New World Order”), Jason Nelson (“The

Bomar Gene”), and Michael Joyce (“Reach, a Fiction”) (“The Iowa Review Web”). Many

of these works are not included in other collections. Here is the first set of replies to

Kirschenbaum’s tweet by Scott Rettberg and Dene Grigar:

Scott Rettberg @scottrettberg – 4 Jan 2015: “@mkirschenbaum

@markmarino @dgrigar @eliterature No. But I expect we can rebuild it.

Scott Rettberg @scottrettberg – 4 Jan 2015: “@mkirschenbaum

@markmarino @dgrigar @eliterature They moved to an ‘Iowa Review
Web Archive’ and then, it appears, deleted the archive.”
Dene Grigar @dgrigar – 4 Jan 2015: “@scottrettberg @mkirschenbaum
@markmarino @eliterature yep, that’s what I learned. Someone did not
think it was valuable to retain”
Scott Rettberg @scottrettberg – 4 Jan 2015: “@mkirschenbaum
@markmarino @dgrigar @eliterature Deleting the archive, what the fuck
is that? It’s called archive, that means don’t delete.”
Dene Grigar @dgrigar – 4 Jan 2015: “@scottrettberg @mkirschenbaum
@markmarino @eliterature It’s archived if the work is valued enough to be
preserved and it wasn’t, obviously”
The concern being expressed here is not about the work itself becoming

unreadable, although much of it has become so. The concern is the disappearance of an

archive that was maintained by a poetry journal. However, the source of the anxiety is
 29

the same. Because of its instantiation on digital media, digital literature is vulnerable to

disappearance.

Over a decade ago, Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, writing on behalf of

the Electronic Literature Organization, published “Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations

for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature,” a sort of how-to manual intended to instruct the

writer of digital literature and poetry in the ways of writing works that last. Joseph

Tabbi, in the introduction, writes that this “document is a plea for writers to work

proactively in archiving their own creations, and to bear these issues in mind even in the

act of composition.” The authors write that although the preservation of digital

literature is “the work of a community,” “the practices of authors and publishers will

determine whether preserving particular works is relatively easy or nearly impossible”

(Montford and Fruin). They recommend a litany of principles that the writer can employ

in order to ensure the longevity of her/his work, including preferring open systems to

closed ones, providing copious comments in the code, choosing plain-text formats over

binary formats, keeping multiple copies on various, “durable” media, and so on. It is

necessary, they seem to argue, that the poet or writer think consciously about the

longevity of her/his poem before, during and after its composition.

In 2005, the year after “Acid-Free Bits” was published, Monfort and Wardrip-

Fruin were joined by Alan Liu, David Durand, Merrilee Proffitt, Liam R.E. Quin, and

Jean-Hugues Réty in publishing “Born-Again Bits: A Framework for Migrating

Electronic Literature” on the Electronic Literature Organization’s website. Their stated

goal this time was to “[envision] a technical framework that can not just keep e-lit alive

but allow it to come back to life in new forms adapted to evolving technologies and
 30

social needs” (Liu et al). They felt they could not only strive to keep digital literature

alive, that was in many cases a losing battle, but they could also give it new life on

different platforms via a process they were calling “migration”. In other words they were

interested in either creating interpretations or emulations of an outdated work so that it

could “be experienced once more in a form as functionally like the original as possible,”

or they could “describe or represent works … so as to facilitate moving them into

alternative formats and software.” Both “Acid-Free Bits” and “Born-Again Bits” reveal

an urgent desire within the community of digital literature scholars and practitioners to

keep dying digital poetry and fiction alive.

The question of archiving works of literature written in digital media continues to

be at the forefront of critical discussion. Kathleen Fitzpatrick dedicates a chapter in her

book Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy to

the need to update academic libraries and library systems to accommodate for the

preservation and accessibility of digital texts. She cites Michael Joyce’s hypertext novel,

Afternoon, as a work that is largely inaccessible (it was composed using the now

unsupported HyperCard authoring software), as an example of why libraries need to

engage more directly with issues of digital preservation. She writes, “the hardware and

software environments necessary to opening these files are largely out of date, and many

licensed users of these texts find themselves unable to read them” (122). She goes on to

argue that the loss of digital work is an immediate problem, and preservationists and

creators need to look to the future, to “[plan] for the persistent availability of digital

resources as part of the process of their creation” (125). It is a complicated process, of

course. New technologies will continue to develop as older ones become obsolete. We
 31

must, however, “not throw up our hands at that realization… and declare the problem

intractable; we can and should take steps today to ensure that texts and artifacts

produced and preserved under today’s systems remain interoperable with or portable to

the systems of tomorrow” (125). It’s a tall order, but, she argues, a necessary one.

Manuel Portela recently wrote about the difficulties of archiving digital texts as

well. He is contending with the problem of “reproduc[ing]… early digital works for

which it is no longer possible to reconstitute the original hardware and software

environment.” He discusses his work with PO.EX: A Digital Archive of Portuguese

Experimental Literature and the difficulty of archiving computer works by Pedro

Barbosa, Silvestre Pestana, and E.M. de Melo e Castro. The animated poetry of Barbosa

and Castro, produced in the 1980s, cannot be “re-created” in its original computer

environment because of a “lack of specific documentation;” the original code is lost.

There are VHS copies of some of Castro’s work, and there are “handwritten notes and

diagrams” documenting Barbosa’s. The archivists have decided to maintain the work in

those forms, but not to try to work backward and recreate the original code. Pestana’s

original work is also gone, but he did publish the code in a book called Poemographias

in 1985, and they are able to run the poems on emulators in the Java environment in “a

version that approximates the functionality of the original” (Portela).

“Approximates” is the right word. I think it’s important to point out the fact that a

work of digital literature run on an emulator is not the same work as the original. One

might think of it as a document of the original, or one might think of it is a new piece

altogether. As I argue throughout this and other chapters, meaning is created by both

the text and the medium upon with it is instantiated. If a text is ported to a different
 32

medium or if it is emulated in a different medium, the reader’s relationship to that text

is altered, and the meaning of the text is changed.

Archiving the Ephemeral

Can, or should, ephemeral digital literature be preserved, especially if the work’s

short life is an essential part of its poetics? If a piece is supposed to die, should archivists

continually try to resuscitate it? These questions have not been and are not generally

being addressed in the field of digital literature. Alexandra Saemmer, whom I quote

above, has addressed some of these issues by providing an aesthetic framework for

embracing the ephemeral in digital writing, but other than that, there is little discussion

of the matter. Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Planned Obsolescence), Matthew Kirschenbaum

(“The .txtual Condition), and countless other digital writers and scholars all, in similar

ways, address digital literature’s ephemerality as a problem that needs to addressed, but

none of them discuss ways in which preservationists might deal with ephemeral digital

media that is intended to eventually stop working. However, these questions are being

discussed vigorously in the field of visual art conservation, preservation, and archiving.

A great many recent and contemporary artists work in ephemeral media (Andy

Goldsworthy, Richard Long, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, not to mention performance

artists). For this reason, I am going to turn briefly to that field with the hope of gleaning

some concepts that may be helpful for those of us thinking about ephemerality in digital

literature and digital poetry.

 33

In her essay, “Curating Ephemera: Responsibility and Reality,” Jan Schall writes

that although we all know that “the essence of life is change, and life itself is

impermanent,” we still have a desire to make our present permanent. She writes:

We want to know the world we live in, and we want the future to know us

as we have come to know the past. We understand that we are part of a

vast cultural stream that has been flowing since time immemorial and will

continue to flow into time unimaginable. We have the cultural artifacts to

prove it. (Schall 15)

The archive is a site wherein that past can be made present, and the present can have a

chance at lasting into the future. It is a repository for a community’s cultural heritage, a

place for one to experience the past and to provide for the future. It is natural, I think, to

want to save cultural artifacts, to have a representation of ourselves available to future

generations, but it is also important that we recognize that there are additional concerns

when it comes to archiving the ephemeral.

Museum curators are continually struggling with the fact “that the contemporary

world is fixated on change, obsolescence, speed, impermanence and ephemera,” and for

that reason, “[m]uch modern art is ephemeral, and contemporary art is ephemeral in

the extreme” (Schall 24). Of course, from a certain perspective, all art is ephemeral.

Everything will decompose eventually. Paintings fade and chip, sculptures crumble,

books fall apart. It is the archivist’s job to try to prolong the life of these objects. But that

job becomes particularly difficult when the works being preserved are made of media

that are chosen by the artist because they are short-lived.

 34

In their article, “It’s Only Temporary,” Margaret Hedstrom and Anna Perricci

write that “archivists and curators make a careful distinction between preservation,

conservation, and restoration” (29). Preservation is a process of minimizing

deterioration. The archivist may create protective cases, maintain optimal temperature

and humidity in the space within which the work is stored, shelter the work from

destructive light, and so on. Conservation is the “repair or stabilization of materials

through chemical or physical treatment to ensure that they survive in their original form

as long as possible” (Pearce-Moses in Hedstrom and Perricci 29). And restoration is

repair and rehabilitation of the object, the goal of which is to bring the object back, as

closely as possible, to its original condition.

One issue that archivists are struggling with is how one should preserve, conserve

or restore ephemeral work, and if one should. After all, the artist, if he or she

intentionally created the work using materials that would break, decompose, be

consumed, etc., never intended the work to last. The piece only “works” or “makes

sense” if its lability is embraced. One might think of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,

for example, as a series of pieces that were not intended to be preserved. His “candy

pieces,” sculptures made of stacked pieces of individually wrapped candy that exactly

match the weight of his lover’s body, and which the audience is invited to take and

consume piece by piece, function as “sweet and sad eulogies” imbued with “a profound

sense of mourning and loss” (The Renaissance Society). Gonzalez-Torres, like many of

his contemporaries, was dealing with the devastating effects of the AIDS virus on the gay

community in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and he saw his art as an analogue to the crisis that

surrounded him. He said the following in an interview not long before his death:
 35

I wanted to do a show that would disappear completely. It had to do a lot

with disappearance and learning. It was also about trying to be a threat to

the art-marketing system, and also, to be really honest, it was about being

generous to a certain extent. I wanted people to have my work. The fact

that someone could just come and take my work and carry it with them

was very exciting. Freud said that we rehearse our fears in order to lessen

them. In a way this “letting go” of the work, this refusal to make a static

form, a monolithic sculpture, in favor of disappearing, changing, unstable,

and fragile form was an attempt on my part to rehearse my fears of having

Ross [his partner] disappear day by day right in front of my eyes.

(Gonzalez-Torres 13)

However, regardless of his intentions, we look for ways to preserve, conserve, or

restore his work. According to the journal Contemporary Art, he has become “one of the

most influential artists of his generation…mixing political activism, emotional affect,

and deep formal concerns in a wide range of media.” His work has come to be highly

prized for its uniquely emotional engagement with themes such as love and death, and is

“a profoundly human body of work, intimate and vulnerable even as it destabilizes so

many seemingly unshakable certainties” (“Gonzalez-Torres at MMK”).

Since his death in 1996, his work has become ever more prized as a commodity

within the art market. In 2010, a stacked candy piece he called “Untitled” (Portrait of

Marcel Brient), a piece that is composed of 200 pounds of candy pieces each

individually wrapped in blue cellophane, sold at a Philips de Pury auction for $4.5

million (Cahyka). Perhaps Gonzelez-Torres was attempting, in part, to “be a threat to

 36

the art-marketing system,” to question the assumptions and expectations that that

system imposes on art and artists, yet it that system is remarkably resilient, and it

managed to subsume into itself a piece that was intended to disappear. One can imagine

that the person or organization that purchased “Untitled” (Portrait of Marcel Brient) is

not interested in letting it disappear. They will undoubtedly be employing all of the

archival tools at their disposal to make sure the piece lasts a very long time.

So certain questions present themselves: is it the same piece if it doesn’t

“disappear?” Is the integrity of the piece compromised by the very act of preservation?

Are there archival strategies that can preserve an ephemeral work that don’t

compromise its intended political position in relation to, for instance, the market?

Hedstrom and Perricci outline a separate but related archival strategy that is

particularly relevant to archiving ephemeral works: preserving surrogates. According to

the authors, “surrogates are representations of some sort that stand in for original

documents” (32). These surrogates can take the form of photographs, audio or video

recordings, written accounts of the pieces, and so on. To be sure, “surrogates are always

inferior substitutes for originals, and in most cases they are many steps removed from

the activity, event, or transaction that they purport to represent” (32). A videocassette

recording of a performance is not the piece – but importantly, it doesn’t pretend to be.

The surrogate announces itself as a documentation of the work, and the knowledge that

the piece is gone remains a part of the piece – or at least of the memory of the piece.

The version of “Untitled” (Portrait of Marcel Brient) that was sold for $4.5

million is not the “Untitled” (Portrait of Marcel Brient) that was consumed by its

viewers piece by piece until there was nothing left.

 37

Digital media is ephemeral media, and therefore, the strategies outlined above

are particularly useful when thinking about archiving digital literature and poetry. Alain

Depocas writes that we need to come to terms with the fact that digital media (he is

writing specifically about digital art) is “ephemeral or continually evolving” and that

“[d]enyig this state would mean renouncing the fundamental nature of such artwork.

Yet grasping all the consequences of this transitoriness requires a profound paradigm

shift” (n.p.) with regard to the ways we think about preserving and archiving artworks

composed in digital media. The same holds true with regard to the ways we think about

preserving digital literature and digital poetry.

The (Short) Life of a Digital Poem: bpNichol’s First Screening

In 1984, the Canadian experimental poet bpNichol published one of the earliest

examples of programmed kinetic poetry, First Screening. The piece is a collection of

twelve poems, all written in the Applesoft BASIC programing language on an Apple //e.

In his printed notes that accompany the disk, Nichol described the poems as being:

…composed over the period of a year & a half, from approximately Spring

83 to Fall 84. As a result, tho the on-screen activity never reveals it, the

off-screen programming moves from brute stumbling to some much more

elegant solutions, a record of how the process of programming, the process

of composition, guided me to the final result. What most surprised me in

this process was how concerns that had been present for me in the mid-

60’s, issues of composition and content i was confronting while working

with my early concrete poems, suddenly found a new focus. In fact, i was
 38

finally in a position to create those filmic effects that i hadn’t the patience

or skill to animate at that time. (Nichol)

The poems are ingeniously animated concrete/kinetic pieces that explore poetic tension

and meaning creation through the evolving relationship of words to each other and to

filmic movement. The language often evokes, referentially at least, images from the

natural world and the complexities of human relationship; in other words, content that

one often associates with a long tradition of poetic expression. The individual pieces are

often comical and filled with puns. In one piece, for example, titled “Reverie,” the word

“sun” rises from a line in the middle of the screen, below which is the word “(field).”

Then the word “HOE” makes its way haltingly across the center of the screen, from right

to left. As it moves across the line in the center of the screen, the line that separates the

words “sun” and “(field),” it leaves behind it, in place of the line, the letters “rizon,”

naming the line for a moment as the horizon, and leaving the letters “rizon” to evoke,

perhaps, both a crop “rising” from the earth and a “rhizome,” a complex root system and

a metaphor employed by Deleuze and Guattari to indicate an ontology of networked

bodies, a metaphor entirely relevant to bpNichol’s work. Referencing the rhizome

emphasizes the relationships between human bodies and technology, between text and

technology.
 39

Figure 1 bpNichol First Screening – “Reverie”

In another poem, “After the Storm,” letters and words are “blown” around the

screen until the sentence:

Figure 2 bpNichol First Screening "After the Storm"

finally settles on the screen, broken, scattered, and inevitable.

Christopher Funkhouser writes that First Screening is “indicative of what

transpired when poets began to use computer programs to produce kinetic poetry with

prominent languages such as BASIC” (113). First Screening, along with a few other

coeval poems, set the stage for the rapid development and creative advancement of
 40

digital poetry that would take place over the next three decades. “[T]hese poems

represent the style of manipulated tactility that has come to define videopoems and that

were subsequently extended by many works of digital poetry” (113). The multiple ways

in which Nichol animates the text highlight “the interplay between the words on the

screen and how such play can establish meaning” (114). This is certainly true. However,

the poems in First Screening also highlight their unique connection to the medium

upon which they are read.

The collection was published by Underwhich Editions, a small, independent press

that Nichol started and operated with fellow poets Steve McCaffery, John Riddel, Paul

Dutton, Micahael Dean, Steven Ross Smith, Brian Dedora, and Richard Trular (One

Zero Zero). It was released in a limited edition run of 100 signed and numbered, five

and a quarter inch floppy disks. Each disk was packaged along with a short, printed

introduction written by Nichol. The disk is identified as the first of a series called

Underwhich Software Series, but it is apparently the only piece of software the press

released. Leaving aside the fact that Nichol was an editor at Underwhich, the press was

an ideal vehicle for a collection like First Screening. Underwhich had established itself

as a publisher of not only experimental print-based works that focus on visual elements

of poetry (Nichol’s Conitnuum and Riddell’s War, for example), but they also published

recordings of sound poetry by Paul Dutton and The Four Horsemen (a sound poetry

ensemble comprised of Nichol, Dutton, McCaffery and Raphael Barreto-Rivera). So

when Nichol had the idea to animate concrete poetry using the BASIC programming

language, it made sense that Underwhich would publish it.

First Screening could only run on the Apple //e. This computer was introduced in

January of 1983 and was discontinued in November of 1993. To this day it remains
 41

Apple’s longest-lived computer at eleven years (Apple History). And because First

Screening was published only a year after the release of the //e, it enjoyed a relatively

long life itself before it, like all digital poetry, could no longer be accessed due to

changing technology.

I’d like to reiterate here what I mean by ephemerality in digital media. I am

referring specifically to effective ease of access to digital work. However, it is worth

remembering that texts inscribed on digital media do, in fact, stick around quite a bit

longer than we generally think. Matthew Kirschenbaum, in his book Mechanisms,

highlights the fact that writing in digital media is not as ephemeral as we might expect.

Information that is inscribed on storage media is, through a process of media forensics,

accessible for a particularly long time. He writes that:

[w]hile it may be technically possible to create the conditions in which

electronic writing can subsist without inscription and therefore vanish

without a trace, those conditions are not the norm but the special case,

artificially induced by an expert with the resources, skill, and motive to

defeat an expert investigator. (50)

Generally speaking, digital writing is inscribed on digital storage devices, whether they

be removable storage devices, hard drives on one’s one computer, or hard drives on

other people’s computer’s (i.e. the cloud). Kirschenbaum reminds us that texts inscribed

on a storage device remains accessible for a good deal longer than we think. I am,

however, referring to the practical fact that most of us are not expert forensic

investigators, and when a hardware or software “development” renders a piece of

writing unreadable, it is no longer, generally speaking, available to us.

 42

Perhaps Nichol knew the poems were being written in an ephemeral media. Nichol

was, in his lifetime, recognized as an important experimental writer. He had dozens of

books in print, including The Martyrology, a long poem in nine volumes published in

installments from the seventies through the nineties. He even wrote for the HBO

children’s show Fraggle Rock for a time (bp Nichol 1944-1988). But as Gregory Betts

points out in “The bpNichol.ca Project: An Archive for Ephemera”:

…he also published thousands of “ephemeral” literary objects, including

chapbooks, broadsides, comics, pillows, balloons, and much much more.

Moreover, it is certainly the case that his ephemeral publications are more

central to his poetics than his recognition with official verse culture. As the

mark of an avant-garde reversal, his ephemera functions as a, if not the,

central manifestation of his literary oeuvre. (Betts)

I mention his non-digital ephemera simply to suggest that temporality was a major

concern in his work. Non-digital ephemera is a staple of academic study, and it is

generally understood as doing something other than, say, printed books. Referring to

bpNichol’s non-digital ephemera, Kit Dobson writes that, “Nichol’s commitment to

ephemera functions, at a material level, to destabilize concretized – or concretizing –

notions that we might hold about his work” (9). I would argue that poets like Nichol,

who produce ephemera, are not only questioning notions we night have about their

work, but they are providing an opportunity for us to question, or to destabilize

concretized notions that we might hold about the way things are supposed to work more

generally. Poets who create ephemera realize that it, though perhaps important, is of a
 43

moment, not a grand gesture meant to stand the proverbial tests of time. Nichol seemed

to embrace the fleeting nature of art, of literature, of poetry.

We can never know for sure, but it stands to reason that Nichol had some

awareness of the fact that First Screening would eventually be technologically obsolete,

and one can read into the themes of the piece itself a kind of metonymic

acknowledgment of the piece’s eventual evanescence. Let us consider, for example, the

piece he called “Island.” This piece is composed of only two words, “ROCK” and

“WAVE.” The word “ROCK” occupies a vertical column at the center of the screen. It is

“surrounded” on both sides by the word “WAVE,” three columns on each side. All of the

words are scrolling upwards very rapidly. However, the “ROCK” column has no spaces

between the words, while the six “WAVE” columns do. The result is a sense that the six

“WAVE” columns are moving, are shifting, while the “ROCK” column is solid,

unmoving. But the word “ROCK” at the bottom of the column, at the bottom of our

screen, is flickering, it reveals the fact that indeed that column is moving, shifting,

changing. Perhaps there is an illusion of stillness (an island) in the center of the ever-

changing sea, but Nichol is demonstrating in this poem that it is only that: an illusion.

Those things we feel are most permanent, most constant, are in fact always labile,

always fading away.

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Figure 3 bpNichol First Screening "Island"

As I mentioned above, this piece was released on a five and a quarter inch floppy

disk in a limited edition run of 100 copies. A floppy disk, if used regularly, will generally

last anywhere from three to twenty years (Morgan), and First Screening is more than

thirty years old. Though there are a few archived disks that seem to function, and the

code is accessible, the piece is none-the-less only functional on an Apple //e (and they

are getting harder to come across) or on an Apple //e emulator run on a newer machine.

First Screening is, practically speaking, a collection of inaccessible poems. One

could say it is dead – but it is not gone. There has been a significant effort to archive the

poems on a number of occasions. Various archival recordings, or surrogates, of the

poem are available on the new media artist and writer Jim Andrews’ website, vispo.com

(Andrews). Andrews has created a good example of a digital literature archive, and the
 45

archive itself is a good example of the necessary and ongoing process of archiving, of the

fact that requires the continual effort of human intervention.

In 1992, four years after Nichols’ death, J.B. Hohm made a HyperCard version of

the poem and published it on a 3 ½ inch floppy disk with Red Deer College Press. This

version is significantly different from the Basic version. Holm wrote, for example, that

he made “design decisions” that “were to include speed and font controls – that is I gave

users the power to change fonts and display speed. (Blasphemy!)” (Holm in Andrews).

This version is currently unplayable without a HyperCard emulator. HyperCard was a

pre-World Wide Web application designed for Apple that provided a platform for what

was then considered sophisticated hypermedia projects, but it became increasingly

outdated as the development of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) rose to

prominence with the rise of the Web. HyperCard was sold up until 2004, but it had not

been updated since 1998 (LEM Staff).

Then there is a JavaScript version, recoded by Andrews and Marko Niemi,

available on Andrews’ website. The font is different because of the limitations of

javascript; it’s heavier and seems to be more solid, smoother. The speed is

approximated, but it runs very differently. And the way one experiences the poem is

different. One doesn’t hear the whir of the disk as the poem runs. One doesn’t type “run”

to initiate the initiate the process of reading the poems. It’s a valuable surrogate for

archival purposes, but it’s not First Screening.

Andrews also supplies the original AppleSoft BASIC code that can be entered and

run in an Apple //e emulator, which might give the reader a sense of the original
 46

collection, but the experience of the particular hardware is lost (one’s interaction with

an Apple //e is very different from one’s interaction with a MacBook Pro.

The poems are also available as a video, a Quicktime screen capture of the

emulator. This is the most common way the reader experiences the poem today, but

Andrews acknowledges that “[f]reeze-frames from the Quicktime do not always reflect

the structure of bpNichol’s code… Not that the discrepancy is a big deal. But it does bear

on the issue of authenticity” (Andrews). Perhaps even more significant, the Quicktime

video of the emulator opens in a small window, approximately 500 by 400 pixels, on the

desktop of a modern machine. The poem shares the space on the reader’s desktop with

whatever software applications are running, whether it’s a web browser, operating

system interface, or word document, and the meaning of the poem will be

affected/infected by the adjacent content. The experience of reading the poems is

markedly different in its different incarnations and on different machines.

Lori Emerson writes that:

In First Screening it appears as though Nichol – writing at the very

beginning of the era of the personal computer – understands the ease with

which the digital computer has an entirely different effect on the body than

that of a reading/writing machine like the typewriter. (67)

She supports that assertion by discussing one of the poems, “ANY OF YOUR LIP: a

silent sound poem for Sean O’Huigin,” in which the word “MOUTH” appears in the

center of the screen and alternates with words that are sonically similar: “myth,”

“moth,” “math,” and so on. The poem “invites readers to sound out or to ‘mouth’ the

words as they try to make sense of the words while they flash across the screen”
 47

(Emerson 68). Indeed, the poem inspires a bodily interaction with the kinetic text that a

static text likely would not. Importantly, it, along with the other poems included in First

Screening, also highlights the unique interactions that the body has with the Apple //e.

Part of the appeal of digital poetry is the interface - not only the screen interface, or

the graphic user interface on newer computers, but the actual interaction with the

machine itself. The tactile interaction with the poem is as much a part of it as the text,

movement, visual elements, etc. Whether it is inserting a five and a quarter in floppy

disk into the drive and typing “run” into an Apple //e on a 1980’s style keyboard in

order to watch and read First Screening or dragging your finger across a tablet’s touch

screen to form lines of poetry in Jason Edward Lewis’ “What They Speak When They

Speak to Me,” the interface is a part of the poetics of the piece. What the poem does to

the body, what the body must do to read the poem, what the body must do to make the

poem – these things are entirely significant. When they are changed, when the interface

is different, it is no longer the poem. The gestures that the medium requires of the poem

convey a kind of meaning that the text alone doesn’t necessarily contain.

First Screening is still in some sense available, thanks in large part to Jim

Andrews, Marko Niemi, J.B. Holm, Dan Waber and Geof Huth, who have over the years

expended great effort to make sure the poem could still be accessed. Their work has

ensured and continues to ensure the poems can be seen and read. But unless a reader

has a thirty year old Apple //e that still works and a copy of the original 5 1/4 inch

floppy disk, the poems, like a performance of a great dancer seen on a scratchy

videotape recording, can only be experienced second hand, a recording of a poem that

once was. The few Apple //e’s that still exist will, inevitably, stop working. And the
 48

original floppies will no longer be accessible. So although there are archival recordings,

or surrogates, of the poem, First Screening is, for all intents and purposes, a dead poem.

It is archived, but it is gone.

We can see, by looking at First Screening, that in fact the archivist is limited in the

ways she or he can maintain an archive of digital poetry. Preservation, conservation, and

restoration can be applied to hardware; we see a few good examples of this kind of

archive around the globe. One example is the Media Archaeology Lab at the University

of Colorado Boulder, for instance, with its ever-growing collection of “still-functioning

but obsolete tools, software, hardware, platforms from the past” (Media Archaeology

Lab), an archival laboratory that allows researchers access to, for example, functional

Apple //e’s, on which the researcher can actually read and experience First Screening as

it was meant to be read and experienced. Another example is the MITH (Maryland

Institute for Technology in the Humanities) collection of vintage computers at the

University of Maryland, which has been developing a system of “basic descriptive and

technical metadata” that documents “computers not just as generic classes of devices,

but as specific individual instances of hardware, that is, as unique material artifacts”

(Kirschenbaum n.d.). At archives like the Media Archaeology Lab and MITH’s Vintage

Computer Collection, archivists employ preservation (e.g. maintaining a space in which

the computers will experience as little environmental degradation as possible),

conservation (e.g. bringing in experts to repair malfunctioning hardware), and

restoration. And historical digital poetry is able to maintain some kind of life as long as

its associated hardware is functional.

 49

But the hardware will eventually stop working. The poems will be lost much more

quickly than printed poems will. This is where the notion of surrogacy comes into play.

As Andrews et al have demonstrated with First Screening, the only practical way to

archive digital poetry is through the creation of surrogates. Surrogates allow the poem to

remain a part of the archive, to be accessible to researchers and curious readers alike,

but they also allow the poem to do what it is supposed to do – to fade away.

Art’s value doesn’t necessarily lie in its constancy and longevity. This is the

realization of so many artists and poets working in ephemeral media. They have

consciously chosen to write poems and make works that refuse to comply with the

demands of, for example, market or institutional forces. There are certainly economic

and cultural pressures on the artist to make work that will stand the test of time, yet

many are choosing to resist these pressures by embracing the lability of the materials

with which they work.

Writing in digital media implies a kind of conscious acknowledgment on the part of

the writer that the medium in which the poem is written, the medium out of which the

work of art is made, is going to break. More and more commonly, writers are

acknowledging this and incorporating the ephemerality of the media with which they

work, digital media, into their poetics. The reasons for doing this are varied, but what is

almost always certain is the writer is writing work that can stand in opposition to the

pressures of market forces and institutional demands, manifestations of power that

coexist with limitation, oppression, and suppression.

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Ephemeral vs Temporary

Art critic Mary O’Neill differentiates between ephemeral art and temporary art.

The differentiation that she articulates will serve us well in the discussion of digital

poetry. She writes that temporary art is “dismantled, abandoned, or removed,” while

ephemeral art is art wherein “the decay and/or disappearance of the work over the

course of time is an intrinsic element of the piece” (O’Neill 88). The implications of each

within a political context are very different. In this section, I will look at two examples of

digital poetry, William Gibson’s “Agrippa” and Talan Memmott’s “Lexia to Perplexia.”

Both were intended to be short lived, but they have very different relationships to

power, to the market.

In 1992, the science fiction novelist William Gibson published a digital poem

called “Agrippa.” The poem was inscribed on a 3 ½ inch floppy disk and was included in

a hollowed-out section of a conceptual art book called Agrippa (A Book of the Dead).

The book was created by artist Dennis Ashbaugh and published by Kevin Begos Jr. The

text of the book itself consists of two columns of DNA coding and various other visual

elements, including copperplate aquatint etchings designed by Ashbaugh, that were

intended to make each copy of the book feel like a unique relic, a rarified, valuable

object. The book was released in two limited editions, the Deluxe and the Small. The

Deluxe version was sold for $1500 (later $2000), and the Small edition was sold for

$450 (Transcriptions Project).

The poem Gibson wrote for the piece is a 305 line, semi-autobiographical

narrative about a boy and his father. The disk that contained the poem was designed to
 51

run on a Macintosh with System 7, the most current operating system available in 1992

(Apple History), and was coded in such a way that the poem could only run once before

infecting itself with a virus that rendered it unplayable. The poem was made to exist for

only a brief moment before it was gone. It would scroll slowly upwards, and when a line

left the top of the screen, that line is encrypted, and so it is, from then on, unreadable.

As Matthew Kirschenbaum writes in Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic

Imagination, the poem would still be on the disk, if someone could get it off. And, a

bootleg video of an early public run of the poem at an event called “Agrippa – The

Transmission,” which took place at the Americas Society in New York, was posted

online at MindVox the very day after the performance. It has circulated for years and is

now available on the Agrippa Files website. The text of the poem in its entirety is

available on Gibson’s author site, and videos of emulated runs of the disk are available

(Kirschenbaum 223-4). But again, I contend that what is available to us are documents

of the poem. If, as I have stated above, a poem and the medium upon which it is

instantiated are both necessary to the formulation of meaning, then all of the video

versions of the poem running, the text of the poem on a website or printed on paper, are

not “Agrippa,” the poem. They are surrogates.

The piece is about memory, and the loss of memory. “As a work and a text,”

Kirschembaum writes, “Agrippa [which includes the book Agrippa and the poem

“Agrippa”] is intensely self-reflexive about its own artifice and artefactual dimensions”

(218). It is engaging very directly with its material dimensions. The title, “Agrippa,”

refers to a brand of photo album, the object around which the poem revolves. In the
 52

early stanzas of the poem, the speaker articulates the ephemerality of objects, and by

extension, of memory itself. Here are a few stanzas:

A Kodak album of time-burned

black construction paper

The string he tied

Has been unraveled by years

and the dry weather of trunks

Like a lady's shoestring from the First World War

Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen

Until they resemble cigarette-ash

Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite

Now lost

Then his name

W.F. Gibson Jr.

and something, comma,

1924

Even the black construction paper of which the album is constructed is “time-burned,”

falling apart. The string around it is “unraveled,” the “ferrules eaten by oxygen.”

Immediately, Gibson presents us with the container, the frame around the speaker’s

memories, and he shows us that container and frame are in a process of degradation.

Not only is the container fading, but so is the language within. Inside the cover, his
 53

father “inscribed something in soft graphite / now lost.” Something that followed his

name, perhaps a title, perhaps an endearment (one can imagine it saying “W.F. Gibson

Jr. / With love for my son, / 1924,” or something along those lines), is also lost. The

poem opens with the reader being made aware of the fact that memories and the things

that contain them are always already in a state of evanescence, or they are simply gone.

It makes sense that the poem would incorporate its own destruction within its

poetics. But there is more going on here. Gibson refers in his poem to “the mechanism,”

first as a camera (“A lens / The shutter falls / Forever / Dividing that from this.”), then

as a gun, which the boy/speaker accidentally fires, twice. And the mechanism has a

profound effect on him: “Absolutely alone / in awareness of the mechanism. // Like the

first time you put your mouth / on a woman.” Eventually “the mechanism” becomes

more abstract. People look down upon the melting snow of the city “and on the revealed

grace / of the mechanism,” perhaps referring to the grid of cities, the movement of

people through space. Then in the penultimate stanza, we are again reminded of

destruction: the speaker walks by a razed bus station (“no busses stop there at all”)

through a raging typhoon. The final stanza, which consists of only two lines (laughing, /

in the mechanism.”), reminds us that “the mechanism” is, perhaps, always all around us,

a kind of machinic assemblage that determines the way we understand our past.

Perhaps the mechanism is the object (a gun, a book, a city) with which we associate

memory, and perhaps loss of the object equates to a loss of memory.

This brings to mind another “mechanism:” the computer on which the poem is

being read. It too is an object associated with an experience, and it too is impermanent.

The reality of the mechanism is that it is going to break; it is going to become obsolete. It
 54

will eventually fail. The Macintosh Classic running a System 7 operating system on

which one would have read “Agrippa” in 1992 is, for all practical purposes, no longer

functional. Like the pencil markings in the photo album that are “now lost,” the

mechanisms to which Gibson refers in the poem have faded. The poem is gone too.

By coding its breakage, by writing a poem that could only run one time, Gibson

created a work of temporary art, not ephemeral art. This particular poem, rather than

challenging the cultural conventions of the role a poem plays, (e.g. it should strive

toward canonization, it should be represented as a product with economic value)

actually reinforces those conventions. It could be said that in this instance, the poet’s

intention in making a poem that essentially self-destructs is not an act of tactical

resistance. Rather, it is an act that serves to reinforce the role poetry plays in capital and

the role capital plays in poetry. This is an instant in which the forces within the

assemblages that maintain power are reinforced by the poem’s self-imposed exit. The

intention here is not, it seems, to use poetry to illuminate the fact that these seemingly

solid relationships that enable the market to continue to function as it does are in fact

not so solid; that can be altered. Rather it seems the poet’s intention is to make a poem

that is rarified and reified, to turn it into something that one might feel has some extra-

material quality that makes it a valuable possession due to the very fact that the poem

can only be seen once. In this case, the poet (Gibson) is negating the power that is

actually inherent in the poem’s short life by endowing it with a false sense of

uniqueness. The very attitude that compelled Begos to create an art object (Agrippa (A

Book of the Dead)) that could trigger something in the consumer that would make

him/her want to spend a $2000 on that particular object was the same attitude that
 55

compelled, it would appear, Gibson to make the poem “Agrippa” an experience one

could only have once.

This temporary work of digital poetry, this limited edition, stands in stark contrast

to another work, one that embraces its actual ephemerality as a part of its poetics, and

by extension, makes a political statement with regard to its relationship to capital: Talan

Memmott’s “Lexia to Perplexia.”

Lexia to Perplexia: The End of a Poem

Like “Untitled” (Portrait of Marcel Brient), Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia

is composed of ephemeral media, and Memmott was entirely aware of that as he wrote

the piece. It is, in part, about its own demise.

If digital literature and poetry can be said to have a canon, “Lexia to Perplexia” is

a central part of it. It was initially published on the Iowa Web Review, and later

anthologized in the Electronic Literature Organization’s Electronic Literature

Collection, Volume One, which is available online and on a CD-ROM that accompanies

N. Katherine Hayles’ 2008 book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.

It has received much critical attention, and it has been a part of countless course syllabi.

Hayles has called it a “brilliantly designed and programmed” work (Horizons 7).

“Lexia to Perplexia” is a literary hypertext poem composed in DHTML and

JavaScript. It is presented in four sections, “The Process of Attachment,” “Double-

Funnels,” “Metastrophe,” and “Exe.Termination.” Each section provides a platform to

explore the complex relationship and illusory borders between subject and machine,
 56

between reader and text, between human language and computer code, and between

flesh and silicone. It illuminates the fact that the screen is a meeting place between the

“I-terminal,” or the human subject, and the network. It sees the screen as a site that

appears to be stable and constant, but is in fact the quintessence of lability. The first

lexia1the reader encounters if she or he begins with the first section, “A Process of

Attachment,” reads:

Figure 4 Talan Memmott "Lexia to Perplexia"

The “illusory object at the screen”, be that object text, image, sound, or animation, is in

actuality a manifestation of the machine’s rendering of code and data. The reader’s

connection to the network is tangible because of her/his engagement with the screen. As

Memmott articulates in the lexia above, the reader sees her/his face reflected in the

1
“Lexia” is a word adopted from Barthes by early hypertext writers to denote a block of
text that is connected, via hyperlinks, to other lexia, or blocks of text.
 57

screen, and that reflection metaphorically represents the level of integration the I-

terminal has with the machine, with the network of machines and other I-terminals. We

see in that reflection that face; we see ourselves a part of, not apart from the machine. It

is articulated quite poetically in the code-worked line: “<HEAD>[FACE]<BODY>,

<BODY> FACE </BODY>.” In it, the [FACE] and its reflection “FACE” are contained

within both flesh (head and body) and code/silicone (<HEAD>, <BODY>,</BODY> are

ubiquitous HTML tags).

As we move deeper into Lexia’s web of lexia, as we “exit the exo, / taking

fingersteps into the apparatus,” we are confronted with a reworking of the myth of Echo

and Narcissus. We are put in the position of the beautiful boy who falls in love with his

own reflection. We become “the terminal-I, a Cell.f, or, cell…(f) that processes the self as

outside of itself.” Echo then becomes a recursive feedback loop reminding us just how

integrated we, the machine, and the network are. As Memmott writes in the section

“Metastrophe,” in his “Minifesto 2,” “We *.fect the atmosphere as we move through it,

construct the infosphere as we move through it, striving toward communification.” And

once we’ve sounded our call, “sen[t] out signals, smoke and otherwise,” we wait eagerly

for the Echo, a recognition of ourselves as a singularity within the network. In a certain

sense, there is no us without the network.

But Lexia also is entirely aware of its eventual obsolescence. In “Minifesto 3,”

Memmott writes:

The machine is not equipped with the modern, yet reliably obsolete

modules available today. The machine is built in expectation, more than as

an object – the tangible machine, the one you are seated before, is dead
 58

already, or returns a dead eye – slowly – I can’t think fast enough; or, if

today you think I think fast enough for you, tomorrow you will reject me –

this is my destiny I know. (Lexia)

If the reader clicks on the word “obsolete,” – it is a hyperlink – a new lexia pops up in

which one of Memmott’s neologisms, “obsoletics,” is defined:

Figure 5 Talan Memmott "Lexia to Perplexia"

One of the most significant aspects of “Lexia to Perplexia” is its awareness and

acknowledgment of its own “obsoletics,” of its ephemerality. And the piece, at the time
 59

of this writing, due to “advancements” in web browsers and JavaScript,2 is no longer

functional.3

Memmott writes that Lexia “began as an observation of the fluctuating and ever-

evolving protocols and prefixes of internet technology as applied to literary hypermedia”

(Memmott Lexia). He makes it clear that these “ever-evolving” technologies result in an

ever-increasing lack of functionality within the piece, and this is an intentional part of

its poetics.

At the 2014 annual convention of the Modern Language Association, digital

literature scholar Zach Whalen gave a talk on “Lexia to Perplexia” and its obsolescence

during a panel entitled “Electronic Literature after Flash,” later published on Whalen’s

blog. During the talk, he said that after struggling with a piece that no longer worked

beyond a few clicks4 (he was teaching the piece in a course on the subject) he “decided to

fix it.” He said, “With surprisingly few edits, I did succeed in making an unauthorized

2
Zach Whalen, in his talk/blogpost addressing Lexia’s ephemerality, specifically
identifies the problem thus: “October 17, 2013. Microsoft publishes version 11 of its
Internet Explorer web browser, including in its release notes a statement that
the document.all mode will no longer be supported and that websites relying on this
feature should update their code.”
3
In order to write about this piece, I had to find an old, but still functional, computer
with a version of JavaScript that could run the poem. I was able to run it on a PC that
has been lying unused for about seven years. I was able to turn the computer on; it
booted up, but the noises coming from the cooling fan were frightening. Given the fact
that a computer is only built to last from three to five years, I count myself lucky that the
machine was able to run at all.
4
As of this writing, “Lexia to Perplexia” can be accessed on current web browsers via the
Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One, but, as I mentioned above, the JavaScript
is no longer viable. The browsers can read the HTML, and so one can click into the first
page of each section. At that point, however, one can access no more of the poem.
 60

update to ‘Lexia to Perplexia’ that now works fine in all four of the major browsers, but

since the author has asked me not to share that version, it remains offline” (Whalen).

Whalen’s very thoughtful and well-researched talk is excellent in its discussion of

the reasons “Lexia” no longer functions in current browsers, in the reading of the code,

and in an understanding and explication of the piece in general. But I was particularly

struck by the quote above – that the author asked him not to share the “unauthorized

fix.” So I contacted Memmott to ask him about this; I asked him why he asked Whalen

not to share the “fixed” version. This was his reply:

Within the piece itself… there is a discussion of obsolescence… or, as it is

dubbed in the piece – obsoletics. The piece sort of predicts its own demise.

As such, I think of its slide into no longer functioning as part of the text

itself. That said, the piece itself has not eroded; it remains the same, but

the conditions of the platform have changed. By altering the piece to make

it function, is to actually destroy the work. Or, to make something other

than itself. A fully functioning Lexia to Perplexia would not be the work I

created, and would ignore one of the theoretical issues dealt with in the

work, or embodied through it. (Memmott “Interview”)

The question then becomes, in this context, is the piece’s “obsoletics,” its embracing of

the ephemeral nature of writing in digital media, a political act? After all, the content of

this piece doesn’t deal with tactical concerns; it doesn’t represent itself in its content as

struggling against something. But I contend that, in its way, it is very much a political

poem.
 61

The Ephemeral Digital Poem as Tactical Resistance

One could argue (and many poets and critics do argue) that all poetry is political

because it is standing in relationship to the world in which it was written. If the poem is

an object of cultural production and if, as Maria Damon and Ira Livingston write in their

introduction to the anthology Poetry and Cultural Studies: a Reader, “cultural practices

are … inconceivable except as constellations with material, social, and political

dimensions, then poetry and cultural studies might be said to bear ‘withness’ to each

other and to their worlds; that is, they become fellow participants” (2). One can find

countless examples of poets making similar claims about poetry. Andrew Joron writes

that poetry is “the uncanny reflection of an unfinished world” (10), and Joan Retallack

that “[t]his is a question of poethics – what we make of events as we use language in the

present, how we continuously create an ethos of the way in which events are

understood” (9). I don’t mean to oversimplify these poets’ views of the ways in which

they consider poetry as always political. I do, however, want to reinforce the idea that

many poets do see their poems as intervening in existing social organization.

A poem is a social act, and the very writing and presentation of a poem articulates

a social and political point of view. But when a poem does what it’s not supposed to do,

when it breaks established rules and order, then, one might argue, that poem becomes

an act of resistance. The poet takes a tactical stance against what Mary O’Neill calls

“considerable cultural and economic pressure to make permanent art” (O’Neill 157)

when she or he chooses to create an ephemeral poem. Dobson, writing specifically about

bpNichol’s non-digital ephemera, believes that “[t]here is a lot of resistance in Nichol’s

 62

work” (13), and indeed, there is, in his and others’ non-digital and digital ephemeral

work. In the ephemeral pieces at which I am looking here, there is a tactical engagement

with the social that can only be considered political.

Rita Raley, in the introduction to her book Tactical Media, writes that tactical

media “projects are not oriented toward the grand, sweeping revolutionary event;

rather, they engage in a micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education” (Raley

1). She quotes the activist art collective, the Critical Art Ensemble, as writing, “After two

centuries of revolution and near-revolution, one historical lesson continually appears –

authoritarian structure cannot be smashed; it can only be resisted” (qtd. in Raley 10).

The possibility of “the grand, sweeping revolutionary event” seems to no longer be very

relevant. Ever since the networking of power, ever since the globalization of financial

capital, more and more contemporary theorists argue that there is no outside of power

(Foucault 93, Hardt and Negri Multitude 226). But that doesn’t mean that resistance is

futile. Raley writes that “tactical media’s imagination of an outside, a space exterior to

neoliberal capitalism, is not spatial but temporal” (12). A key term here is “imagination;”

the imagination of a temporal outside of power (for there is no outside of power) allows

the producer of tactical media to act in a conscious way to alter relationships within the

field of power. She continues by writing that “tactical media do not necessarily evade the

us-them dialectic, but they do recast it such that “us” and “them” are no longer

permanently situated” (12).

I’d like to consider Raley’s claim in relation to digital (ephemeral) poetry. She

writes, referencing Michel de Certeau, that “shifting from strategy to tactics is important

because it renders the phenomenon of resistance fleeting, ephemeral, and subject to

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continual morphing” (13). Employing the tactic of writing in an ephemeral medium and

then letting the poem break, as Memmott has done, shifts the poem from the realm of

the spatial (strategic) to the realm of the temporal (tactical). It is here that it does what it

needs to do, and then it’s gone before it can become subsumed into capital.

One way we can consider the resistant potential of an ephemeral poem like “Lexia

to Perplexia” is to employ the theoretical notion of exit or exodus. After all, when a poem

refuses to engage the pressures placed upon it by capital, pressures to maintain, to keep

existing, to be permanent, it refuses to play capital’s game. It intentionally avoids the

trappings of the market, for instance. It even, on a certain level, reconsiders the social

role of poetry in that it shifts the focus from the poem as object to the poem as

experience. It undermines the belief that the poet must be individuated and celebrated

as an individual. Rather, the poem enters a system of relationships, a system in this case

of linguistic, visual and affective communication, and in its small act of micropolitical

resistance, in its willingness to evanesce, perhaps it alters that system of relationships.

The Italian theorist Paolo Virno might provide a way to think about this. He

writes in A Grammar of the Multitude that:

Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection

modifies the conditions within which the struggle takes place, rather than

presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon; it modifies

the context within which a problem has arisen, rather than facing this

problem by opting for one or the other of the provided alternatives. In

short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the

game and throws the adversary completely off balance. (70)

 64

Perhaps Virno’s passionate claim that exit can “throw the adversary completely off

balance” is hyperbolic, but it is not entirely untrue. After all, if we in fact do exist within

a complex web of relationships, as so many theorists claim we do (c.f. Deleuze, Braidotti,

Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri), and that web of relationships makes up the “truth” of our

lived experience, then surely all a poet can hope to do if she or he wants to effect some

sort of change is to alter those relationships.

Furthermore, poetry might seem an unsatisfactory site for resisting through exit.

After all, it’s only poetry – few people read it, it’s often thought of as a marginal art form

that has little impact on the world of politics and power relations. However, one can

make a strong argument that it can be an ideal place. Let’s return to “Lexia to Perplexia.”

The fact that it is built in an ephemeral medium, that it makes its ephemerality a part of

its content and poetics, and that the poet, Memmott, has consciously allowed it to exit,

in Virno’s sense, makes the poem a site of resistance in two ways: it becomes disruptive,

and it becomes instructive. It becomes disruptive in the sense that it refuses to act like a

poem – it doesn’t strive for permanence, for canonization, despite the fact that the

institutional systems that determine such things have already made attempts to

canonize it. By refusing to struggle for permanence, the poem upsets that relationship,

so easily taken for granted, that cultural production has with capital.

Poetry is sometimes spoken of as something that is not a part of the workings of

capital, that because of its relatively small readership, its “difficulty,” it somehow

escapes the all-encompassing reaches of global capital, the “pool of liquid power,” as the

Critical Art Ensemble calls it (Critical Art Ensemble). But through subverting

expectations, it reveals the presence of those expectations. It reveals that poetry, that
 65

apparently uncorrupted form of cultural production, is in fact just as much a part of the

workings of capital as everything else – it reveals the ubiquity of power. And in this way,

the disruption caused by the poem’s exit proves instructive. We, as readers, are made

aware of just how much a part of capital we all are, how there is no outside of power, as

Foucault so often reminds us (Foucault 93). But at the same time, ephemeral art, and

especially ephemeral poetry like “Lexia to Perplexia,” reminds us that we can, as Virno

claims, “[modify] the context within which a problem has arisen” by choosing a path

that is other than the one expected of us, the one that seems a part of the “unalterable

horizon.”

Planned Obsolescence and the Tactic of Mimesis

In addition to exiting, there could be another way in which an ephemeral poem like

“Lexia” can function as resistance to capital. It is clear that the reason that digital media

generally, and digital poetry specifically, is ephemeral is because there is a constant

“evolution” of digital hardware and software. A computer today is expected to last only

three to five years, and then it is discarded in favor of a new, better one with a new,

faster operating system (Siegle).

In 1964, Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, published a paper in which he

pointed out the fact that the number of transistors on integrated circuits will double

about every two years (Moore), and this prediction has proven to be quite accurate.

Moore’s Law, as it is called, has implications on all aspects of technological

development, from processing speed to memory and storage capacity. The tech industry

uses Moore’s Law to set research and development goals, to anticipate future
 66

development, and to drive future development. Harro van Lente and Arie Rip, in a 1998

article titled “Expectations in Technological Development,” write that Moore:

…observed a regular periodic doubling of the number of “gates” (a

measure of complexity), and claimed, by extrapolation, that this would

continue. This prediction has come true so beautifully, that nowadays we

speak of “Moore’s Law,” as if it were a law of Nature. The validity of this

law cannot be understood from the technical procedures by which the

chips are made. The fact that the law holds so well is an effect of the way

actors (in industry, in science and in government) judge their own and

each other’s accomplishments with respect to what Moore’s Law predicts.

They direct their efforts towards achieving the predicted values.

Laboratories evaluate and plan their efforts in terms of Moore’s Law; when

there is danger of specifications falling short at the predicted moment,

extra effort is expended. (Van Lente 206)

Moore’s Law has become a kind of feedback loop, a force that encourages the

development of more and more computing power at ever lower costs. For each piece of

technology that is improved, there is an existing piece of technology that becomes

obsolete. Capital determined very early on that the way to deal with, initially, the

problem of overproduction, and later, in the era of global finance, the problem of

satisfying corporate shareholders’ insatiable appetite for growth, was to make products

that don’t last. Couple obsolescent products with “an eclectic assortment of advertisers,

bankers, business analysts, communications theorists, economists, engineers, industrial

designers, and even real estate brokers [who] contrived ways to describe, control,
 67

promote, and exploit the market demand that obsolescence created,” (Slade 6) and it’s

not hard to see why obsolescence has become, in the public imagination, an undeniable

“truth” about commerce and industry.

The history of planned obsolescence, that is, “the assortment of techniques used to

artificially limit the durability of a manufactured good in order to stimulate repetitive

consumption” (Slade 5), is well documented. In the era of digital media, it has produced

an epidemic of sorts. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in 2009,

“438 million new consumer electronics were sold; 5 million tons of electronics were in

storage; 2.37 million tons of electronics were ready for end-of-life management; and

25% of these tons were collected for recycling” (Environmental Protection Agency). The

implications of this ever-increasing mass of e-waste, both in the United States and

abroad, are potentially devastating:

All of the discarded components in this growing mountain of e-waste

contain high levels of permanent biological toxins (PBTs), ranging from

arsenic, antimony, beryllium, and cadmium to lead, nickel, and zinc. When

e-waste is burned anywhere in the world, dioxins, furans, and other

pollutants are released into the air, with potentially disastrous health

consequences around the globe. When e-waste is buried in landfill, PBTs

eventually seep into the groundwater, poisoning it. (Slade 261)

The environmental effects of e-waste are growing exponentially. Add to that the fact that

the global corporations that are producing new tech are exploiting labor on a scale we

have never seen, and it becomes apparent that we are facing a crisis. Our desire for a

new phone or laptop coupled with corporate planned obsolescence – they are two sides
 68

of the same coin – is something with which we, if we care about the future at all, must

come to terms.

Can we realistically consider a digital poem an effective site for resistance against

planned obsolescence? It seems almost preposterous to think that poetry can effectively

struggle against so massive a concern. But if we remember Raley’s assertion that

“[t]hese projects are not oriented toward the grand, sweeping revolutionary event;

rather they engage in a micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education” (Raley

1), then perhaps we can see that it, along with “a multitude of creative agents” (Raley 10)

all struggling toward a similar goal, can help generate more of an awareness of existing

problems and can help facilitate changes in behavior.

Raley also writes that “tactical media comes so close to its core informational and

technological apparatuses that protest in a sense becomes the mirror image of its object,

its aesthetic replicatory and reiterative rather than strictly oppositional” (Raley 12).

Perhaps we can look into this “mirror image of its object” in order to find another way in

which the ephemerality of digital poetry can resist the machinations of capital,

specifically a way in which it can resist planned obsolescence.

Luce Irigaray has provided us with an interesting way to examine this potential.

One of her principle strategies for resisting the phallocentric order is mimesis, a process

whereby women playfully imitate stereotypical views of women in order to highlight

these views and call them into question. She writes, “To play with mimesis is thus, for a

woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing

herself to simply be reduced to it.” The woman utilizing this tactic “assume[s] the

feminine role deliberately” (Irigaray 124) in order to resist a phallocentric discourse

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from within that discourse, ultimately “jamming the theoretical machinery…” and

“suspending its pretention to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are

excessively univocal” (126). For example, Ping Xu, in an essay titled, “Irigaray’s Mimicry

and the Problem of Essentialism,” argues that Irigaray successfully refutes an argument

that her critics commonly employ, that she is an essentialist, through the uses of

mimicry. By focusing on the female genitals, for instance, in “This Sex Which is Not

One,” Xu points out that “Irigaray is here mimicking the phallogocentric tradition and

that we should take it seriously while never forgetting to laugh at the same time” (Xu

86). She is most likely “fully aware that there is in fact no ‘scientific’ ‘ground’ for sexual

identity, no pure or neutral essentialism, but only ‘sexed’ essentialism, as have been

evidenced by the entire phallogocentric tradition itself” (86).

The relevance here to using the ephemerality of digital poetry as a resistant tactic

is significant. The poem has an opportunity to “jam the theoretical machinery” that is

produced by capital, the machinery that creates the conditions under which the

corporate practice of planned obsolescence is represented as normal, as appropriate,

even as good, by identifying with, by even mimicking the hardware upon which it is

read.

Let us return to “Lexia to Perplexia” once again. As illustrated in the image above,

the image in which Memmott links the word “obsolete” to a pop-up box in which

progress (pro|gress) is equated (==) with obsolescence (OBSOLETICS). As I discussed

in more detail above, “Lexia,” in both its form and content, demonstrates an ontological

link between the reader and the machine, and it highlights the temporal nature of both

the poem and the machine. He shows us that the machine upon which we are reading is
 70

already obsolete and will eventually die. (Or we could say it has died, or is gasping for its

final breaths.)

So it is possible to see this approach, this acknowledgment of the poem’s

ephemerality, as a resistant gesture, to think of the poem mimicking the machine in the

sense Irigaray outlined. By mimicking the short life of the computer, the poem may well

act to reveal the discourses that make the consumer believe that the way things are is the

way they have to be; it can reveal the fact that power’s “pretention to the production of a

truth” (Irigaray 126) is just that: pretention. It can, perhaps, make the reader aware of

the corporate interests that lie at the heart of planned obsolescence, and therefor of the

environmental degradation and labor exploitation that are the byproducts of that

practice. Awareness must necessarily precede change.

More recently, two terms have arisen that may help us understand this notion

more clearly. Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse posit the term “subversive affirmation,” and

Slavoj Žižek has coined the term “over-identification.” They are both more or less

identifying the same approach with regard to the production of cultural objects, or art

objects, that use mimesis to resist power. Arns and Sasse define “subversive affirmation”

as:

an artistic/political tactic that allows artists/activists to take part in certain

social, political, or economic discourses and to affirm, appropriate, or

consume them while simultaneously undermining them. It is

characterized precisely by the fact that with affirmation there is

simultaneously taking place a distancing from, or revelation of what is

 71

being affirmed. In subversive affirmation, there is always a surplus which

destabilizes affirmation and turns it into its opposite. (Arns 445)

Žižek points to the fact that we might be misguided in thinking that distancing ourselves

from the system(s) that we would like to subvert will always be an effective strategy.

“What if the distance,” he asks us, “far from posing any threat to the system, designates

the supreme form of conformism, since the normal function of the system requires

cynical distance” (Zizek)? So rather than stand apart from and against the perceived

injustice, subversive affirmation and over-identification require the artist/activist to

intentionally over-identify with the very practices they wish to subvert.5

Subversive affirmation and over-identification work by engaging the

audience/reader very differently from other forms of tactical resistance. Arns and Sasse

write that these practices “[have] to – almost physically – involve the listener or reader

in the situation so that she or he can understand her or his involvement afterwards and

reflect upon it” (447). The purpose is to put them “in such a state or situation which she

or he would or will criticize later” (445).

The digital poem provides a unique opportunity to engage in this kind of tactical

resistance. If the poem doesn’t fight, tooth and nail, to outlive its medium, then we, as

readers, are put in a position in which we are made aware of the poem’s intrinsic

5
There are a number of illustrative examples of artists/activists utilizing these kinds of
tactics in their works, notably including The Yes Men. The two members of this group
have, for instance, presented themselves as heads of industry or government, and
appeared at conferences, been interviewed on cable news, and spoken at universities.
On their web site, they write they are “[i]mpersonating big time criminals in order to
humiliate them, and otherwise giving journalists excuses to cover important issues.”
Their work is playful, humorous, and remarkably effective.
 72

association with that medium – a medium that was made to break. The poem engages

consciously with the system it intends to subvert – it over-identifies with it – and the

reader will then, perhaps, upon later reflection, think more critically upon the reasons

s/he is supporting a system that makes planned obsolescence seem like a good thing.

Of course “Lexia to Perplexia” is not likely to change the world on its own, but

that’s not really the point. It does act as a micro-political agent; it is disruptive, and it is

educational. When a multitude of creative tactics all work in pursuit of a similar goal,

even if that goal is to raise awareness, the singularities that make up that multitude can

be effective. And sometimes, one could say, the point is simply to keep resisting.

Digital Poetry, the Mortal Body, and Forgetting

I am now going to turn to two digital poems that engage the topic of mortality by

embracing their own mortality. The first is Alexandra Saemmer’s “Tramway,” a poem

that engages the subject of death on a personal level. The piece is designed to make the

reader feel the loss of a loved one, in part by the fact that the poem is becoming

unreadable. I then look at Jody Zellen’s “Seen Death,” a piece that uses newspaper

clippings and fatality statistics from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as its source

materials. I argue that it, like “Tramway” generates a feeling of loss in the reader that is,

in this case, politically effective.

In 2009, the French poet Alexandra Saemmer published a multimedia poem

called “Tramway” in the Canadian online art and literature journal BleuOrange. It is a

narrative poem of sorts that is centered on the death of the poet’s father. Saemmer

writes, “My mother and I had to make a gesture that always seems so solemn and
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natural in movies, i.e. close the eyes of my father who had just died” (Saemmer), but the

task seems to have rather difficult. The reality of death is significantly different from its

representation in popular media.

Visually, the poem is relatively straightforward. There is a rather large square in

the middle of the screen that contains an image of a landscape viewed through rain-

dappled glass. A line of text is running across the image, from left to right, at an upward

angle. The reader experiences the poem as a sequence of lexia, each in its own pop-up

window, sometimes static, sometimes kinetic (in one lexia, the letters individually fall to

the bottom of the pop-up box, the text is falling apart, complicating legibility).

Whenever the reader closes a box, even more open. This goes on until s/he stops reading

the poem.

The speaker of “Tramway” is riding in a train. She is flooded with memories, all

spurred on by the death of her father. Like Michel de Certeau’s train passenger, her

stillness coupled with the window glass and the extended rail, facilitates an overflow of

mental activity. In an introduction to the piece, she writes:

I wrote the fragments of the story one year after the death of my father.

Among the many bursts of stories that I collected as I rode the train each

day, one shameful moment, a moment about which I couldn’t speak for

years, kept arising.

An enflamed eye, one that could not be closed nor kept open.

Impossible to make a clean sweep. (Saemmer)

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This is the driving concern of the piece. We find ourselves, as a result, asking questions

about the role and function of memory: How does one remember? What happens when

one forgets? Can a memory be true? How long can we hold on to a memory before it

fades? In one lexia, we are told, “Le visage de mon père était incroyablement maigre, et

il paraissait beaucoup plus âge que son corps. // Après sa mort, mon père avait pris un

visage de Christ. (The face of my father was incredibly thin, and it looked much older

than his body. // After he died, my father took on the face of Christ.)6 Though the image

of the dead father pervades the piece, we see it as an image that is changing. In this case,

it is becoming a metaphor; it is being removed from the object that was initially

perceived and is being transformed into something else.

At the same time, memories spur other memories, they occur randomly, with ever

increasing frequency. “Tramway” not only presents memories of the dead father, but

also, gossipy fragments of the speaker’s blind lover Thurstan, a scientist, with one glass

eye that is “illumine de mille étincelles (illuminated by a thousand sparks),” and his

various infidelities:

A woman who claims to be a married man defends Thurstan. Leave him

alone, he tells the truth! Thurstan looks into his archives. The identity of

his interlocutor is copied and pasted from all sides, with cracks that reveal

her true nature – the ophthalmologist! Thurstan is defeated. (Saemmer)

All of these little lexia, these narrative prose-poems, are thoughts, memories that keep

persisting. But what is most relevant about “Tramway” to this discussion is the reader’s

6
All translations of Saemmer’s work are my own.
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interaction with the poem and her/his experience of that interaction. Whenever one

tries to close a window, several more pop up. It can become a remarkably frustrating.

Yet, of course, that frustration is a part of the piece. Like the speaker trying to close her

father’s eyes, we cannot “shut the book” on this experience so easily. It won’t let us. We

can read the content of each lexia relatively easily, but the task of reading becomes

complicated by that fact that so many lexia (memories) are stacking up on top of others.

The reader has to move them around, careful not to close any, knowing full well more

will open. We quickly become aware of a feeling within us that is somehow analogous to

the experience of the speaker/poet. We are sharing the experience, or an approximation

of it, with the speaker. It is an experience that conveys meaning beyond the syntactical

referentiality of the words. We understand the experience being described in the poem

because we are feeling something like it. It is not just a mental engagement, but also a

physical one.

Once we identify with and experience the poem in this complex way, with both the

intellect and with the body via physical interaction, the notion of death’s effect on the

bodies of the survivors – the inability of the survivors to simply “close the eyes” of the

person who has died - becomes particularly charged; one might even say it becomes

somehow more real. We physically feel the frustration of memory persisting.

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Figure 6 Alexandra Saemmer "Tramway"

However, there is even more going on in “Tramway.” In her introduction to the

piece on BleuOrange, Saemmer writes that the poem is made up of childhood memories

and gossip about Thurstan. She writes that there is a love story that began a year after

her father’s death. She then writes “L’essentiel est ailleurs. / Se trame au fond la scéne

inavouable. / Bientôt illisible à nouveau. // Délivrance fragile. (The key lies elsewhere. /

Life’s web itself the shameful scene. / Soon, once again, illegible. // Delicate issue.)”

(Saemmer). It is in the line “Bientôt illisible à nouveau” that we find what that key might

be. By employing language associated with reading, illisible, we are made aware of the

fact that this is not just a piece about the death and memory of a person, but also about

the death and memory of a particular work of art. It is an acknowledgment that this
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particular text will soon die. As Talan Memmott highlighted in “Lexia to Perplexia,” the

body, the text, and the machine are all intimately linked, are all in communication with

each other; they are all dependent upon each other. Here, in “Tramway,” we see this

notion echoed. The body is indeed mortal, but so is the poem, and so is the media upon

which the poem is written. The Saemmer writes in her introduction to the poem on the

ELMCIP (Anthology of European Electronic Literature) site,

After a few exploratory clicks a scrolling text describes the traumatic

scene. On most standard computers, it is possible to decipher the text. On

more powerful computers the words will be undecipherable. The ‘lability’

of the digital device is used to reflect on the possible forgetting of this

scene. The result of this process is both reassuring and unbearable.

(Saemmer)

As processing speeds increase, the poem becomes less readable. Add to that the fact that

this poem is written in Adobe Flash, a platform that is fast becoming obsolete, and it is

clear to see this poem is dying, and it is aware of its impending death. The poem’s very

ephemerality, it seems, presents the reader with a way to understand and cope with

human mortality.

Mary O’Neill, writing about ephemeral art, writes that one reason an artist might

choose to work in ephemeral media “involves a crisis of meaning and a resulting value

shift experienced as a consequence of bereavement, in particular to mourning untimely

or violent death” (O’Neill 152). We see this very clearly in works like those of Gonzalez-

Torres, for example, and we also see it in a poem like “Tramway.” These are pieces in

which the creators are trying to make meaning out of their personal losses, and the
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resulting works provide an opportunity for the viewer/reader to gain a sense of death’s

actuality in a very conscious and bodily way. O’Neill writes:

In relinquishing the myth of permanence and immortality, they [artists

working in ephemeral media] speak a truth that may be too hard to bear

and be easily dismissed as ‘sentimental’. Through their ephemerality, they

offer us knowledge not just of art and the role it plays in our world view,

but of mourning. They ‘speak’ about the unspeakable which renders us

mute, they speak of loving and the pain of loss and of being left behind.

What is significant about these works is that they are active. In this they

differ radically from death works which are static; death masks capture the

frozen moment of death; ephemeral works begin with death and are alive.

Their very transience creates a new life, if only the surrogate life of art. If

we sacrifice our need for permanence, if we can make the shift in value

orientation that transience requires, we have an opportunity to appreciate

the here and now, the changing work, alive in the moment and soon to be

gone. Our lives, and the lives of those we love, are chancy and short. This is

the lesson of these works of art – the knowledge of what is to be lost.

(O’Neill 158)

In “Tramway,” and in works like it, this is precisely what we gain: a sense of our own

transience. They provide us with a way of understanding and dealing with death, and

they remind us of the value of appreciating the moment in which we are currently living.

I’ve spend a good deal of time discussing “Tramway,” although it’s not explicitly an

example of tactical resistance, because I feel it is an excellent example of a poem that is

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embracing its ephemerality in order to allow the reader to experience loss. Now I would

like to turn to a poem that embraces digital poetry’s unique ability to remind the reader

of the reality of death, this time with notions of tactical resistance at its core: Jody

Zellen’s “Seen Death.”

This poem, written in 2007 in response to the US invasion of Iraq, relies heavily

upon appropriated text, imagery and audio in an effort to demonstrate the devastation

brought on by the invasion. The poem opens on a sort of poem cum menu, text of

various sizes spell out the following phrases or words, phrases or words that seems to

consist of language pulled from headlines and newscasts: “Warnings Exist,” “Middle of

Nowhere,” “Extended Harmoniously,” “Seen,” “Death,” “Tug of War,” and “Raise

Concerns.” Faded text and imagery scroll erratically behind the menu. All the while, a

soundtrack consisting of recordings of a number of voices, apparently from news or

other documentary sources, creates a kind of illegible and unnerving cacophony. Only

three of the apparent menu items are actually hyperlinks: “Extended Harmoniously,”

“Seen,” and “Death.” The rest of the text on the first page is there to function poetically.

Figure 7 Jody Zellen "Seen Death"

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The graphic quality of the poem conveys a sense that there is something far more

important and pressing than the storm of rhetoric which surrounded the war. One can

note particularly the size, placement, and weight of the word “Death,” its overwhelming

presence on the screen. It is as if this poem refuses to hide or minimize the reality of the

event, as so many news organizations were likely to do during the years of escalation.

If we click on the word “Death,” we are taken to a page on which text and images

scanned from newspapers flash quickly on the screen. We see and read evocative words

and fragments: “88 Killed as Car Bombs” “Black Coach / Make a Key” “Low Point in the

Polls / His Domestic Agenda” “Gun’s” “Scant Evid- / of Iran.” Eventually the word death

appears in the middle of the screen and begins to get larger until it takes over the screen,

until it is much larger than the screen. When we click on the “ea” of death – the only bit

of the word that we can still see, the screen becomes populated with many of the words

from the previous “clippings,” now isolated: Death, Knell, Devastate, Baghdad, Market,

Public – The word stack on top of each other, creating a sense of anxiety as we try to

grasp their meaning before they are covered up by new words. Finally we see a series of

photojournalistic images depicting scenes of destruction and the anguished faces of

those witnessing them.

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Figure 8 Jody Zellen "Seen Death"

“Seen,” takes the reader to a screen that is filled with icons with labels like

“Decapitated/Strangled,” “Improvised Explosive Devices,” “Suicide Bomb,” and “Hostile

Fire,” which fades into a series of graphics articulating the number of dead on each

particular day, of both soldiers and civilians. The graphics keep multiplying

exponentially until the screen is blackened with figures representing the dead.

The final section, the section at which one arrives after clicking “Extended

Harmoniously,” is quite different in tone. In an animated sequence, we see a

background image of a boy running across what looks like a courtyard, one arm raised

joyously in the air. A crudely drawn pair of eyes and ears begins moving slowly over the

image, first downward, then to the left, across the screen, until finally more sets of eyes

appear, filling the screen. The image is then recreated in a simple line drawing with

block colors with the words “The World Extended Harmonious” appearing above it. It’s

a scene of hope, of possibility. Yet the audio, the disturbing cacophony of media voices,

continues. This juxtaposition seems to articulate the tension in the poem. Are we just
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passively watching this catastrophe happen, excusing ourselves from any responsibility

we may have for the actions of a few in power? Are the eyes and ears those of the rest of

humanity, looking to the source of this terror for some kind of action? There is certainly

no harmonious conclusion to the poem here – the audio is as chaotic as ever. This

section adds tension to the piece; it complicates it. It certainly doesn’t provide

resolution.

Figure 9 Jody Zellen "Seen Death"

“Seen Death” is clearly a protest piece. One could say it is most effective in the way

it both makes the reader aware of the horrors of war, and because of the sophisticated

turn from the documentary sources to the “Extended Harmoniously” section, it

implicates the reader in the actions of the US and its allies. And I would argue it is

effective. But we might consider that a great resistant potential lies in this poem’s

lability, its inevitable obsolescence.

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Zellen doesn’t speak of “Seen Death” as an ephemeral object; the content of the

poem doesn’t address its ephemerality. But it is, nonetheless, made of dying stuff. The

poem is written in Flash, and it is widely acknowledged that Flash is a platform that is

on the way out. Mark Sample, moderating a panel at the 2014 MLA convention in

Chicago titled “Electronic Literature After Flash,” tackled the question of Flash’s

viability. In the proposal for the panel which was published online, Sample writes that

Flash was the dominant technology used by e-lit authors for fifteen years.

Flash is dying though. Apple does not allow Flash in its wildly popular

iPhones and iPads. Android no longer supports Flash on its smartphones

and tablets. Even Adobe itself has stopped throwing its weight behind

Flash. Flash is dying. And with it, potentially an entire generation of e-lit

work that cannot be accessed without Flash. (Sample)

Perhaps “Seen Death” can function, like “Tramway,” to evoke an affective experience of

death because we, the readers, are aware of its death. O’Neill tells us that “[t]he myth of

the immortality of art represents a victory of humankind over nature, which is viewed as

other and destructive, and ultimately responsible for death” (O’Neill 91). Perhaps a

poem like “Seen Death” can function, because of its mortality, to undermine that myth.

Perhaps, by equating the poem’s ephemerality with loss of life, we as readers might gain

a more tangible understanding of the death discussed in it – the deaths caused by the

US invasion of Iraq might register on a somewhat deeper level. If the deaths of the

thousands of people can become slightly more real for the reader (after all, the US

government, since the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, were and continue to be

diligent about hiding that reality, not allowing images of war dead to be released to news
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organizations, for example), then perhaps people can alter the way they understand the

world in which they live.

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Chapter II

Glitch-Lit: The Embrace of Error in Digital and Non-Digital Poetry

Failure is an accident: art has tripped on the rug. In any case, you
should not forget my logic of failure, my logic of the accident. In my
view, the accident is positive. Why? Because it reveals something
important that we would not otherwise be able to perceive. In this
respect, it’s a profane miracle.
Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, “The Accident of Art”

In the previous chapter, I discuss the political potential inherent in digital

poetry’s ephemerality. When a poet embraces the fact that their poem is going to be

accessible for a relatively short period of time, when they incorporate its eventual

breakage into its poetics, they are confronting and challenging the social and

institutional expectations that are a part of lived experience. In this chapter, I focus on

another kind of poetic breakage: glitch. Glitch is an error, a disruption in what appears

otherwise to be a seamless transmission of information. This chapter is about the

politics of glitch as they apply to the production of poetic language and the politics of

poetic language as they apply to glitch. This chapter is about text glitches and glitched

text.

I argue that glitching poetry is a remix tactic, always with aleatoric results.

Eduardo Navas writes that remix, the process of combining and manipulating found

source material, “informs the development of material reality dependent on the constant

recyclability of material with the implementation of mechanical reproduction” (3). We

live in a time where remix is a dominant mode of cultural production. Networked,

digital media provides a user/creator with access to a virtually unlimited amount of

source material. Artists and writers, according to Mark Amerika, can “formally innovate
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/ new iterations of contemporaneity / by sampling from the flux of data / at their

immediate disposal / (Source Material Everywhere)” (16-17). Glitching poetry is a remix

tactic (one of many) in which errors are either provoked in the source material, or they

are noticed and captured. The results are always unexpected, and they are experienced

by a user as affect.

I begin with a general discussion of the term “glitch,” particularly as it has

recently been applied to visual and sound art. Most readers will have a sense of what a

visual glitch is; anyone who uses a computer regularly has likely experienced glitches.

“In our modern, networked world, the glitch is everywhere… A bad electrical contact or

an improperly connected cable is enough to elicit novel geometric forms” (Donaldson).

A glitch aesthetic, in fact, has become somewhat ubiquitous. We see glitched images

regularly in design and advertising, for example. However, according to Nick Briz, Curt

Cloninger, and Rosa Menkman, all glitch artists and theorists of glitch art, it is crucial

that we recognize that glitch is much more than just a jumbled, pixely aesthetic. It is a

break or error that is experienced by a feeling body. “A glitch is experienced when a

human mis-expects one thing and winds up with something else. Without hope,

anticipation, and expectation, without a sense of rightness and the way things are

supposed to be, there is no glitch” (Cloninger and Briz 16). The result of a glitch is

sometimes aesthetically interesting or pleasing, but the result of the glitch is not the

glitch; the experience of the error is the glitch.

Next, I differentiate between two kinds of glitches, the captured and the

provoked. It is true that “[g]litches are produced by error and are usually not intended

by humans” (Goriunova and Shulgin 115), but some artists over the past few decades
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have recognized the value of these accidental appearances of glitched images or sounds

within their computer environments and have taken steps to save or record those

images or sounds. “As a not-entirely human-produced reality, its elements are not one

hundred percent compatible with customary human logic, visual, sound, or behavioral

conventions of organizing and acting in space” (Goriunova and Shulgin 115). The artist

notices something beyond what they could conceive, recognizes the value of it, and grabs

hold of it. This is the captured glitch. The provoked glitch, on the other hand, is one that

the artist encourages. They may bend circuits, alter hardware, or open and manipulate a

file in a program that is not designed to work with that file format. Importantly, they

don’t know what the product of the glitch they are provoking will be.

In order to illustrate the difference between the two and to introduce the concept

of glitched poetry, I look at two wildly different poets at either end of history: Glitchr, a

contemporary hacker and artist/poet, and Sappho, the great lyric poet of ancient Greece.

Glitchr is an online pseudonym used by Laimonas Zakas, a contemporary hacker and

artist/poet who exploits weaknesses in the code behind user interfaces of various social

media platforms. He creates randomly-generated visual poems that more or less take

over one’s entire screen. On Facebook, for example, users are confined to a certain few

actions; they can only enter text into predetermined fields. Glitchr managed to break the

user interface and create pieces in which diacritical marks burst out of the text fields and

create visual poems in randomly-generated patterns across the entire page. This is a

provoked glitch. I then turn to Sappho, or, more accurately, I turn to the fragments of

Sappho that are available to us today to illustrate a captured glitch in poetry. Time, I

argue, was the glitching agent here – a long, slow glitch. When a reader engages with
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what’s left of Sappho’s poems, the glitch runs. The text we can read in the fragments

only hints at what’s not there. What resonates for the reader is the break, the error, the

absence, much more significantly, I think, than the fragments of text. I look at Anne

Carson’s translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, in which she uses

brackets (] [) to indicate the glitch in Sappho’s poems. She writes that there “is no

reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with

holes or smaller than a postage stamp - brackets imply a free space of imaginal

adventure” (xi). Her optimistic appraisal of the reader’s expected response aside, it

appears Carson understands that Sappho’s poems resonate more in the fracture than in

the fragment.

After discussing Glitchr and Sappho as two illustrative, albeit extreme, examples

of provoked and captured poetic glitches, I turn to two examples of glitch in digital

sound poetry: Jim Andrews’ “The Idea of Order at Key West Reordered,” published in

2004, and Jhave’s “Mups,” published in 2012. Because both of these pieces utilize

appropriated audio files of poets reading their work, and because they employ software

that corrupts the smooth transmission of language, they uniquely illustrate glitch as a

remix tactic. There are a number of digital poets who work in sound. Jörg Piringer is an

example of a poet who is producing fascinating digital sound poetry. Andrews has also

worked extensively in sound (“Nio,” “F8MW9” with Margateta Waterman, “Enigma

n2”). I focus on “The Idea of Order” and “Mups,” however, because they best utilize

glitch as I am defining it: they are provoking error in appropriated poetic texts.

Cloninger writes, “What happens to human language when it is glitched by media

machines? As receiving humans, we still try to semiotically decode such language

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(language as a system of ‘meaning’), but we also experience it as a material, affective

force” (69). We realize, when spoken language that is instantiated in a medium (as it

always is) is corrupted via an error in that medium, that communicative language is a

part of a surface, a surface that appears to be reality, to be all there is. When that

linguistic surface is disrupted via glitch, when noise enters the mix, the “myth of pure

transcendental data, of pure and perfect signal” (Cloninger 67) is revealed to be just

that: a myth.

In “The Idea of Order at Key West Reordered,” Andrews takes as his source

material a recording of Wallace Stevens reading his much anthologized poem “The Idea

of Order at Key West” and applies a program that glitches the sound file, turning order

into noise. First, I provide a thorough close reading of Stevens’ poem. I do so in order to

clarify the effect of glitching the poem. It is a poem that celebrates the ordering of

unordered nature “word by word” (Stevens 105). One way to think about ordering is as a

filtering, a removal of noise. Andrews, by glitching the poem, finds the noise again,

allows disorder back into the poem. Jhave’s “Mups” similarly takes as its source material

digital audio files of poets reading their poems. Where Andrews’ poem glitched one file,

Jhave’s creates an environment in which 1260 audio files can glitch each other. The

1260 files are all mp3s culled from the PennSound online audio archive of poetry

readings. There are a number of ways a user can engage this “online sonic mashup

engine” (Johnston), but ultimately the most effective way to provoke a glitch is by

layering files on top of each other until the individual voices disappear into noise. The

piece finds the noise that had previously been filtered out. Peter Krapp writes that “[o]ur

digital media culture is predicated on communication efficiencies to an extent that can

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obscure or veil the sources of noise, as faults, glitches, and bugs are too often relegated

to the realm of the accidental” (53). Yet when we embrace noise, when we provoke it,

when we “learn to lean into it” (Cloninger 81), we learn to, on some level, re-evaluate the

way things are and to consider the way things could be.

I end this chapter with a discussion of glitched poetry in print. M. NourbeSe

Philip’s book-length poem Zong!, published in 2008, serves as a focal point for the

discussion of what a glitched print poem might look like. The source material for this

poem is a 1783 British appellate court document called Gregson v. Gilbert. This short,

clinically-worded document discusses the systematic murder of 132 slaves who were

thrown from the slave ship Zong. The ship owners were making an insurance claim for

loss of cargo. Philip takes the horrifying document and systematically begins to break it,

to mutilate it, in an effort to somehow give voice to the murdered slaves, to tell “this

story [that] must be told by not telling” (Philip 190). Throughout the book, Philip

employs remix strategies that progressively approach remix and glitch, and thus I spend

some time exploring these various tactics. However, it isn’t until the final section of the

book that the poem becomes an example of glitch. A computer error caused several

pages from each section of the book to print on top of each other, and Philip decided to

keep these pages as the final section of the book. It is this error that allowed for the

production of glitched poetry. It is here that Philip fully achieves her stated goal – to tell

the story without telling it – by capturing the glitch.

The Medium and Materiality

It is crucial, when approaching the notion of glitch as it relates to text, to

acknowledge the fact of a text’s materiality. N. Katherine Hayles, in her 2004 article
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“Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media Specific Analysis,” writes that

media specific analysis is “a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are

instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters”

(67). She argues, quite compellingly, that the “immateriality of the text has ceased to be

a useful or even a viable fiction” (87). If we still place any merit in Marshall McLuahn’s

thesis that the medium is the message, we can see that the critic must consider the

medium through which the text is instantiated as a necessary factor in any critical

reading of any text.

In my analyses of poetic texts below, I often close-read the texts at the surface

level (screen or page), and I feel it’s necessary to do so. As Roberto Simanowski argues,

“The physical interaction [with a text] should not overwrite the cognitive interaction

with the work but rather become part of it” (7). However, I go to great effort to

remember that a text is always instantiated in a medium, and that medium has a great

impact on the way we read and experience that text, even if I am focusing on its

signifying elements. Materiality, according to Hayles’, must be:

reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics

and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and

signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of

considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central

focus on interpretation.” (Print 67)

This definition of materiality is foundational to understanding how it is possible for a

text to glitch or break. If the medium upon which a given text is instantiated somehow

fails, then the interplay between the “text’s physical characteristics and its signifying
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strategies” is undeniably altered. A text can glitch because it is bound to a medium, and

the medium can glitch.

What is Glitch?

Most people who regularly use computers know what a glitch is. They’ve seen

their screens freeze, an image transmission fail, a sound file turn from music to noise.

But the term “glitch” predates digital media. In his 1962 memoir Into Orbit, space

pioneer John Glenn brought a certain level of attention to the word glitch. He and his

fellow astronauts were using it to refer to an unexpected surge in or anomaly in an

electrical current, but he also wrote that glitch was astronaut slang for any kind of hitch

in a system (Glenn 86). Up into the nineties, the term was generally used to describe

anomalies in electric currents, but with the popularization of personal computers, the

term began to expand to take on the meaning it holds today. According to Olga

Goriunova and Alexi Shulgin:

A glitch is a short-term deviation from a correct value and as such the term

can also describe hardware malfunctions. The outcome of a glitch is not

predictable … When applied to software, the meaning of glitch is slightly

altered. A glitch is an unpredictable change in the system’s behavior,

when something obviously goes wrong. (110)

It didn’t take long for artists working in digital media to begin exploiting the

aesthetic potentials of glitch. Throughout the eighties and nineties, artists and

musicians began to see the value of the noise that was typically filtered out. “[P]erfect

sound copies [were] abandoned in favor of errors, glitches [became] aestheticized,

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mistakes and accidents [were] recuperated for art under the conditions of signal

processing” (Krapp 54). Artists working primarily in digital media began to identify

glitch as an occurrence of breakage or error within a system that otherwise seems pure,

solid, or continuous. It is unexpected visual or audible noise in a flow of information

that serves to reveal the ordinarily unseen underbelly of a medium; in this way, glitch

“defamiliarizes the slick surface of the hardware/software of the computer and so ideally

transforms us into critically minded observers of the underlying workings of the

computer” (Emerson 36). Etymologically, “error” indicates wandering, meandering off

of an expected path into the hidden world that determines the path. Glitch takes us off

of that path; it shows us what was never meant to be seen.

Glitching can be a relatively easy process. For example, one can open an image

file, a .jpeg or a .gif, in a text editor. The text editor won’t be able to translate the bits,

the digital information, into an image that a viewer or editor can render as a human

readable image – it’s not programed to do that. Instead, it will display a long sequence

of ascii characters. One can scroll down and change a letter, insert a word, delete a line,

or mess with the text that is displayed, a little or a lot. Then they can save the file and

open it in an image editor/viewer. The result is a glitched image. They will have a more

complete understanding of the systems and processes that allow humans to understand

this collection of data as an image, because they will have intentionally corrupted a file,

forced an error – they will have forced the technologies to do something they were not

intended to do. They will have an image with an aesthetic that is recognizable as glitch.

The “glitch aesthetic” is recognizable now because of the fact that glitch has

become a common visual trope in art, design and advertising in recent years. As Rosa
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Menkman says, “What is now a glitch will become a fashion” (12). (See the images

below, screen grabs from Kanye West’s video for “Welcome to Heartbreak,” directed by

Satrom, and a television commercial for a perfume by Calvin Klein, both examples of an

aesthetic of glitch.7) Currently one can even download an app on one’s phone that will

glitch an image for you (www.glitchwizard.com). Though we may like the way this

glitched image looks, we may use it as our Facebook profile picture, it is not, in fact,

what I (or most artists who currently work in glitch) would consider glitch art. As the

media artists and critics Nick Briz and Curt Cloninger say, we must “make a distinction

between the glitch(y) as in aesthetic [datamosh(y), noise(y), pixel(y), artifact(y)] and the

glitch as in the ‘a-ha’ and ‘oh shit’ [break, crack, interruption, slip]” (18). A glitch may

indeed share the aesthetic that has come to be associated with glitch, but it does not

necessarily share it.

Figure 100 Two images from a television ad for CK One Shock.

7
These particular examples came to my attention via Robert Urquhart on his blog,
Analogue and Digital (Urquhart).
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Figure 11 Image from the Kanye West music video for the song “Welcome to Heartbreak.”

This chapter is interested in glitch as a break in a material system that is

experienced by a reader/viewer as a break. It may look like glitch, or it may not. What it

does do is it “foregrounds and problematizes this myth of pure transcendental data, of

pure and perfect signal” in such a way as to reveal “the contours of the system”

(Cloninger 67). “There are a thousand different ways to fail, and each new way enacts a

unique (uniquely exploitable) contour of the system’s behavior” (Briz and Cloninger 13).

Therefore glitch, in the way I’ve described it above, is always critical, and could be

considered political.

Power is an assemblage of forces that determines our lived experience, and

politics is the play of the relationships of forces. We necessarily need to think of the

apparatuses of power, the assemblages that maintains systems of inequality and

injustice, as including human beings, sure, but also including the complex networks of
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digital and analog media, language code, computer code, patters of global finance,

cultural products and symbols, etc. Glitch is always political in that it intervenes with

aspects of this assemblage, particularly with technology. “By revealing errors, scholars

and activists can reveal previously invisible technologies and their effects more

generally. Errors can reveal technologies and their power and can do so in ways that

users of technologies confront daily and understand intimately” (Hill 28). And indeed,

technologies are not separate from our cultural and political experience; rather, they are

part of it. “A glitch reveals itself as political when it reminds us that technologies are not

neutral tools, but are rather symptoms of our worldview and cultural norms” (Briz and

Cloninger 14), or, utilizing the lexicon I’ve employed throughout the rest of this book,

they are a part of the same assemblage.

Just as glitch reveals the artificiality of the notion of the “slick surface of the

hardware/software of the computer” (Emerson 35), just as it breaks the seemingly

seamless flow of information, so does it serve as an analog for, and perhaps an example

of, the revelation of what Deleuze calls the virtual, the limitless realm of unrealized

potential that has yet to be actualized. It is an affective experience of intensities (i.e. of

potential) made visible and experienced in the sensing body. Tim Barker nicely

articulates the way in which a glitch can help one experience the virtual. He writes:

Following Deleuze, we may say that the software may articulate a link to

the field of potential - in this case a field of potential errors - in order to

generate unforeseen, and perhaps unwanted, information. This is because

the virtual that Deleuze theorizes is a mode of reality that is articulated in

the emergence of new potentials; to understand how any collective,

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assemblage, or machine, including the digital machine, is able to produce

new or novel information we need to understand the virtual as a field of

emergence, a field or grounding that conditions the manner in which

novelties arise. (51)

Furthermore, a glitch is only a glitch when a human is there to experience it. It must

process on human wetware, and it must not be expected. It can be provoked by an artist

or activist, but the result is always a surprise, always a revelation, always disconcerting.

The human has an expectation of the way something is supposed to be, and the glitch

subverts that expectation. The glitch breaks the flow. “When humans filter out the glitch

as so much noise interfering with their status quo signal, when humans refuse to engage

with and be thrilled and terrified by the nuances of the glitch event, they are making a

[con/pre]servative political decision” (Briz and Cloninger 16). On the other hand, when

a human either provokes or captures a glitch, when a human disturbs that signal and the

disturbance is felt by a body or bodies, it is a (perhaps radical) micropolitical gesture, an

act of tactical resistance. When a human chooses to allow him or herself to be affected

by the glitch, physically affected – not so much an experience of being “thrilled or

terrified,” as these are emotions, defined post-event, but affected in the sense of

experiencing the non-qualified intensities that are the virtual – he or she has an

experience that could, conceivably, lead to personal or social transformation.

I’m expanding the idea of glitch, outlined above, to include language glitching as

a poetic writing/remix strategy. As I hope I’ve made clear, glitch is not primarily

aesthetic, although a glitch aesthetic may be a result of a glitch. It is an error, either

provoked or captured that reveals the parameters of the systems, or intensive flows,
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upon which it occurs. Can a language glitch, as I’m calling it, reveal the parameters of

the apparently seamless system of language communication that is so pervasive? Can a

glitch open up a text, allow us to peer beneath the surface, allow the beyond-language to

burst forth in all its affective radiance?

The Captured Glitch and the Provoked Glitch

I am going to briefly outline two examples of glitched poetry, one provoked and

one captured, that are also kind of historical/literary book-ends. The purpose here is to

illustrate what I mean by captured and provoked, and to demonstrate a claim that I will

be making shortly – that because of their instantiation in physical media, both digital

files and a printed texts can glitch.

First, let us look at a recent example of glitch poetry. In 2011, Laimonas Zakas, a

Lithuanian digital artist, began exploring ways in which he could exploit weaknesses in

popular web sites, particularly social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumbler.

These sites are designed to create a particular ease in the user experience. They are

designed to make the user feel a sense of freedom in their ease of use, in the number of

options afforded the user, and so on. But in fact, social media are designed to maximize

the user experience in order to create massive databases of user data that can be

packaged and sold to business which in turn can sell products back to the user, using the

user’s own information to target the corporation’s marketing efforts.8 In a sense, users

8
See Jodi Dean, “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and The Foreclosure of
Politics” for a compelling explanation of the ways in which, through an illusion of citizen
participation on networked technologies, “the deluge of screens and spectacles
undermines political efficacy for most of the world’s peoples” (55).
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of Facebook, by using it, are both the corporation’s customers and members of its

billion-plus9 strong, free labor force. As Ulises Ali Mejias says10, “[f]or a digital network

to operate successfully and support “free” participation, it must figure out a way to

exploit the creative and social labor of participants and turn that participation into a

commodity, into something that can be exchanged for capital” (22).

Zakas, who goes by the name Glitchr on social media, said in an interview that he

“stumbled upon some crazy unicode characters on Facebook extending up, down and all

over the place.” After some experimentation, he found that he could initiate this process

by exploiting weaknesses in the code beneath the social media site’s interface.

My initial idea was to explore how far I can go beyond the strict

constraints of Facebook's layout. It all started with combinations of

unicode, but later I discovered that I could embed the site's own graphical

elements (chat boxes/search bars/captchas etc.) in the posts and this way

distort the whole layout even more. (Zakas)

It was a simple proposition – is it possible to break Facebook (and Twitter, Tumbler,

even Google’s search UI)? He found flaws in the websites’ infrastructures and exploited

them. If you were friends with Glitchr on Facebook, when he would post, your wall

would be covered with his digital graffiti. His text, made of Unicode and diacritical

marks, burst forth beyond the text boxes to which we are generally restrained while

9
As of Q3 of 2014, Facebook’s active monthly user base was more than 1.35 billion. To
put this in perspective, that is roughly the entire population of China. (Dewey)
10
Mejias recent book, Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World, provides an
excellent and detailed overview of the problems of living in a networked world,
problems to which I am only gesturing here.
 100

interacting with the Facebook interface. The result would be a transformation of your

timeline into a concrete, visual poem. Here are a few examples:

Figure 12 Screen capture of Glitchr on Facebook

Figure 13 Screen capture of Glitchr on Facebook

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Figure 14 Screen capture of Glitchr on Twitter

Zakas’ work is reminiscent of the visual poetry of poets like John Riddell, Geof Huth and

derek beaulieu. This is a poetry that explores and exploits the non-referential qualities

of text that are still involved in the communication of “meaning,” in the broadest sense

of that word. Geof Huth tells us that:

Visual poetry is written for the eye, but its methods and intentions, even in

those works most limited in their verbal content, are always poetic, always

compelling the reader forward into the transformative power of language,

always entranced by - and entrancing through - the text that is before us.

(127)

Spatial arrangement of textual elements on a page and the graphical qualities of those

elements are crucial in all poetry, but visual poetry foregrounds the graphical elements

and often backgrounds the semantic elements of text, sometimes to the point at which

the text has no sematic value at all. Writing about the visual poetry of derek beaulieu,

Mike Borkent argues that:

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beaulieu plays with orientations and relations of letters to decompose and

recompose bibliographic assumptions surrounding type and visible

language. This free-flowing compositional method removes most notions

of authorial intentionality since beaulieu is not attempting to convey

anything specific, but fosters, as a creative organism in a textual

environment, a sensuous response to letters as meaningful, constructive

forms unto themselves.

Glitchr has taken this notion of a free-flowing compositional method to an entirely new

place. He has provoked a glitch in software, caused it to malfunction, and the software

has “composed” the poem on top of a Facebook page. The poems look and act like visual

poems. They are using elements of language (diacritical marks) to exploit the graphical

elements of meaning production. The poems are also, however, revealing something

about the medium upon which they are instantiated.

Beyond the graphical quality of these poems, they are also functioning in two

additional ways: they reveal the limitations of social media user interfaces, and they

reveal the limitations of language. First, they are interrupting the apparently normal or

natural experience of engaging with the systems the social media sites have put into

place, and by disrupting that normativity, they are revealing in fact how limiting and

controlled the user experience is in digital environments like Facebook and Twitter.

They highlight the fact that the visually seamless interface, the very interface that

promises ease of use, is actually a forced limitation of the user’s bodily interaction with

the machine; it is, as Foucault might say, a disciplinary apparatus in the sense that the

body is isolated and controlled by the institutional infrastructure, in this case, the
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massive, profit-driven interests of corporations. But secondly, the poems demonstrate

the possibility that these visual poems, created by the breakage of a system, are glitching

yet another system – the system of language. The visual poetry of Glitchr might give us a

glimpse beneath the apparently seamless flow of information that is language

communication. These accidental visual poems might gesture to the power of linguistic

rupture and the potential that is released as a result of that glitch.

Glitchr is an example of a poet that provokes glitches. To illustrate the concept of

a captured glitch, I’m going to look a little farther back into literary history, back to the

7th and 6th centuries BCE. The Greek lyric poet and singer Sappho composed what we

understand was a massive oeuvre of poetry – when Alexandrian scholars collected her

work, several centuries after her death, it took up nine volumes. Grammarians and

rhetoricians cited her poetry in their work often, and it’s good that they did (Barnstone

xxi). Her work has, in the intervening years, been all but lost. What we do have is one

complete poem and a series of fragments, some “seven hundred intelligible lines …

pieced together from many sources: from the scholia of ancient grammarians to the

mummy wrappings in Egyptian tombs” (Barnstone xxi). 11 Indeed, fragments of papyri

containing pieces of her lyrics have been found in various excavated Egyptian garbage

heaps or wrapped, papier-mâché style, around the preserved bodies of the Egyptian

dead.

11
There was a recent discovery of two “new” poems of Sappho, both remarkably
complete. One is, we presume, about her brothers, and the other is about unrequited
love. A collector bought a “tiny piece of glued-together papyri” at a 2011 London auction
that apparently contained the two poems. (Gannon)
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A number of Sappho’s manuscripts were intentionally destroyed, burned by those

who found her work morally reprehensible. An early (180 A.D.) critic, identified as

Tatian, said that “Sappho was a whorish woman, love-crazy, who sang about her own

licentiousness” (in Barnstone xxi), and the moral laxity of her writings inspired various

attempts to eradicate her work.12 But the destructive influence of time has perhaps been

the most culpable destroyer of her work.

The point is, for the purposes of this discussion, that what we are left with, today,

are fragments of poems that look something like this:

Figure 15 Example of Sappho’s poetry, as we know it today.

12
For example, “About 380 A.D St. Gregory of Nazianzos, Bishop of Constantinople,
ordered the burning of Sappho’s writings wherever found.” Also, “[w]e shall never know
how many poems by Sappho were destroyed in April 1204 during the terrible pillage of
Constantinople by the Venetian knights of the Fourth Crusade, or by the Ottoman Turks
at the fall of Byzantium in 1453” (Barnstone xxi-xxii).
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The image above demonstrates a long, slow glitch13, an accidental glitch that has been

captured, and in its way, will process, or run, whenever one chooses to engage with it.

In the introduction to her translation of Sappho’s fragments, Anne Carson

confronts the problem of translating these broken bits of papyrus into readable English.

She talks about her use of brackets ( ] [ ) to indicate missing text, to “give an impression

of missing matter” that provide “an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event…”

(xi). She says:

I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it

will affect your reading experience, if you allow it. Brackets are exciting.

Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason

you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or

riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp - brackets imply a free

space of imaginal adventure. (xi)

I consider the excitement to which she refers an affective reaction to a captured glitch. I

would go on to say that what she calls “a free space of imaginal adventure” is in fact a

very significant space that always lies just beyond the clear, clean signal of

communicative language. This is the space of the virtual, of potential, that lies beyond

the actualized, mediated event of the text. When the glitch (in this case, the slow glitch

of destroyed or deteriorated text) is experienced in an autonomic way by the human

13
I am indebted to the glitch artist/theorist Curt Cloninger for this idea. In his essay
“GlitchLinguistix:The Machine in the Ghost / Static Trapped in Mouths,” he refers to the
Book of Durrow, a work created around 680 A.D. that has been disintegrating over time
as “a very slow glitch” (76).
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body, then the human is exposed to the virtual, “the pressing crowd of incipiencies and

tendencies … a realm of potential” (Massumi 224) that is only available because of the

text having broken.

The glitch artist/theorist Michael Betancourt says, “the 'glitch' reveals both the

material foundations and processes of digital media, yet these dimensions only appear

when an audience member chooses to interpret the glitched work critically—

i.e. actively engages it.” I agree with him, but I might amend his claim here to say that in

order for the glitch to process on the body, one must actively engage it, whether it occurs

in digital or analog media. So let us do that:

25

]quit

]luxurious woman

] (49)
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67b

]nor

]these

]more

]around

]desire (137)

Here are two of the 192 plus fragments translated in Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments

of Sappho. The material of the medium is immediately apparent, for we can see its

destruction – or, more importantly, we can feel its destruction – in the absence

indicated by the brackets. And the materiality of the text itself is also felt in the same

way. We see the remainders of a text that once was whole, that once, we presume,

communicated some kind of clear message. But in the above examples, as in a great

many of Sappho’s fragments, that clear message is no longer communicated at all. We

are left attempting to fill in the blanks, the blanks imposed upon both the papyrus and

the text written upon by the decomposition and/or destruction of the text – by the

glitch. The sensation we encounter around the words, in the space of the broken, is an

experience of the affective space beyond language, the affective space of creative

potential. We feel the loss of the text, and we must do something with its absence.

One would be pressed to provide a close-reading of either of the above fragments.

We could look at the first example, fragment 25, on a surface, semantic level, and this

might provide us with some satisfaction. "/ quit / / luxurious woman / / /” is compelling
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in its own right. But if we want the poem to communicate meaning in the way we

generally expect a poem, or language in general, to communicate, we are really out of

luck. The “luxurious woman” is something/someone that is apparently desirable, while

“quit” indicates something negative in relation to her. Perhaps one must quit her or his

infatuation with or advances toward the woman. Perhaps “quit” is some kind of

directive. Perhaps, but really, who knows? The glitched fragment doesn’t give us enough

to function on that level, on the level of intentional communication. The glitched

fragment, and particularly Carson’s capture of it, can only really be read in view of

what’s not there, and this is where the poem is effective.

The same can be said of the second example. Though there are more words, there

is really no more communicative potential. We can’t talk, with any degree of satisfaction,

of the words and their meanings alone. The interest in this poem, too, lies in the

resonant emptiness around the words; it lies in the breaks indicated by the brackets, in

the forgotten utterances that are somehow felt.

Deleuze, in an interview with Antonio Negri, said, “We’ve got to hijack speech.

Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may

be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control”

(“Life” 175). Of course, in this case, the “vacuoles of noncommunication” are not created,

but captured by Carson in the fact that she translated the fragments in such a way as to

allow us to feel the break in what was once a clear communication interface – the

complete lyric, once spoken or sung by Sappho herself, and perhaps inscribed by the

poet on papyrus or on wax-covered, wooden tablets, a complete lyric that was likely,
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centuries later, transferred by an Egyptian grammarian to the papyrus that (scarcely)

exists today.

Certainly it is true that poetry is never about pure, semantic communication, that

what makes a poem a poem is the extra-linguistic experience of the language. If I were

pressed to define poetry (a near impossible task), I might say something like “poetry is

the use of language to express the things we don’t have language to express.” Also, a

poem is always a visual poem; the formal/graphical elements can communicate as much

as the words. All these statements are valid, and all apply to glitch poetry. But the

experience of reading glitched poems, like Sappho’s, is similar to the experience of

reading, for instance, language poetry. One of the projects of the language poets was to

shift the meaning-making power from the author to the reader and to place an emphasis

on the poststructuralist determination that meaning isn’t fixed. The disjunction between

the individual words in the Sappho fragments could, one might argue, be viewed in this

way. Or one might look to a poet like Aram Saroyan and his minimalist poems or Ted

Berrigan’s one word poems to evoke the notion that meaning is made in the space

around the poem. But the major difference between the glitched poem and the language

poem or the minimalist poem is both the language and minimalist poets composed their

poems very intentionally, with an understanding of what the final product would be. The

resulting poem is what it is intended to be. The glitched poem, conversely, is the result

of a break, and the resulting product is always aleatoric. It is crucially important, when

encountering the glitch, to actually encounter the glitch. One must feel the break, the

rupture, in order to experience the poem’s affect, or more precisely, the affect beyond

the poem.
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Blessed Rage of (Dis)Order: Glitching the Spoken Poem

The works that I am looking at in this section (Jim Andrews’ “The Idea of Order

at Key West Reordered” and Jhave’s “MUPS”) differ from other experimental works that

employ poetic approaches intended to disrupt the illusory idea that language alone

carries meaning, that it is an impenetrable interface with nothing beneath it. They

employ what may be the dominant form of artistic production in the 21st century:

appropriation and remix. More specifically, they are employing the provoked glitch as a

remix tactic, allowing for unexpected results.

In 2004, net artist and poet Jim Andrews composed a piece called “The Idea of

Order at Key West Reordered,” using software called Macromedia Director,14 a timeline-

based content creation software, similar in many respects to Adobe Flash, that runs on

the Shockwave browser plugin. The piece appropriates an audio recording of Wallace

Stevens reading his poem “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Fragments of Stevens’ poem

play in random order and in various durations, allowing the listener to hear perhaps a

word or two, perhaps only a piece of a word, a “meaningless” sound. Some fragments

will loop for a few iterations before the software jumps to another random bit of spoken

text. The reader can sit back and let the software randomly navigate the poem, or she/he

14
In 2005, Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc., and in 2008, the first
edition of Adobe Director was released (Adobe.com).
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can click anywhere on the waveform to move the cursor and hear a fragment of the

poem at that location.

When the reader navigates to the website on which the poem is hosted, she or he

will see the audio file of Stevens reading the poem represented as a light blue waveform

in a pale green box, the colors of sea and sky, images that are central to the original

poem. The box is located more or less in the center of the screen. Just to the left of the

box containing the waveform is a smaller, black box that contains the text of the original

poem. The background is an image of orange leaves on wooden slats that are painted in

the same blue and green that are used in the waveform window.

Figure 16 A screenshot of Jim Andrews’ The Idea of Order at Key West Reordered.

In order to understand Andrews’ remix, we must understand the source poem.

“The Idea of Order at Key West,” a poem from Stevens’ second collection, Ideas of Order

(1936), is a widely anthologized and much discussed work that explores the
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philosophical relationship between art and nature, between acts of creation (including

acts of speech) and the world before, beyond, and/or after those acts.

The poem opens with an image of a girl who is walking along the seashore,

singing.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. (105)

At once, we are confronted with a dichotomy: there is the song of the girl (language) and

there is nature, unformed, bodied perhaps, but meaningless. According to Pat Righelato,

“the girl singer (symbol of the lyric poet), who walks beside the sea sings beyond the sea

because the sea is incapable of expressive utterance; the sea is empty rhetoric … the sea

is at once presence and absence” (87). We can understand the world as a thing that

exists, yet we cannot understand it in a meaningful way without the expressive

utterance. I take some issue with Righelato’s articulation of the “constant cry” of the sea

as “empty rhetoric,” for the term “rhetoric” implies a linguistic organization, a kind of

structure, even if it is “empty.” Instead, it seems to me that the “mimic motion” of the

sea makes a “constant cry” of unformed intensity; it isn’t until the girl sings, echoing the

sounds she hears, that there is any way for the listeners to understand the experience of

the sea and wind.

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It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind;

But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The girl has taken the unintelligible “dark voice of the sea” and made it intelligible. It is

the very act of composition that has made the world in a way that is understandable, in a

way that the human intellect can comprehend. The unformed intensities represented by

nature here “need the human voice to give them significance. There is moreover a

discrepancy of scale in this theatre – the small figure of the girl and the huge ocean –

but it is the girl who brings it all to bear” (Righelato 87), and it is the girl, or rather, the

ordering principles she represents, that are so crucial to Stevens.

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker.

Stevens shows us a world in this poem that is entirely unknowable until it has been

constructed by the creative product of the artist (the singer, the poet, the speaker, the

maker), a world that is not just illuminated by metaphor, but is literally created, or at

least made comprehensible, by the song. Of course, the world exists in the poem; it is

there. But it is a mass of disorder waiting to be ordered by “the maker’s rage to order,”

by our human desire to make sense of the senseless. Even after the girl has gone and the
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singing has ended, the speaker and his companion know, understand and can articulate

the scene because of her song, because of the order it created.

Our understanding of ourselves, our relationship to each other, and our

relationship to everything beyond our bodies, is dependent upon a narrativization of

sorts, an ordering. But what the poem doesn’t directly address is the nature of the

unformed beyond, nor does it directly address the limitations of the maker’s artifice. It

claims that the song the singer sings creates the knowable world for the listeners, but it

doesn’t address what is not created; it doesn’t address the unexplored potential inherent

in the beyond language, in the virtual intensities, the pure potential that exists before

being ordered into a shape that we recognize as truth.

Jim Andrews’ “The Idea of Order at Key West Reordered” un-orders the poem by

glitching the language in it. Clearly the software is not glitching; it is running exactly as

it is designed to run. But the appropriated medium, a digital file of an audio recording of

Stevens reading his poem, is being glitched by the virus-like program, and the disorder

produced undoes the poem, the song the girl sings as she walks along the beach. The

listener is asked to confront the realm of disorder, i.e. the realm of potential.

In Andrews’ piece, the listener experiences Stevens’ poem as a material object in

a state of breakage rather than as a “pure, clear, clean, natural, transcendental “signal”

to be dialed-in” (Briz and Cloninger 23); one experiences it as phonemes that are

ultimately composed of nothing more than bits and bytes. One becomes aware of the

materiality of the .swa file, a compressed file that is very similar to the more ubiquitous

.mp3 file; it reveals itself for what it is: a computational ordering of rapid-fire pulses of

electricity, an ordering that digitally recreates something very like spoken speech. One
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experiences the materiality of the machine upon which the poem is run. As the poem

glitches, as broken words and phrases repeat until another random jump occurs, and a

combination of phonemes, not quite a word, repeats, repeats, repeats, then an almost

coherent phrase, played once, as the poem enacts the sabotage of the Stevens’ poem, we,

the listeners, see more clearly the seeming impermeable interface of the machine, the

machine that is designed to deliver content in such a way that we don’t question that

content, we just accept it as real, as a fact.

Importantly, one experiences the materiality of the spoken word itself. Stevens’

voice, so commanding, so ordered, is shattered, is relegated to functioning at the mercy

of a simple, randomizing algorithm. The authority that seems so much a part of the

voice reveals itself to be nothing more than a fiction. The language that the poet uses,

like the song that the girl sings, is only an ordering of the as-yet unordered, one of

limitless possible orderings.

Of course, it is a poetic voice, and poetry, by many definitions, employing tactics

such as disjunction, polyvocality, and ambiguity, problematizes the notion that language

can communicate clearly. But it is the commanding voice of Wallace Stevens that is the

source material here, and it is a voice that represents a clear, speaking subject position

that is in a position to make meaning, to order the unordered. Stevens’ voice here is a

majoritarian voice of power. In the poem, the girl’s singing makes the world, but it is

Steven’s poem that makes the philosophical claim about that girl’s singing. Helen

Vendler writes that in the poem, “Stevens decides, or appears to decide, that the human

voice, given its powerful effects, if of a greater order of magnitude than the voice of the

ocean” (68). What is important here is that Stevens is deciding – the author has the
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agency – to prioritize the girls song over the unformed “constant cry.” As Jacqueline

Vaught Brogan writes, “by the end of the poem this woman [the female singer] emerges

once again as only a springboard for the speaker, whom I take, once again, to be Stevens

himself” (185). In a very real sense, Stevens is philosophically reinforcing his own

subject position within an assemblage in which the white, male voice is the ordering

agent.

It is worth noting that Stevens’ voice, the ordering voice, is a problematic one on

many levels. It is the voice, for example, of an unabashed racist, and it is the racist voice

that holds the power, in this particular instance, of “making the world.” Stevens, after

all, referring to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in a 1935 letter to Ronald Lane Latimer,

said that “The Italians have as much a right to take Ethiopia from the coons as the coons

had to take if from the boa constrictors” (Stevens Letters 290). Aldon Lynn Nielsen

writes, “Stevens could hold such notions and still consider himself rational because he

was ignorant of Africa’s contributions to culture, because he chose to ignore the means

by which the Africans had been rendered homeless, and because he thought within

structures of belief which supported such conceptions and shrouded them in

scientificity” (65). It’s difficult to ignore such statements and attitudes when reading the

poet’s work, particularly when the poem is legitimizing the ordering voice.

The purpose here, however, is not to discuss Stevens’ racism, although it certainly

deserves discussion. It is rather to acknowledge the fact that the language of ordering is

not some kind of revelation of transcendental truth. Rather, it is a method of

organization of the virtual. Glitching systems, in this case, glitching the system of poetic

language that is instantiated in digital media, helps to reveal the materially constructed
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nature of language and the assemblages of which they are a part, and it allows us a

glimpse of the vast potential beyond it.

Where Stevens’ poem asks the reader to accept the text as the sole site of meaning

creation, Andrews’ piece shifts the reader’s attention from the text to the diverse media

of which the text is composed. It undoes the text, shows the reader/listener the

glistening world of potentiality beyond the interface.

Jhave’s “MUPS”
On the splash page of Jhave’s “Mups,” the artist writes, “MUPS (MashUPs) is an

online sonic mashup engine built in 2012 in Flash (sorry iOS users) by Jhave for the

sheer pleasure of simultaneity” (Johnston). It’s an interesting claim about a poem, that

it exists for “sheer pleasure,” that it is art pour l’art. It’s not something one hears often

today in this politically charged poetic atmosphere. It seems, however, that the author

doesn’t actually intend the poem to exist for sheer pleasure. At the bottom of the same

page, to conclude his introduction to the piece, he says the following:

Caveat: in spite of the playful tone of this intro, MUPS is intended as a

digital augmentation in the study of prosody. As computational analysis

advances it is feasible to foresee cultural heritage archives such as

PennSound operating as sites where digital tools permit innovative

explorations into the evolution of poetics. In MUPS, remote users can on

one webpage, hear 1260 poems speak to each other and with each other.

This is both fun and informative. (Johnston)

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So Jhave acknowledges a purpose beyond pleasure for his poem, as an academic

“exploration of poetics” via a particular digital tool. I will agree that MUPS does indeed

do that, but I would also argue that it is, like “The Idea of Order at Key West Reordered,”

a particularly political piece. Like Andrews’ piece, it glitches spoken text that is

instantiated in digital media in a way that reveals things hidden. It allows the reader

(player, listener) to reevaluate the ways in which information is communicated, in which

reality is constructed.

“MUPS” utilizes 1260 audio recordings of poets reading their works, all culled

from the PennSound online archive of audio poetry recordings. The poets included in

the piece represent a spectrum of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. The

heavy-hitters of modernism (Pound, Williams, Yates) are placed side by side with

contemporary writers (Erica Hunt, Yusef Komunyakka, Rae Armantrout, Christian Bok,

K. Silem Mohammed). There are writers whom we associate with digital writing (Chris

Funkhouser, Nick Montfort) and a number of 20th century poets who preceded them in

print (Ashbury, Baraka, Rich). It is a conscientiously diverse group that, one could

argue, represents a broad cross-section of modern and contemporary poetry.

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Figure 17 MUPS by Jhave

A user can certainly use the interface as a way to simply listen to poets read their work.

They can click on a little, black square randomly and listen to a poet read their poem.

They can also use the interface as Jhave suggests in his introduction, to augment the

study of prosody by listening to poets read their poems in a linear fashion, one after the

other, and compare them. It is a useful tool in this regard. But the piece becomes most

interesting when the software is allowed to glitch the mp3 files, to glitch the language.

There are two modes for listening to multiple files at once: with the “weave”

function on or off. When the function is on, the software listens for a break in the spoken

text, and it plays another recording from a random point from within the recording. One

can activate any number of poems – the greater number of poems activated, the more

effectively the piece glitches. With “weave” on, the listener, initially, makes unintended

associations between poem fragments. Occasionally, there will be no spoken text at all,

the listener will only hear the hum of a microphone or the digital artifacts that are the
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result of remediation from analog recording to digital file. They might hear a bit of a

line, followed by crowd laughter, or a fragment of an introduction. The juxtaposition of

the artifacts of technological sound production and the randomly accessed signifying

elements and of the various signifying elements with each other produces a broken and

endless poem, a poem that begins to “mean” only insofar as it is broken. The impulse to

try to make the pieces work together is ultimately abandoned, and the piece becomes

about the fracture, not the fragment. We, as listeners, are given over to the experience of

the break, and rather than experience poetic communication in any traditional sense, we

experience only the affect revealed within the interstices.

With the “weave” function off, one has more control in the provocation of the

glitch. Each poem that is initiated by the user plays in its entirety. One can start by

clicking a random poem and listening to the poet read their work. Then they can click

another and listen to the two play simultaneously, two voices competing for space,

resonating with each other, playing off of each other, talking to each other, talking over

each other. Then they can click a third, then a forth. The recorded words spoken by the

poets begin to become illegible, even agitating, as if a group of people are speaking at the

same time in a room. If the listener continues to click the little squares – twenty, thirty

of them at once – the voices lose all sense of individuality. One starts to hear tones,

rhythmic patterns, waves of sound crashing against the body. Eventually, the limits of

the machine begin to show themselves, and the software begins to glitch – it pops, it

stops, it restarts, it jitters, it cracks.

The listener is left with nothing but an experience of sound that is carrying

meaning, if it’s appropriate to call it that. Perhaps it is better to call it an experience of

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an experience that exists outside of, beyond what we understand as communicative

meaning. It is the experience of affect, by which I mean, following Brain Massumi, affect

as a pre-conscious experience of the virtual. It is speech hijacked, resonating with pure

potential.

Provoking a glitch is one of many approaches to remix, but it is unique in that it,

unlike other approaches to remix, produces results that occur beyond the limitations of

ordinary, lived reality. It traffics in chance, and it traffics in noise. “Noise may be

understood as an unintentionally disruptive counterpart to a transmission of an

intended signal to a receiver. However, the babbling also acts as an opening of a position

where the other’s voice can be inserted into the stream of data comprising everyday life”

burrough 80). It counteracts the general assumption that in order to comprehend the

world in which we live, we must constantly filter the noise, the difficult or unwanted

intrusions into daily life. Cloninger sees embracing noise as a kind of ethics. He writes

that “filtering noise is never ‘politically’ neutral; it always involves an initial and

sweeping value assessment” (80).

The general ethics becomes: Do I maintain my current understanding of

what it is to be human by perpetually filtering out, staving off, and

defending myself from the ‘noise’ of the glitch event in order to perpetuate

the myth of a pure signal; or do I welcome the noise of the glitch as

‘natural’ and learn to lean into it? In order to embrace the glitch as

something other than noise to be filtered, I will have to risk modifying my

own signal/noise ratio - this will entail modifying my ‘aesthetics’ and my

human ‘self’.’ (81)

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The glitch can help one to reevaluate their lived experience and the complex

assemblages of which they are a part. “Linguistically, noise can have a positive influence

that results in multiple readings or double-entendres by the receiver. Semantically,

noise also has the power to communicate alternative meanings” (burroughs 80). By

filtering out the noise, by hiding it, we are, from a certain perspective, accepting the

status quo as acceptable.

Glitch and the Print Poem

As I have stated above, a glitch is the aleatoric result of an error, or a break, that

is felt by the body as a break. It can be provoked or it can be captured, but it must

necessarily reveal something about the system that is glitching or being glitched. It must

reveal the fact that the interface is illusory, that the logic of stasis, constancy, of a pure,

transcendent flow of data (i.e. truth) hides the endless potential for change that bubbles

beneath and beyond that apparently static and unchanging surface. We have seen how

digital poetry can glitch or be glitched, can break or be broken. Let us turn to the printed

poem.

In the beginning of this chapter, I looked at the fragments of Sappho as examples

of a slow, analog glitch. The error, in that case, was obviously not electrical; it was the

result of time and decay. When one experiences Sappho’s work, one is struck,

affectively, with the absences, with what is unreadable. The fragment is not shored

against ruins, it is subsumed by the ruins, lost in the torrent of ruins. One feels the error

that time has played upon the papyri more than one reads/feels the words that remain.
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So the question remains of whether a poet today can provoke or capture a glitch

in their own printed poem. One could make a case that the poet Susan Howe, for

example, is working in glitch. It certainly seems she is moving beyond the ideas of

language poetry, the group of poets with whom she is so often associated, when she

collages slivers of paper cut from found texts (Souls of the Labadie Tract, Tom Tit Tot,

etc.), effectively shifting the reader’s attention away from the language and toward the

potential beyond language, beyond language as it is “supposed” to work. If the language

poet’s intention was to write a poem that, in its disjunction, shifted the onus of

meaning-making from the writer to the reader, then Howe writes poems that un-make

meaning. The text with which she works is clearly text, clearly language, but it is

intentionally made unreadable in the traditional, expected sense, and it instead draws

attention to the fracture in the text.

But still, in Howe’s text-collage work, brilliant and effective as it is, there is

evidence of the poet’s intention in the organization of the pieces on the page, and the

poet’s intention reflects a pre-existing communicative structure in the mind that itself is

a reflection and a part of social, linguistic, ordered structures. The thing that keeps her

poems from being examples of glitch poems is that very intentionality. They lack a

certain randomness that is, I would argue, characteristic of glitch. A poet may choose to

provoke a glitch as a compositional strategy, and they may have an idea of what is

happening to the medium as a result of the provoked glitch. They will not, however,

know what the final result will be.

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Zong! as Glitch

In 1783, a British court heard an appeal of an earlier decision regarding an

insurance claim. Two years earlier, a British slave ship, the Zong, due to a navigational

error on the part of the captain, Luke Collingwood, veered off course. Their limited

supply of potable water proved to be woefully insufficient to sustain the lives of the

captain, crew, and the 470 African slaves that were being transported from the coast of

West Africa to Jamaica. Some sixty slaves died of dehydration, and another forty threw

themselves overboard and drowned. According to James Walvin, the crew proceeded to

throw another 132 men, women and children overboard to their watery deaths (103).

The question at trial was not whether the crew had committed murder – that issue was

raised and dismissed. Rather, Gregson, the ship owners, made a claim for the value lost

on the murdered slaves of thirty pounds each against Gilbert, the underwriters, who felt

the payments were not justified because the financial loss was due to “negligence or

ignorance of the captain” and not to “perils of the sea” (Gregson v. Gilbert). A jury,

however, sided with the plaintiffs, determining that the insurers did indeed owe the ship

owners for their claim of property lost. The case was appealed, and the appeal was heard

by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in the case of Gregson v. Gilbert, and “absolute payment

of all costs” was awarded the ship owners. No one was prosecuted.15 (Walven 1-3)

In 2002, M. NourbeSe Philip began working on a long, serialized poem that

would directly engage the documented report of the decision rendered in Gregson v.

Gilbert in an effort to “not tell the story that must be told” (Philip 189), or to tell “this

For an excellent and detailed account of the tragedy of the Zong, see James Walvin’s
15

The Zong, 2011, Yale University press.

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story [that] must be told by not telling” (190). She felt, is seems, that within the text of

the report, it might be possible to, in a sense, find the voices of those that were omitted

from and silenced in that document. The book-length poem that resulted from her many

remixes of the document was titled Zong!

As one might expect, many critics discuss the poem in relation to its form. In an

early review of the book, Tyrone Williams wrote that Philip, in an effort to write a poetry

that engaged the tragedy of the Zong without becoming a document of it, without

engaging in documentary poetry, as many poets of witness do “presumably because

reportage seems less ‘artificial’ than imaginative recreations,” chose to go in the opposite

direction, formally, “by deploying a ‘field’ aesthetics in the manner of Charles Olson and

Susan Howe dismembering sentences, phrases and words, however appropriate to the

subject” (786). But he recognizes that the poet “cannot not ‘create’ a story, even against

her own intentions to ‘merely’ document’ (786). In a similar vein, Erin M. Fehskens sees

the appropriation of a non-literary form in Zong!, that of the ledger book, with its

columns and ordering possibilities. She sees Zong! as a catalogue, an organized list of

words and terms found in the source text, particularly in the first two sections.

The first two sections of Zong! employ cataloguing to replicate the ledger

form while undermining a ledger’s sense of summation and balance. The

four following sections employ the repetition of the catalogue form to a

more diffuse, horizontally oriented collection of poems. (420)

The final four sections, according to Fehskens, in which language has been dispersed

horizontally instead of in vertical columns, “mimics the floating and drifting bodies, no

longer coherent and contained, that cover the ocean surface and floor” (420). This can
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be a profitable way to read the poem; as I wrote above, the graphical quality of any poem

is crucial to the conveyance of meaning. But, still, Fehskens sees the formal arrangement

of the poem as a listing, a cataloguing, and she says herself that the “non-narrative

nature of the catalogue constantly refers itself to the very narrative components it lacks

in order to effectively project a kind of epic totality” (410). Even if the poet embraces the

“artificiality” of the ledger or catalogue form, she can’t not tell the story of the Zong,

even if that is expressly what she wants to do.

I’m interested in focusing on Zong! here not because of its formal

experimentation – as I discuss below, its formal layout is not particularly unique to the

poem. Rather, I am interested in the way Philip, throughout the book, increasingly

destroys the source material. She is, in effect, trying to glitch Gregson v. Gilbert through

a series of remixes that use tactics that are increasingly more and more aggressive, or

“violent,” in the ways the text is mutilated (she produces some amazing poetry along the

way). I argue, however, that it isn’t until the final section that the poem does actually

glitch, due to a computer error, and the poet achieves her goal of letting the story “tell

itself.”

In an essay that concludes the book, a section she calls “Notanda,” Philip

describes, via narrative and excerpts from her notebooks, the long process of making the

poem. She writes:

I deeply distrust this tool I work with – language. It is a distrust rooted in

certain historical events that are all of a piece with the events that took

place on the Zong. The language in which these events took place

promulgated the non-being of African peoples, and I distrust its order,

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which hides disorder; its logic hiding the illogic and its rationality, which is

simultaneously irrational. (197)

I find the notion that language – the tool with which the poet works – is not to be

trusted because of its very order particularly interesting with regard to the concerns of

this study. Glitched language reveals disorder in the face of an unnoticed order, an order

that is a product of and a part of a play of forces that appears to be continuous, solid –

real. So, one way to articulate Philip’s goals is to say she was looking to glitch the

language of Gregson v. Gilbert. She noticed that “[w]ithin the boundaries established by

the words and their meanings there are silences; within each silence is the poem, which

is revealed only when the text is fragmented and mutilated” (195), and therefore she, the

poet, must fragment and mutilate the text in order to reveal what I have been referring

to as the beyond-language, the hidden virtual realm of pure potential, of affect. That is

her stated goal. And this goal has particular significance because the intentional

destruction of the text, the fragmentation and mutilation of it, “mirror[s] the

fragmentation and mutilation that slavery perpetrated on Africans, their customs and

ways of life” (195).

It is this metaphorical violence enacted upon the text that will drive the poetic

choices made throughout the book.

I murder the text, literally cut it to pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating

adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions

overboard, jettisoning adverbs: I separate subject from verb, verb from

object – create semantic mayhem, until my hands bloodied, from so much

killing and cutting, reach into the stinking, eviscerated innards, and like
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some seer, sangorma, or prophet who, having sacrificed an animal for sins

of portents of a new life, or simply life, reads the untold story that tells

itself by not telling. (193-4)

To tell this story that must not be told, that must “tell itself by not telling,” she employs a

series of constraint-based processes, processes that in their own right are not

particularly new or innovative in the history of modernist, experimental poetics –

processes like treating the text as a “word bank” and rearranging the existing words to

make new poems. This is the compositional process she employs in the first section of

the book, “Os.”

“Os” is the Latin word for bone, and it is a fitting title for the first section of the

poem. It is the poet’s initiation of an excavation, a search just below the surface of the

text for the buried bones of the dead. Throughout the book, she will dig deeper and

deeper, until finally the story begins to tell itself – to tell itself by not telling.

“Os” is a series of numbered poems that utilizes, with few exceptions, only

complete words and short phrases directly found in Gregson v. Gilbert. Philip takes the

existing words and rearranges them, opens up white space on the page, creates a new

relationship between them. The effect is one of commentary on the appropriated text.

The poems, for the most part, make semantic “sense” in the way much modern and

contemporary poetry makes sense – that is, it draws focus to the fragments and relates

them to one another with a clear authorial intention. In this case, the poet’s intention is

to illuminate and humanize the events that are so coldly accounted in the legal

document. In “Zong! #8,” there is a clear message being communicated:

the gods of overboard

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justified a throwing
of property
fellow
creatures
become
our portion
of
mortality
provision
a bad market
negros
want
for dying (16)

The poem, using the language of the appropriated text, turns the reader’s attention

toward the reality of what actually occurred, not only on the Zong in 1781, but

repeatedly throughout long, gruesome era of the slave trade. It is a story, clearly told, of

murder, and it gestures toward the dehumanization of the black body that is still being

felt today. Quite effectively, the untold story, hidden in Gregson v. Gilbert, begins to be

told.

Still, it is a story that is being told, and as Philip repeatedly says throughout the

“Notunda,” this is a story that can only be told by not telling.

One can see the poet’s hand in the writing of the poems in “Os.” They rely upon a

kind of semantic “sense” that is likely familiar to readers of modern and contemporary

experimental poetry. Disjunction is paired here with narrative. The poet clearly intends

a particular emotional response from the reader, and the poems are successful, I would
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argue, in that regard. Their embrace of fragmentation and disjunction that is paired with

a kind of narrative thrust is reminiscent of some of the poets associated with the

language school, particularly women like Lyn Hejinian and Rae Armantout. Consider

this excerpt from Armantrout’s “Xenophobia”:

…
“when the window opened of its own accord.
In the big walnut tree
were six or seven wolves…
strained attention. They were white.”
(The fear of cloudy skies.)
like strangers! After five years
Misgiving. Misdoubt. (9)

This poem about, as the title suggests, a fear of the unknown, a fear that is particularly

“white,” works in ways that are similar to the ways in which the poems in “Os” work.

This poem relies heavily upon quotation and upon a narrative thrust that is present in

spite of the disjunctive nature (“After five years / Misgiving. Misdoubt.”) of the diverse

fragments. Pieces are brought together to create a whole that is still in pieces.

Philip is also utilizing strategies that are familiar to us in that they are employed

in experimental poetry beyond that labeled language poetry. The poems in “Os” echo the

politically charged poems of some politically engaged African American poets like June

Jordan, for example, in that they, generally unlike language poets, semantically engage

the subject of protest. Her poem “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon,” ends like this:

You can expect but so much

from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV
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You see my point;

I’m sorry.
I’m really sorry. (382)

Philip’s poems share the directness with which Jordan engages her subject matter, a

fearlessness with it, a kind of referential hurling of the poems into the fray. But formally,

the poems in “Os,” unlike most of Jordan’s poems, utilize the space on the page, the

field, in order to add a level of visual disruption to the narrative that is beyond the line

break. Perhaps for Philip, this formal play helps to reveal the silences that she wanted to

find in Gregson v. Gilbert, the silences that, when explored, might allow a space for the

silenced voices of the murdered slaves to sound. Perhaps, on the other hand, the formal

experimentation is yet another move within an existing system of knowledge.

I am reminded, when reading Philip, of another experimental poet of color,

Myung Mi Kim, who effectively utilizes formal experimentation to articulate a political

stance within the complex discourse of race. Here is an excerpt from Kim’s

“accumulation of land” from her 2009 book Penury :

accumulation of land maintain household bear labor of house child

cooking reserve line belonging to elaborate isolation
familias implements enemies captured in war bearing child rearing
(45)

The strategy that Kim is employing here that I find reminiscent of Philip’s has to do with

a formal arrangement of the fragments upon the page in such a way that the fragments

remain fragments, and they relate to each other only via association. This is very much
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in the same formal camp as the “ledger,” or “cataloguing,” form that Fehskens identifies

(407). The bits of text on the page create a metonymic web that, taken as a whole,

communicates something that the respective poets intended to communicate, albeit it to

communicate in a non-typical, or “poetic” way.

What I am saying here about this poetry is not in any way new or

groundbreaking. Certainly, poets and critics have concerned themselves with the

fragment, with formal experimentation and so on for at least a century. Nor is it my

intention to imply that Philip’s poems in this section are derivative or that they are

somehow not effective as works of art – indeed, I think they are original and quite

effective. What I do wish to highlight, however, is the fact that these poems are speaking

within an existing system of communication – there is an intention to communicate

implied in their construction. They are, in spite of the fact that the language is culled

from Gregson v. Gilbert, in spite of the constraint within which the poet is working, a

part of a preexisting system of language use and communication, a part of a system of

knowledge, and this presents a problem if the poet’s stated goals are to tell “the story

that can only be told by not telling” (Philip 190). As I mention above, Philip herself is

distrustful of the language in which she works: “I distrust its order, which hides

disorder; its logic hiding the illogic and its rationality, which is simultaneously

irrational” (197). By telling the story, the poet is, from a certain perspective,

participating in the ordered, static world of the original document. Even a poem that

ostensibly is disrupting ordinary language is a part of the apparently static assemblage

of language, people, text, and object that determines our lived experience.
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Philip seems to have been acutely aware of this fact as she was composing Zong!,

for the sections that follow “Os” are attempts to rent, to tear, to break Gregson v. Gilbert

even more drastically than in the first section. In these sections, she not only destroys

the paragraphs and sentences of the appropriated text, but the words. She breaks the

language into smaller bits, finds the words that are not in the original text, but are in it.

There are English words, sure, but she also finds words in Arabic, Dutch, French, Greek,

Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portugese, Spanish. She finds African words, words in languages

like Fon (part of the Niger-Congo languages), Shona (a Bantu language of Zimbabwe),

Twi (a Akan dialect, of the Niger-Congo languages), West African Patois, and Yoruba

(Nigeria). She breaks words, allowing space to interrupt their meaning. She allows

certain letters to indicate sound. Here is an excerpt from early in the second section,

“Sal:”

justice danger
ous the law
a crime she
died es es es
oh es
oh oh es es oh
es s o
s s o
s s
os
os
os
bone
(63)

Here, Philip seems to be moving closer to creating a “vacuole of non-communication,”

as Deleuze would call it, an escape from the linguistic system within which she is

working. Indeed, a different kind of communicative function is introduced here. She is

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no longer relying entirely upon semantically and syntactically typical modes of

expression, nor is she relying entirely upon existing words and their referentiality.

Instead, she is allowing for the words to become sound, to perhaps gesture toward a

kind of telling without telling. The words here, as Rachel Nolan argues, are beginning to

become active occurrences rather than simply vehicles for communication, and “[b]y

drawing attention to words as phenomena – that variously hold together, break, and fail

– the poems simultaneously expose language as a constitutive site of cultural production

and identity formation” (25). We are beginning to see, in this section, the role that

language plays within the ordering of our understanding of lived experience. Again,

Philip “distrust[s] its order, which hides disorder; its logic hiding the illogic and its

rationality, which is simultaneously irrational” (Philip 197).

If poetry is a written record of thought, as some claim16 (a claim with which I, in

large part, agree), then the above excerpt demonstrates a free, improvisatory kind of

thinking. The reader can trace the movement from the referential to the non-referential

via a path of spontaneous association. The words “justice” and “danger” on the first line

situate the reader by telling, by directly commenting upon the appropriated text, much

the way the poems in the previous section do. But by isolating the three letters “ous” on

16
Percy Bysshe Shelly writes in his “Defense of Poetry” that “Poetry is the record of the
best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds” (n.p.). Robert Frost: “A
complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the
words” (Letter to Lewis Untermeyer). Contemporary poet Elisa Gabbert said recently in
an interview, “I look for poetry that, when I’m reading it, makes me feel … like I’m
seeing thinking happen and ideas occur on the page. That’s the kind of poetry that gets
me really excited” (Gabbert). Poet and critic Charles Bernstein says that John Ashbury,
“places temporal conjunctions between discrepant collage elements, giving the spatial
sensation of overlay and the temporal sensation of meandering thought” (Bernstein). I
highlight these diverse examples to highlight the prevalence of the idea that poetry is, or
at least can be, a record of thought – an idea with which I wholeheartedly agree.
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the next line, the poet creates a disruption in the referential stability that the first line

implies. Sure the word “danger” becomes “danger/ous,” and that word “dangerous” is

modifying, or commenting upon, the nouns that follow: “law,” and “crime,” which lead

to the tragic statement “she / died.” The “ous” changes the noun “danger” into an

adjective and propels the reader along a kind of narrative trajectory. However, it also, by

being isolated, functions simply as a sound, ous, disconnected from the kind of meaning

that we associate with specific, recognizable words, and it leads the poet to the series of

sounds that follow, the es, the oh, and the s and o.

This is an instance, I think, still early in the book, in which Philip approaches

what might seem to be a poetic glitch, although it isn’t one. A glitch, as I’ve mentioned

above, is the result of a material error, either provoked or captured by the poet. The

experience, in this moment, is one of discomfort perhaps – a loss of semantic footing.

The improvisatory nature of the text here allows a brief irruption of non-thought to fly

forth, an emergence of affect. But as soon as the reader experiences the affect that is

revealed in that glitch-like moment, the poet reins it in via a poetic tool one might call

cleverness17. The es’s and the oh’s become s’s and o’s, which then become os, the title of

the previous section, the Latin word for “bone.” As quickly as we leave the familiar

17
I’d like to reiterate here my assertion that poetry does not need to glitch to be valuable
or “good,” whatever that may mean. Philip’s poetry, along with the poets to whom I
compare her above, is artfully crafted, emotionally resonant work. When I say that
Philip is “clever,” I don’t mean that pejoratively; it is the work of a sensitive, refined
poetic mind. Rather, I want simply to demonstrate that “cleverness” is an indication of
language working as a part of a system of thought, a system of knowledge, an interface,
as are the words I’m writing now. This study is, in part, a search for the glitch, the error,
the break. It is not to claim a certain poetry is “better” than another.
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patterns of referentiality, we are pulled back into it. For the briefest of moments, the

poet gestures toward telling “the story that must not be told,” but it is brief and fleeting.

It is move toward her stated goal, but it a goal unmet – thus far.

The titles of the first five sections of Zong! are as follows:

Os – bone (Latin)

Sal – salt (Latin)

Ventus – wind (Latin)

Ratio – reason, the law, short for ratio decidendi, the central reason for

a legal decision (Latin)

Ferrum – iron (Latin)

The titles themselves, all words belonging to the West (Latin), seem to indicate a story,

the story of writing these poems. First there are the bones, the bones of the slaves,

resting at the bottom of the sea, the bones that recall the skeletal structure of the ship

itself, or perhaps the bones are the bones of Gregson v. Gilbert, the structure upon

which the language hangs. It is a starting place. A foundation. From there, the poet

moves to salt, the salt of the sea, the salt of sweat, the salt that once was a commodity, a

measure of wealth and commerce. Then there is the wind, the power that moves ships

across the sea and opens up trade between nations, between continents, that pushed the

Zong across the Atlantic, from Manchester to the West Coast of Africa. Wind, also,

perhaps, exhalation, expiration. A breathing out. A gasp. Then there is reason, the

justification for murder, an application of language to the maintenance of power, the

structural justification for dehumanizing an entire group of people. A justification for

murder. And finally, there is iron, the metal from which shackles were made, the metal
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that bound the hands and feet of the murdered, that weighted them, that helped pull

their bodies below the waves.

Each of these titular words helps to illustrate the situation in which this

particular tragedy took place and serves to aid the poet in the telling the story. The

bones, the salt, the wind, the law, and the iron all serve to help the reader see the reality

of the events so dismissively addressed in the source document. They continue to

narrate the story of the Zong.

Yet throughout the progression of these five sections, Philip seems to want more,

to continue to destroy the text in the hopes that the silenced voices can be heard,

somehow, on their own terms. In “Ferrum,” the fifth section, she has further mutilated

the text, still, it seems, searching for the beyond-language within the language. The

section begins thus:

me i sing song
for ògún el son of iron come bring
our mask s
let the play begin we each act the part
in murder what will they
how do they the bones
say what cannot be give voice to
a tale one tale their tale
how bone be
come sand be
come the tale that can not be
told in this tale the tao
the way of the dead of what do
es this mean drat …
(127)

We are introduced to this section, a section that is arguably the most “broken” section

up to this point in the book, with a very clear idea of what the poem is not only doing,

but what it is about. Regardless of the visually fractured text, the content is presented in
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remarkably clear syntax. “me i sing song for ògún [Yoruba deity of iron] el son [Spanish:

the sound or song] of iron come bring our masks let the play begin we each act the part

in murder…” It is as if the poet’s compositional strategy is to find a story in the

appropriated text, or to say what it is she wants to say, and to formally disrupt the

progression of that story.

Indeed, we do each play a part in the murder of those slaves. Our actions matter;

they determine the part we play. We also bear responsibility for the actions of our

ancestors, especially if we are still benefiting from those actions, as indeed we are. It’s

fair to say the United States was built on slave labor, on the bodies of men and women

who were taken from their homes on ships like the Zong, who suffered unimaginable

hardships at the hands of their white captors and masters. This is the message one

might receive from the passage excerpted above. It is a message that the poet is

articulating and communicating with her reader, who in this case, is me – a middle-

class, white, liberal academic living and working in the U.S. Certainly a person of color

may take something different from this text, as will a European or an African. But the

text itself is still firmly rooted in the language and thought structures that seem to be so

calcified, so firm, so unchanging, so true. It is still participating in the thing that the

poet so distrusts. As I have demonstrated above, Zong! goes a long way in implicating

“us as readers who must search for sensible and audible patterns and consequently

recognize ourselves as subjects implicated in processes of value-production and

violence” (Nolan 25), but Philip is still telling the story.

At one point in the “Notunda,” Philip says, “The ones I like best are those where

the poem escapes the net of complete understanding – where the poem is shot through
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with meaning” (192). This thought, so apparently simple in its directness of expression,

does, I think, warrant examination. Of course, one might argue that the notion that

poetry articulates something beyond what words themselves, as tools for

communication, can actually express. In other words, poetry uses language to express

the things we don’t have language to express. This has always been, for me, a defining

characteristic of the genre, regardless of form, style, historical period, and so on. But I

think Philip is gesturing toward something a bit different here. She doesn’t say she likes

the poems that she writes that escape the “net of complete understanding.” Instead, she

seems to be admiring a kind of agency that the poems take on apart from her. She

doesn’t successfully write the escaping poem – it escapes. It does something unexpected

– something that it is not supposed to do.

It is that “supposed to do” that really is important here, that is so important to

this entire study. What determines what one is “supposed to do?” Who determines it,

and how? The network of language and bodies and technologies that make up lived

experience is manifest as “supposed to do.” It is a manifestation of what is possible to

do. But the limitations implied by the interface are a manifestation of what Brian

Massumi might call the qualification of intensities, or Deleuze might call a plane of

organization.

Throughout this book, I’ve been referring to and employing a kind of Deleuzian

and Massumian theoretical perspective in which there is a surface that seems to

represent reality as we know and experience it. Below, or beyond that surface is the

virtual, is pure, immanent potential. According to Massumi, “The virtual, the pressing

crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where

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futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are infolded, and sadness

is happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life)” (Massumi 224).

Accessing the virtual is a necessary precursor to meaningfully altering our lived

existence.

When Philip notes that the poem is “shot through with meaning” when it

“escapes the net of complete understanding,” she is referring, I believe, to a crack in the

metaphorical surface of language and communication. She seems to be referring to a

moment in which she, as a reader of her own poetry, experiences a glitch, experiences

the intensities beyond the interface. The “meaning” to which she refers is in fact the

experience of affect.

Although there are moments of near-glitch throughout the book, it seems to me

that the book finally succeeds in glitching, in breaking, in its final section, “Ẹbọra.” It is

an interesting title, particularly as it relates to the five previous titles: “Os,” “Sal,”

“Ventus,” “Ratio,” and “Ferrum,” all Latin words having to do with the story that is

being told. But “Ẹbọra” breaks that pattern. It is a word that comes from the Yoruba

language, a language that is native to parts of Nigeria and the Republic of Benin, that

means, according to Philip’s own glossary, something along the lines of “underwater

spirits.” The poet herself seems to acknowledge that in this section that she comes

closest to achieving her stated goal: not speaking but letting the text speak, giving voice

to those who were silenced.

Philip is clear, in the “Notunda,” that her intention is always “to avoid imposing

meaning,” to write “poetry to disassemble the ordered, to create disorder and mayhem

so as to release the story that cannot be told, but which, through not telling, will tell
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itself” (199). This finally happens as the result of an actual computer glitch. She says

that:

Another [serendipitous event] was computer related: Having completed

the first draft of one section I attempt to print it; the laser printer for no

apparent reason prints the first two or three pages superimposed on each

other – crumped, so to speak – so that the page becomes a dense

landscape of text. The subsequent pages are, however, printed as they

should be. With the beginning of each movement of the second part of the

book – Sal, Ventus, Ratio, and Ferrum – the same thing happens. I’ve

never been able to find a reason for it and my printer has not since done

that with anything else I have written. (206)

Though Philip here seems, perhaps, to be implying some metaphysical imposition on

the composition of the text, something akin to a spiritual intervention, I would like to

highlight the very physical, the very material aspects of this glitch. The last section of the

book is the result of computer error, a glitched signal as data is being transferred

between her computer and printer that resulted in the pages being printed “incorrectly.”

This is the final page of “Ẹbọra”:

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Figure 18 The final page of the final section of Zong! - the result of a computer glitch.
 143

As is apparent in the image above, the text becomes illegible in a number of places.

Because of the unintentional overlay of multiple pages of text, the narrative propulsion

is hobbled, the meaning is undermined. It is, one could say, the telling of a story that

cannot be told, the revelation of something more than surface, more than a qualification

of intensities.

Fehskens, still thinking of the poem’s form, writes, “Layered, nearly

indistinguishable from one another, and grey on the pages, [the words] accumulation in

the same space ironically threatens to make them fade away entirely in ‘Ebora’ ” (421). I

argue that the order, logic, and rationality that Philip so distrusts is what is fading away,

which was her goal all along. Several remixes of the source text got her close to that goal,

but she couldn’t escape the telling. It wasn’t until the final remix, the captured glitch,

that the story began to tell itself.

Throughout this chapter, I have been equating the poetic glitch with an irruption

of affect, of what Deleuze and Massumi refer to as the virtual. The poetic glitch is the

opening to potential, and the text’s instantiation in a medium allows this glitch to occur.

Zong! reveals the fact that one cannot separate the text from its medium, that all texts

are instantiated in media. Philip is only able to achieve her goal of not-telling the story

of the Zong because, finally, of a glitch.

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Chapter III

To Mutate is to Live: De-Performance and The Black Took Collective

We save ourselves, we become minor, only by the

creation of a disgrace or deformation.
-Deleuze, “One Less Manifesto”

In the previous chapter, I discussed glitch as a remix tactic in which poets are

provoking or capturing errors as an approach to composing poetry. Now I’d like to turn

to another kind of poetic breakage, another kind of provocation of error. This chapter is

about de-performance. I’ve used this term to indicate an amalgam of performance and

deformation, “deform” here borrowed from Deleuze and used to indicate a moment in a

performance in which a disruption occurs. De-performance is a disruption of a kind of

metaphorical surface that appears to be natural and unchanging, that represents a kind

of status quo. Breakage, as I’ve discussed throughout this dissertation, allows for a kind

of immanent revelation, or letting-in, of potential. But de-performance, specifically the

de-performance of poetry, unlike the other examples of poetic breakage examined in the

preceding pages, crucially involves the body, draws attention to the body and its role in

the production of meaning and as a site of political activity. The body is a part of the

assemblage that is the performance, an assemblage that includes text, audience

members, a performance space and all that that entails, various media, and so on.

A de-performance need not necessarily involve digital media. Just as a printed

poem can glitch, a live, analog performance can de-perform. Breakage occurs when the

medium upon which a text is instantiated malfunctions, either accidentally or as the

result of provocation; note, too, that the human body (voice, gesture, etc.) can also be a
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medium (Thacker 10-11). However, de-performance is most effective when multiple

media are employed simultaneously, when text is instantiated across various media,

including the body. There is a kind of affective dissonance that is generated, that is

experienced by a reader/audience member, when they must engage with a text in this

multifaceted way. This is what the Black Took Collective, the group I am examining in

this chapter, is doing, perhaps more effectively than any other group of performance

poets working today. I have chosen to focus on Black Took for the simple reason that

their work exemplifies de-performance. Though there are performers working in art and

in theatre who also exemplify this mode of working, I am unaware of any other poets

who are engaging so fully in de-performance within the context of poetry.

I begin with a description of The Black Took Collective and a brief account of

their formation. The three poets that make up the collective – Dawn Lundy Martin,

Duriel Harris, and Ronaldo Wilson – met at Cave Canem in 1999 and found that they

had a shared interest in moving their work “beyond normative aesthetic possibilities.”

They write that they were particularly interested in creating work that might “resist and

speak powerfully against entrenched notions of identity, culture, and experiences”

(“Call” 132), particularly within the context of African American poetry.

Next, I highlight a few historical movements in the twentieth century that provide

background for the environment from which BTC emerged. I begin with conflicting

ideas about how one might represent Black identity in poetry that were emerging during

the Harlem Renaissance. Then, I move to a brief discussion of the Umbra Workshop and

its role in the downtown New York poetry scene in the sixties and the way its members

functioned as a kind of African American counterpart to the first and second generation
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New York School. I end this brief outline with a discussion of the formation of the Black

Arts movement and its influence on North American Black poetry, particularly in the

way it encouraged what Dawn Lundy Martin calls an “attendant belief that there is a

‘Black aesthetics’,” a belief that The Black Took Collective sought and continues to seek

to challenge.

Throughout this chapter, I focus on one primary work: a performance that the

members of the Black Took Collective gave at the University of Notre Dame on March

19, 2014, a piece simply called Black Took Collective: A Retrospective. I discuss

moments from the performance over the course of the entire chapter, moments that

demonstrate immanence, becoming-minoritarian, and the generation/revelation of

affect – three terms that are crucial to understanding de-performance as a poetic

breakage tactic. This performance moves generally from representation to deformation.

The audience enters the space with a set of expectations – about what poetry is generally

(particularly poetry in an academic context), about what Black poetry is, about what a

poetry reading is, and about what Blackness is. Over the course of the evening, these

expectations are systematically subverted.

The final pages of this chapter are dedicated to the BTC’s use of digital media in

their performance. By digitally manipulating their own voices, by projecting digital

video of themselves and of written text in several locations around the performance

space, by making live-writing a part of the performance, the BTC turned their “poetry

reading,” or performance, into a deformation. The BTC’s use of digital media in their

performances does two things: first, it helps to generate a shared affective experience for

the audience, am affective connection between individual bodies. Second, the digital
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media blurs the apparent boundaries between human bodies and technological bodies,

between people and technology. I discuss the performance in relation to what Rosi

Braidotti and Patricia MacCormack call the “posthuman subject.” This conception

expands upon Deleuze’s notions of becoming, and it relies upon and develops Donna

Haraway’s early theorization of the cyborg, which rethinks the boundaries between

individuals and between humans and machines, a re-conception of the human that

theoretically allows individuals to move beyond limitations traditionally placed on the

political self.

There are several “interludes” scattered throughout the following pages in which I

take the liberty of breaking from the discussion of the BTC’s performance to specifically

address the theoretical underpinnings of de-performance. Specifically, I write about the

aforementioned immanence, becoming-minoritarian, and affect via the works of Gilles

Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Brian Massumi, and I make an effort to clarify those terms

and the theoretical foundations upon which the readings in this chapter (and the rest of

this book) are built. My hope is that these interludes illuminate the ways in which The

Black Took Collective specifically, and de-performance generally, functions effectively as

a tactic of resistance.

The Black Took Collective

In 1999, at the Cave Canem retreat for African-American poets in Esopus, NY,

three poets came together to create the Black Took Collective. Duriel Harris, Ronaldo

Wilson, and Dawn Lundy Martin found within that space that they shared a common set

of concerns with regard to their roles as African-American poets. Generally, they

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wondered if the creative space offered by Cave Canem “could be used to challenge how

we think about representational forms of Black identity and the poetics that they

engender” (“Call” 132). They stated in their manifesto “A Call to Dissonance,” that:

our driving questions were and are: How can our work move beyond

normative aesthetic possibilities? What if we critiqued poetic conventions

– metaphor, simile, meaning, the story – in our work, or discarded them

completely? What if we broke down the assumptions about race that tend

to go unchallenged in our “community,” make their ways into the poem,

and are often blindly accepted in workshop? How might our gestures resist

and speak powerfully against entrenched notions of identity, culture, and

experience? Our wish is to respond to received ideas about what a Black

poetics is or is fantasized to be. (132)

With these questions propelling them toward developing an understanding of Black

poetry and poetics that could, in some way, resist and rethink “entrenched notions of

identity, culture, and experience,” the members of what would become the Black Took

Collective called a meeting with the faculty and fellows attending the retreat that year.

Dawn Lundy Martin recounts the episode in a series of email exchanges, collected and

published under the title “The Black Took Collective: On Intimacy & Origin”:

We were reading Erica Hunt’s “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” and

wanted to use it as a launching pad into a conversation about how

language can trap us into certain ways of knowing ourselves and the world.

These familiar languages, the tropes of Blackness, were grating upon us I

think, which was kind of a catalyst for the meeting. (212)

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This first collective move, the calling of this meeting, is particularly notable because

Harris, Martin and Wilson were not identifying only as oppositional poets in relation to

“official verse culture,” but also in relation to existing ideas about Black identity and

Black poetics within the larger community of Black poets; they were “compelled to take

other stances within big mamma’s arms” (“Call” 134). Erica Hunt, in the article cited by

Martin above, writes that “we reiterate codes that negate our humanity by denying

human difference among us” (201), and that was precisely what was driving this

meeting – the fact that there seemed to be a kind of stagnation and conservatism within

African American poetry that was dominant at the time. The “reiterative and irascible

Black poem, cloaked in ‘authenticity,’” with its “faceless ancestor shadows;

remembrances of kin and the dozens; o noble savage; collards, cornbread, and

cornrows” (“Call” 132), all articulated with a kind of “unpretentious,” narrative,

transparent language, was in fact, in the words of Hunt, “us[ing] convention and label to

bind and organize us” (199). The future Black Took Collective was particularly

concerned with the ways in which poetic form can read and reveal a kind of identity that

is not fixed and stable, but is rather both embodied and constantly in a state of

transformation. They were asking how one can be a Black body, with all that that

implies socially and politically, without stagnating, without simply “reiterate[ing those]

codes.”

Of course, it must be noted that although the poetic landscape to which the BTC

was responding was the dominant one, there were a number of poets who were engaging

these ideas much earlier. For example, in the manifesto, the BTC cites Harryette Mullen,

who writes that “our anxiety to embody or represent Black identity…may impoverish our
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cultural heritage and simplify the complexity of our historical experience” (in Call 132).

Myung Mi Kim, whose work has for decades been engaging the relationship between

poetics and political identity. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 book of experimental

poetry/novel Dictee is another prominent example of a poet writing outside of and

against the accepted notions of what a minority group’s poetry should look like. Dictee

was, as Timothy Yu pointed out in his book Race and the Avant-Garde, not initially

recognized as an important work of Asian American poetry. Rather it was considered –

by mainly white critics – a work of “feminist experimental writing,” the result of which

“effectively ‘neutralize[d]’ its multivalent critique of race and nation” (119). It wasn’t

until the nineties, a full decade after it was published, that it began to be embraced by

Asian American critics as an important work of cross-genre, experimental writing that

challenged the notions of a definable Asian American identity (Yu 119).

A Bit of Context: What is a “Black Aesthetic?”

For the century preceding the formation of the BTC, there had been among many

African-American poets and thinkers a conscious desire and a concerted effort to define

Blackness in the context of poetry. During the 20s and 30s, for example, Harlem

Renaissance poet Countee Cullen took on the project by essentially appropriating

European poetic forms and filling them with content reflecting the Black experience. In

“A Brown Girl Dead,” he writes:

With two white roses on her breasts,

White candles at head and feet,
Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;
Lord Death has found her sweet.
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Her mother pawned her wedding ring

To lay her out in white;
She'd be so proud she'd dance and sing
to see herself tonight.

Here he employs the ballad form, a form that is, for readers of American poetry, most

associated with Emily Dickinson, as well as church hymns, European folk music, and

British poetry for centuries (think Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner). Cullen’s

approach was to insert the “Dark Madonna” into the white form. On the other hand,

another representative figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, thought a

Black poetry might utilize existing Black forms. For instance, in “Bound No’th Blues,” he

writes in the tradition of the blues lyric:

Goin’ down the road, Lawd,

Goin’ down the road.
Down the road, Lawd,
Way, way down the road.
Got to find somebody
To help me carry this load.

Road’s in front o’ me,

Nothin’ to do but walk.
Road’s in front of me,
Walk…an’ walk…an’ walk.
I’d like to meet a good friend
To come along an’ talk.

For Hughes, elevating Black forms like the blues form to the level of high art was not

only an aesthetic choice, but it was a way of establishing a unique Black identity. He said

in the introduction to The Big Sea that many African American critics found his

approach reprehensible. “The Chicago Whip characterized me as ‘the poet low-rate of

Harlem.’ Others called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition,

and a parading of all our racial defects before the public” (in “Langston”). Of course,
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history has proven Hughes’ critics wrong in their assertions, yet a debate regarding how

a Black poet should represent Black identity in verse was clearly developing. These two

very different approaches to the use of poetic form had a common intention –to define,

or rather to re-define, Blackness, from within a Black community. This kind of

intentionality was a hallmark of Black poetry throughout the twentieth century, and not

without reason. The establishment and validation of Black identity within a

predominately white literary landscape was (many would say it still is) a politically

motivated gesture, and it was a gesture that dictated a series of Black aesthetic

movements that continued throughout the century.

In 1950, Dr. John Herrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, John Oliver Killens and Watler

Christmas founded the Harlem Writers Club, which later became the Harlem Writers

Guild. The founder’s intention was simply to “provide a forum where African-American

writers could develop their craft” (Harlem Writers). Its members in the 1950s and 1960s

included such diverse writers as Maya Angelou and Audrey Lorde (Terry). The group

began in Harlem, and was “thriving off of a rich culture” (Terry) that had been

established there as a result of the Harlem Renaissance. Though less a group that

advocated for a particular aesthetic, it was “dedicated to the continuance of preserving

the experience of black people through literature” (Terry). In the sixties, the group

became closely associated with the Black Arts Movement. It is still in existence, and over

the years, its members have produced hundreds of works of poetry and fiction.

Just over a decade later, in the early 1960s, New York’s Lower East Side was the

home of the Umbra Workshop, an early protonationalist group of experimental Black

poets whose center was a literary magazine, Umbra. The poets associated with the
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group participated in live readings at various downtown bohemian cafes, often much to

the chagrin of the white literary establishment. James Smithurst, in his book The Black

Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, writes that Umbra’s

practice “suggest[ed] how important Black artists were to the new literary

counterculture [i.e. the first and second generation New York School] downtown (and

vice versa) as well as ways in which Black artists stood apart from that counterculture”

(Smethurst 40). As Lorenzo Thomas, one of Umbra’s founding members, points out,

“Umbra was linking formal experimentation with political dissent” (in Kane 85), paving

the road for the experimentation that would define black identity for the members of the

Black Arts Movement.

The impulse toward experimentation, and more importantly, the desire to stand

apart from the white literary avant-garde, or the “New American Poets,”18 as they were

called, led Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) to found The Black Arts movement, a self-

proclaimed aesthetic arm of the Black Power movement. The Black Arts movement

began in 1965 when Baraka moved away from the downtown home of the white avant-

garde, and of Umbra, to Harlem, where he started the Black Arts Repertory Theater and

School, the institutional center of that historical moment. Whereas Umbra made an

effort, in a certain sense, to be a part of the downtown poetry scene, often by disrupting

it, by “hijacking” readings and so on (Smethurst 41), Black Arts intended to separate

18
The mid-20th century avant-garde poets were referred to as “New American Poets” in
reference to the anthology New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen. The
anthology provided an alternative to the prevalent Academic poetry of the day and
included such poets as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbury, Charles Olson, Allan Ginsburg,
Barbara Guest, Jack Spicer, and Denise Levertov. Of the 44 poets included in this highly
influential anthology, Jones (Baraka) was the only poet of color.
 154

from it entirely and establish its own identity apart from it. Like its political counterpart,

the Black Power movement, Black Arts was motivated by Black nationalism, which

“advocated economic self-sufficiency, race pride for African Americans, and black

separatism” (Black Nationalism).

Although “the poetics and basic ideological stances of the Black Arts movement

were far from unified” (Smethurst 57), there are certain aesthetic concerns that tend to

define it. For instance, “an almost obsessive concern with the theorizing of the

relationship of the African American artist and his or her formal practices to the black

community (or nation) was one of the distinguishing features of the movement”

(Smethurst 68). Baraka’s desire to create an art that was linguistically accessible, and at

the same time, an art that advocates unapologetically for a Black nationalism, resulted

in a kind of poetry that was visceral, immediate, and often inflammatory. A Black

identity was articulated, an identity that stood in defiance of the representations of

blackness that came before it.19

In addition to producing poems written in a rhetorical style associated with

common speech, Black Arts poets “elevated the oral over the written, the public

collective performance over more individual modes of cultural production and

reception.” (Smethurst 89). This is not only apparent in the fact that playwriting and

producing theater was a significant part of the Black Arts movement, for it was, but also

in the fact that the poetry was written to be spoken, to be performed, to be immediate

19
Ideas of Black Nationalism were, of course, not new. For example, Marcus Garvey
formed the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 with the intent of
both enabling Black communities and promoting “black emigration to Africa as a
program of ‘national independence, an independence so strong as to enable us to rout
others if they attempt to interfere with us’.” (Garvey in Black Nationalism)
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and felt viscerally. The repercussions of this embrace of orality in Black poetry is still felt

today. As Robert Chrisman writes of the group:

If we had not had a Black Arts movement in the sixties we certainly

wouldn't have had national Black literary figures like Henry Louis Gates,

Jr., Alice Walker, or Toni Morrison because much more so than the

Harlem Renaissance, in which Black artists were always on the leash of

white patrons and publishing houses, the Black Arts movement did it for

itself. What you had was Black people going out nationally, in mass, saying

that we are an independent Black people and this is what we produce.

(Chrisman in Salaam)

Clearly, the influence of those associated with Black Arts is still profoundly felt today. In

addition to the more well-known writers and intellectuals Chrisman cites above, the

Black Arts Movement still resonates in performance poetry (slam poetry, Nuyorican

poetry), in rap, and with countless other contemporary writers and poets of color who

are articulating a kind of essential Black identity, a uniquely Black voice, in their work.

I’ve spent some time lingering on the Black Arts movement in this brief (and

admittedly very incomplete) section of this chapter in which I’ve tried to sketch a

historical contextualization of American Black poetry because I see a direct and strong

influence of Black Arts on the work of the Black Took Collective. Baraka and the Black

Arts movement, understandably, were intent upon articulating a Black voice, an

essential Black identity. No doubt this was an affirmative and politically effective thing

to do; after all, when a voice is institutionally silenced, perhaps the best thing to do is

find that silenced voice and shout. When the Black community, or any community,
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decides upon a particular voice, a particular identity, a particular aesthetic as the “right”

one, to the exclusion of others, then we find ourselves back in a position of stagnation

and oppression. This view is articulated by one member of the Black Took Collective,

Dawn Lundy Martin, who in an interview with Noah Eli Gordon in the Denver

Quarterly, addressed the Black Took Collective’s relationship to a defined “Black

aesthetic” thus:

I find it problematic when language attempts (creative, analytical, other

other) to house “race” or any identity – in certainty. At one time in our

American history, certainly, it was usefully or perhaps necessary

(politically and socially) for black people to speak about race in terms that

insisted on race’s stability and, of course, language reflected that. I think I

am thinking more of the Black Arts Movement here with the attendant

belief that there is a “Black aesthetics” or that an aesthetics can be

reflective of or somehow emergent from a body that happens to be Black

because of that “Blackness.” This kind of approach, I believe, has

historically been politically and socially motivated but somehow, even as

political and social fabrics have morphed, the “natural” configuration of

race as it relates to the creative or vice versa has stuck around. (Martin)

She goes on to acknowledge that, of course, the notion of ambivalence as it relates to

identity has been a part African-American writing since at least the 19th century,

particularly in slave narratives and fiction (Martin). But by the 1980s and 90s, the idea

of a stable Black identity had become so much a part of the poetic landscape, it seemed

almost to be taken for granted. The “reiterative and irascible Black poem, cloaked in
 157

‘authenticity’,” had quite possibly “become metaphorical loci of permanence and theme

that suffocate the body that reads them” (Harris, Martin and Wilson “Call” 132). This

was the atmosphere in which the members of the BTC found themselves at the Cave

Canem retreat, and it became the foundation upon which they began to build their own

oppositional poetics, in their individual writing and in their collective performances, or

de-performances.

This exploration of alternative poetic approaches to exploring and expressing

race and identity led the BTC away from representations of Blackness that they found so

prevalent at Cave Canem to the body itself. They wrote in their manifesto, “[w]hy not the

human body as poem’s material: open, full of spaces, grotesque; not beautiful beyond its

own flesh filling, never exhausting, Black space” (“Call” 133). Once they began thinking

the material body as the poem’s material, it became clear that a resistant poetics might

in fact be an embodied poetics; a resistant poetics might be interrogated through live

performance and through the breakage of such performances.

I’m going to turn, for a moment, to Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of theatre as a way

to shed some light on the Black Took Collective. While I contend that the performances

the BTC mounts are not “theatre,” per se – their performances are always contextualized

within poetry and the poetry reading – Deleuze’s insight into alternative theatrical

strategies can be useful as we move forward. In his essay on the theatre of Carmelo Bene

entitled “One Less Manifesto,” Deleuze embraces the notion of what he calls an

“antirepresentational” theatre, a theatre that prizes variability over structure, movement

over stasis. He advocates for a theatre that “first appears to us as coming from the

subtraction of the stale elements of power that will release a new potentiality of theater,
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an always unbalanced, non-representative force” (242). These “stale elements of power”

that must be subtracted include majoritarian language and speech – language and

speech that represent stasis, continuity, invariability, etc. In their stead the artist will

employ minor languages, “languages of continuous variability – whether the

considered dimension may be phonological, syntactical, semantical, or even stylistical”

(244). In this antirepresentational, immanent theatre:

All the linguistic and sonorous components, inseparably language and

speech, are put in a state of continuous variation. But this is not without

effect on other nonlinguistic components like actions, passions, gestures,

attitudes, objects, etc. For one cannot treat the elements of language and

speech as so many interior variables without placing them in a reciprocal

relation with exterior variables, in the same continuity, in the same flux of

continuity. It is in this same movement that language will tend to escape

the system of power structuring it. And, similarly, action will tend to

escape the system of Mastery of domination organizing it. (248)

The Black Took Collective’s desire to explore an oppositional poetics, to use language “to

escape the system of power structuring it,” by focusing on embodiment and by resisting

representation (i.e. established representations of Blackness) has led it to establish a

kind of theatre of potentiality, a theatre that Laura Cull has referred to as a “theatre of

immanence.” This is a theatre in which “the material bodies involved in the creative

process do not obey commands issued from a transcendent source, but generate their

own rules and forms of creation” (Cull 25). Throughout the following pages, I will

examine a particular performance that the members of the Black Took Collective gave at
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the University of Notre Dame on March 19, 2014, a piece simply called Black Took

Collective: A Retrospective. I will consider the ways in which the kind of theatre the

members of the BTC are creating is in fact an immanent theatre of sorts, but in the

context of a poetry reading.

Black Took Collective: A Retrospective

I would like to briefly describe the performance that will function as the primary

text in this analysis. Then, I will look specifically at various aspects of it that will

illuminate the ways in which the piece is an immanent performance, the ways in which

it reveals the transformative potentialities that are available to individuals and to

groups, and the ways in which the piece might be considered a demonstration of a

posthuman ethics. This is an ethics that is defined by Rosi Braidotti as “a qualitative

shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our

species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet” (Braidotti

2).

The space in which the performance took place, called the Digital Visualization

Theater, is located on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. Much like a

planetarium, the audience sits in reclining chairs beneath a domed screen, 50 feet in

diameter. But unlike a traditional planetarium, this theater can accommodate both front

and rear projection, utilizing a number of “Sony SRXS110 projectors, one of the most

advanced projection systems available, a JBL 9,000-watt 5.1 Dolby surround sound

system, and ten computers for the real-time rendering of 3D objects” (University of

Notre Dame). The space is generally used for scientific research and visualization. It has
 160

been used to explore “3D models of complex molecules such as enzymes and DNA,” “the

internal structure of the human body,” or “the intricate details of the Large Hadron

Collider at CERN”(University of Notre Dame). It is not a common site for poetry

readings.

Figure 19 A Skeleton projected on the domed screen during the BTC's preshow.

As the audience entered the space, music was playing and a projection of an

anatomically accurate human skeleton was being manipulated in time to it. The

perspectival position of the audience members gave them the illusion that they were

both dancing with the skeleton and exploring it, inside and out. They were swept close to

it, then away, then closer still until they entered the skull, passed through the ribcage,

out the pelvis. The digital, visual imagery facilitated an intimate awareness of the body,

the human body as both flesh and medium. The preshow music, loud and prominent,

served to both racialize and genderize the body that the visualization represented. First,
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the rapper Azaelia Banks’ song “Fierce” played. It is a song that embraces a queer

aesthetic and overt queer content in direct contradiction of the generally accepted

notion (generally accepted by those who haven’t dug very deeply into the genre) that rap

is a hyper-masculine, cis-gendered musical form. “‘Miss Thing, you think you’re fierce?’

I said, ‘Of course.’ She said ‘All queens think they’re fierce.’ I said, ‘Miss Thing, all

queens ain’t me!’”20 The progressive, educated, mostly white audience was generally

comfortable with this. It’s what it was likely expecting from a collective of progressive,

highly educated, critically lauded poet/performers whom they know are going to be

addressing issues of race, gender and sexuality. The next song played was Zebra Katz’s

“Ima Read,” a song with lyrics that are essentially a long metaphor for the speaker’s

intention to physically assault somebody, and the vehicle for that metaphor is academia:

“Ima take that bitch to college / Ima give that bitch some knowledge.” This is an

indication of sorts that the BTC is going to, over the course of the performance,

criticizing the academy and academic poetry from within,“[t]o abuse its hospitality, to

spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of –

this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university” (Harney and

Moten 26). The BTC will, over the course of the performance, use their position within

the academy to subvert expectations that are a part of the academy, expectations

associated with what one is supposed to do or how one is supposed to be in a given

situation.

This spoken text is a sample from “Work it Girlfriend/Fierce Talk” by Jack & Jill (Jack
20

and Jill). The speaker is queer activist Franklin Fuentes, who is alluding to New York
drag culture in the 1980’s, a culture that is notably captured in the 1990 documentary
Paris is Burning.
 162

Harris, Wilson and Martin entered the space as the Katz piece was playing

wearing white, flowing fabric. They danced freely around the front of the space until the

song ended and the piece began in earnest.

I’m going to discuss the piece from three perspectives: text, body, and digital

media. It’s important to note, however, that the isolation of each of these elements of the

performance is artificial, and I am only doing it here for the sake of clarity.

The Text: Undoing the Poetry Reading

At the &Now Conference at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2013, Black

Took member Ronaldo Wilson gave a talk on a African-American, experimental writing

practices and communities on a panel he shared with other prominent African-

American poets including Tisa Bryant, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, John Keene, Douglas

Kearney and Ruth Ellen Kocher. The panel, called “What the Dark Cave Took:

MotherFellowships of the Black Avant-Garde,” was composed, as the title indicates, of

members of The Dark Room Collective, Cave Canem, and Black Took, all speaking about

the importance of belonging to a group or collective of like-minded poets with common

poetic intentions.

But when it came time for Wilson to speak at the end of the session, he didn’t

“perform” as a scholar is expected to perform in such circumstances. Instead, he played

music through the sound system in the room and began to freestyle along with it,

improvising text associated with the theme of the panel. He had no notes and had

clearly not “written” the text he spoke, cogent and appropriate as it was. As his
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freestyling continued and he seemed to find his flow, he began to run and dance up and

down the aisle of the elegant room on the top floor of the university’s library, between

the seated conference-goers, still improvising the text. He jumped up onto a heavy, oak

table at the back of the room and danced, his unlaced boots pounding on the dark wood

tables, the tables that graduate students were likely sitting around during a seminar only

days earlier.

I highlight this event because Wilson’s approach is emblematic of, and likely

inspired by, the performances of Black Took. Wilson was not just giving an academic

talk, he was also undoing the academic talk; he was revealing to the audience that the

academic talk is a structure of power, of repeating the same. There is a “right way” to be

in that context – a right way to speak and a right way to compose oneself. To follow the

“right way” is to participate in the reproductive systems of power. To be clear, I don’t

intend to imply that there is anything wrong with a panel on an academic conference.

After all, as Foucault tells us, power is always also productive. But what Wilson was able

to do with his performance was to reveal the otherwise invisible structures that serve to

maintain a status quo, in this case, within the academy, and by extension, within the

wider realm of experience.

The power of Wilson’s performance lay in the fact that it was located within the

space of an academic talk, within the academy where a particular set of behaviors are

expected. His performance made those expectations apparent. Likewise, the power of a

Black Took Collective performance lies in the fact that it is located within the space of an

academic poetry reading, and it breaks that reading.

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Contemporary poetry, and by extension, the poetry reading, exists within the

structures and strictures of the academy. The social scientist Michael Laurence, in a

paper analyzing the ways in which the University is an apparatus of power, an apparatus

of disciplinary organization and normalization, reminds us that:

The view of the modern university as a site of open and objective learning

needs to be reconsidered. Furthermore, the notion that the university is

not a political institution, that it somehow exists outside of the realm of

the political, is a notion that needs to be destabilized. (Laurence)

Likewise, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney tell us that “The Universitas is always a

state/State strategy” (Harney and Moten 32) in that it reproduces social relations.21 The

university, in short, is very good at maintaining the order of things, even if/in spite of

the fact that what is being reproduced is, quite often, a system of relationships that is

exclusionary, unjust, and discriminatory. And it is within the structured, self-

reproducing academy that “serious” poetry has found a home.22 Poets become

professors (or they want to), students write the poems that will be published in journals

that are run by creative writing programs at other universities, and the universities

21
For Moten and Harney, this is represented in the way the university has become a
place of professionalization. It’s social function is to support and reproduce a
professionalized subject and to exclude alternative ways of being/thinking/acting in the
world.
22
To be clear, I am referring to a particular poetry – the poetry that is taught in MFA
programs, written by poets who are employed by the university, supported by university
money. This is AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) poetry. When I write
“serious” poetry, with quotes, I am not talking about songwriting, rap and hip hop, slam
poetry, and the myriad poetic expressions that one encounters every day, all the time, in
contemporary Western life.
 165

bring the poets published in the universities’ journals and presses to their university for

poetry readings.

And it is in the space of the poetry reading that the Black Took Collective’s

performances become effective (and affective); it is because they enter the language-

world of poetry that they have such a political impact. They demonstrate what Deleuze

calls becoming-minoritarian within the majoritarian world of academic poetry.

Deleuze tells us that “major languages are languages of power,” and academic

poetry, regardless of how innovative or experimental it is, is a language of power; it’s a

major language. It is a language that, in spite of the good intentions of a great majority

of its writers, can be exclusionary and even downright racist. Poet Cathy Park Hong

writes that many contemporary, experimental writers are affected by a “delusion of

whiteness.” She writes that their “‘delusion of whiteness’ is the luxurious opinion that

anyone can be ‘post-identity’ and can causally slip in and out of identities like a video

game avatar, when there are those who are constantly harassed, surveilled, profiled, or

deported for whom they are” (Hong 248). She writes of academic poetry generally, of

what might be called “mainstream academic poetry,” echoing some of what the

members of Black Took wrote in their manifesto, that “They prefer their poets [of color]

to praise rather than excoriate, to write sanitized, easily understood personal lyrics on

family and ancestry rather than make sweeping institutional critiques” (248). She goes

on to point out that the academic avant-garde, “prefer[s] their poets of color to be
 166

quietest as well, preferably invisible, or at the very least, buried” (248). They are all a

part of a self-reproducing system of power relations.23

If, however, academic poetry is a major language, and “major languages are

languages of power,” how does a poet resist that power? Deleuze goes on to say that as

opposed to major languages, “one must define minor languages as languages of

continuous variability – whether the considered dimension may be phonological,

syntactical, semantical, or even stylistical” (Deluze “One Less” 244). The way to resist

majoritarian systems of power is to become-minoritarian by embracing the notion of

immanent and continual change and variability.

Interlude One – Minority

Let us take a moment to clarify the term “minority” here to avoid confusion.

Indeed, we are talking about poets of color and queer poets, i.e. minority poets.

Deleuze recognizes this definition and, in his essay “One Less Manifesto,” describes it

this way:

23
Hong is speaking generally, as an experimental poet herself, in Lana Turner Journal,
a poetry and poetics journal, not in a scholarly journal. She is making a point, from the
perspective of a poet of color, about recent moves in experimental poetry by white poets
to which she and many other poets had taken offence, moves that included, for instance,
Kenneth Goldsmith’s appropriation and reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy report as a
conceptual poem.
This is also perhaps a bit ironic, as Hong is an academic poet of color who has published
books with Norton, the most mainstream of press that publishes poetry.
 167

First of all, minority denotes a state of rule, that is to say, the situation of

a group that, whatever its size, is excluded from the majority, or even

included, but as a subordinate fraction in relation to the standard of

measure that regulates the law and establishes the majority. (255)

But he describes his concept of minority, or of becoming minoritarian, thus:

…minority no longer denotes a state of rule, but a becoming in which one

enlists to become-minority … minority here denotes the strength of a

becoming while majority designates the power or weakness of a state, or

a situation. Here is where theatre or art can surge forward with a

specific, political function. (255)

It’s important to note that embracing the notion of becoming-minoritarian as a

political tactic in no way negates the reality of individuals within a group who are

excluded from or subordinated within a system of power. Discrimination based on race,

gender, sexual orientation, or disability is a very real, daily experience for many. The

Black Took Collective is a collective of three “minority” poets who, I believe,

interestingly and profitably engage an ethic of “becoming-minoritarian” in their work in

order to address the very real discrimination that they and other people of color and

gender queer people face all the time.

Structurally, a BTC performance uses representational text in order to later

demonstrate a destruction of that representation. In other words, the poets in the

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collective use representational language to situate the audience in a particular way – to

encourage a particular mindset, even to allow a kind of comfort to settle in – before

stripping away the representative aspects of the performance and revealing the potential

becoming inherent in being. At the retrospective performance at Notre Dame, the

members of the BTC entered the space during the Zebra Katz song with white fabric

draped around them, and they danced and moved freely about the performance area

until the song ended. The almost nightclub-like energy abruptly ended when the song

ended, and the music was replaced with the sound of birds – a calm, natural (though

clearly digitally processed) sound. Harris approached a microphone, wearing a reflective

traffic safety vest over a white top, she removed a long, red wig, and spoke the following

lines of text, her voice booming with amplified delay and reverb (the line-breaks are

mine – it’s an attempt to indicate the phrasing Harris used):

There is a huge
Blackface mask
hanging from the ceiling of the theatre
as the audience enters.
Abruptly cornrowed
and kerchiefed
washboard, hambone, cooling board
boogie, limping hard jive
and false
bottoms.
There is a huge
wrought-iron gate
hanging from the ceiling of the theatre
as the audience enters.
It swings precariously on one hinge.
There are trees hanging too
roots upturned
their branches scrape the stage making a coughing sound.
 169

She continued in this vein, invoking the space of the theatre, the audience entering, and

the fact that this is a performance about race. It is readily apparent that this is the

“written” part of the show. Not only is the spoken text the text of one of Harris’ existing

poems, but it is also the text with which the group chose to begin their performance. It

feels structured, planned and composed. In order for us to experience a break, we must

first know what is being broken.

The referential function of the text is foregrounded here, at the beginning of the

piece. The performers are communicating to the audience clearly, in a language that the

members of the audience understand and expect. It is a way for the performers to

ground and situate the audience within the physical space and within a particular socio-

historical space. The meta-reference, right at the beginning, to the theatre and the

audience, in some sense reassures the audience; it is a place they know – the theatre –

and their role for the foreseeable future is identified and established. An audience in the

theatre, or at a poetry reading, is expected to sit and receive, to be engaged but silent, its

members express themselves at the appropriate time, in the appropriate way, perhaps

pushing boundaries a bit (pushing boundaries a bit is often expected in such an

environment). There is a kind of comfort in this, and the audience, generally speaking,

accepts it without question.

Furthermore, the representational spoken text at the beginning of the piece

serves a couple of primary functions. First, it tells the audience that what they are about

to see is going to be, in large part, about race, it is a performance that is directly

engaging issues associated with race. The first image articulated is that of blackface, an

overtly racist theatrical form, popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
 170

centuries, in which white actors/performers applied dark makeup to their faces in order

to imitate persons of African descent with the express purpose, according to John

Stausbaugh, “of displaying Blackness for the enjoyment and edification of White

viewers” (Strausbaugh 38). Harris’ text raises the image of a “huge Blackface mask”

above the audience, in a place of prominence, a kind of defining image that defines the

space and the performance that is about to take place – this is, in some way, a display of

Blackness.

This referential language continues, reinforcing the idea that the performance is

such a display. Harris recites a litany of word/images that evoke Blackness and Black

history, while simultaneously reminding the audience of the ways in which certain

words and images have become tired and stereotypical. “Cornrows,” “washboard,”

“hambone,” “jive,” – this language reminds one of what the BTC itself, in its manifesto,

called the “reiterative and irascible Black poem, cloaked in ‘authenticity’.” These words,

the established opening text of the performance, are of the class that the BTC criticized:

“faceless ancestor shadows; remembrances of kin and the dozens; o noble savage;

collards, cornbread, and cornrows” (Call 132). The more evocative language in the first

stanza, i.e. the “cooling board,” (a platform upon which the bodies of the dead were

once stored in order to slow the processes of decay) is quite effective, even profound. It

resonates as it sits among the other, clearly racialized words; one can’t help but be

reminded of the countless Black lives cut short by the violent acts of those who have

power and operate within a racist system, be they slave owners of the past or police

officers today. One might also be reminded of his/her complicity with this violence, for

indeed participation in a system, particularly if one benefits from it, indicts him or her
 171

in that system’s offences. But it nonetheless remains likely that a white audience

member that isn’t already undergoing a process of understanding his/her role in a racist

system of power is unlikely to have a life-changing epiphany because of the artful

placement of the words “cooling board.” In fact, the white, liberal claim that racism is

something that “other people” are involved with or affected by, that they are somehow

outside of or above systemic racism, can be reinforced by the use of disquieting,

representational poetic language. The response is often one in which the progressive

audience member (or reader) says to him or herself, “Yes, I agree. Isn’t racism terrible,”

and nothing changes. But that aside, what this early representational text is doing is

contextualizing the experiences that are to come.

The second stanza, in which Harris presents the surreal image of a tree hanging

upside down, its roots in the air, its branches scratching the stage making a “coughing

sound,” evokes the horrifying legacy of lynching in the United States. The words

“hanging,” “swinging,” “tree,” “coughing,” all create a metonymic web that calls to mind

images of this troubling history. This continues the work that “cooling board’ is doing –

it continues the work of contextualizing the work that is to come. It reminds the

audience of the very real fact that the past is yet present, that the system that allowed

such offences as lynchings to occur is still, in no small way, working today.

Still, it’s not likely that these words are going to change anything or anybody, no

matter how disturbing the words are to the attentive listener. But by beginning the

performance in a more or less expected way, a “normal” way, the BTC provides a

starting place, a foundation, an expected pathway from which to diverge. Even as they

bring to the audience members’ minds racial disparity and racial injustice, they present
 172

that content using a majoritarian language, the language of theatre and the language of

contemporary American Black poetry – the “serious” poetry of the academy of which I

wrote earlier. They create a space in which the audience finds itself comfortable; it is

getting what it expects. It is easy. But I return to the quote that I used as an epigraph for

this chapter: “We save ourselves, we become minor, only by the creation of a disgrace or

deformation” (Deleuze “One Less” 243). This is precisely the performance tactic of the

BTC. The audience is about to be shaken by unexpected “deformations;” they are about

to experience a de-performance.

Figure 110 The Black Took Collective at the University of Notre Dame.
 173

Referring to Carmelo Bene’s theatrical work, Deleuze writes that “the originality

of his [Bene’s] bearing, the totality of his methods, first appears to us as coming from

the subtraction of the stable elements of power that will release a new potentiality of

theater, an always unbalanced, non-representative force” (Deleuze “One Less” 242).

These “stable elements of power,” one might say, are the very points of attack for a

politically oriented art. “Releasing the potentiality” of art, or in other words, revealing

the possibility of individual and/or group becoming within a work of art, might be

considered one of the BTC’s primary tactics.

After Harris’ opening stanzas, Dawn Lundy Martin began reading some of her

poems into a microphone on the opposite side of the stage, her voice loud and booming

but without the digital delay that was on Harris’ mic. Martin’s poems, like Harris’,

continue to referentially confront race, but less directly. The language she is employing

is less the language of “the irascible Black poem,” and more the more prosaic language

of the documentary poem. Still, early in the performance, the text here is serving to

contextualize the forthcoming piece. Martin brings the “I” into the piece here, makes the

audience aware of the bodies before it. This is an excerpt from the text she spoke:

Wanted the swell of Black earth, a legacy, something larger than ourselves
to hold us.
What are the dimensions of the field? They put me here in the tallest
grasses, the strangest fruit, and have demanded at gunpoint that I bend
over.
And over.
But I am so tired my limbs are sore and I feel disconnected. Or I
disintegrate. A shadow figure towers over me as I exhaust. Body buckle
ballast removed.
We think there is no escape. The material’s always the same. Yet
malleable.
To mutate is to live.
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The first half of the excerpted text above indicates the context in which Black bodies,

and in particular the Black bodies standing, moving, speaking before us, currently find

themselves within a particular system of power. Remember, this performance was a

retrospective of the Black Took Collective’s work, and one could read this section as a

description of their unique poetic journey. Martin articulates the desire to be a part of

something, “something larger than [them]selves,” not unlike the poetic community into

which they entered when they began their collaboration at Cave Canem. But whether

one chooses to read these first lines as the BTC’s personal experience in Black poetry, or

as a more general desire of African Americans to identify with the past, with their

unique legacy, the fact remains that the speaker is subject to an oppressive external

agency. “They put me here,” she says, and we are left to contemplate who “they” are. Are

“they” the members of the Black poetry community? Are “they” the state actors that

enforce and re-enforce the racist elements of the current social order? Are “they” the

privileged, white members of a racist society who refuse to acknowledge the inequity of

which they are a part? Are “they” some combination of all of these? Most likely, “they”

are the latter. But nonetheless, we are left with an image of a Black body being violently

subjugated within a space of “legacy,” a space of “Black earth.” And she connects the

Black body of the “I” to the historical Black body by invoking the highly-charged and

well-known metaphor “strange fruit,” a reference to the song written by Abel Meeropol

in 1937 and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939 (Magolick 3), in which the strange fruit to

which the singer refers is the Black body of a person who had been lynched. The demand

“at gunpoint that I bend over” contemporizes the image and highlights the fact that

there is something beyond the individual’s control that, through the use of violence,

forces the body into a position of subjugation. There is a power that is systemic and is
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always acting, through a promise of violence, to maintain itself by keeping the oppressed

in a position of powerlessness.

However, it is in the second half of the text excerpted above that the Black Took

Collective’s apparent tactics are first articulated. Martin describes the physical impact of

living a life in which the person of color is constantly “bending over” under the threat of

violence, the body is broken down by the weight of a racist system, a system personified

by this towering shadow figure. The subjugated body then collapses, breaks down, fades

– in a sense it ceases to exist. Of course, the body is there as it has always been; the fact

of embodiment is one that must not be forgotten. But what happens, in a certain sense,

is the representative qualities of the body are disintegrated, exhausted, and removed.

The body is transformed into the ashes from which a phoenix can rise. A certain

understanding of the body, an understanding imposed upon it, will bend the body until

it breaks into nothingness and a new understanding must take its place. Martin’s words

go far in articulating a clear ontology: “We think there is no escape. The material’s

always the same. Yet malleable. To mutate is to live.”

Interlude Two – Deleuze and Immanence

I’d like to look at these sentences and the ontology they imply a little more

closely before moving on to the BTC’s specific tactics.

“We think there is no escape.” In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari

describes a version of reality that, in brief, looks something like this: there is the plane

of consistency (sometimes called the plane of immanence) and the plane of

organization. The plane of consistency is an uncoded, infinite system of flows which

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has not yet manifested itself, through differentiation, into anything. "Here, there are

no longer any forms or developments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation

of subjects. There is no structure, any more than there is genesis" (Guattari and

Deleuze 266).

There is no outside of the plane of consistency; a person, an automobile, an act

of speech, a pencil – these things are not on the plane of consistency, nor are they in

the plane of consistency. They are, rather, of the plane of consistency. It is through

desire and differentiation that the plane of organization is manifest. This is the way we

generally experience the world – it is a codification of flows, a collection of

“assemblages.” Assemblages “are complex constellations of objects, bodies,

expressions, qualities, and territories that come together for varying periods of time to

ideally create new ways of functioning” (Livesey 18).

The reality, according to Deleuze, of an assemblage is that it is Janus-faced,

looking two ways at once. The side of it we generally experience is the one “facing the

strata,” the one in which the intensities that make up the continuous flows of the body

without organs “discontinuous, bound up in forms and substances; the only particles

are divided into particles of content and articles of expression; the only

deterritorialized flows are disjointed and reterritorialized” (70). This is the strata most

of us see, understand, and experience. This strata even appears as something given,

something determined by an outside force – something from which, as Martin says in

her poem, “We think there is no escape.”

“The material’s always the same.” But this is not an ontology of transcendence –

it is one of immanence. There are no outside forces determining the situation, no

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Platonic ideal to which we all strive. Every assemblage is of the plane of consistency,

and every differentiation is immanent. An assemblage not only has the face that looks

toward the actual, seemingly unescapable strata, but it also has the face that looks to

the virtual, the side that allows for rupture and lines of flight within the assemblage. It

is, according to Deleuze and other philosophers before him (Spinoza, Nietzsche) true

that “The material’s always the same.”24

“Yet malleable.” Indeed, it is malleable. Within an assemblage there is always

the possibility of becoming. I’ve written a good bit on becoming minority above – I

believe it is the primary ethical and tactical position that the Black Took Collective

takes. Becoming is a creative act, and a truly creative act is becoming. As Laura Cull

writes, “[t]he material bodies involved in the creative practice do not obey commands

issued from a transcendent source, but generate their own rules and forms of creation”

(Cull 25), and they generate them from within. Creativity is taking advantage of the

inherent potential in every assemblage – a potential that was not there before. Lines of

flight are becomings, and choosing to become upsets the reterritorialized assemblage.

Creative acts of becoming change things on every level. What may seem to us fixed can

be moved.

“To mutate is to live.” Deleuze tells us that “We save ourselves, we become

minor, only by the creation of a disgrace or a deformity” (Deleuze “One Less” 243). To

mutate is to change, and it’s often not pretty. It’s often uncomfortable. However, if one

24
It is important to note that the idea of “one substance” in no way implies
homogenization. As Laura Cull writes, “Nevertheless, we should not be misled into
thinking that this philosophy somehow involves homogenizing the world or denying ‘the
very possibility of difference.’ The ‘one kind of thing’ we have evoked is not one thing at
all, but process, change or difference” (Cull 7).
 178

desires change (and change is where potential lies), then one must be willing to let

things get a little dirty.

This realization, “To mutate is to live,” expressed in this seemingly

straightforward way, is the key to understanding the performance and to

understanding the ways in which a performance like this can have a political impact.

Cull writes that “a theatre [that] is an immanent one will always be a matter of

perspective, not in the sense of ‘mere’ doxa or impression, but literally and physically,

a product of perception as well as that which produces new ways of seeing and

participating in the world” (Cull 16). The role of immanent performance then is

instructive in that it demonstrates becoming through the presentation of “a disgrace or

deformity,” or, one might say, through the presentation of intentional illegibility in a

text, either spoken or written. It breaks text. It communicates not primarily through

representation, but through a minor language of illegibility.

In a 1990 conversation with Antonio Negri, Deleuze said that “We’ve got to

hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The

key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can

elude control” (175). A Black Took performance does just this. It breaks the circuits of a

major language, in this case, the language of contemporary American academic

poetry, and creates the vacuoles that allow for lines of flight, for becoming. Martin,

Wilson and Harris demonstrate, before an audience and with an audience, actual

creativity, actual becoming.

“We think there is no escape. The material’s always the same. Yet malleable. To

mutate is to live.”
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During the text I have examined above, the text that Martin speaks into an

unaffected microphone, Ronaldo Wilson begins speaking behind her, over her,

improvising in response to what she is saying. His voice is modulated, dropped deep in

pitch by a digital apparatus. Because of the digital manipulation, it becomes difficult for

the audience to comprehend the improvised words he speaks. The words one can make

out, “as if you understood…” “it was she, as if the she…” imply a conversation, an

engagement with the words she is reciting, replies to specific lines in the poem. But they

also seem to work in opposition to it. Wilson’s text fights against Martin’s, tries to make

its way in, but it doesn’t create dialogue. Rather it creates obfuscation. This is not

dialogue in a play, or commentary on a text, but it is a tool that is used to obscure both

texts.

Here, still very early in the performance, after the performers have contextualized

the piece by drawing attention to the ideas of race, embodiment and theatricality in

strictly expected and representational ways, they begin dismantling the representational

aspects of the piece in order to provide a space for and to demonstrate a rupture within

the assemblage that is the piece. But it doesn’t happen all at once. The trace of the

poetry reading remains, at least for a while. Martin reads for a significant period of time

from what appears to be an ordered stack of poems. After that, Harris does the same.

But where the performance really “works,” I would argue, is within the breaks, when the

structure of the reading is broken. This takes place in part in several early improvisatory

moments.
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In “The Black Took Collective: On Intimacy & Origin,” Wilson writes, “I am

moving totally towards freestyle as a vehicle, away from the written word, for now, or

the written word as in the freestyle. I will not even edit like the good slave, but the bad

ass that I want to see untaxed” (321). The improvisatory impulse expressed by Wilson,

demonstrated so early in the performance with his improvisation of text over Martin’s

text, becomes one of the primary ways in which the performers communicate the

potentiality of becoming with the audience. Remember, the audiences that so often

attend a BTC performance are audiences that are expecting a poetry reading, that know

the protocols, structures and mores of a poetry reading. Wilson’s (and shortly after,

Harris’, for she also riffs along with Martin’s poems) improvisations over Martin’s text

are the first indication that those protocols, structures and mores are not going to hold

up during the performance. The performers are not only going to give a poetry reading,

they are also going to break a poetry reading.

As Martin finished reading, Harris, having put on a garish wig, approached the

microphone for what appears to be her portion of the “reading.” Like Martin, she read

from a stack of printed poetry, but her performance of the text was more of an

improvisatory riff on the written works. She read from a series of poems that are

inspired by children’s nursery rhymes. In themselves, they are doing a kind of

emancipatory work in that they are appropriate the prosody and playfulness of the

children’s rhymes, but Harris’ text deals unexpectedly with disturbing themes associated

with racial oppression, creating an effective tension within the poems themselves.

However, in the performance, it is her spontaneous interpretation of the poems that is

most remarkable. After looking at her wigged self in a hand mirror, she begins speaking:
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(laughter) You, you are sooooo – black. (laughs) You’re a muddy muddy

muddy muddy muddy muddy muddy muddy muddy black thing, you’re so

black, you’re so black, you’re so black, you’re so black.

It is apparent that she is not reading the text but she is using it as a point of departure,

much the way a jazz musician improvises on a head, or a preexisting melody. She moves

in and out of the written text with a kind of seamlessness that doesn’t allow the audience

the comfort of knowing when she is on the page and when she is off of it. There is a

demonstration here, it seems, of thought as art, art as thought, thinking as creating,

creating as becoming. Improvising within and without a structured, written form – in

this case, poetry – demonstrates the possibility of “inventing new possibilities of life”

from within itself. Harris makes visible the more static elements of an assemblage by

reading the poem, and simultaneously demonstrates the potential for becoming

inherent in that assemblage.

Power is “force, and the play of forces, not form” (Deleuze “Life” 97), but it is

generally experienced (falsely) as formal, immovable. It is often thought of as something

transcendent, externally organized and therefore immutable. But again, the conscious

process of creative becoming, of becoming minoritarian, reveals the nature of the forces

and play of forces that constitute power; it reveals the possibility of rupture, of lines of

flight, that can reorganized the play of forces that is power. The BTC’s spontaneous

creation of the piece through a playful riffing, an improvised expression of a written text,

an expression that increases in intensity and frequency as the piece progresses, is

demonstrative of the potential of bodies within an assemblage, and is therefore

instructive.
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Harris, in this early “reading,” not only improvises on the written text, but she

also destroys it. She begins to push the performance more in the direction of a minor

language in that her reading of the written text and the improvised language is at times

deformed through the performance. She stretches words and alters their pitch,

accentuates consonants and pinches vowels, until the words at times become

unrecognizable as words. The word “Black” at one point becomes so stretched and

pinched, so deformed, that it becomes something like “blaaaaaiiiiiiiieeeeeaaa-aaa-aa-aa-

aaii-ii-kkhh,” and the process of communication is transformed. This, I think, is an

example of what Deleuze calls “the subtraction of the stable elements of power that will

release a new potentiality of theatre, an always unbalanced, non-representational force.”

Her speech at times approaches an almost Artaudian scream, an “extension beyond

words, for development in space, for dissociative and vibratory action upon the

sensibility” (Artaud 89).

At one point during Harris’ reading/performance, Ronaldo Wilson begins

improvising based on the final line of Harris’ poem, “Pretty Little WIC Chick25” which

was “silly girls from every hood are crazy over me,” and this is part of the resulting,

improvised text:

Crazy.
You’re so crazy.
You’re so weird.
Yes you are.
You’re so – flexible.
You’re so – not like us.
You’re so – like us.
You’re so – sincere.
You’re so – eligible.

25
A WIC chick is slang for a young woman who relies upon federal financial assistance
for her day to day needs.
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You’re so – perfect.
In every way.
You’re so – included, and in the club.
You’re so – social.
You’re such a site of social – discourse.
You’re so – discursive.
(audience laughs)
You’re so disgusting when you – laugh.
You’re so – rank.
You’re so – understanding about your current rank and position.
You’re so – much a visitor but you’re a part of us.
You’re so – included.26

And he continues while Harris begins speaking over him, in a high-pitched voice,

“You’re so cute! You’re so cute!” which leads her back into her poems. The way he

delivers the improvised text, pacing back and forth across the stage with his eyes cast

downward, makes it entirely apparent that he is freestyling here; he is taking the

performance into an uncharted area, and the audience knows it. They feel the

discomfort, and perhaps the exhilaration, of being unmoored, of becoming. Some laugh,

others wonder if laughter is the “appropriate” response.

Exposing the Virtual: Affect and the Body

The discomfort the audience feels is of particular importance in a BTC

performance. I use the word “discomfort” here in a way that is not fully appropriate, for

describing what the audience experiences with a descriptor, with a word that is a part of

language, moves that experience into the realm of “feelings,” while what I’m particularly

interested in is “affect.” But before I get too far into this distinction, let’s take a step back

26
There is a certain irony, or absurdity, in my transcribing these improvised words from
a recording of the piece. This language was never meant to be static. The words we never
meant to be read.
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and examine why and how the BTC’s performance tactics are or can be effective tools of

resistance and change. This is ultimately the crux of this argument.

We have already looked at the notion of becoming. We have seen how the

poet/performers can reveal the majoritarianism of the worlds they (and we) inhabit by

demonstrating a becoming-minoritarian. Their performance work is therefore

instructive, and there is great value in that. In order to understand one’s potential, one

must understand what is possible. That statement sounds tautological, and perhaps it is.

But there is an experience of potential that an audience member at a BTC performance

will encounter, and it is a bodily experience. The presence of what we identify as the

human body (as opposed to other non-human bodies) is what makes this work effective.

Patricia MacCormack stresses the importance of the body to an activist. She

writes:

Flesh is the point where becomings go from metaphors to actualized,

fetishism to minoritarianism. Matter or meaning of specific ethics is not

the most important point of consideration in order to formulate an ethical

theory; it is the movement of the ethics within the world that must be

considered. (131)

She makes it clear that she is not thinking of bodies in a humanist way; the human is not

the rational center of the universe, ruling over everything that is identified as non-

human (animal, earth, machine). She goes on to write that a worldview that individuates

the self is deeply unethical because the isolation of the self makes it easier to other

another. She writes that “activism needs to challenge the dividuated and over-valued self

through both becomings and assemblages (which are indivisible but differ in
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intensities)” (130). It is the flesh that experiences the connection between bodies, and it

is the flesh that experiences the potential that lies in that connection. The body is the

vessel through which an activist ethics can be enacted. Through affect.

Interlude Three - Affect

Given its ubiquity in recent years, the term “affect” can be a confounding one.

Some use the term interchangeably with the word “feelings.” I am using the term

“affect” here in the way Brian Massumi, following Deleuze, has defined it. Affect is an

experience of an intensity, it is a non-conscious, or a pre-conscious experience of

unstructured potential. It is certainly felt. In his essay “The Autonomy of Affect,”

Massumi cites a study in which children were monitored while watching three

versions of a film about a melting snowman – a film that was played on television and

was apparently upsetting some children. There was the original non-verbal version, a

“factual” version in which a voice-over narrated what was happening in the film, and

an “emotional” version, in which the voice-over commented on the action. He describes

the study’s conclusions that “[t]he original nonverbal version elicited the greatest

response from their skin. Galvanic skin response measures autonomic reaction. (84)

The autonomic reactions, the skin reactions, were the experience of affect; they were

the experience of pre-conscious intensities. This is affect.

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Emotion, on the other hand, is social and linguistically processed. Here is

Massumi once again:

An emotion is a subjective content, the socio-linguistic fixing of the

quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as

personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual

point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed

progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function

and meaning. (88)

Affect is what one experiences, for instance, when they are “moved” by a piece of

music. It is that sensation one experiences when they walk into a room and are struck

with – something – a creeping sensation in the skin. It is what an infant responds to

before she or he has access to language. It is the “discomfort” one experiences at a

performance of any kind, be it a musical performance on stage or the performance of a

candidate at a job interview, when expectations are not being met – before it is made

sense of, before on articulates that experience.

Emotion is a narrativization of an experience. It is socially defined and

intellectually understood. In other words, it means something, and it’s meaning is a

socially preexisting meaning. The emotional reaction one has to the latest blockbuster

film, for instance, to an exciting thriller or a heartfelt romance, is just that –

emotional. It satisfies an expectation, and it is therefore comfortable – even if the

emotion experienced is one we think of as negative – sad, angry, etc. It is the fact that

we know what we are feeling, that we know that we are feeling what we are supposed
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to be feeling, and that our emotional expectations are met that makes the emotional

response pleasant and easy.

Affect is the experience of the virtual. “The virtual,” Massumi tells us, “the

pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is

where futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are infolded, and

sadness is happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life)” (91). The

virtual is always present, impressing itself upon us in the form of intensities. The

instant intensities become qualified they are captured, they are no longer potential.

Instead, they become a part of what already is.

The performance tactics of the Black Took Collective are designed to give the

audience access to the virtual, i.e. access to immanent potential. The work engages the

audience on a conscious level; they are aware of the machinic assemblage of language,

of the qualified language, and that is where they feel comfortable, where they know

their place. We love to feel the comfort of being in our place, as long as we don’t know

that’s why we feel so comfortable. We are comfortable existing in the narrative.

The BTC sets up a situation in which both they and their audience feel the tension

between qualification and intensity. I provided some examples of the ways they do this

above in my discussion of the early moments of the piece when ruptures begin to

appear. I foregrounded two particular tactics: improvisation and the deformation of

language, or illegibility. The moments of each tactic, the events within the event of the

performance, are ruptures, moments of intensive escape. When one experiences a

becoming there is an autonomic reaction, a galvanic skin response. It is an affective

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experience in which both the performer and the audience member(s) are touched by the

virtual, by the experience of potential.

In his introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Massumi writes:

L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a

prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experimental

state of the body to another and implying an augmentation of diminution

in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affection) is each such

state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second,

affecting, body… (Massumi, Plateaus xvi)

The idea of L’affection is crucial to an understanding of the political implications of the

work of the Black Took Collective. Affect happens between bodies. There is a

transmission of affect that extends beyond one supposed individual that affects another.

It is an extension beyond the flesh, and it reveals the fact that the body is not self-

contained. There is no such thing as an individual. Instead there are collections of

dividuals, singular multiplicities expanding beyond the individual body to connect with

other diviual bodies. Massumi borrows the term “transduction” from medicine and

genetic science to describe this phenomenon. He writes “[t]ransduction is the

transmission of force of potential that cannot but be felt, simultaneously doubling,

enabling and ultimately counteracting the limitative selections of apparatuses of

actualization and implantation” (Massumi Parables 235). The “apparatuses of

actualization and implantation,” or, in other words, the apparatuses that maintain a

social order in which some individuated bodies are oppressed and suppressed, can be
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counteracted through the transmission of affect and the alteration of the assemblage(s)

that reiterate a system of oppression.

The intensity that is released into the event of the poetry reading at a Black Took

performance creates an opportunity for bodies that were once thought of as individual

(that understood themselves as individuals) to create a more powerful body. Generating

shared affect is a form of tactical resistance; it is micropolitical activism. “Activism and

political mobilization is created though the sharing of a singular intensity by many who

may have nothing else in common” (MacCormack 40). These newly formed political

bodies are formed because of the generation and transmission of affect, regardless of the

fact that the bodies that compose the newly formed bodies are unique unto themselves,

for they themselves are multiplicities of bodies. Eugene Thacker, referring in his book

Biomedia to Deleuze’s theories of molecular becoming, writes that “A body thus

articulates aggregates of particles that may have a molar effect of a single unit (a whole

cell, a whole organ, a whole anatomy, a whole self, a whole couple, a whole community,

etc.)” (185). The shared affect produced during the event of a de-performance creates

such a unit in the audience.

When an affective connection is made between bodies, when we realize we extend

beyond our constructed idea of self, it becomes much more difficult to think of the other

as outside, it’s harder to other the other.

The examples I provided earlier in this chapter of the Black Took Collective’s

performance all occurred within the first five or ten minutes of the performance. I’d like

to highlight the fact that these “affective breaks” as I call them, occurred more and more
 190

frequently as the performance progressed. These breaks, these instances of becoming,

mostly characterized by improvisation and/or illegibility, along with the constant

presence of the body, became, in my mind, the defining characteristic of the

performance. Here are some examples, in the order in which they occurred:

 At one point, Harris reads a poem that is written in the style of a child’s nursery

rhyme – “Five little nigga-knots27 leaning on the subway doors. One tumbled to

the tracks, then there were four. Four little nigga-knots on a snatch and grab

knock out spree – one got hit by a hollow point, then there were three…” The

content of the piece is itself terribly upsetting, and the poems themselves

generate an affective response in the juxtaposition of the content (young Black

men and women dying violently, the word “nigga,” being repeated throughout the

poem, always disruptive in this and most other contexts) and the form – sing-

song verse for children. But the reading is broken, the rupture occurs, when

Wilson begins singing and dancing while Harris is reading. He sings something

that sounds like a spiritual, the words are difficult to make out, but he appears,

based on his halting voice, to be making it up. He dances across the stage, in front

of Harris, bouncing as if he is listening to an upbeat dance track. All of them are

wearing safety vests covered in led lights, the kind someone directing traffic

might wear. It makes it difficult to hear and listen to Harris’ performance. Then,

Martin, on the other side of the stage, begins triggering sounds, pads and digital

noises like those one might hear on the soundtrack to a film, sounds akin to

27
The term is a racial slur that refers to 1) an African-American person with braids or
corn-rows, or 2) the braids or corn-rows themselves.
 191

bowing a cymbal, but the sounds/noises are not connected to a specific event on

stage. They are just more literal noise.

 Wilson reads from some pages, but he has a flashlight in his mouth, illuminating

the papers. His words are more or less inaudible. He drops to the ground, takes

the flashlight out of his mouth and begins reading from the written text – a series

of fragments of dreamlike narratives having to do with racialized violence: “I see

a little brown girl with a fat white gun. He stops his car. Her gun is fake. His is

real. There’s a Black baby she takes aim to protect…” Harris, meanwhile, is

making high-pitched and guttural noises into the microphone, and the sounds,

processed through a digital delay, echo across the performance space. Wilson

rolls across the floor, still holding the microphone, and continues speaking, his

eyes on the floor, only now it is clear that he is freestyling. “My eyes open to the

facts. The facts are a little bit like these stains I see. This little ant crawling so

invisibly…”

 As the piece progresses, the “reading of poetry” becomes an ever less significant

part of the performance. At one point Martin puts a cheap, cardboard cutout

mask of Justin Bieber on while Harris begins to read a poem. Right away, the

poem is drowned out by recorded sounds of laughter, and Martin and Wilson

begin laughing. The text immediately moves from written to freestyle. Harris:

“Someone’s always laughing.” Wilson: “Someone’s always cackling, that’s the

way. Those two things are twins, aren’t they? You know a little bit about Silvan

Tompkins I see. All this affect theory you’re so clever animalia studies…” Each of

the three performers are talking over each other. Some audience members laugh;

most don’t know what to do.

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 Harris notices Martin’s Bieber mask, screams “Justin!”, runs over to her and

throws her arms around her. Wilson, rolling on the floor, starts to sing, full

voiced and unabashed, a vaguely familiar Backstreet Boys song: “Everybody, rock

your body / Everybody, rock your body tonight.” Martin and Harris join in,

clapping and echoing his singing. He goes on, “I don’t know the song.” They

repeat, still clapping, “I don’t know the song.” “I don’t know the way.” “I don’t

know the way.” He gets up and puts the microphone in Harris’ face and they

continue to sing, to make up lyrics, jump around the stage, and so on. There is a

sense that what is happening on stage is completely unrehearsed, unprepared,

and frankly not “good” by any traditional standard. It is, in a sense, chaos – the

performance is falling apart – in profoundly affective way.

The performance doesn’t really end. Rather, it breaks apart. The audience

certainly doesn’t know the performance is over, nor, I think, do the performers. They

just keep doing – stuff. Singing “Funky Town,” singing spirituals, dancing. The expected

structure of performance – the assemblage that is a “performance,” a “poetry reading” is

no longer recognizable as such. It peters out until the final sound that plays, the sound

of birds, stops. The audience members have witnessed a becoming, and through

transduction (l’affection) of intensity, have experienced becoming themselves.

Digital Media: The Mediated Body

In her essay “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Cathy Park Hong

writes the following:

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Excessive and expressionist, poets like Ronaldo Wilson, Dawn Lundy

Martin, and [LaTasha N. Nevada] Diggs have created cyborg enunciations

out of shredded text, music and lived experiences; they are building a new,

dissonant futurism, treating poetry as rank growth as it punctures the

dying medium of print via performance, video, or audio recordings,

finding inspiration from hip-hop that has oddly, so far, been ignored by

poetry. (253)

I believe that a number of Black poets, certainly including the poets she mentions above,

are at the forefront of the move to push against established, centuries-old practices of

essentializing Black identity. They are doing this by creating “cyborg enunciations” that

enact a kind of “code-switching between languages, between Englishes, between genres,

between races, between bodies” (Hong 253). And they are doing this, in part, by

reevaluating their and our relationship to digital media.

I wanted to finish this chapter with a discussion of the Black Took Collective’s

employment of digital media in their performances. I’ve not spoken of it in detail up to

this point, but it is a crucial element, if not the most important element, of their

performance, and it reinforces and expands upon many of the concepts I’ve discussed

above. The use of digital media by the poets in their performances is useful in at least

two ways. First, on a basic level, digital media help generate an affective experience for

the audience that becomes political because it contributes to the creation of a shared

affect, a kind of connective tissue between the individuated bodies. Second, it helps to

blur the lines between human bodies and technology, providing an opportunity for

audience members to gain a new understanding of their individuated bodies in

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relationship to the rest of the embodied world, to bodies both organic and silicone, and

it brings to mind the idea of mediated representations of bodies. In the concluding pages

I will address each of these roles in turn.

Throughout the performance, there are multiple video projections

simultaneously thrown upon the domed screen above and around the audience. There is

a projection directly above the performers, another to the audience’s right, and one to

their left. There is a fourth directly above the audience, and a fifth behind it. The screen

to the left of the audience is a mirrored screen of an on stage computer upon which the

performers are live-writing poetry into a word processor during the performance. Each

of the other four screens plays a different looped sequence of videos. In addition to the

videos, there are sound beds, digital samples of sounds from nature, particularly birds,

sequenced rhythmical loops, and various environmental sound textures. And finally, the

BTC uses digital processing to manipulate and alter their own voices.
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Figure 21 The Black Took Collective: A Retrospective

The videos all employ a DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetic, an intentionally

amateurish video quality often associated with Fluxus artists, as a creative strategy. The

videos are visually reminiscent of home movies or YouTube videos; they appear to have

been shot on inexpensive video recorders, perhaps cell phones, and edited in iMovie.

Most feature the BTC members themselves performing before the camera, and they

often include superimposed text, much of which is culled from the email conversation

between Wilson, Harris and Martin that was published under the title “Black Took

Collective: On Intimacy and Origin.” At any given time there are four different videos,

most containing text, all playing at the same time, while the fifth projector image is the

mirror of the computer being used for live writing, yet another example of the

performers demonstrating, though improvisation, creative becoming. Still, it is a screen

of ever-changing text that is competing for the audience’s attention. Add to that the
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layers of sounds, beats, and music, and the audience finds itself in the midst of a barrage

of digitally mediated images, texts and sounds, all while watching a live performance – a

live performance, by the way, including voices that are often being digitally processed.

In the Q&A after the performance, Martin said the following about this experience:

The one thing that’s really important to the work it that it’s multimedia.

That there’s so much going on at once that you are incapable as viewers of

creating a central narrative. And so, you know, we want to really

destabilize those central narratives, mainstream narratives, that kind of

mainstream discourse that constructs us as such. And so, that’s part of

what’s at work here. The piece is always different, but if you were to see

exactly the same thing over and over, you know, the meaning that’s

constructed is really between the narratives, in the interstices in some way.

Kind of the overlapping moments.

When one is “incapable…of creating a central narrative,” one is left in the lurch, so to

speak. In the absence of representation and narrative, the audience is left with nothing

but an experience of an intensity, of the yet uncaptured virtual, of potential – of affect.

The affect becomes a shared affect through the process of transduction, or l’affection,

and the audience members and the performers become-together an altered and more

powerful body. This ground has been covered thoroughly above, but I wish to highlight

here how the various digital media to which the audience is subjected has a role in the

generation of affective intensities.

It also reminds us that bodies are multiple. In this case, the body of the

performance, or the assemblage that composes that body, is not individual. It is rather a
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composition of parts: theater, audience members, performers, screen, language events,

text, video projection, digital audio apparatuses, and so on. These things make up the

multiplicity that is the reading. But we are also reminded that the human body itself is

in fact a multiplicity that extends well beyond the humanistic confines of the flesh. This

is the posthuman subject to which Rosi Braidotti and Patricia MacCormack refer in their

writings. I find Braidotti’s definition of the posthuman subject particularly on point:

I define the critical posthuman subject within an eco-philosophy of

multiple belongings, as a relational subject constituted in and by

multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is

also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable.

Posthuman subjectivity is an embodied and embedded and hence partial

form of accountability, based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality

and hence community building. (49)

The ethical and political implications of rethinking the body in this way, made apparent

in the way the Black Took Collective incorporates digital media into their performances,

are significant here. There is a becoming-machine at work, and it is readily apparent.

“As Deleuze emphasizes, what we get here is not the relationship of a metaphor (the old

boring topic of "machines replacing humans"), but that of metamorphosis, of the

"becoming-machine" of a man” (Žižek “Organs” 16). This is a subjective auto-poesis that

involves becoming with technology, of technogenesis, as Katherine Hayles calls it

(Hayles 13). In other words, it is no longer possible (if it ever was) to isolate the human

body from technology. Here is Braidotti again:

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Contemporary machines are no metaphors, but they are engines or devices

that both capture and process forces and energies, facilitating

interrelations, multiple connections, and assemblages. They stand for

radical relationality and delight as well as productivity.

The ‘becoming-machine’ understood in this specific sense indicates and

actualizes the relational powers of a subject that is no longer in a dualistic

frame, but bears a privileged bond with multiple others and merges with

one’s technologically mediated planetary environment. (92)

Technology, then, is not so much an extension of the body, as Marshall McLuhan so

famously stated – or at least it is not only and extension of the body. For McLuhan, the

human was still at the center of the ontological picture. But as a number of current

thinkers (including Braidotti and MacCormack, but also including Eugene Thacker,

Nicholas Rose and others) have pointed out, we are not distinct from technology, and

technology is not distinct from us. In fact, our understandings of both ourselves and

technology are entirely dependent upon each other. Computer modeling has enabled us

to unlock and understand the genetic makeup of the body. Human memory is informing

machine memory. Human memory is being transferred to digital storage devices, and

digital memory is beginning to be stored in living organisms.28 The once apparent

28
In a 2012 article, George Church, Yuan Gao and Sriram Kosuri published a paper in
the journal Science documenting an experiment in which they encoded 70 billion copies
of Dr. Church’s book, which contained 53,426 words, 11 JPG images, and one JavaScript
program, on DNA (Church, Gao and Kosuri) – on a miniscule bit of genetic material.
While the expected life of a current digital storage medium is about five years, DNA
storage is remarkably stable and can last some 3.5 billion years. And space is not really a
problem either. Using the method they invented, one million gigabits of information can
be stored per cubic millimeter. (Leo)
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borders between human bodies and technological bodies are revealing themselves to be

much more false than we once imagined.

I’d like to revisit Cathy Park Hong’s observation that a number of Black poets,

including the members of the BTC, are creating “cyborg enunciations” as “they are

building a new, dissonant futurism, treating poetry as rank growth as it punctures the

dying medium of print via performance, video, or audio recordings” (253). Hong’s use of

the term “cyborg” to articulate a kind of alternative subjectivity brings to mind Donna

Haraway’s 1983 essay (published in 1991 in her book Simians, Cyborgs and Women) “A

Cyborg Manifesto,” in which Haraway narrates the myth of the cyborg, “a hybrid of

machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”

(Haraway 149), in order to begin to dismantle the borders that have traditionally

appeared to exist between human and animal, human and technology, and the physical

and non-physical. For Haraway, the cyborg is a metaphor for a person who is both

organic and machine, who is of the present (“creature of social reality”) and of the future

(“creature of fiction”). In this early essay on the subject, she identifies the political value

of considering the body as a cyborg, for “[t]he cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our

politics” (150). She points out that rethinking the body can, in a certain sense, remake

the body. That is why she stresses the fact that the “cyborg” is both of the lived social

reality and of fiction.

Being in the present, the “creature of social reality,” indicates a genuine

engagement with the reality that is the present. A body in the present is subject to the

reality of that body, the “meaning” that is signified by that body. And the Black body is

particularly laden with meaning in our current reality. It is the body that is the target of
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oppression, repression and suppression in our world. One need only read a newspaper

or watch television to see that white police officers disproportionately use force against

people of color, people of color are disproportionately incarcerated, people of color are

disproportionately unemployed or underemployed – this list can go on. It’s no secret

that we continue to live in a global society that is unabashedly racist. This is real, this is

true, and this is now.

The cyborg body, on the other hand, is not only subject to the real, true, and now,

for it is also a body of fiction. For Haraway, the fictive aspect of the cyborg is about re-

thinking the body. It is about possibility. I’d like to leave the word “cyborg” behind here,

and return to the language I’ve used throughout this chapter. “Cyborg,” it seems to me,

though very useful and evocative for Haraway in the late 20th century, today seems to

almost trivialize multiplicity and posthuman subjectivity; it has an aura of camp.

Indeed, Haraway’s “cyborg myth” is today’s lived reality. When animal cloning is

commonplace, when digital technology is being integrated into fleshy bodies on a

regular basis, when computer programs reveal the actual genetic composition of the

human, when the code that defines human can be read, manipulated, and hacked, when

ones and zeros are stored in DNA, then the myth begins to reveal itself to be, in fact, the

actual conditions of existence.

The Black Took Collective’s use of digital media emphasizes the mediated nature

of the body, the body remediated in other media, and other media remediated in the

dividual body in a constant recursive flow, a feedback loop; the experience of the

performers bodies and the digital representations of their being folded back upon

themselves is one of the most significant and foregrounded aspects of the performance.
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There are fleshy bodies on stage with digital voices. There are mediated representations

of the performers bodies on the screens. Their bodies become screens, reflecting the

remediated self through a complex interface. Masks (of Justin Bieber, for example)

remediate the bodies again. The screens interact with the flesh below them, revealing

the many nodes in a complex, ever-changing assemblage.

Haraway’s idea of the multiple body being in part a “creature of fiction” is also a

relevant way of thinking about potential. By creatively rethinking the human (dividual)

body, we provide the space for becoming. By accepting that we are always both living in

our current social relation, and simultaneously in the realm of fiction, we allow

ourselves to be remade in no existing image, to continue to be remade, over and over

again in perpetuity. Both the multiple body of the human and the multiple body of a

social group or community provide a way for us to see the body as something in motion,

not as something that is as it has always been; we can see both human bodies and

collective bodies as assemblages, as complexes of flows of relational energy whose

capture and stability are in many respects illusory.

The simultaneity of the social reality of the body and the realization of potential

in the virtual is crucial here. The real body, as we understand it, has access to intensity,

to the virtual, through affective response. Affect allows for a realization of immanent,

creative potential, and the flesh in our social reality demands activity, for “our

becomings must be more than just affectuation through the power of material thought.

We have to get up, get out, and do” (MacCormack 130). And this is what the Black Took

Collective is doing. Their performances, in the space of the poetry reading, are tactical

actions with the express purpose of altering the reality of the performers, the audience,
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and by extension, those with whom the audience members are in contact. Their

performances demonstrate processes of becoming (minoritarian, together, machine)

and expose audiences to the intensities of the virtual (affect) – to their own potential for

becoming.

The Black Took Collective, in their desire to “move beyond normative aesthetic

possibilities” (Call) and to disrupt the “legitimate” poetry world, the expectations

associated with “Black poetry,” and the codified academic poetry reading, have

successfully created a performance style that both acknowledges the very real experience

of the Black body in a contemporary, racist society – acknowledges the need to change

that society – and provides an example of a way to do it.

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Chapter IV

Practice-Based Research in Literary Studies: Poemedia 2.0 and The Denver

Poetry Map

This is where artist-researchers take us – to where

we’ve never been, to see what we’ve never seen.
- Graeme Sullivan, “Making Space”

The preceding three chapters all focus on breakage in poetry, breakage in the

form of ephemerality, glitch, and de-performance. This chapter veers from that

trajectory. Here I discuss a kind of break in that, one could say, I am advocating for

greater inclusion of practice-based research in literary studies. If, as I have argued

elsewhere in this dissertation, breakage is a disruption in an apparent continuity, then

expanding the ways in which research is conducted in traditional English departments is

certainly breaking that continuity.

I begin by discussing practice-based research generally. I define it as research

conducted by a creative-practitioner that is centered around praxis. The resulting

research, often presented in the form of a creative artifact, contributes new knowledge

in ways that would not be possible otherwise. I discuss resistance that many creative-

practitioners encounter in the academy when they wish to generate new knowledge via

practice-based research, and I cite a number of scholars who consider their own

practice-based work a “radical challenge” to “established methods of knowledge

production” (Kershaw 123); they consider their methods of working disruptive to the
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continual reproduction of the same kind of knowledge. In our present digital, networked

condition, new ways of producing knowledge are necessary.

Next, I explore practice-based research within literary studies. I argue that most

English departments in the U.S. and Canada are already acquainted with practice-based

work in that creative writing courses and programs are a significant part of their

departments. M.F.A. and creative Ph.D. programs have demonstrated the value of

focusing on praxis rather than product and have shed light upon the ways in which

literary scholars understand and interpret texts. However, I am interested in a wider use

of practice-based research in English departments. Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk

have identified four sub-categories that I find useful in thinking about the kinds of

research that can be done: ‘research-for-creation,’ ‘research-from-creation,’ ‘creative

presentations of research,’ and finally ‘creation-as-research’” (15). I briefly discuss each

of these and provide a couple of examples of the kind of literary work that might be done

in each.

The rest of this chapter is divided into two parts, each of which focuses on a

practice-based research project I have undertaken while pursuing my Ph.D. in the

English department at the University of Colorado. The first is Poemedia 2.0, a poetry

and digital media installation, and the second is The Denver Poetry Map, an online,

interactive map on which poems are pinned to very specific locations that the poet has

identified. The two projects are very different; each addresses unique problems and has

unique outcomes.

Poemedia 2.0 extends a number of issues I have written about throughout this

dissertation. As I will discuss in more detail below, I made a concerted effort to

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incorporate and emphasize ephemerality, glitch and de-performance into the making

and presentation of the piece. For example, my collaborator and I applied a layering

technique of sound files that was very much inspired by Jhave’s “Mups.” We stacked

sound files on top of other sound files until the entire soundscape in the piece began to

glitch. The individual sound files – spoken text, music, sounds of nature, etc. – became

progressive less legible until they were only glitched noise. We, the performers/artists,

and the audience members, experienced the provoked glitches together. By provoking

glitches as a remix tactic in a practice-based piece, we were able to better understand the

ways in which glitch can function as a compositional tool; we were able to observe

audience members’/readers’ responses to the glitch as it occurred (as it ran on ‘human

wetware’); and we were able to better understand the ways in which research can inform

practice and vice-versa. The understanding gained through praxis is unique, and it adds

to and expands upon the more traditional research that I have conducted in the

preceding pages.

Likewise, The Denver Poetry Map addresses research questions in a way that can

only be done through praxis. For instance, one might begin with the question, “How

does poetry relate to space?” Traditional modes of scholarship may produce some

valuable outcomes, but they will not provide the researcher with the kind of information

that will come from practice. The Denver Poetry Map project has provided me with a

platform upon which a large-scale collaboration can take place. I was able to essentially

collaborate with over forty poets on an investigation of the research question I posed

above. One need not read a paper to understand the findings; instead one can look at the
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map itself and read the poems that are attached to specific places. There is a

demonstration, in the artifact, of the new knowledge that it helped to produce.

I write about both of these projects in much more detail below. My hope is that

they will serve as examples of practice-based paths that might add to and expand upon

the methods of research that are currently the norm in English departments. Although I

strongly believe each artifact can serve as a contribution to literary studies in itself, I

have organized each section according to the guidelines that Linda Candy has outlined

for doctoral theses at the Creativity & Cognition Studios, University of Technology,

Sydney. This outline includes an introduction, a state of the art review, discussion of

methodology and new studies, results and conclusions. My hope is that these two

projects can serve as examples of practice-based work that can help to “move beyond

prevailing attitudes, assumptions and assurances” ( Sullivan 62) in the current ways

research is conducted and presented within the context of literary studies.

What is Practice-Based Research?

Practice-based research (PBR), as the name suggests, places creative practice at

the center of the production of new knowledge. I’m using the term here to refer

generally to a family of practice-centered research activities, none of which fit neatly

into long-established paradigms associated with qualitative or quantitative research in

the university. The procedures, goals, and evaluation of practice-based research often

necessarily differ from those of traditionally produced academic research. In PBR,

“there is an unequivocal creative impulse that is a critical starting point in looking

beyond what is known,” and there is also an understanding “that traditional systems for

knowledge that rely on probable outcomes or plausible interpretations cannot fully

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respond to the challenge of new interpretive possibilities” (Sullivan 62). Creative-

practitioners – artists, writers, performers – are generally the ones conducting research,

sometimes alone, often in collaboration with others in their field, sometimes with others

in entirely different disciplines. Much current work in digital humanities, for example,

involves collaborations between computer scientists and researchers in the humanities,

and these interdisciplinary collaborations have proven to be quite fruitful (Engel and

Thain, Argamon and Olsen).

Creative-practitioners, working within research institutions, have long believed

that the outcomes of their creative work, outcomes that often include the creative

artifact as a significant aspect of their research, could contribute greatly to academic

discourse and knowledge production. They have worked over the past couple of decades

to integrate the idea of practice-based research into the academy:

partly for political purposes within higher education, research and other

environments, to explain, justify and promote their activities, and to argue

– as forcefully as possible in an often unreceptive environment – that they

are as important to the generation of knowledge as more theoretically,

critically or empirically based research methods. ( Smith and Dean 2)

Those wishing to participate in practice-based research often struggle to explain and

justify their activities. Although PBR has been a part of a number of graduate programs

in Europe and Australia for years, there are only a few Ph.D. programs that are

exclusively practice-based in the U.S., and they tend to be in art, media or design. Daniel

Grant writes that “the United States is well behind the United Kingdom and Europe,

where approximately 40 such programs have been in operation for years” (Grant). For
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creative-practitioners and researchers wanting to engage in practice-based research

within more traditional research programs there is an even greater challenge. According

to Brad Haseman and Daniel Mafe, the institutional expectations that are imposed upon

practice-based researchers create an environment in which it is difficult to even begin

projects. Funding bodies, for instance, require proposed timelines, research outlines,

methodological approaches, purposes of study, and so on, requirements that run

counter to what are often more open-ended, playful approaches to entering into and

engaging with a research project. “[F]or artists and creative practitioners seeking to join

the community of researchers this environment can seem unsympathetic and dismissive

of their contribution” (Haseman and Mafe 212). The fact is, across the university,

research is expected to look very much as it has for decades. Existing paradigms

perpetuate, and existing systems maintain themselves. All the while, the very paradigms

and systems that are maintaining themselves, and by extension the university as a

whole, are becoming less valuable and less viable. Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues in

Planned Obsolescence that the university must reconceive the way things are done if it

wants to maintain its cultural importance. She writes that “[c]hanging our technologies,

our ways of doing research, and our modes of production and distribution of the results

of that research are all crucial to the continued vitality of the academy” (10).

Researchers themselves need to begin to think differently about their work and how it

should be conducted and presented. Practice-based research offers a much needed

challenge to the status quo in academia.

Certainly, a number of creative-practitioners and advocates for practice-based

research consider their practice a kind of necessary intervention into the standard
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workings in the academy. Ben Kershaw, for instance, writes that “[w]hen the challenge

of ‘artistic research’ meets established hierarchies of knowledge, the result might match

that mythical moment in physics when an irresistible force meets an immovable object:

an inconceivable disturbance” (106), and that PBR can offer a “radical challenge” to

“established methods of knowledge production” (123). Likewise, Graeme Sullivan has

observed that among creative-practitioners working in academia, “there is acceptance

that traditional systems for knowledge that rely on probable outcomes or plausible

interpretations cannot fully respond to the challenge of new interpretive possibilities”

(62). These “traditional systems for knowledge” must be interrogated and disrupted if

indeed we value the promise of “new interpretive possibilities” within the academy.

Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk argue that “[r]eserach-creation [their term for

practice-based research] may act as an innovative form of cultural analysis that troubles

the book, the written essay, or the thesis, as the only valid means to express ideas,

concepts and the results of experiments” (7). I cite these four scholars because they are

representative of a growing number of researchers who feel that traditional modes of

scholarship are not, by themselves, as effective as they once were. In an age in which

digital media and networked communication are becoming dominant features of our

daily lives, we need to reconsider the ways in which we develop new knowledge.

***

This chapter is concerned specifically with the use of PBR within the context of

literary study, particularly as a way to investigate the relationships between literary texts

and the media upon with those texts are instantiated. However, I must note that, in a

sense, English departments across the U.S. and Canada are already intimately
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acquainted with PBR, even if the research produced is not tacitly acknowledged as

contributing to the production of literary understanding. I am referring here to creative

writing programs. M.F.A. and Ph.D. programs in creative writing, now so ubiquitous in

English departments, are, by definition, doing practice-based work. As Hazel Smith and

Roger Dean write, “Literary studies… has been shaken up by the inception of creative

writing programmes which put the emphasis on process rather than products, writers as

much as readers” (35). I’m not entirely sure I agree that advocates of traditional literary

scholarship are “shaken up;” creative writing programs are often treated as entirely

separate sub-departments within English departments. Those who evaluate research in

literary studies still generally expect it to look as it always has. However, anyone who

has a foot in both camps, so to speak, in creative writing and in literary studies, can

attest to the fact that the creative writing gives one a unique understanding of literary

texts. The more intently one works on their own creative literary works, the more one

learns about composition and creative processes, the better one can interpret and

understand others’ creative work.

I find Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk’s article “Research-Creation:

Intervention, Analysis and ‘Family Resemblances’” particularly helpful in thinking

through the ways in which practice-based research (they call it “research-creation”) is

being employed. They “elucidate different articulations of research and creation:

‘research-for-creation,’ ‘research-from-creation,’ ‘creative presentations of research,’

and finally ‘creation-as-research” (15). I’d like to borrow these categories as a way to

think through the various ways researchers are engaging in practice-based work in

literary studies.
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“Research-for-creation:” one conducts research so one can then produce the

artifact. This could include anything from conducting research for a novel to

investigating various existing software systems that one might use in a digital

installation.

“Research-from-creation:” the work itself generates research data. This might

include data documenting user response to a particular work. One might, for example,

design a narrative game and collect data based upon choices the player makes within the

game. The presentation of this research may take the form of a more traditional

academic paper.

“Creative presentations of research:” This is “the presentation of traditional

academic research in a creative fashion” (Chapman and Sawchuk 18). A recent article in

Sunoiksis profiles a Ph.D. candidate who defended his dissertation at Columbia in 2014.

He presented his dissertation, which was a study of visual thinking, in the format of a

comic book (Patel), an entirely logical and justifiable way to present such work. This is

an example of a creative presentation of research. On the HASTAC website, Ph.D.

candidates utilize discussion boards to discuss their various approaches to digital

dissertations. It makes sense, some argue, that if one is writing about web-based art, for

example, to write a web-based, interactive dissertation.

“Creation-as-research.” In this case, “knowledge is produced as creative work, not

simply through their analysis and interpretation” (21). This is the most pure form of

practice-based research as it doesn’t usually rely upon traditional paradigms in any

stage of its production. The artifact here is the “form of intervention, contributing to

knowledge in a profoundly different way than the academic norm” (21), and it is doing
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so because the knowledge being contributed could not be expressed accurately in any

way other than in the form of the artifact. One might, for example, create software that

allows for a novel way to produce narratives across various media. One might create an

installation that utilizes twitter feeds to generate poetry in an architectural space. The

products of creation-as-research could be printed objects, literary texts, audio pieces,

performances, installations, websites, software platforms, film – the list is virtually

endless.

Of course, these categories, as articulated by Chapman and Sawchuk, are not

isolable, and most projects include elements of more than one category (21).

***

As I mention above, my interest lies in exploring the possibilities of practice-

based work in English departments. Traditional literary scholarship continues to be

fruitful and useful, but it also tends to (often) ignore the media-specificity of literary

texts. Traditional literary scholarship is predicated upon working within the medium of

the codex. The printed book is so much a part of literary scholarship, in fact, that many

scholars don’t acknowledge the text’s connection to the medium at all. I am greatly

influenced by N. Katherine Hayles, who writes, “the physical form of the literary artifact

always affects what the words (and other semiotic components) mean” (Writing

Machines 25). Indeed, the way the body interacts with the medium upon which a given

text is instantiated contributes to and determines, in part, the text’s meaning.

Practice-based research in literary studies tends to foreground the media

specificity of a given text. It explores and examines a text’s materiality in ways that can

help us better understand the ways in which a text can be read or written. It can help us
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experience a text in new ways, ways that may reveal aspects of its meaning beyond those

accessible via traditional scholarship.

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Part 1 – Poemedia 2.0

I begin this discussion of Poemedia 2.0 with a description of the project and the

technologies that my collaborator and I used to create it. In the “State of the Art

Review,” I look at John Cayley’s work in the Cave at Brown University, at Romy Achituv

and Camille Utterback’s Text Rain, and at Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between

Page and Screen as examples of practice-based work that share certain concerns with

Poemedia 2.0. For example, Text Rain and Cayley’s work in the Cave are both pieces

that emphasize the materiality of text in a space designed to be occupied by multiple

bodies at once. Between Page and Screen interrogates the relationship between print

and digital media and highlights the fact that the user/reader’s interpretation of text is

in large part dependent upon the medium upon which the text is instantiated. In the

“Methodology/New Studies” section, I discuss the fact that Poemedia 2.0 is, in large

part, a result of the research conducted in the previous three chapters of this

dissertation. The three kinds of breakage that I address – ephemerality, glitch, and de-

performance – are explored through praxis here. I conclude this discussion of Poemedia

2.0 in “Results/Conclusions” with a look at how the piece challenges the notions of

borders between individuals and technology and how it foregrounds the materiality of

poetic text. I also discuss the ways that the research I conducted earlier informed the

creation of the piece. Finally, I look at how Poemedia 2.0 might prove a useful model for

practice-based research and for practice-based pedagogy within literary studies.

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Description of the Project

Poemedia 2.0 was a multimedia art and poetry installation and live performance

that took place in the Atlas Black Box Theatre on the campus of the University of

Colorado Boulder on December 5th and 6th, 2014. It was a continuation and

development of a project my collaborator, Erin Costello, and I installed in the Black Box

Theatre in 2010. In its initial iteration, Poemedia was a digital poetry on paper

installation and live performance that was composed of a sculptural cloud of poems

printed on paper, all hung in the center of the space at varying heights and serving as

the projection surface for video that was being manipulated with VJ software. The video

worked in concert with (or in opposition to) a soundscape composed of a collage of

spoken text, music, nature sounds, etc., all being mixed live in response to audience

reaction, the video, and the artists’ whims. By engaging with the printed poem in that

media saturated environment, Poemedia called into question the definitions of digital

poetry and the screen. It asked, “What is the role of printed poetry in an age in which we

are existing in a constant barrage of digital information?”

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Figure 22 Inside Poemedia 2.0.

Poemedia 2.0 continued to explore these themes, but with a few new layers of

audience/reader interaction. Projected text now included lines written by the

audience/reader, and the audio background included the voices of those exploring the

space. Now the audience member/reader was not only a screen upon which our video

was projected, he or she was part creator of that content.

Poemedia was a space in which human bodies came together with a shared

purpose, in which poetry existed both on the page and in the air, in which the borders

between the individual human body, the collective human body, the textual body, and

the digital body were blurred – the porousness of those borders was, we hope, in some

small way, revealed.

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When an audience member walked into the space, the first thing they

encountered was the sound, which they heard before they entered the curtained off

installation area. The sound, which I mixed live throughout the performance, was

composed of live internet streams of talk radio feeds, mp3s of various current and

historic radio commercials, recorded music, recordings of poets reading their poems,

“sounds of nature” generators, and so on. I had one laptop which handled the live

streams and a second laptop running a DJ software called Mixxx. That machine was

loaded with an array of pre-recorded music and other audio, all linked to the Mixxx

platform. The software allowed for fading between two tracks, playing two tracks

simultaneously, and for altering the speed and direction of an audio track. I also had an

additional mp3 player that was loaded with many more audio files. All of this was fed

into a mixing board so that I could control, or “play” the levels.

I also managed the audience audio feed. Across the space from where Erin and I

were set up, there was a platform upon which was a microphone on a stand, a music

stand, and stacks of books of poetry. Audience members were instructed to speak or

read into the microphone. The text could either be an existing text or something

improvised. The feed from that microphone fed into a looping device and a digital multi-

effects unit, both of which I was manipulating in real time. I captured some portion of

the audience member’s voice onto the looping device, processed it to varying degrees –

from a conservative application of digital effects to manipulating the audio so much it

resulted in complete illegibility – and mixed it into the rest of the soundscape.

The complete effect was an ever-shifting soundscape made up of spoken text, live

newscasts, music, and various other sounds. At certain times, there was only a single
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track running – a Chopin nocturne or the sound of falling rain. At other times, there was

absolute cacophony – several voices speaking, two contrasting pieces of music, the

distorted voice of an audience member speaking a line that is looping over and over.

This was the sound.

Figure 123 A view from within Poemedia 2.0.

When the audience members entered the space in which the work is installed,

they saw approximately 400 poems printed on the front and back of white, 8 ½ by 11

cardstock, hanging from the grid above by nylon line. The poems were hung at varying

heights, from about 2 to 7 feet above the floor. Together, they created a kind of

sculptural cloud that took up much of the physical space of the theatre.

The printed poems, collectively, acted as a screen for a video throw that Erin was

manipulating live using Resolume, a popular VJ and video mapping software. Resolume
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allows the user to live-mix video files much the way a DJ software like Mixxx allows one

to mix audio files. Two files can be loaded at once, and the user can use a fader to shift

from one to the other and to mix the two together. The software also allows the user to

apply various effects to the videos being projected. Four high-quality video projectors

are simultaneously projecting the video feed onto the poems from four different

directions. This results in the poems, which hang freely from one point and rotate on

their own, always catching the video throw.

The videos that were in the array were chosen based upon two primary factors:

color and detail. Small details allow for more compelling visuals on the individual

poems and for more variation across the installation. Bright, saturated colors are also

significantly more compelling. Most of the videos were captured by Erin using a video

camera and an iPhone, however she also incorporated multiple found videos,

particularly videos that include text. The graphic qualities of the text, when projected

upon the printed text, created a kind of palimpsest, a layering that highlighted the

constant processes of remediation that occur with text in digital media.

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Figure 24 Part of our workstation for Poemedia 2.0.

Additionally, with the implementation of some ActionScript within the Resolume

framework, we were able to type text into the video feed and that text could be

manipulated similarly to the rest of the video. We printed out slips of paper upon which

an audience member could write anything they’d like – a line of verse, a thought, a

favorite quote. We would then incorporated their text into the video feed, once again

providing an opportunity for the audience to be a part of the creation of the piece.

Audience members could observe the whole piece from without, taking it all in

generally, so to speak. However, they were encouraged to enter the installation, to walk

into it, through it, to read the poems, to see the colorful pixels move across the printed

words. When they entered the piece, they quite literally became a part of it. Their bodies

became part of the screen; the video images were projected on both the poems and the

people.
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This piece addressed a number of questions having to do with the relationship

between text, digital media, and the body. How, for instance, does the experience of

reading print-based text change when one is enveloped within a barrage of media (a

situation not terribly unlike the one we experience in our daily lives on a regular basis)?

Can an artwork demonstrate the porousness of the borders between the body and digital

media? Between a text and its medium? Between individual bodies?

I asked these questions by intentionally employing the three modes of “breaking”

poetry that have been discussed elsewhere in this dissertation. First, the piece is very

aware of its own ephemerality, which should be obvious in that it is an

installation/performance and is meant to be an ephemeral experience. But beyond that,

the audience, by being given the opportunity to include their own spoken or written text

in the installation, had the experience of seeing their poetry exist, be a part of something

larger, and then disappear. Text, in the context of Poemedia, is a performative event, not

some static manifestation of the way things supposedly are. Second, the piece employed

glitch. Glitch, as outlined in Chapter Two, is the aleatoric product of an error that occurs

in the context of appropriation and remix. The glitch must necessarily be a surprise to

the human sensorium, it must “run on human wetware,” producing an affective

experience for the viewer/reader that is not recognizable as an emotional response, but

as a pre-conscious experience of an intensity (Massumi 221). And finally, it employs

notions of de-performance, or live performance that utilizes digital media in order to

cloud or subvert expected methods of communicating information. In the case of

Poemedia, we perform appropriated media using VJ and DJ software until the

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audience’s experience is affective, in the way I mentioned above – a “non-conscious

experience of intensity…a moment of unformed and unstructured potential” (Shouse).

The result, I hope, was that those who visited Poemedia 2.0, through the

experience of affect, gained at least an awareness of the questions the piece addressed, if

not perhaps some answers. For instance, it was my intention that the audience members

come away from the installation with a new understanding of the materiality of poetic

text, and by extension, of all text. They will have had a more complete understanding of

the fact that a text must be instantiated within a given medium, and that medium both

conveys meaning itself and limits the way a text can be written and read.

I also hoped those who experience the installation, those who chose to enter it,

realized their place in it – the fact that they are a part of it. I wanted them to feel the

constructedness of the borders that separate individual bodies from the technologies

that are so intimately a part of their lives, and I wanted them to experience the

constructedness of the borders that individuate bodies. When multiple individuals

entered the space, it was my hope that they have a shared, affective experience, and that

that experience helped them to realize their collective potential.

State of the Art Review

I am indebted to a number of artists and theorists for producing work that has

proved foundational to my own. I find John Cayley’s notion of “media-constituted

diegetic worlds,” a theoretical formulation that comes out of his and his students’ work

in the Cave at Brown University, particularly helpful when it comes to thinking about

Poemedia. “The Cave,” is an immersive media space in which there are two projectors
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pointing at each of three walls and a floor (eight in total). The two images of text that are

projected onto each given surface are offset a bit, and polarized glasses are provided so

that the spectator/reader can experience the projection in three-dimensions (Cayley

201). He explicates the term I’m referring to thus:

Diegesis here is used in a manner that is related to the way it is used in

narrative and film theory, but the usage is extended to refer to worlds of

cultural practice. I say that these diegetic worlds are “media-constituted”

which, as outlined above, implies that they are a combination of

technology, device, prosthesis on the one hand and what I’m content to

call “style” on the other. As a serviceable sketch of what I mean by style, I

am also content with Barthes’ far from exhaustive but suggestive listing:

“schemes, colours, graphisms, gestures, expressions, arrangements of

elements” (“The Photographic Message” 18). When technology and style

work together as media, they create a diegetic world. (209)

The expression “media-constituted diegetic world” is a useful way to conceptualize

Poemedia 2.0 as both material and as an interpretable unity – it incorporates various

media, multiple instances of language being remediated, along with literal and abstract

video imagery and sounds into a constant, consistently integrated literary artwork.

Where Poemedia 2.0 differs from the work in the Cave and from a number of

other literary art installations that preceded it (including Romy Achituv and Camille

Utterback’s Text Rain [1999], an interactive video installation in which the user sees

their own image on the screen, and letters fall onto the surfaces of the image – the user,

in a sense, “catches” the text and can then read it, or Noah Wardrup-Fruin, Camille
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Utterback, Clilly Castiglia and Nathan Wardrup-Fruin’s Talking Cure [2002], a piece in

which the user’s image is reconstructed in text) is in its explicit use and interrogation of

print-based poetry within a context of digital media. In Poemedia, the printed poems

are crucial elements of the “diegetic world” of the piece.

Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s augmented reality book Between Page and

Screen (2012) is an example of another work that, like Poemedia, interrogates the

relationship between print and digital media. The book contains only simple, black and

white geometric patterns. The user’s computer’s webcam recognizes these graphics, and

interactive text appears on the screen along with a video image of the user. The text is

sometimes kinetic, and other times it is static in the sense that it is not animated,

though it is locked to the image of the geometric pattern that triggers it and moves as

the image captured with the webcam moves.

The text is epistolary, a series of letters between the characters Page and Screen;

their struggles against each other are only matched by their absolute reliance upon each

other. “Page, don’t cage me!” Screen says at one point. But the purpose of the piece is to

demonstrate its own kind of diegetic world. The piece is only a piece when the printed

medium is brought into relation with the digital, and all of it runs on “text’s fleshy

network,” as Borsuk calls it in the book. It is “a beautiful attempt to enact the serious

playfulness of language, reading, otherness, the otherness of reading, and of language

and reading interacting with the 21st century inhibitions of text” (Orme). The body, the

printed media, and the computer are all necessary components if one wants the text to

run.
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Between Page and Screen is not an installation, of course. It is, however, an

example of practice-based research that shares a number of concerns with Poemedia

2.0. Bouse developed an augmented reality program that works in conjunction with

Borsuk’s poetry and interrogates the relationship of printed text, machine language, and

human interaction. The book is, in this respect, an example of research-as-creation –

the knowledge produced is demonstrated in the object itself. It is about the ways in

which print, digital media, and the human body are all interrelated, all dependent upon

each other, all a part of a larger whole. Between relies upon a kind of narrative through-

line based upon our traditional relationship to the codex – we start at the beginning and

move, page by page, to the end. This haptic relationship to print is entirely media

specific – non-linear narrative is a hallmark of digital textuality – we’re used to that. It

feels somehow strange to engage with a book in a traditional, linear way while reading

the pixelated text on the computer’s screen. We become aware of each medium’s unique

relationship to our body, and we understand that there is a connection between the

media and the reader that is necessary for any “meaning” to arise.

Poemedia 2.0, on the other hand, is consistently and consciously non-linear. The

reader wanders through the hanging poems and reads as much or as little as interests

them, in a completely random order. Each experience within the piece is unique, but it is

also a shared experience. This brings up another crucial difference between Borsuk’s

piece and Poemedia: Poemedia is designed to create a space within which a group of

individuals have a shared, affective experience, where they can come to understand they

are a part of something larger than themselves, that individual bodies constitute larger
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communal bodies. Between Page and Screen, of course, is not concerned with these

things. It rather emphasizes the individuating nature of so many literary experiences.

Methodology/New Studies

When conceiving Poemedia 2.0, we decided to build upon Poemedia by

integrating the research concerns I address throughout the rest of this dissertation into

the installation itself. The areas of research that we attempted to integrate, in praxis, are

ephemerality, glitch, and de-performance. It seemed to me that the Poemedia project

lent itself to this methodological approach as we were already, in a certain sense,

employing these poetic and artistic approaches, we just weren’t doing it intentionally.

Initially, we were more concerned with addressing a simple question: What is the role of

printed poetry in a media-saturated environment? This question resulted in the initial

iteration of the piece.

As we began to re-think the piece for its second iteration, we decided to

consciously apply, or highlight, the poetic strategies of ephemerality, glitch, and de-

performance to the work to, essentially, see if it could be done. If it could be done, we

wanted to see how these concepts played out within the work itself, and how they may

have affected the audience.

First, we wanted to explore the possibilities of creating a piece that made its own

ephemerality a central part of its poetics. Because the piece is, in part, a live

performance, it is, obviously, ephemeral. It has a limited lifespan. In the case of its most

recent iteration, it was built to last two evenings. Of course, the question of archiving
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came up. How ought we proceed in archiving the piece? Should we archive it at all? If

indeed we are engaging its ephemerality as an important component of the work itself,

perhaps the best thing to do is to allow it to be a unique experience for only those who

were there.

Based upon the work I did in Chapter One of this dissertation, we came to the

conclusion that we could archive the piece via what Hedstrom and Perricci call

“surrogates,” or “representations of some sort that stand in for original documents”

(32). The term “surrogates” is distinct from the more general term “documents” in that

it inherently acknowledges the piece’s absence. We compiled images and video of the

piece that we felt provided an accurate representation of what the piece was, and we

edited the video, along with interview footage of the two of us, into a short documentary

film about the piece. The film serves as a surrogate in the sense that it is available should

anyone in the future care to learn about Poemedia 2.0,29 but it is abundantly clear that it

is not Poemedia. It is a document about it. Furthermore, the film discusses the

importance of embracing and exploiting the work’s brief life.

To reiterate, I claimed in Chapter One that embracing a digital literary work’s

ephemerality can do a couple of things, politically. I argue that an artist can act to resist

dominant assemblages of power by not forcing a work to do what it is “supposed to do,”

by not trying to make it (appear to) last forever. I cite the political theorist Paolo Virno,

who claims that:

29
However, it should be clear, the film itself, shot on digital video and uploaded to the
web, is an ephemeral artifact. It is likely that in a few short years the film will no longer
be viewable. Without the continual intervention of an archivist – either us or someone
else – it will cease to be an accessible document. I’m fine with that.
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Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection

modifies the conditions within which the struggle takes place, rather than

presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon; it modifies

the context within which a problem has arisen, rather than facing this

problem by opting for one or the other of the provided alternatives. In

short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the

game and throws the adversary completely off balance. (70)

I am partial to this quote because it seems so clear and simple; engaging in a struggle

against something often reinforces that thing; by opting out of “supposed to do,” one

creates new possibilities, new ways of relating within a complex web of power relations.

By not participating in a system in which the artist is expected to strive for their work’s

canonization and for a work’s permanence, the artist is allowing their work to redefine

the relations that compromise oppressive or repressive power, to change the “rules of

the game.”

Rather, by making a piece about its evanescence, the artist can intensify its

effervescence. It becomes about the experience of the piece at a given moment in time,

perhaps a transformative one, and not about what how it is furthering some agenda held

by the artist or the institutions with which the work and the artists are associated.

Furthermore, we wanted to highlight Poemedia 2.0’s ephemerality for the

audience, to bring it to their attention, by allowing them to incorporate their own text

into the “diegetic world” of the piece. That text would last for a brief moment, then it

was gone. This was done in two distinct ways. First, audience members were given a slip

of paper upon which they could write anything they wanted. They handed it to Erin or
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me, and with the addition of a few simple lines of code, Erin could type the audience

member’s text into Resolume, the VJ software we were using to live-mix the video. The

text could be animated and treated with visual effects in an instant. Erin would run the

text for a few moments, then delete it. The author, or contributor, of the text would

experience the disappearance of their own words.

Figure 25 A slip of paper given to audience members who attended Poemedia 2.0. The text they wrote in the space

provided was inserted into the video projection.

A second way in which the audience was reminded of the ephemerality of the

piece was in the participatory audio portion of the piece. Opposite us, on the other side

of the installation, there was a platform upon which was a single microphone, a music

stand, and stacks of books. Audience members could step up to the microphone and

speak into it. They could read from one of the many books of poetry that were stacked all

around them, they could recite a poem from memory, they could make something up on

the spot – really they could say anything. When I noticed someone speaking into the

microphone, I could trigger a looping device to capture a couple of seconds to a couple

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of minutes of what they were saying. That captured audio would then repeat for as brief

or as long a period of time as I chose.

Once the audio was captured, I was able to “play” it. I could digitally adjust the

speed and direction at which the audio would be played back, and I could apply any

number of digital effects to it – digital delays and reverbs, pitch adjustments, and so on.

I would mix it into the rest of the soundscape, let it run for an improvised amount of

time, and then I would delete it. Although I did detect some anxiety among some

audience members with regard to their written text, I didn’t notice any here. Some

audience members asked us what was going to happen to the text they wrote down. It

seemed to be personal to them - important. We told them it would be incorporated into

the piece, then discarded. When the spoken text played and then was gone, however, the

audience members seemed to accept it disappearance without any concern.

The purpose of integrating audience generated text into Poemedia 2.0 was not

only to highlight its ephemerality, but perhaps more importantly, it also served to

provide an example of our interconnectedness and of the illusory nature of the borders

between individual subjects, between text and media, and between human and

technology. We didn’t want the audience to feel, as they may have while visiting the

initial iteration of Poemedia, that it was a work of art separate from them and their

experience. We wanted to highlight the fact that they were, quite literally, a part of the

piece, that they were a part of the diegetic world that was created in the space. Perhaps,

then, by extension, they might gain an awareness of how these connections extend

beyond the installation space, into the world beyond it.

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In addition to exploring the piece’s ephemerality, we wanted to provoke glitches

in the piece. A glitch is an error in a system, either provoked or captured. I’m

particularly interested in the notion of glitch as it applies to poetic text and in the

affective responses a reader might have to that glitch. In literature, I contend that the

result of a glitch is always aleatoric, whether the glitch was provoked or captured. It is a

kind of literary or artistic approach to remix. I look, in my chapter on glitch, at various

examples of poets who appropriate text and try to either capture or provoke errors in the

communication of that text, and therein lies the poetic intention of the remixed work.

I (and many others) make a distinction between a “glitchy” aesthetic and an

actual glitch. The former is not, really, glitch. The aesthetic associated with glitch came

about because of real glitches; artists heard errors in their digital audio files or saw

errors in the image or video files, all caused by an error in computer software or

hardware. The initial reaction to the glitch was one of a kind of shock, a physical

reaction to the product of the glitch. But the aesthetic associated with glitch art, now so

common in commercial design and popular culture, is not the actual glitch. As Nick Briz

and Curt Cloninger say:

A glitch is experienced when a human mis-expects one thing and winds up

with something else. Without hope, anticipation, and expectation, without

a sense of rightness and the way things are supposed to be, there is no

glitch. There are merely events in the world… The glitch happens when the

media runs (last mile) on human wetware. (16-17)

A glitch is not so much the error, it is the experience of the error. In Poemedia 2.0, we

made a concerted effort to provoke glitches in the sense I’ve outlined above. Our
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strategy was to juxtapose moments of relative stillness and comprehensibility with

moments wherein we push the amount and intensity of audio and video media to such

an extent that something would happen that neither we nor our audience was expecting

– communication would break. By intensifying the amount of sound, for instance, by

layering several live streams of talk radio with an Ornette Colman sax solo, a Hank

Williams song, a recording of Robert Frost reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy

Evening,” and the sounds of a rainstorm, we could gradually erase anything that related

to communication in any of the individual layers. Speech layered upon itself becomes

sound, pitch and timbre meet to produce new pitches and timbres, an incomprehensible

sound. The audience experience of the audio, in these moments, is an affective one. It

resonates autonomically, not intellectually.

In Chapter Two, the chapter in which I specifically discuss glitch, I write

extensively about the ways in which poets write software that provokes glitch, or allows

for the user to provoke a glitch, in audio files of spoken poetry by layering those files

until breakage occurs. What we did with the audio in Poemedia and Poemedia 2.0 is an

example of this kind of glitching.

The audience must “mis-expect” something, they must enter the situation with an

expectation of one thing and end up with something completely different. In the case of

Poemedia, they are, perhaps, expecting to read and relate to poetry as they have done in

the past. Perhaps they are expecting a kind of theme, a story – they are expecting a kind

of communication, even if that communication is “poetic,” whatever that means. When

the glitch occurs, when expectations are subverted, we are reminded that there is more
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to our world than what we experience on a surface level. There are other ways that

things can be.

Finally, we were interested in notions of what I am calling de-performance within

the context of Poemedia. This is a live performance that incorporates technology in such

a way as to generate an affective response in the audience. One might think of is as

exploring glitch and ephemerality, as outlined above, in a communal space. The shared

affective response of the audience to the performance allows for a new understanding of

how human beings relate to each other.

I return to Spinoza, a kind of theoretical foundation for this entire project, to

understand what happens when a group of people have a shared experience, and by

extension, a shared intention as a result of the performance. In his Ethics, he says, “if a

number of individuals concur in one action in such a way that all are simultaneously the

cause of one effect, then to this extent I consider all of them as one particular thing” (E

II, Def. 7). The individual bodies become a new, collective body when they share in

action.

This is what occurs in a de-performance. Very simply, a group of people arrive at

the performance space (theatre, gallery, public space – it doesn’t matter) with a certain

set of expectations. These expectations usually have to do with an expectation of the way

in which they will receive information, via language, image, or gesture. The performers,

using various media in addition to their corporeal bodies, subvert those expectations.

Instead of communicating meaning, the performers deform meaning, and what is

communicated is, as Brian Massumi says in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus:

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a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one

experimental state of the body to another and implying an augmentation

or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s

affection) is each such state considered as an encounter between the

affected body and a second, affecting, body… (xvi)

The “prepersonal intensity” to which he refers is affect – it is the virtual, the non-

codified realm of potential that is experienced by the body not as emotion but as

something that pre-exists emotion. And when bodies are together in physical space,

affect can be transmitted and shared between bodies.

Within the context of de-performance, the many individual audience members

will likely feel the significance of shared potential revealed by the glitch or break that de-

performance initiates. The surface-level artifice is broken, and the community that is

formed in the performance space becomes aware, together, that the surface is not all

there is, that there are alternative ways we can relate to each other, can identify

ourselves as subjects, and so on.

Poemedia didn’t really include live performers, at least not visibly, which is a

significant, constitutive element of de-performance. The performers I discuss in Chapter

3, members of the Black Took Collective, know this very well, and they exploit the body’s

presence in the performance. In the initial Poemedia, however, the audience member’s

bodies were the only bodies in the piece. As I mentioned above, the people in the

installation, because of the projection on their bodies, become a part of the work. The

boundaries between individual bodies and technology are blurred.

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In the first iteration of Poemedia, Erin and I were out of sight, up in a booth

overlooking the performance space. We observed the audience and adjusted the

intensity of the audio and video based upon what they were doing, how they were

interacting with each other and with the poems. We tried to affect them with our live

performance, but they never saw us, never really even knew we were there. In Poemedia

2.0, we decided to move from the booth to the floor just outside of the installation. We

wanted the audience to see us perform, to be able to watch us playing the audio and

video. We wanted them to know that this installation was also a live performance, and

we, like them, were just a part of the piece, not some power outside of it, controlling

everything. There is no outside of power, and we wanted to emphasize this.

Results/Conclusions

In addition to what I hope is a unique aesthetic and literary experience,

Poemedia 2.0 demonstrates the connection between people, a connection that power

often makes appear non-existent. The borders between individuals, between flesh and

silicone, between text and medium, and between text and the body are all shown to be

illusory, or at the very least, the illusory and constructed nature of these borders can be

made more apparent.

I applied the research on ephemerality, glitch, and de-performance that I

conducted throughout this dissertation to the creation of the piece, and by putting that

research into practice, a couple of things were revealed. Particularly, the research

provided a new way to think about composition. By embracing the piece’s ephemerality,

we shifted our focus from creating objects, images, and so on, to creating experiential
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moments. Thinking about glitch as a remix tactic allowed us a new way to consider the

use of sound in the piece, it encouraged us to layer sound to the point of absolute

breakage and illegibility. The moments in the piece in which the audio was glitching

were, in my opinion, the most effective moments of our performance. They were the

moments when affect, as I described it in Chapter Two, was most effectively generated.

Similarly, my exploration of de-performance in Chapter Three allowed us a kind of

freedom and playfulness in the way we performed the piece. We worked to confuse,

overwhelm, and move improvisationally from legibility to illegibility with the goal of

creating “vacuoles of non-communication,” moments during which the audience might

experience a kind of crack in the surface of lived reality, in expectations, in “supposed to

do.” The research provided a new way to think about making.

Furthermore, the piece allows us to engage with poetic text in some novel ways,

in some ways that might crucially alter our approach to reading and writing. I am

particularly interested in taking poetry out of books and out of the classroom, in part

because traditional approaches to research and pedagogy ignore the material nature of

poetic text. When one enters Poemedia 2.0, one cannot help but consider the fact that

text that is instantiated in digital media is fundamentally different than that instantiated

in print media. Also, one cannot help but notice that one’s interpretation of the text is

deeply influenced by the medium upon which it is instantiated and by the media that

surrounds it. We live a multi-media, networked existence, and to conduct research and

to teach poetry as if we don’t denies much of our lived reality. One could even argue that

denying much of our lived reality when it comes to studying and teaching poetry pushes

poetry closer to obscurity, or at the very least, to irrelevancy. It is crucial that we, as
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literary scholars, expand the ways in which we do research, adding practice-based

research methods to more traditional research methods. Poemedia 2.0 is an example of

the kind of work that I’d like to see more of in English departments, where existing

notions of textuality tend to often go unchallenged.

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Part 2 – The Denver Poetry Map

In this section, I begin by describing The Denver Poetry Map, its interface, and

the way it functions. I will discuss the impetus behind creating the map and the research

questions that drove its creation. Next, in the State of the Art Review, I discuss a couple

of online “counter maps” that are doing some similar work, and I will discuss some ways

in which The Denver Poetry Map differs from them. Specifically, I will look at the NY

Sound Map, a 2006 digital mapping project in which audio files of sounds recorded at

unique locations in the city are pinned to an interactive map, and The Toronto Poetry

Map, a map that is similar to The Denver Poetry Map in many ways. It doesn’t,

however, provide the user an opportunity to read the poems, and this is a crucial part of

the Denver map. Then, in “Methodologies/New Studies,” I consider the influence of two

theoretical concepts on the development of the map: Michel de Certeau’s conceptions of

“strategies” and “tactics” that he outlines in The Practice of Everyday Life, and Guy

Debord’s notion of “déreve,” a way of moving through a city based on what he calls

“psychogeography,” a playful drifting through city spaces. In the final section, “Results /

Outcomes,” I provide examples of various poets’ works as a way to think through the

multiple ways they consider poetry’s relationship to place. The section ends with a look

at some ways in which the map has been used to facilitate social poetry events in public.

A group called Write Denver, for example, organized a walk in which poets read poems

through a megaphone at the sites of those poems. The map, I argue, has provided an

opportunity for some of the city’s residents to challenge the ways they are “supposed to”

act within urban landscapes.

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Description of the Project

The Denver Poetry Map is a web-based project that utilizes the Google Maps API so

that poems can be attached, on a digital map, to a specific place, a place that the poet somehow

associates with the poem. From a certain perspective, the map may appear to be little

more than an alternative publishing platform. It is, however, much more than that. The

poems are sometimes about a specific location, written in a specific location, or inspired by an

event that took place at that location. The idea is to create a counter-map, a way to rethink and

re-know the city spaces we regularly inhabit. The map brings together diverse communities of

poets and provides a forum for discussion between those communities. It takes poetry out of the

book and out of the classroom and places it into the spaces of everyday life. A number of groups

have organized “poetry walks,” live-writing events, and readings that are facilitated by the map.

It was nominated for a 2014 Digital Humanities Award, and has been prominently featured in

the media.

When one visits the site, the first thing they will see is a familiar Google map in

the center of the home page surrounded by a glitched image of the Denver skyline. The

map contains a number of markers, each denoting a poem. Like any Google map, the

user can zoom in to near street level or out to a map of the globe. They can change the

view of map from a more typical street map to a satellite image. None of this is

particularly new for users of online maps; it is a familiar interface.

What is somewhat novel, however, is the fact that the markers on the map don’t

indicate objects in physical space. Rather, they indicate poems, poems that poets

connected, in some way, to very specific locations. When the user clicks on a marker, a

small window opens, and they are prompted to either click on a thumbnail to open the

poem or to click on a link that will take them to a new webpage where they can read the
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poem. If they click the thumbnail, an image file, a .png or .jpeg, opens in a new window,

and they user can scroll down and/or across the image to read the poem, all without

leaving the map. If the user clicks the link, a new tab will open on their browser with a

webpage which is dedicated to that poet and contains that and any other poems the poet

might have on the map.

Figure 26 The home page of the Denver Poetry Map.

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Figure 27 Using the "Satellite" option and zooming in can give the reader a greater sense of place while using the
map.

Figure 28 One can read a poem as an image file (shown here) or on a separate web page.
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For years now, I have had a particular research interest in the relationship of

poetry to place. I use the word “place” here, as opposed to “space,” quite intentionally.

Place, I think, is space endowed with meaning. In “Framing Locative Consciousness,”

Francisco J. Ricardo writes that “space evokes a promising openness and place implies

boundaried enclosure” (261); space is the pre-existing condition of place. I would add to

that, however, that the boundaried enclosure of place also implies a space imbued with

significance: one’s home is a place; the back row of a movie theater where a girl first

kisses a boy is a place; the crossroads where a car accident happened is a place. At the

same time, place can be the result of governmental, institutional, or corporate interests

imposed upon space – think of a public park, a street or sidewalk, a courthouse, a power

station – that kind of thing. As Michel de Certeau points out, a city is like a text that is

designed to be clearly readable, that is designed for “proper” use and navigation (93).

The user of the “textualized” space, however, can break those rules.

The Denver Poetry Map is a kind of rule-breaking tool. If, to stick with de

Certeau’s metaphor, a city is a text composed by power, then the Poetry Map is re-

writing that text – quite literally. It is another tactic that the city’s inhabitants can utilize

that functions counter to the strategies of power. It allows for the expression of

alternative understandings of place. It allows poets to complicate existing

understandings of and relationships to place. I will discuss some of the ways the map is

functioning tactically, in the sense that de Certeau implies, in in the “Methodologies /

New Studies” section below.

A number of questions set the stage for the creation of a practice-based research

project interrogating the relationship between poetry and place. How might one explore
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this relationship? What does it mean to associate a poem with a specific location? If I

ask poets to contribute “place poems” to a digital platform, how will they interpret that,

and what might I understand from their interpretation? And importantly, how might

praxis, how might doing, allow for discoveries to be made that might not be found via

traditional research methods?

Maps represent a kind of power – they represent an interpretation of space in

which there is an implied “supposed to do” and “supposed to be.” They often are

graphical representations of how one is supposed to think about space. They can effect,

or even determine, the ways in which we relate to each other. The “new interpretive

possibilities” (Sullivan 62) promised by engaging in this kind of practice-based research

are many; by creating an alternative map, I felt I could address the questions posed

above in a way that traditional research could not.

State of the Art Review

Recently, mapping in the digital humanities has become rather common. A

number of GIS (Geographical Information System) platforms that are relatively easy to

use are being used by humanities scholars to visualize and analyze various aspects of

their research. GIS allows for layering, which in the field of history, for example, allows

for a kind of comparative analysis of say, areas of production of a particular commodity

with the economic situation of the residents of those geospatial areas. It can allow for a

visual representation of data that might be more informative than a verbal

representation of that same data: migratory patterns of people at various moments in

history, for instance, might be better represented visually, on a map, than in other ways.
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If the map is created with GIS software, it could utilize an interactive timeline that

allows the user to see the ways in which those migratory patterns change over time.

The Denver Poetry Map uses some of these tools, but it has a very different

purpose. It is less about analyzing existing data, and more about examining literary and

social potential. It provides a platform for poets to explore the relationship of their work

to place. It allows readers to rethink their relationship to the spaces they inhabit on a

daily basis. The map is a way to rewrite the text of a cartographic space.

One of the primary influences on this project was a project called NY Sound Map,

a project that I was introduced to around 2006, the year the project seems to have been

abandoned. Particularly, there was a map on the site called “Sound Seeker” 30 that

allowed for users to submit audio files along with a location. The curators would then

place appropriate files on a digital map. Users submitted sounds associated with

particular locations around New York City: an alarm on Greene Street, leaves rustling in

Central Park, water dripping in a 42nd Street subway station, people bustling about at

the Fulton Street Fish Market, and so on.

When I encountered this site several years ago, I was struck with the way it

opened up a way of thinking about not just cartography, but about the city in general.

This map was not a map of streets and buildings, or not only that. It was also a map of

the people who live in New York, of their voices, of their daily experience. The map

became human, and the city became human. It was no longer just a collection of

30
Interestingly, “Sound Seeker” is the only map that is still functioning on the site. All of
the other links either result in a 404 error, indicating a missing web page, or the plugins
associated with the site are obsolete. This is yet another example of the practical
ephemerality of digital media (c.f. Chapter One of this dissertation).
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buildings and streets, of parks and piers. By incorporating the sensory experience of

listening into the more typical cartographic representation of space, the map’s creators

enabled a way for the user to engage with the world the map represents in a much more

visceral way. It allowed me, particularly, to rethink the ways a map might represent a

more subjective, communal and changeable world.

There is a more recent site, launched since the launch of The Denver Poetry Map,

and possibly influenced by it, called the Toronto Poetry Map. It is similar to the Denver

map in that it primarily consists of an interactive map of the city. Rather than markers

that indicate a particular poem, the Toronto map has semi-transparent, blue circles that

indicate clusters of poems – the greater number of poems in the cluster, the larger the

circle. When a user clicks on a circle, excerpts from a number of poems show up in the

sidebar on the left side of the page. All of the poems excerpted mention the location in

them. The circle at Union Station, for example, has an excerpt from a poem by Michael

Ondaatje called “Rock Bottom” from the collection Secular Love. Here is the excerpted

section:

I write down now

a fiction of your arm
or of that afternoon
in Union Station
when we both were lost
And here is another from the same cluster, an excerpt from a poem called “Doctor Ded”

by Barry Callaghan, from the collection Hogg: the poems and drawings:

Hogg had a bone and he went to pick it,

setting flares in Union Station
The map was conceived by Toronto poet laureate George Elliott Clarke in

partnership with The Toronto Public Library. There is a committee that finds poems for
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the map, most likely using a search function on a computer, and also reviews user

submissions of poems that mention a particular location in the body of the text. There

are “approximately 55 poets and excerpts from over 200 poems, from the city’s foremost

chroniclers (Raymond Souster and Gwendolyn MacEwen) to relatively unknown

writers” (Medley).

On the home page of the map, under the heading “Using the Map,” the following

directive is written: “Select a map marker to see excerpts of poems associated with that

location. Follow the links to borrow the poetry books from the library” (“Toronto”). It is

an effective and visually appealing site, with the admirable intention of promoting poets

and poetry of Toronto, as well as promoting the library. However, a reader must go

somewhere else to read a poem, and this is a significant difference between the Toronto

and the Denver maps. The Denver Poetry Map is a platform for reading poetry – even

for reading it at the physical location that corresponds with the place on the map that it

is pinned. If one is able to read a poem that is about a particular place in that place,

there is a good chance that place will change for them. It will become, to use Debord’s

term, “psychogeographically” altered. The normal organization of space becomes

disorganized, or differently organized. As I wrote earlier, the map can be used as a tool

to reexamine one’s place in a city and can alter the way one experiences and navigates

through it. In a certain sense, the Toronto map is designed to maintain the status quo –

it is meant to get the user to the library to check out a book. The Denver map is designed

to provide the user with a new way to think about their place in the city.
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Figure 29 A screen capture of the Toronto Public Library's Toronto Poetry Map.

Methodology/New Studies

The theoretical foundations for The Denver Poetry Map are many and varied.

While constructing the map, I was thinking often of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of

Everyday Life, particularly his conception of strategies and tactics. This is how he

differentiates between the two in the book’s introduction:

I call a “strategy” the calculus of force-relationships which becomes

possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a

city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an “environment.” A

strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and

thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct

from it (competitors, adversaries, “clientèles,” targets, or “objects” of

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research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been

constructed on this strategic model.

I call a “tactic,” on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a

“proper” (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline

distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to

the other. (xix)

Maps tend to represent the strategic – the isolated, environmental objects that are

manifestations and tools of power – streets, buildings, public and private space – all

named, all categorized, all structured to maintain a particular arrangement of relations.

Traditionally, maps inform their users where they can go and how they are supposed to

get there. They provide proper directions. They let us know which areas are off limits,

and they let us know where we’re allowed to be. They also represent a way of thinking

about a particular space, of understanding space as place, and, importantly, they

articulate one’s role or function in the world. Maps traditionally represent a particular

kind of power/knowledge.

But de Certeau shows us that there can be a productive aspect to the strategic

arrangement of space via a tactical engagement with it. Strategies “elaborate theoretical

places (systems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulating an ensemble of

physical places in which forces are distributed … they privilege spatial relationships” (de

Certeau 38). Tactics, on the other hand, are not of the proper. They are temporal in

nature, they:

gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time – to the

circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention transforms into

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a favorable situation, to the rapidity of the movements that change the

organization of a space, to the possible intersections of durations and

heterogeneous rhythms, etc. (38)

As I built The Denver Poetry Map, I was thinking very much about the ways I might

create what the literary and media critic Stephen Voyce calls a “counter-map,” a map

“that disrupt[s] and reconstitute[s] notions of place, space, landscape and community”

(Voyce). In other words, I wanted to make a map that would provide a space, both

figuratively and literally, in which tactical behavior/thinking/being would be

encouraged. I wanted the map to allow the user to encounter the spaces they inhabit

every day with an entirely new and different perspective. I wanted them to be afforded

an opportunity to stop and consider the places they thought they knew, differently. And

I felt poetry was a particularly useful way to do this.

If, as some claim, poetry is a record of a kind of thinking, a thinking that is

uniquely expressed in poetry, then attaching a poem to a place allows an alternate way

of thinking to be attached to that place; it allows disjunction, appropriation, sometimes

abstract association, and all of the countless ways thought is represented in poetry to

alter the way a user may think about a seemingly familiar place.

Another concept that played a significant role in the development of The Denver

Poetry Map is what members of the Situationist International call a dérive (drifting). In

his essay “Theory of the Dérive,” Guy Debord defined the dérive as “a technique of rapid

passage through varied ambiences,” that “involve playful-constructive behavior and

awareness of psychogeographical effects, and [is] thus quite different from the classic

notions of journey or stroll” (Debord). The Situationists advocated for experiencing a

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city not in the ways that have been prescribed by administrative authorities, but rather

to explore it according to its “psychogeography,” or “the attractions of the terrain and

the encounters [those participating in a dérive] find there.” They may start with a map,

but ultimately they want to experience the city in a way other than that which the map

prescribes.

With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives,

one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose

inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first

navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter

delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.

(Debord)

By creating a counter-map like The Denver Poetry Map, I wanted to not only create a

website that a user could access from the comfort of their home, could “recollect in

tranquility” a place that is associated with a poem. I also wanted the reader to be

inspired to move through and think about the city in a way that they hadn’t before. I

wanted to encourage a kind of psychogeograpic relation to the city, a playful drifting

from poem to poem. As I will discuss below, the map has been quite successful in this

regard.

Technically, the creation of the map was pretty straightforward. It is currently

hosted on a simple WordPress site. The main page includes an embedded map that

utilizes a Google Maps API (application program interface). I’ve been using a service

called ZeeMaps to interface with the API rather than write the code myself. This has

allowed me to focus on collecting poetry from among the many talented writers living in
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the Denver Metro area. I lay out each poem in a word processing program, make an

image file of it, and upload the image to the site. I also add a page to the site for each

poet. After clicking on a marker on the map, a user can either open the image file to read

the poem or follow a link to the poets page.

Initially, I sent out a call to Denver and Boulder poets I know personally and to

the four major writing programs in the area (University of Colorado MFA, University of

Denver PhD, Naropa University MFA, and Colorado State University MFA) asking for

poems that are attached to a specific place. I didn’t really articulate what I meant by

“attached to a specific place” in the call other than to say I was leaving the interpretation

of that phrase up to the poets. I said the poem could be inspired by the place, it could be

about the place, it could have been written at the place, it could have occurred to the

poet while at the place – anything really. The poets responded enthusiastically; I

received dozens of poems within the first month of the project.

Results/Outcomes

The poems on the map, all formally and stylistically varied, tend to fall into a few

categories with regard to the way they engage with the notion of place. There are poems

that are specifically about a place or about an event or events that the speaker seems to

have experienced in the space. Here is Kathy Goodkin’s “The Last Man Who Spat on the

Floor,” a poem attached to Denver’s Union Station:

I never knew the sound they made arriving.

Like feet in a train station

a three-fingered hand taps the glass.

A telegraph.
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Get off and keep walking.

The sign says to yield.

Why call me?

Why string me out here:

twenty paces past the potter’s field.

It shouldn’t have been

the way the story was told.

It shouldn’t have been my name

breaking into a room

from the cold mouth of an archway.

There is a sense of the physical location in this poem, particularly with the evocation of

specific architecture. The “floor,” the “train station,” the “archway” – these all paint a

kind of picture of the space to which the poem is attached. One can almost feel oneself

there, in the position of the speaker. However, the location is not actually described in

any way. Rather, we are placed there while confronting a kind of anxiety that the

speaker seems to be expressing: “Why string me out here:” and “It shouldn’t have

been my name / breaking into a room…” That coupled with the paratactic nature of

many of the lines creates a kind of uneasiness that, when placed into the physical

environment of Union Station – a landmark that represents commerce, stability,

longevity – shifts the reader’s attention away from the symbolic function of the building

and toward the fleshy network within it. The map takes on a new function in that it

humanizes the way we are thinking about the physical spaces we often enter, but don’t

often think about. It imbues that particular place with affect.

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Some poems describe experience and a reaction to that experience within given

space. Selah Saterstrom’s “3216 E Colfax Ave” is an example of just such a poem.

A stray end sections the ink and

needle.
Elsewhere, the gown bothers,
elsewhere,
a worthwhile evil hopes. Here,
flowers
before the faithful, a
mathematics
breathing flowers, here is a
calendar that
regards them. The ink and
needle
caution. The point renders
the
sharpest meal. The ink and
needle burn.
This tattoo technique is called
Plum
Blossom Anniversary.
The title of the poem is the address of a business called Peter Tat-2, a tattoo parlor

where, one assumes, the poet received a tattoo. Unlike the poem above, this poem

doesn’t mention the name of the tattoo parlor or anything about the physical building

itself. This is entirely about the experience that took place at the location. The place is

what allowed for the experience that is recollected in this poem.

There are poems in private spaces, in people’s apartments and the like. Alexis

Renee Smith’s “She could see fainter” is an example of such a poem.

green leaves through window light reminds one

of something
that grows it’s hard to call
this feeling by name I went to the window
I went to your window
and still I went on by
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a lost shopper a
stagnant lily is not surely not
so happy as those that see it
This isn’t a confessional poem really, but it does allow the reader access to a private

place. It allows them access to a kind of desire and sadness that one only really allows

oneself to experience in these private places, alone. But the reader can visit the location

of this poem, read the poem, and feel the presence of the poem’s speaker. The reader

can locate and perhaps empathize with another human being in a space that is

strategically designed, one might argue, to isolate us, to keep us apart.

Some poets choose to relate a political message with a particular location. A

Denver Post reporter named Steve Shultz submitted this poem, “Making Headlines,”

and located it in the newsroom of the paper:

I stand in the newsroom

as we celebrate
a Pulitzer
care of a theater shooting
in Aurora
simultaneously, we watch
as footage from Boston
rolls in
Other poems relate to a particular location because they were written in that spot.

J. Michael Martinez’s “Reflections on Walter Benjamin at City Park Written on the 8th of

June, 2010” is an example of just such a poem. I had a conversation with the poet about

the poem, and he told me that he had been at the park, by the lake, sitting beneath a tree

reading about Benjamin’s life and suicide. The quiet of that spot in the park evoked a

kind of melancholic longing in him and inspired him to write. He wrote a first draft of

this poem there, beneath that tree. (Martinez)

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There are a number of other poems that aren’t about the place, that don’t

mention the place, but are related to it because it is the place of their composition. Julie

Carr’s “A fourteen-line poem on capitol hill,” Elisa Gabbert’s “A Little Drunk in the Park

with Jack,” and Jennifer Denrow’s “Landscape” are examples that fit this description. I

find the relationship these poems have with a particular place particularly interesting.

The association between the poem and the place is not so very literal; the abstract

nature of the connection is more fruitful, more filled with possibility. Knowing that a

poem was written in a particular coffee shop or on a park bench infuses meaning into

that poem, sure, but it also generates a kind of affective resonance at that spot: this is

where these words were composed, this is where the poet had some inspiration, if one

can say poems are inspired.

Every poem on the map creates a kind of shimmer in physical space, and each

poem highlights our connection to one another. We feel another out in the world, not

just within the cover of a book.

I was somewhat surprised and pleased by the sense of community that the map

has inspired and by the ways in which people have begun to engage with it out in the

world. Poets have embedded paper poetry into tree bark and buried them in parks.

People have chalked poems on sidewalks. There have been several poetry walks that

have been inspired by the map. Recently, a program associated with the Lighthouse

Writers’ Workshop called “Write Denver” organized a Denver Poetry Map walk.

Participants walked a predetermined route through the city, stopping at poems along

the way. Some of the poets were there, and they read their poems into a megaphone at

the spot associated with the poem. The walkers have some time to write themselves at
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each stop in response to the reading, to the poem, and/or to the environment. I feel this

is evidence that the map is creating community, it is promoting dérive, it is making

poetry something that is alive off of the page and out of the classroom, and it is

generating more creative activity in the city.

The Denver Poetry Map is only the beginning of this poetry mapping project.

There is now a second map, The Boulder Poetry Map that is built upon the same

infrastructure as the Denver map, and I plan to create maps in Washington D.C. and

Baltimore within the next year. I am also working with an artist and developer who

works in augmented reality to develop a mobile application that will utilize GPS to alert

you when you are near a poem. You will then be able to hold your device up to some

recognizable object, most likely an architectural object, and the poem will appear on

your phone. The poems will be, in some cases static, in other cases animated, but they

will be “attached” to the place. We are also looking into interesting ways in which we can

incorporate audio and/or video into the project using the augmented reality technology.

There could, for example, be video of a poet reading the poem at the location, an audio

recording of the poet reading while there is some other video element that is attached,

on the mobile device’s screen, to the image of the location.

This project is far from complete. It has great potential for future development

and expansion into other urban areas, creating a possibility that readers across the

country will soon be able to read the grammar of their cities in a way that wasn’t

available to them before.

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Appendix – Poemedia 2.0 Images

Figure 13 The outside of the Poemedia 2.0 program.

 270

Figure 14 Inside the Poemedia 2.0 program.

 271

Figure 15 The Poster for Poemedia 2.0.

 272

Figure 16 The installation and the control area.

Figure 17 Deeper into the text.

 273

Figure 18 Text projected on text, 1.

Figure 19 Text projected on text, 2

 274

Figure 20 Image from the original Poemedia.

Figure 21 The original Poemedia.

 275

Figure 22 Detail from within the piece.

Figure 23The Poems.