Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World
Just finished Media Poetry edited by Eduardo Kac and although it's a bit old (2007), it really got my ideas flowing for some new pieces and solidified my thinking around what I want to do.
I created a few new things:
– my own essay on directions for digital poetry
– a digital literature primer (linked from the essay)
– I've also been exploring more digital lit pieces and updating my favorites list
I just finished reading The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich. Three things I can say about this book. One is that it's written like a textbook and is very, very dry. If you're not serious about New Media pieces, I would skip this book. Two, there's a lot of philosophy of new media culture here that is much broader than simply talking about art on computer and film (there's actually a lot about film chat here). This book is about how these tools (databases, navigable space, computer collage) change our thinking, just as media changes have always tweaked our view of the world. And three, no other book has ever given me more ideas about digital projects than this one. It was slow going, but it was really crunchy food for thought.
And predictably, after finishing the book I was inspired to experiment with a slew of new media, e-lit poems: https://www.marymccray.com/audio-clips.html.
One goal of mine was to give my e-lit projects some higher emotional content. My slim surveys (to-date) around the e-lit landscape have shown me lots of cool projects that use language as mostly raw material in order to experiment with the new technologies. Not many artists have gone beyond post-modernist and modernist kinds of intellectual experiments around language to use poetry in a more traditional way but still incorporating new media platforms. That's not entirely true, but for the most part.
This is a question I'm always asking: what affordances (or attributes) about a book or an HTML page help serve the poem better than without those affordances? The same with e-lit stories. How does the platform serve the story or poem? And if it doesn't, it's not an integral part of the poem or story. It's just an alternate-delivery device.
So, there are really three things I was interested in: using (1) crafted sentence (versus randomly generated material) with (2) emotional content (vs. content with ironic distance or an intellectual message) in play with (3) new media platforms (HTML, Forms, PowerPoint, Graphs/Images, etc.).
And all that equals e-lit love poems, doesn't it? Of course it does.
I keep trying to think outside the book and this makes me appreciate books. But also things that aren’t books.
Recently I read two anthologies of Edgar Allan Poe stories that pushed the boundaries of prose on paper. One was an illustrated anthology I bought back when we lived in LA: Tales of Death and Dementia, Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe by Gris Grimly. Grimly also did a similar Mystery and Madness book with other Poe tales.
Edgar Allan Poe stories are perfect candidates for visual remediation in cartoons, comics and animated apps. Poe is famously Gothic and his stories can be dense slogs. These formats open up his stories with a bit with some visuals and sound. His plots are always so inventive but written so, well, gothically, that he’s stayed relevant in probably every medium but probably least of all books. Interestingly, all Poe products seem to use his face as part of their branding. He’s got such a Gothic mug.
The illustrated book included these stories:
The Tell-Tale Heart
The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
The Oblong Box
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
As a side note, my brother and father had an argument on a recent visit about whether comics (illustrated novels, etc ) rise to the level of art. My Dad and I were on the side that they did. My brother, who did illustrate pretty well as a kid, believes they do not.
Articles on the topic:
I would also recommend for consideration, The Carter Family, Don’t Forget the Song by Frank M. Young and David Lasky which I feel rises to the level and comes with a CD. You could argue that folk music history tracks really well to an illustrated novel, especially to communicate landscape and scenes and for dialogue-heavy storytelling.
There are three apps of Poe stories from iClassics. I read them all on my iPad. This was an even better experience than the comic stories because animations and interactivity brought out the visual beauty of the stories with a full orchestra and rich color. Much of the animation is triggered by interactivity which gave the stories an exciting feeling of suspense you wouldn’t get from even page turning. In fact, the apps were kind of really scary. Stories were interspersed with poems.
iClassics also had a great feature where you could scan through the pages at any time to see how much more reading was ahead. You could flip through them and go backwards to find parts of the story behind you.
My only complaint with these beautifully created experiences is the overly fetishistic cartoon boobs on all the Gothic gals. Firstly, kids are reading these. Secondly, it indicated these apps were created by a bunch of immature boys considering none of the men in the stories got the same hyper-sexed treatment.
App 1:
The Mask of the Red Death
Annabel Lee
The Oval Portrait
The Tell-Tale Heart
App 2:
The Black Cat
The Raven
Hop-Frog
App 2:
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Alone
The Cask of Amontillado
Eldorado
Here are some screenshots to compare the drawings from the comic and the app.
The Tell Tale Heart Comic Book
The Tell Tale Heart App
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar Comic Book vs. App
Here's a video sample from the app.
I also read iClassics’ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow which is very wordy for a short story but the app made it finally readable for me. For someone who loves The Headless Horseman story, especially the Scooby Doo episode which scared the beejesus out of me when I was a kid and the TV movie where I developed a preteen crush on Paul Sand. However, I’ve never been able to get through the original short story.
One interesting thing was the reference of the word “cowboy” in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I was surprised by this considering the story was written so early, in 1820. Was this an app translation issue or was that word really in the story? Through Project Guttenberg site, I was able to do an online text search to see if indeed it was in the source. It was.
Unrelated to this project, I’ve been reading a great book about digital literature (more on that later). Anyway, the book talks about all the uses of Google’s Ngram viewer (a tool that uses Google Books to search word usage throughout time. So I searched for the word “cowboy” and found the big spike of usage in 1880 (as expected, post Civil War, during the western expansion and the great cattle drives). So where did Washington Irving pick it up in 1820?
With the ngram viewer I could see there were no usages in 1797 and then a few in 1798:
The first appearance was 1798 according to the Ngram viewer but cowboy history tells of a much-earlier reference. Jonathan Swift coined the word in 1725 while simply referring to the boy who tends cows. So Washington Irving was using a very boutique word for the time.
Over the weekend I also read Oscar Wilde’s The Cantefield Ghost, which I had never read. I also watched the 1940s movie which was silly and I really struggle watching Margaret O’Brien for some reason. The app was a much better experience of the original story. I also love the sound of pages turning, which has the sound of really good parchment paper. This was my favorite iClassics app so far.
iClassics also have apps on other writers like Charles Dickins, Jack London, Lovecraft…the scary stuff mostly.
I’m also reading Inkle’s choose-your-own-adventure version of Frankenstein retold by Dave Morris. This version takes place in France after the Revolution. So far this format hasn’t been very engaging. Although I do love the visual of having scraps of paper stitched into scrolls for each choice you make. This app requires much more reading and the choose your own adventure format isn’t as satisfying when you already kind of know the ending, such as with autobiographies (sorry Neil Patrick Harris) stories you already know even if they’ve been retweaked. It’s also hard in the Inkle book to tell how long each section will take to read. Turns out, this is a major feature of the paper book. I’m sleepy and I want to know how much more of a section I’m in for.
Online poetry classes: It’s been a while since I posted about online classes. I keep checking all the platforms and over the last year there haven’t been many offerings.
Except I just found this William Wordsworth class offered by Lancaster University delivered through FutureLearn (there’s more international stuff on this platform). So I signed up. Starts in September.
E Poetry & FictionI’ve continued with explorations of digital poetry as I'm still interested in how readers process narratives, multi-sensory experiences and the playful and participatory. I'm also getting my mind blown by the frame busting.
I’ve just started to read the textbook, New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, edited by Adalaide Morris. It's just as nerdy as you would expect but I'm really lovin it.
I also recently tried to introduce a digital novel into my Difficult Book Club (more on that below). Before I mistakenly chose the books we read, I tried to contact a few members of the Electronic Literature Org to find out what they might recommend for introducing to book-bound club to electronic literature. But I consistently received no response so we picked a PDF novel with a image archive and the group choked on it. They hated it. Granted the execution of the narrative wasn’t very good, but they weren’t even interested in the concept of it or the opportunities for escaping the limitations of their chosen media.
Since then, I’ve received a copy of the digital novel Wallpaper (now touring in art installations in Europe) but I haven’t been able to run it yet, finding too many technical limitations from one computer to another. You can see some online “short stories” from the story's creator at Dreaming Methods. Click 'Portfolio' in the top menu.
Monsieur Big Bang and I are also going to tackle House of Leaves shortly after we finish the Gormanghast novels. I know this sounds more like The Masochist’s Book Club than just The Difficult Book Club but you can peruse our evolving reading list.
I’ve also been reading more about poet Stephanie Strickland. Here is a good example of her work: “Sea and Spar Between”
The poem is based on Emily Dickinson poem “each second is the last” below:
Each Second is the last
Perhaps, recalls the Man
Just measuring unconsciousness
The Sea and Spar between.
To fail within a Chance –
How terribler a thing
Than perish from the Chance’s list
Before the Perishing!
Unlike Emily Dickinson poems, this one is 225 trillion stanzas long (yeah, you heard that right), impossible to read fully which is part of the point. It’s still fun to “skim across the surface” of it and experience the responsiveness of your computer mouse as the poem’s stanzas flutter away. You can use your A and Z keys to zoom in and out.
Here is Strickland’s essay from the Poetry Foundation website, “Born Digital,” where she lists 11 ways to identify and conceptualize digital poetry.
I’ve also come across The Iowa Review Web that seems worth exploring, an online journal of digital pieces from 2000-2008. Browse the archive: http://thestudio.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/judymalloy.php
These three recent reads also classify as difficult if you're feeling adventurous.
A Poetical Dictionary by Loren Green (Amazon)
When I first started to read this, I gave up. I wasn’t in the mood to read something that slowly. It’s all timing with these difficult books. A year or two later, I started again. This is a short book and well worth the effort of going slow with but its only 42 words long. Fascinating if you’re in any way into etymology (or the study of words). Word nerds, dictionary nerds.
Don’t skip the preface, it’s full of prose poetry. Beautifully printed, pronunciation tips that are pure poetry, historical word history followed by lyrical explorations of the chosen words. A sprinkling of dictionary abbreviations I had to look up…I’m no dictionary snob. So observant. We should all do this exercise with our favorite words.
Don’t miss the charts at the end! Never have I found charts so moving.
Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History by Franco Moretti (Amazon)
I read this book and then lost it in my book-stuffed house (which makes me a hoarder). Google Books explains this book well,
"The 'great iconoclast of literary criticism' ("Guardian") reinvents the study of the novel. Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. …For any given period, scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture. Moretti offers bar charts, maps, and time lines instead, developing the idea of "distant reading" into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, where the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres – the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed…”
Not everybody's chosen literary vantage point but it is well-suited for a data-obsessed culture. And there are some surprising trends you can see when you look at data from outside the matrix (and contemporary lit criticism is nothing if not a matrix). This book is not for the faint of heart. It’s a data set story and my eyes glazed over more than once. That said, it’s a revolutionary look at how the novel has evolved…using real data. A new story emerges.
Some examples. Click to enlarge.
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson 1980 (Amazon)
A common theme in the American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2013) with a few of the language poets represented were comments around the failures of metaphor in language and the capricious pursuit of newly minted metaphor.
Lakoff and Johnson’s book is lots of theory but the book dissects how metaphor is absolutely ingrained not only in our language but in the very way we conceive of abstract ideas, even simple ones. The authors categorize orientation metaphors (happy is up, sad is down), motion metaphors, war metaphors.
Metaphor construction is a “fundamental mechanism of the mind” and one that language poets like to toy with. Could we communicate without them?
Yesterday I even came across the 2012 Lexicon Valley podcast on the same topic, episode #23, "Good Is Up." One listener to the show commented that "much of language is fossilized metaphor.” A very metaphorical response. The podcast covers Lakoff and Johnson book and also interviews James Geary who has probably a much easier read on the topic, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. (How the paperback is more expensive than the kindle version, we'll never understand.) But Geary says every 1-25 words. The differentiate between literary metaphors, intentional metaphors and unintentional so ancient and subconscious metaphors. During the podcast, the hosts quote from three poets. In trying to describe metaphors of time, Bob Garfield, (who you may recognize as the host of NPR's national show "All Things Considered") found this quote from Ralph Hodgson poem "Time, You Old Gipsy Man"
Time, You Old Gypsy Man
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?
Mike Vuolo found this quote:"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day" from Pink Floyd’s lyrics to “Time” to which Bob replied, “Okay you win; I am a nerd loser.”
The culture positioning between songwriters and poets is constantly happening.
Later Mike Vuolo quoted Virgil: "But meanwhile it flees: time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail," (I could not find a good source for that translation). to explain the metaphors of time as movement, where time moves forward (for humans who walk forward) and from left to right on line graphs, which takes us back to Graphs Maps and Trees!
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