Exhausted Yet? Cut up Machines, Code Poetry and More

First, Nada Gordon explains the world to us. 

(2019 note: Actually, this is just her reading a funny poem about art at the Whitney over ten years ago. I was there. It was sort of a Ken Goldsmith celebration.)

Here Nada Gordon wanders her kitchen and explains the realm of lyric-loathing -- lyric as "whipping girl" -- that brought us flarf. She discusses being educated by the critique of the lyrical subject, and the resulting decision to create lyrical voices out of shards, borrowed language and collage; she claims that flarf really carries the torch for poetry. She says, basically, We are dedicated to saving poetry and keeping it alive. The whipping girl, the lyrical subject, is now revived by flarfists as a zombie. (Which is pretty well what the first link is doing.) 

See what I mean? Trying to find something new can drive a poet crazy. Which is generally where a poet likes to be. And has been for a century, but we'll just start with the Fifties. 

From the 2017 Getty show on Concrete Poetry of the 50s, 60s and 70s. 

1975 performance of "Peter Innisfree Moore" by Jackson Mac Low, a poem/song/dance created by finding 960 words in the Fluxus photographer's (Moore's) name and using chance operations to express (also musical notes, dance moves, etc.)

Nice roundup of experimental poetry from textext.com.

A link to the Language Is a Virus cut-up machine. 

Check "Recombinant Code Poetry" at the bottom of the options on this archived page from Beehive.

Fantastic link re: L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E P-O-E-T-R-Y.

And, a propos of something related, syllabus from hypertexter Stephanie Strickland. 

To think about Strickland and the proliferation of options, it's nice to remember Raymond Queneau, who created a flip book of sonnets in which the lines were cut so that the reader might create 190 million poems. Then he went and titled it Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes, or One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Randomization designed to destroy narrative and kill author/birth reader. Yes.

Queneau's pals formed Oulipo, hoping to create artificial constraints that would remind us of the real ones we live with all the time. My favorite take-away has been the N+7, a process that replaces every noun with the seventh noun following it in the dictionary. Here is Spoonbill's N+7 machine.  Here are a few examples.  

17 GOOGLE poems linked on Huff Post.

Czech poet and mathematician Ladislav Nebeský (b. 1937) (whose father was murdered by the Nazis in 1940) began as a concrete poet and ended as a binary poet.  Here are "8 Planar Binary poems." And here are his "Non-Written Words."

Flarf starring Sharon Mesmer. 

And my favorite Vito Acconci.

Don't forget Alan Sondheim. 



"All art should become science, 
and all science art." 
(Friedrich Schlegel)

Benjamin on Ads and Crit

"What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says -- but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt..."  -- Walter Benjamin

Stephanie Strickland, hypertext, authorship, final versions

I just happened upon this wonderful essay by Stephanie Strickland, "Poetry in the Electronic Environment." Ostensibly she is describing how she composed her hypertext poetry book, True North, using the "electronic environment" of hypertext, but she deals with other crucial matters as she goes.

She is (sorry, but it's true) poetic on the topic of the Web and the "great freedom" it affords us. She points to it as our best example of hypertext, the "almost biological" entity that is always "proliferating links." Only connect, as the Romantic Forster implored (and as two male financiers have quoted to me. Surprising me. Way off topic, but you never know where literature lurks, longing to link. With you.) As she writes,

"[Cyberspace] is characterized as tidal sea, web, sky, and solid. Thus, people surf it, send out web-crawlers to explore it, gophers to tunnel through it, engines to mine data from it, and they fly through and above it in game simulations. They establish "home" pages in it, as though it were rooted, although at their own location distance has disappeared--New Zealand, New York, St. Paul, equally present, and equally speedily present."

And this, for perspective, is from a talk given in Minnesota in 1997. Even during these heady days, she is hardly fanatical. She wryly adds,

"All these metaphors suggest a great freedom of movement, but electronic space is also where you lock up, if the power goes down, if the network crashes, if your machine fails to harmonize with its software. Maybe space metaphors are not the right ones to choose; maybe time is more to the point, and you will think so as you wait for your host connection, or wait for sound to download, a graphic to paint."

Ironically, just as I was moving (appropriating) (stealing) (sharing) this text, Safari locked down and, for two days, I lost this, her essay, and a dozen windows I'd opened to look and think about conceptual writing. As if to prove her true. (She is powerful.)

Considering hypertext, she connects with the "truly radical" method of Emily Dickinson, ever preserving alternative versions of her work. An inability to commit -- neurosis -- becomes a genius for keeping the world open, suspended, engagable -- write-able. She gifted us with a multi-dimensional space, and offers a hint at what is to come. Strickland urges us to explore

"how to shape our intuitions about digitized data, how to learn to "read" meaning in geometries of representation, how to understand more fully the meaning of numbers, number-systems, and the modes of number-use which we are invoking to incarnate data, literally to construct virtual bodies."

The author is dead, long live the author.

And here is the link to order True North Hypertext.