INTRODUCTION

POETRY BLOGS

The Dadaists considered the unconscious to be a source of images free from the biases engrained in us by parents, social custom and all the other artificial restrictions on intellectual freedom:

“We are now in a position to formulate the problem of art, more accurately the problem of expression, as it appeared to the writers of a Literature group [Aragon, Breton, Soupault]: only the unconscious does not lie, it alone is worth bringing to light. All deliberate and conscious efforts, composition, logic are futile. The celebrated French lucidity is nothing but a cheap lantern. At best the ‘poet’ can prepare traps (as a physician might do in treating a patient), with which to catch the unconscious by surprise and to prevent it from cheating . . . ” Marcel Raymond

“The unconscious is inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as mysterious as the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we could not reconstruct it.” Tristan Tzara

George Brecht in Chance-Imagery

The action of a Blog on the net and in our lives often escapes specific educated and speculative criticism. Probably and mainly because a Blog can cover many, if not all branches of knowledge. There are blogs dedicated to physics, astrophysics, philosophy, mathematics, fiction, nonfiction, criticism, and perhaps the list could continue ad infinitum... The blogs dedicated only to poetry are uncountable. A quick Blog search round the end of October, 2006, gave me exactly 1,500,413 posts matching the word “poetry”, it does not mean that these posts have been made on blogs that deal uniquely with poetry, but I could give at least a 70% probability of actual poetry blogs. As many poetry blogs do not mention the word “poetry” but feature poems. The present essay could take two different paths, one regarding poetry tout-court – the way it is developing on the net on blogs, and the other concerned with blogs that feature or rotate around poetry. The two points are connected and I will try to merge them.

A poetry blog does not fall under the notion of collaborative writing, that is a text open to the collaborations of those who from readers become contributors, see: a fragmented linear story, a tree fiction, or an assemblage of independent text segments. Nor does it imply the idea of the “wreader” as with an hypertext where the reader works his/her way through a story open to many possible plots and ends. The reader of a poetry blog usually has the possibility of leaving a comment in a tiny box at the end of each post that opens up when clicked. The same setting does not invite to exceptionally long diatribes or speculations, it is mainly meant to annotate a quick feedback forwarded to the Author.

A poetry blog is a form of electronic writing that takes advantage of the possibility the digital world has offered. It is a free space, and after the first approach that seems time consuming, extremely easy to use. Its main interest rotates on and around poetry.

In “After language poetry” and without going to the extreme examples of the quoted poetry sites, Christian Bők talks of the passage from a “proprioceptive investigation” to “a new era of poetry [...] that may provide the first, truly synaesthetic composition by field” that interacts in a dynamic and sensorial way with the poet. This achievement, according to Bők has been reached because “poetry has virtually exhausted the exploration of its own aesthetic formalism”… “not only in composition, but also in publication”. “the poetry of the future may have to explode the formal limits of the books, [….] By actively engaging the experimental technologies of cybernetic publishing”.

Blogs were not created to host refined cyber-games, like the disappearing or reappearance of colored intersecting lines or complex structures, but if you know some htlm language, you can easily make of a blog a very inviting site. Even without knowing any htlm language.

Many poetry bloggers are just happy with the preset format. Photographs can be uploaded, the text can be hyperlinked with other blogs or outside sites, reference can be made without having to quote extensively. An arrangement that draws back to the original idea of Ted Nelson. His Xanadu project, already in the 60’s pivoted on several points that still have to be carried out completely. He talks of “unbreakable links; copyright simplification and softening; origin connection; two-way links; deep version management; incremental publishing”. Blogs don’t offer all this, but under a certain aspect we are close to some of Nelson’s requests. The free creative commons license allows readers to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work if it is attributed in the manner specified by the author or licensor; the work cannot be used for commercial purposes; the reader or user cannot alter, transform, or build upon the work. Links among blogs are not breakable, as far as I know, but a blogger can decide one day to stop managing a blog and to take it off the net, at that point when you click on the link a white page might show up. It is difficult for anyone to use the same name of a blogger, since, like in my case, my address is: http://annyballardini.blogspot.com. As per origin connection, Sitemeter can track down visitors by details, referrals, world map, location, out and entry clicks, entry and exit pages. Technorati offers the free service of finding which blogs link to yours. If you buy their services, both Technorati and Sitemeter grant a more accurate search. This is not what Nelson defined as the origin connection or two-way links, but I find that there is a certain similarity. We, as bloggers, do not have the possibility of writing by “incremental publishing” but the way a blog archives posts, with the latest on top - any post previously written easily reached - is a form to store material that might satisfy many requests.

Stepping back to poetry in the context of e-poetry and specifically inserting it into the context of a blog, of utmost interest is Loss Pequeňo Glazier’s contribution on Poesis. The Author tries to understand the new relationship established in-between the poet and the digital medium. He quotes Charles Olson in respect to the typewriter:

“It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends, “

Within this context, indicative is William Vaughan note on Blake: “his own position as being equally gifted in both [media] enabled him to explore the interchange in a unique manner. For him [painting …] was a counterpart, a genuine other half [of writing].”

The Electronic Labyrinth, under the designation of illuminated book, mentions John Ruskin and William Morris. Ruskin “felt like Blake that [the illuminated text] was a means to political and spiritual reform, a way of breaking with the capitalist mode of production which took the means of artistic production out of the hands of the individual and placed it in the hands of the factory owner”. Ruskin is quoted: “It is with a view [...] to the re-opening of this great field of human intelligence, long entirely closed, that I am striving to [...] revive the art of illumination, properly so called; not the art of miniature-painting in books, or on vellum [...] but of making writing, simple writing, beautiful to the eye, by investing it with the great chord of colour, blue, purple, scarlet, white and gold, and in that chord of colour, permitting the continual play of the fancy of the writer in every species of grotesque imagination [...].”

The “Illuminated Manuscript”, the most beautiful examples of which are given by the Medieval monks, was meant to “release the light of truth from within”, “not on it”. Blake, later on, ascribed light to the “revolution of imagination”. Marshall McLuhan gives the final note: “Probably any medieval person would be puzzled at our idea of looking through something. He would assume that the reality looked through at us, and that by contemplation we bathed in the divine light, rather than looked at it.”

Loss Pequeňo Glazier through McGann says: “[…] Pound felt that the renewal of the resources of poetry in an age of advanced mechanical reproduction required the artist to bring all aspects of textual production under the aegis of imagination. […] poetry would be brought forth not simply at the linguistic level, but in every feature of the media available to the scriptural imagination.”

Thus Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound, William Blake, Guillaume Apollinaire with his Calligrammes, in music Charlie Parker when his way of dealing with improvisation is described, are mentioned by the Author to highlight the importance of the medium on the same composing. Loss Pequeňo Glazier draws us back also to Aristotle and the librarians of Babylon when the question is raised on how to organize resources.

The problem of the “new” has been one of the main concerns of Ted Nelson, not only in developing his Xanadu project, but specifically in the “invention of new words”, as it is the problem of Bob Grumman, Geof Huth and Dan Waber. Through Barthes’ exploration we might be able to understand the three Authors in a more respectful way. Roland Barthes gives us important keys to unlock the notion of why nothing enters the language which has not before been tested by speech, on the other hand, and interesting is his progression by dichotomies, “no speech is possible if it is not drawn from the treasure of the language”. He continues by stating that the language is not elaborated “by the speaking mass but by a deciding group”. The arbitrariness of language becomes well visible through advertisement and in the way logo-techniques direct to the purchase of objects. What is most important here is his stressing how - what he defines - a “signifying contract” is imposed on the user, and if the user does not accept it “he is marked with a certain asociability: he can no longer communicate anything except his eccentricity”. Man is enclosed in the “collective field of imagination” of his own epoch (he previously mentions Lacan and the notion of eros), and Barthes continues: “individual innovation is transcended by sociological determination (from restricted groups)”, and that these sociological determinations refer in turn to a final meaning, which is anthropological.

If we go back to McLuhan and remember what he wrote of “the artist, the poet”¹, then we can finally understand how difficult it is to be the outsider who can “see” what is happening and to be able, through a codified and convened system of words (language/speech), to break through such an imposing cathedral of “signifying contracts”. In the moment in which a reader does not understand a concept, he is momentarily excluded from McLuhan’s “great village” and it will be up to him to try to be included or to understand why his understanding is undermined. If his incapacity of understanding stems from sociological reasons, then he might or should find a way to write a new system of codes, i.e. of “signifieds” to twist the meaning of “signifiers” into a new language/speech, for our reality/society in order to open new views.

Or, with Barthes again as in 1.1.7. iii), to find a new "idiolect", i.e.: “the language of a linguistic community, that is, of a group of persons who all interpret in the same way all linguistic statements”. Barthes then continues by saying that the idiolect could broadly be identified with "writing". Some poetry blogs are introducing new “idiolects” and my reference goes specifically to Geof Huth, Bob Grumman, Dan Waber and the numerous contributors to his blogs, and broadly, to all those I have included in my interview. I would like to interpret “idiolect” not only in terms of the creation of new words, but of the invention of new forms, the capacity of matching common words inside a new structure thanks to which they acquire a new meaning. Or simply the example given by their choices, brief descriptions of an event the Author values as the highlight of his/her days, I am referring to Br. Tom (Tom Murphy); some of his entries are a link to an online paper, or a photograph, or series of photographs. Each medium/blog characterized by its own language, the message is forceful and gets directly to the reader. This is the invaluable unpaid work of the many bloggers I was lucky to meet. In one of his answers Bob Grumman says that we are all like monks waving to one another. Under a certain light he is right, on the other side since we are here working, it means that there is still enough energy not only to survive, but to break through with some kind of emotional content or observation the static atmosphere that sometimes seems to lower down our already slow and hypnotized going.

A word is a bit of crystal in formation

Christian Bők

The definition of “mechanical reproduction” brings to the most intense criticism history has forged up to now against our commonly accepted way of living. I am referring to Walter Benjamin and to his outcry that mechanical reproduction has not only brought to the manipulation of all desires, but condemned Art because it has deprived it of its “aura”. Benjamin’s concept of “aura” is founded on the principles of a society that forges its needs and actions through the innermost feeling that sacredness permeates our presence. The deprivation of the “aura” from an artwork brings us to face a reality based on interest, on the mere bargain of objects, be them written/printed or painted/sculpted, towards the achievement of an individual profit, or in the case of Benjamin, towards the attempt of extinguishing a race. McLuhan adds, an induced profit, better, the masterfully crafted induced idea that we must possess some particular object created by those that Vance Packard first defined as: “The Hidden Persuaders”, subtitle on the original cover of the book published in 1957: "What Makes Us Buy, Believe – And Even Vote- The Way We Do. An Introduction to the New World of Symbol Manipulation, and Motivational Research." A maybe outdated book, as stated on Wikipedia, but quite impressive for its foresightedness and considering the lack of in-depth sociological studies at the time. A book like this with its ingenuity and doom predictions can give us the actual dimension of where we are and shows us how unreal it has all become when compared with the ‘50s, already depicted as “unreal” by Packard. William Gibson through Hubertus Bigend in his “Pattern recognition” gives a detailed description of the way ads work when correcting Cayce that there is no “knowing in your heart”: “The heart is a muscle,” … “You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things.” 

William Gibson in “Pattern Recognition” outlines in the form of a novel, a most powerful criticism to fashion and advertisement in general. His protagonist, Cayce Pollard is shaped throughout the book and acquires in depth. We are first attracted by her somehow ethereal form, a talent/special sensitivity she has that throws her abruptly into a world full of logos from which she has to protect herself and in which she is highly specialized: “with her compulsive memory for brand names.” She is strong but at the same time extremely weak with un/known enemies from all corners. And they storm up, gather like glutinous clouds. It is around the middle of the book that the reader finally feels he has a grip on it and leisurely plunges into it. When we are slowly led to a final twist that shows Cayce in her best human side: her meeting with Stella, and finally with Nora, the Creator of the footages that enchant masses. A thick narrative with an intricate plot made almost concrete with the numerous scenes and images. Cayce is portrayed, together with her father Win, a Cold War security guru who has been missing since September 11, 2001, as the sensitive soul, the device inside the structure that does not serve as a servomechanism, and even if one of its most important parts, it breaks up any calculation meant to manipulate others to reach a personal profit. The example of Cayce Pollard can be brought in this context as the possibility of finding still nowadays discarding energies embodied by individuals who can cut by their mere existence and intelligence, intuition and hard work, the negative maelstrom that inevitably builds up seen the instinctive misery intrinsic human nature.

Richard Rorty can be quoted at this point. Cayce Pollard, in her early thirties, is able to get through the mental barricades set by those who do not want her to crack the code to reach the footages. A young girl, saddened by the loss of her father, lost herself in the myriad of wrong encounters she has to deal with in her daily life. This is our net, be it virtual, be it material with neighbors, employers, students interested in a better evaluation, advertisement bombing from any corner on which our sights are set. Rorty’s philosophical position represents for me what the States are in opposition to Walter Benjamin who can stand as one the best symbols the European culture was able to create. Here are Rorty’s positive expectations: “There would still be hero-worship [but …] It would simply be admiration of exceptional men and women who were very good at doing the quite diverse kinds of things they did. Such people would not be those who knew a Secret, who had won through to the Truth, but simply people who were good at being human.” To get to this conclusion, Rorty summarizes history in the following way: Enlightenment succeeded religion and … “thought, rightly, that what would succeed religion would be better. The pragmatist is betting that what succeeds the “scientific” positivist culture which the Enlightenment produced will be better.” Rorty, as the philosopher of hypertextuality, is greeted in the moment in which we face hypertextuality and blogs in general, or poetry blogs as a new event. The infinity of people who venture on the net are still nothing in comparison to what we will be seeing in a near future with the opening of China, the improvement of the African states’ economy, the stabilization of South American policies. At that point everybody will have a voice on the vast web. That is when Rorty becomes most important with his lucid pragmatism. If man wants to survive he will have to acknowledge the best people and follow their advice, be them, as Rorty said: (I am paraphrasing) mathematicians, scientists, physicists, artists, … each one coping with the other, without any -more “relative” or “subjective” theory - than the other.

Conscious of our predecessors’ voices, we are dealing with new mediums and an art, Poetry, that has existed since ever. Loss Pequeňo Glazier’s acknowledges through the highly refined poetic composing of Robert Creeley what for postmodernism is the shattering of the “I”:

“There is nothing I am, / nothing not. A place / between, I am. I am // more than thought, less / than thought”.

I would like to extend Creeley's “I” to the broader “I” of Poetry, fragmented as it is now on blogs, each blog being more than thought, less / than thought; each Author striving to find the poetic “I” inside him/herself to post his/her “I” on a blog. A blog being of Poetry, of the Poet who writes poetry, of his fragmented “I” described almost daily to an invisible audience, to invisible other "I"'s. A blog could be the : nothing not. A place / between, I am. I am //

Loss Pequeňo Glazier concludes that “… innovative poetry’s historic concern with the multiple in discourse, perspective, and textual constitution, positions it uniquely to approach the multiple “I”s that are collapsed to form the polysemous, constantly changing, multiple-author text known as the Web.”

To reach this thought, Loss Pequeňo Glazier navigates in the most appropriate poetic seas by opening his essay with the quotation of one of the most beautiful books we have been given to read: The Book of Sand by Jorge Louis Borges. He highlights the need of the buyer of the book to be able to master the ever-changing text: “The number of pages in this book is literally infinite. No page is the first page; no page is the last”. Glazier connects the essence of this book with writing in electronic media “-whether simple web pages, text generated by an algorithm, or pages that display kinetically-“ either way they exist “within specific conditions of textuality. Such writing has different properties than the writing to which we are accustomed. These properties include the fact that the text is not physical but displayed (similar to film, holograms, and other “projected” media, for example).”

A transmutation

takes place at many levels. The same fact that we are not writing with a pencil or with a pen on a piece of paper but typing directly on a screen, be it on a word document or directly inside the box that will bring our words onto our blog, has to be taken in consideration. I remember years ago writing that poetry is the poorest art, it does not require brushes and expensive colors, canvases, or instruments like music, a piece of paper and a pencil can do. We are now dealing with very expensive equipments, a broadband connection, sophisticated softwares, the best anti-viruses, backup memories. Who are the poets now? What time is left to the observation so dear to Goethe in his “Theory of colors” or to Leonardo in his “Notes”? Our time filled in with acronyms: URL, URI, WAP (Wireless Protocol Applications), PDA (Personal Digital Assistants), IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), IP addresses, ISP (Internet Service Provider or IAP, Internet Access Provider) to connect through: ADSL, ISDN or Broadband wireless connections, ...

Havelock through Birkerts states that “the shift from oral to literate culture was a slow process; for centuries, despite the existence of writing, Greece remained essentially an oral culture. [… it] depended heavily on the encoding of information in poetic texts, to be learned by rote and to provide a cultural encyclopedia of conduct. It was not until the age of Plato in the fourth century that the dominance of poetry in an oral culture was challenged in the final triumph of literacy."

“What difference does it make who is speaking?” asks Foucault at the end of his essay: “What is an Author?”, an opening and a closing question, his irony could not be more rhetorical, his observation so piercing. We have to follow the development of his idea important to the understanding of his conclusion because it trains us to approach, in a refining process, his concept of the Author in our reality. Fiction, says Foucault, is perceived as a threat to our social system. The subsequent reduction of this threat is the inevitable passage to the reduction of the same abstract concept of fiction within the limit of the author. If we want to follow his thought, we have to reach the notion that there is a shared fear felt by man towards meanings, his thrifty acceptance of new openings in order to keep the solid structure well set, like an imposing statue.

And here is the important twist. The Author is not the Genius, he is the scapegoat… the “functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and re-composition of fiction. […] The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.” There is a repetition, but the point is fundamental.

With the proliferation of blogs, poetry blogs in this context, in a wider sense web pages could be included, the Author has become many authors. A destabilizing process has been triggered with the advent of the World Wide Web, the forming of new meanings, different realities are photographed almost daily on blogs, each one in its chosen form.

In this positive note I am close to Pierre Lévy’s almost enthusiastic notion that the web is offering us the tools to head towards a “Collective Intelligence”. 

The negative side is easily depicted by the amount of hours spent in front of a screen in a sitting posture. Many people could point out the lack of quality of numerous sites, and therefore again uncountable void hours spent in trying to find interesting material, or in the present contexts, blogs worth reading and following. It is anyhow quite easy to invalidate such an opinion since Poetry Mailing Lists have recently flourished with some highly respectable correspondents who send in their chosen links; or blogs with their blogrolls (links to blogs or sites selected by the Author) are unending. There is a new society out there, people lead you to “good stuff” to read, they recommend you check the new issue of an online magazine, they even point out which Poets you should read first.

Thinking of the net, and of poetry blogs, I cannot but compare this virtual structure to architecture as it is now hosting us. There are slums, sky-scrapers, maps that lead to everywhere and to nowhere, there is that game as defined by William Gibson in “Pattern Recognition”, of the mind doing the but-really-it’s-like-thing when Cayce first lands in Moscow: “[…] but really it’s like Vienna, except it isn’t, and really it’s like Stockholm, but it’s not, really [ …]”.  There are those who support Giò Ponti’s (1891 – 1979) oratorical and rhetorical ideas:

“Love architecture,” he wrote “In Praise of Architecture”. “Love it for its fantastic, adventurous and solemn creations; for its inventions; for the abstract, allusive and figurative forms that enchant our spirits and enrapture our thoughts. Love architecture, the stage and support of our lives.”

McLuhan would not be so reassuring, nor would Benjamin, the substance of his thoughts similar to the ethereal state of our illusory dreams. But they would not maybe be so strict towards some selected Poetry Blogs. They would understand the spirit that animates them, which fundamentally is the same that animated their work, as a matter of fact, the product in time of their thought. As probably Friedrich Nietzsche would have found some correspondences on the net, similar minds who would have listened to him and praised his thought.

The deception of Poets will mark our era, as it has already marked history. On the other hand Poets will show future generations the steadiness of hope, its strength. By paraphrasing Rorty, humanity will have to accept in front of the gravity of nuclear bombs the need to develop our relationships on human values, and to recognize those who are better suited to lead governments and institutions. With the proliferation of poetry blogs, the poetic message should reach an umpteenth public, poetry is filling the medium and instead of “massaging”, it disrupts.

Talking of Walt Whitman, Randall Jarrell says: “It is like magic: that is, something has been done to us without our knowing it was done.” I would like to extend this concept to Poetry in general and to its new action on our times.

NOTES:

1. McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore: the medium is the Massage; Ginko Press; 2001; page 88:

“The poet, the artist, the sleuth – whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely “well-adjusted,” he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” “Well-adjusted” courtiers, having vested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifully appointed. The “antisocial” brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor “ain’t got nothin’ on.” The new environment was clearly visible to him.

REFERENCES:

Barthes, Roland at lowres.uno

Benjamin, Walter (1936): The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction at marxists.org

Birkerts, Sven (1994): The Gutenberg Elegies, The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

Borges, Jorge Luis (1998): Collected Fictions, New York.

Brecht, George: Chance-Imagery, Ubu.com

Bők, Christian : After Language Poetry, Ubu.com

Creeley, Robert (1989): The collected Essays of Robert Creeley, Berkeley

-- (1982): The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, Berkeley

The Electronic Labyrinth, http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0263.html

Foucault, Michel: What is an Author? At lowres.uno

Glazier, Loss Pequeňo (2004): The Conditional Text: Siting the “Poetry” in E-Poetry, Poiesis, pOesis. Digital Poetry, Berlin

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1970): Theory of Colours, MIT Press

Leonardo (1960): The Notebooks, Courier Dover Publications

Lévy, Pierre: Collective Intelligence

McGann, Jerome (1991): The Textual Condition, Pinceton, JF.

McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore (2001): the medium is the Massage, Ginko Press.

McLuhan, Marshall (1962): The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P.

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Packard, Vance (1984): The Hidden Persuaders, Pocket.

Ponti, Giò: In Praise of Architecture

Randall, Jarrell (2001): Poetry, and the age; University Press of Florida.

Rorty, Richard: Consequences of Pragmatism

Ruskin, John: Modern Painters. 1834-1860. New York: Dutton, n.d

Vaughan, William (1999): William Blake, Princeton.