Who's Writing?

Definition of Digital Poetics

Throughout this webtext, I am guided by Louise Rosenblatt (1978) in my use of the term poetry and poetics. As Rosenblatt explains in The Reader, the Text, the Poem, she relies on poem to stand for any literary evocation or event: poetry, fiction, drama, and so forth. Thus, for the purposes of my argument, digital poetics encompasses fictional/theatrical/poetic performances blossoming in cyberspace, and, like all poetics, teases out the structures or "laws" by which emotional and aesthetic engagement is elicited within and by means of digital media. Cyberspace is crucial to this definition. Although digital poetics includes much performance art that relies on new media and even an Internet interface (see, for instance, Coco Fusco),  I focus on digital poetics created for, disseminated through, and stored in cyberspace. Because of the rising access to Internet technologies, such art acquires a larger audience than face to face performance art or installations.

Two additional characteristics are important to my definition of digital poetics. The first is interactivity. Eduardo Kac (1993) names digital poetics "telepresence art," an interactive art that integrates "telecommunications, robotics, new kinds of human-machine interfaces, and computers." Kac argues that interactive art:

implies less stress on form (composition) and more emphasis on behavior (choice, action), negotiation of meanings, and the foregrounding of the public who, not transformed into "participants," acquire a prominent and active role in shaping their own field of experiences. The role of the artist in interactive art is not to encode messages unidirectionally but to define the parameters of the open-ended context in which experiences will unfold.

This concept of interactivity, thus, is important both to the definition of a digital poem and to its differentiation from an electronic or a print poem. Let me unpack this important term a bit. For instance, as Bruce Andrews (2001) makes clear, interactive need not apply solely to digital creations. In "The Poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E," a talk that is, in fact, a poem, Andrews contends that: "Reading constructs./And it does so by combating the obvious at all levels —/in order to maximize openness at every level:/acoustics, ‘looks', page layout and design, authorship, genre, grammar."

What Andrews calls "Language Writing" invites a reading that consists of "a drastic unnerving constructivism all the way down to the level of the sign./And then beyond, backstage."

Andrews's approach to interactive, constructive reading resonates to Rosenblatt's concept of transactive, a term that she derives from Dewey and Bentley, and one that she deliberately chooses to disrupt the Newtonian cause and effect she associates with "interaction." For Rosenblatt, all reading is transactive (a significant difference from Andrews who focuses exclusively on the necessity of ensuring the interactivity of "Language Writing" or poetry). Aesthetic reading is one kind of transaction, the kind that yields a literary work—a poem—by attending to the emotive, evocative characteristics of a text (rather than the information in the text that can be "carried away" by the reader in efferent reading, the second kind of reading transaction).

The necessary participation of the reader in constructing meaning (and in evoking the poem) is central to both Andrews and Rosenblatt. These scholars perceive the inter/transaction as a kind of interior bio-psychological process, a cognitive-emotional activity with physiological consequences. In addition, both scholars conceive of this active reading process in conjunction with print texts, where the marks on the page remain static. While meaning is active—in that the meaning we evoke from the marks on the page changes each time we transact with those marks (because, as Rosenblatt explains, we change as a result of prior transactions)—the marks themselves remain the same.

This is a central difference in the interactivity of digital poetics. Interactivity as I am using it here highlights a physical participation as part of and as necessary to the discernment of the marks on the "page" because those marks—as well as the reading of those marks—are active, not static. While with print reading physical activity is necessary, too—the eye tracks a line, the hand turns a page—with digital texts, the text itself is active. The interactivity of digital poetics conjures the line to track and the page "to turn." Such a participatory process adds a third and fourth dimension to a reader's choices, creating, as Marie-Laure Ryan (1999) notes, not the reader but the writer-reader: the wreader.

Espen J. Aarseth (1997) makes this very point in Cybertext. He argues that cybertext is ergodic, a neologism emphasizing that "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text" (p. 1). Unlike print text, cybertext:

centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim. The performance of their reader takes place all in his [sic] head, while the user of cybertext also performs in an extranoematic sense. During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of "reading" do not account for. (p.1)

Examples of digital poetry reveal the range of interactivity—the range of choice and action—potentially available to the user. For instance, on the one hand, Annie Abrahams's "Separation" unfolds at slow clicks of a mouse (and chides the user if the clicks come too quickly), drawing the reader into an elliptical monologue of the persona's pain made even harder to bear by its invisibility to an other. This bio-textual experience is segmented by erupting windows with image, instructions, and a timeline for the reader to perform certain physical tasks: contorting the face into a rictus of pain, soothing the body with careful stretches. On the other hand, "Am I an artwork? Yes, no, maybe, why?", a link from Abrahams's "being human" site, invites less intense physical involvement. This deceptively simple page is constructed out of contributors' responses to the question "Am I an artwork?" These (25 to 250 words) are reproduced in multicolored segments so that the ensuing poem is a fabric of wreaders' contributions, a coat of many colors.

The second characteristic important to my definition of digital poetics concerns sound, or, for this webtext at least, the absence of sound. Scholars in composition studies have begun to theorize sound and its integration with other multimedia features of webtext design. Heidi McKee (2006) attempts to provide a framework for that theorizing in "Sound Matters." Here she analyzes poetic Flash texts to suss out ways in which these cyberpoets use the multiple modalities of aurality, textuality, and visuality. She looks specifically at four elements— vocal delivery, music, sound effects, and silence—hoping that her preliminary framework for talking about sound might serve as a "productive catalyst" for further work.

Without a doubt, sound is becoming increasingly important, but I have deliberately chosen not to extend my argument concerning the author position to include the growing experimentation with sound in digital poetics. Instead, my primary concern is with visual-textual fusion in interactive digital poetry because that is the current matrix for the majority of interactive digital poetry. However, even though I deliberately abstain from addressing sound in cyberpoetry, it lurks throughout my argument, pressing against its absence. It does so in at least two ways.

The first absent presence for sound is metaphoric: the sound of the textual language of the poem itself. Andrews (1998) refers to this as the music of a poem and argues for the importance of "informalist noise": a tool to disrupt the lyrical, melodic rhythms of poetic language, which simultaneously disrupts a status quo reality along with its politics.

As he explains in "Praxis," informalist noise, white noise, serves:

to disrupt the flow of communiation, to create extreme libidinalized density, to approach 'white noise'—mixing so many audible frequencies together that no perceivable definite pitch is observed. (And perhaps we can imagine a white noise of rhythm, timbre, lexicon.) Noise—as freely composed dissonance, and untimely mimesis of shock. To reject the untouchability of auratic beauty. To disturb automatism, to estrange and displace, to burst the binding of current usage.

Brian Kim Stefans (2003) in Fashionable Noise echoes and extends this metaphoric aspect of sound in the production of digital poetry: "I think of creating Flash poems as something like a musician setting a text to music. . . I'm just a composer" (p. 19). However, Stefans points as well to the second aspect of sound that is absent from my definition: the literal importation of music and/or other material sounds. For instance, Stefans notes, in 2003, that he is waiting for technology to beome more sophisticated, so that he can "go into sound poetry, and mate the genre (if that doesn't sound like biotechnology) with what can be done with digitization" (p. 28).

The metaphoric and the actual aspects of sound press for attention in this webtext, both in the examples of digital poetry I tap and in my discussion of the visual-oral similarities between fourth century BCE Athens and the millennial West. McKee's work points to important ways that discussions concerning the author position in digital poetics can be enriched. Furthermore, her work reinforces explictly and implicitly my argument that the aesthetic dimension of digital poetics can be powerfully informed by—and inform—rhetoric.