As I walked in rather late, Philippe Bootz (France) was saying
'Everybody can be a meta-reader, except during reading', and promising
to show us 'the aesthetics of frustration', if there was time. Bootz's
theorising is stern stuff. The style of his work we saw later seemed
different: quite expansive, aesthetic, warm even; some was even comic,
and part of his own perfomance broke into non-verbal grunting. Gavin
Stuart (UK) is the new director of trAce, the remarkable online writing
organization founded by Sue Thomas (www.trace.ntu.ac.uk ), but he was
talking about the applicability of some of Bakhtin's ideas to digital,
interactive writing. An idea like 'dialogism' can be completely baggy,
but if you can keep it sharp I guess it can be used generatively, which
was Stuart's stated interest, and even to critique and improve the work
you do. Talan Memmott (US) does theory as clowning, or vice versa.
Bootz's 'Poetry Without Reading' he raised with a 'Silent Lecture', a
typically brilliant performance whose apparent shambolic and chaotic
style contradicted its precise planning (subject to a noisy kitchen
timer) and the seamless virtuosity of (what I've seen of) Memmott's own
creative work. Its introduction, typed live, remained projected
throughout onto a whiteboard, on which Memmott then wrote and drew
diagrams apparently referring to pages of notes on paper, ('mostly
crap'), which he tore in pieces and scattered. Boxes of board markers
were emptied onto the floor, so that he slithered over them, stumbling
also sometimes across the board's protruding supports. However what
emerged, albeit quickly occluded again, was sensible: witty and clever,
and even readable if you followed closely, at least as much so as a
poem; though  I couldn't say whether a logical argument unfolded.
Towards the end he drew around his own shadow. In the discussion session
following these presentations, someone expressed surprise at the
emphasis on the body in performances throughout the conference, which
occasioned a good deal of response.

Loss Pequen~o Glazier (US) talked about the textual body, its
architecture, in particular its apertures. The 'smallest details' can
(should) create meaning in text in whatever medium, but when these
architectural aspects are not set in stone but programmed to occur ad
hoc, whether randomly or systematically, the poetics is arguably much
deepened: you don't see everything at once. What, then constitutes 'the
work'? etc. ... (There was much more to Loss's paper than this.) Theory
was implicit in Jean-Pierre Balpe (France)'s presentation, of a dynamic
work installed in public spaces throughout a French town, on the LED
billboards used by traffic authorities etc. to communicate with the
public. A phone line was used to receive commands from the readers, who
were able to influence the story that was distributed across these
separate sites. Skirting on public art here would have been a good
moment to widen the discussion into the political realm -- a paper had
been proposed by Keston Sutherland which looked likely to suggest that
interactive aesthetics deludes and diverts the impulse to real activity
(a doubtless very crude reading of the abstract seems to suggest this);
unfortunately he wasn't able to attend. Very little (though not nothing)
has been said about politics so far; underlying issues of importance
seem rather to be, how digital and networked writing may contribute to
poetics in general by raising awareness of the mediatedness, unnoticed
or denied, of all textual production, and what that could lead to; and
the need for a rhetorical taxonomy of e poetry or new media writing
generally.

The evening began with a reception in the foyer bar of RADA (the drama
college), which was very pleasant but I mention it only because
following hard on our heels there was a Farrago slam poetry event, and
when it was made clear we should push off, with a MOR 'performance poet'
having taken to the stage, someone negotiated for justin katko to have a
spot. He proceeeded to perform a sound reading, which he dedicated to
Bob Cobbing, of the floor of the room. It was terrific stuff -- for a
minute I thought there might be a fight, but to give them credit the
Farrago crew applauded, and then we all trooped back across the road to
Birkbeck.

Later our evening ended too with sound poetry: first Joerg Piringer
improvised an accelerated reading with live sampling, of a Flash action
script manual he'd just bought in nearby Waterstone's, and then Lawrence
Upton (UK), and justin k again, performed together a new visual text of
Lawrence's, hissing and growling and twitching around in front of some
of justin's video. Lovely! At the end, Lawrence was left standing in
centre stage with NO SIGNAL projected fortuitously across his mouth.

e
"When I play the pieces that were made ten years ago, they are totally
different." (Philippe Bootz)