David Latane wrote---
One of the things I've noticed in academia over in the new world is
that "hypertext" and "hypertext poetry" have become fields of
expertise for people who are actually not that adept at "text" or
"poetry"--making one wonder if the wondrous stone in county cork has
a URL.
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This is certainly true but doesn't necessarily matter, if you think that
some of the great early photographers were people not all that good at
painting or drawing, who turned to photography instead, such as Eugene
Atget and Cartier-Bresson and some of those Americans. Sometimes the
frustration of failure is the very fuel of a new bound.
What I wish they wouldn't do is attempt to sell the new product with
constant claims implying limitation or even authoritarian oppressiveness to
pre- electronic forms. All this talk of new freedom and creative sharing.
The reader of a traditional ink-on-paper poem has a complete freedom of
spirit in her hands which can't be bettered. The reader of a hypertext is
no more a collaborator in the creative process than someone stuck in a
labyrinth. Because the choices are limited by the mode dictated by the
author and the whole set-up is an illusion of liberty such as you get in
any department store. You are not free to deny the validity of the terms by
which you're allowed to move around. You can put in things beyond what the
author put in but strictly under contract to the author's architectonic
mythopoesis, surely. What's freedom got to do with creative text anyway?
Does nobody read S.Beckett any more?
The Blarney Stone has a bicycle pump attached these days.
P Riley
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