In response to Rupert & Roger :
The Internet is already , and will continue to be, a massive influence on
the creation, consumption and even definition of poetry/word art/text
generation, whatever. Although that old crypto-Papist techno-determinist Mc
Luhan got the small print wrong he was right about the big picture and the
mega mix, the global village of pillage, the medium being the missile/missal
, the message as frottage,our immersive pottage... he proclaimed Joyce and
the high priests of modernism for embodying the tropes and memes of mass
media in their work and had lotsa pun doing it...
Digi tech on the web drives this process faster and further into new
territories.
Yes, I know you can't go to bed with a cosyiMac, that gentle browsing
easily becomes manic itchy finger grazing, and I recall that books are
wonderful low tech devices (I love mine, even after my experiences in the
used-book cartels). I recognise that with a massive surplus of global
poetry production too many poems hang around in the web like dead
bluebottles ("The Emperor said there were TOO MANY NOH PLAYS!" Ezra Pound,
ABC of Reading). But the whole political economy and hierarchy of poetry
starts to shift if everyone (everyone with sufficient energy & capital that
is) can nail their hyperthesis to the virtual door of the canonical
cathedra. "Poetry will be made by all..." said Lautreamont. Now, to quote
my learned friend Doktor DNA Lawrence Russell, " we have more writers than
readers..." Is the poem a commodity? Or is it a floating text, a
director's cut or a reader's cut-up?
One point that McLuhan made was that culture tends to use the rear-view
mirror when dealing at first with technological change (e.g very early
filmed narrative being shot like staged play from single viewpoint, Porter,
Griffiths, Eisenstein learning the language of cinema through experiment,
early BBC TV thinking of newscasts as radio with a few pictures).
Now, after a decade of poetry on the WWW we're already seeing ( in the
work of quite a few members of this list) not only extensions of
collage/montage/cut-up ( all facilitated by the technology common to all
text-editing and hypertext-reading platforms) but multi-media (audio &
video), collective composition, extended intertextuality ( quite literally
via hyperlink) de-centering of the authorial voice, alternative narrative
pathways and what Lev Manovich
(http://www.manovich.net/ ) has called a "data-base" aesthetic as opposed to
a deployment of linear structures.
Where this goes, I don't know yet. It could be that among a few writers
there could be some kind of Wordsworthian reaction as in the classic early
Ballard story where the poets of Vermilion Sands give up writing
computerised pastiches on their clunky punched card machines to pursue the
Muse. Also possible is a collapse/implosion of the world's industrial
infrastructure as a result of global struggles over diminishing energy, in
which case the web goes down and we get out our chewed pencils. But I'll
wager - I'll buy Rupert a pint to put by his (virtual) notebook - that in a
decade (Oct 9 2014) that the web and the e-book will have totally
redefined the way we do poetry...
