> Of course all that you say must be correct because you say it so
> precisely, but here's my point (and you've heard it before): You may
> sit and play "Dueling Banjos" with whey-faced computer buddies all day
> long, but until you've given Basil Bunting, David Jones, Emily
> Dickinson, William Blake, the Bard and every other member of that long
> "literary" tradition more than a modicum of attention before telling
> us--as some do--that the computer has somehow allowed us to go beyond
> them and it--until that time, you haven't seen the river nor understood
> its turnings or its depth, or where it debouches.  Jess

Are you recommending I do another degree in English, Jess? I didn't do very 
well on the first one, when I knew very little, and suspect a second would 
go much much worse now that I know it all.

"...the computer has somehow allowed us to go beyond them and it..." Well, I 
remember TS Eliot said something like 'Art does not progress, but the 
materials change.' The materials--including language, society, and the 
planet Earth--change, as do the forms and media of poetry--or new 
possibilities emerge, in any case, which don't preclude the traditional but 
difuse it into an ocean of alternatives, of alternative literary life forms 
scrabbling up from not so silent seas. And these are sometimes viewed by 
traditionalists as stuttering impertinences, but some persist because they 
find literary vitality there and see the traditionalists as manufacturers of 
standard goods mouthing what has already been said, in fact, to death.

You raise an interesting question, I think, when you assert that "There's no 
next step for any of it..." Is that true? Why or why not?

My own feeling on the matter is this. Cobbing and some other poets such as 
bpNichol, Kostelanetz, the de Campos brothers and Chopin were, in some 
sense, media poets. They ventured into various media, arts, and technologies 
as writers/poets. They were curious about how poetry can operate amid arts, 
media, and technologies. I think that sort of openness as a media poet 
allows next steps. Supports next steps. Whatever the current media are--and 
they are bound to change over time; that's in the nature of digital media, 
because computers are so radically flexible as machines. Media are bound to 
change more rapidly now than in the age of electronic media (which was 
faster than the age before electronic media) because computers can emulate 
*any conceivable machine*.

Part of the 'problem' for books--or any medium, really--is the proliferation 
of media we're experiencing, and the subsequent diffusion of any given art 
through these various media. Some hold fast to one form of art, or one 
medium. Others attempt to explore what looks like new territory in works 
that span various media, arts, and technologies (language itself being a 
technology, if we think of technologies as tools made by people).

That was the sort of direction tended towards by Cobbing and the others I 
mentioned. And it is a direction they continued from poets such as 
Apollinaire who, in 1917, said:

"Typographical artifices worked out with great audacity have the advantage 
of bringing to life a visual lyricism which was almost unknown before our 
age. These artifices can still go much further and achieve the synthesis of 
the arts, of music, painting, and literature ... One should not be 
astonished if, with only the means they have now at their disposal, they set 
themselves to preparing this new art (vaster than the plain art of words) in 
which, like conductors of an orchestra of unbelievable scope they will have 
at their disposal the entire world, its noises and its appearances, the 
thought and language of man, song, dance, all the arts and all the 
artifices, still more mirages than Morgane could summon up on the hill of 
Gibel, with which to compose the visible and unfolded book of the future.... 
Even if it is true that there is nothing new under the sun, the new spirit 
does not refrain from discovering new profundities in all this that is not 
new under the sun. Good sense is its guide, and this guide leads it into 
corners, if not new, at least unknown. But is there nothing new under the 
sun? It remains to be seen."

It is an adaptive approach. An approach to adapting to change. Finding 
literary possibility in change. It has its precipices, but it is also 
implicitly a matter of finding life and possibility where and how we live 
it, speak it, image it. It is all about next steps, really.

ja
http://vispo.com