At which point, an animated mouse pointer says, Nice, y'all...
Doug
On 2011-10-26, at 6:51 AM, Dominic Fox wrote:
> About a decade and a half ago there was a book published with the
> title "Imagologies", which gushed triumphalistically about the
> inevitable replacement of "textual" culture by an ever-mutating
> congeries of gifs and jpegs memetically proliferating across the
> globe. At the time I was a haughty young Derridean, and huffed it off
> with a "what makes you think animated mouse pointers aren't texts?".
>
> Then there was that period where everyone thought hyperlinks were
> going to revolutionize narrative - at least a decade after the
> publication of the first "choose your own adventure" book (see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebook for a brief history of the
> genre).
>
> We're probably due another round of self-congratulatory cackling over
> the death of print pretty soon. Although our present "social media"
> seem pretty intransigently textual, for all the emoticons and
> clickable cows.
>
> Anyway: "performance poetry" seems to me to be poetry geared towards a
> particular range of types of performativity: those that foreground
> vocal timbre, bodily gesture, the sort of stuff you have to be there
> in person to do. How the person appears or disappears in the process
> is unavoidably of interest (as it is in much other poetry, from Sidney
> to Eliot): there's an element of mummery or masquerade. The claim to
> be doing something new is hard to evaluate. All poetry does
> *something* new: fresh repetition, revoicing or regrafting of the old.
> Asking for really novel novelty, for the absolutely unprecedented, may
> be asking a bit much.
>
> Give us a black swan!
>
> Dominic
>
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Wednesdays'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
Why poetry? And why not, I asked,
my right brain humming sedition.
Phyllis Webb
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