---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Vivek Narayanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Apr 26, 2005 3:20 PM Subject: [Reader-list] Re: Hypertextual Poetry: A Study of MSN Poetry Communities To: "River ." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Nitoo, One clarification-- in these groups that you're covering, you seem to describe a wiki-like interface where any reader is welcome to come in, change a poem written by someone else without prior consultation and create a recension. Is this how it works, and in which groups? It wd be very exciting to see examples of that. My understanding, however, was that in most if not all current online poetry groups, a poet presents a poem that she/he has written, gets comments, and then changes a poem based on the comments only if she/he wishes to do so. Thus the poet, although shaped by a collaborative process, retains authorial control over the poem. If the latter is the case, it would not be so different from the way poetry has been written for a very long time-- the myth of the poetic genius in a vacuum is only a very recent blip in this history. The only difference the internet makes is in its archival capacity to represent and organize this collaboration succinctly-- the kind of work, for instance, that had previously been done in cumbersome varorium editions. (There's also simultaneity and speed of transmission, but speed is an ambiguous and contestible value when it comes to poetry.) I'm not saying that online existence does not have the capacity to produce substantially new kinds of poetry, "demistify" poetry, or alter the way it is written, and make Moulthorp's utopia come true-- just that it has not been able to do so yet. The most experimental works of hypertext poetry that I have seen have tended to get crushed under the weight of their own self-conscious theory and-- what else do we expect from poetry, if not this-- do not adequately engage or pleasure the senses, in my humble opinion. The other stuff seems to work on the reader and writer in pretty much the same way that offline poetry does, and succeeds or fails for the same reasons as well. My sense is that, for all our cybermania, we have still been unable to inhabit the network technology fully, imaginatively, and organically in a way that would lead to this revolution in poetry that you speak of-- perhaps it will happen soon. About the question of tradition, which came up some time ago. The most exciting thing about the net for me as a writer and reader of poetry is the fact that it has been able to make freely accessible an enormous amount of historical poetry; the original edition of the collected poems of Emily Dickinson, for instance, to give an example of a must-read. (The selected Emily poems print editions that you can buy in India and elsewhere have the infuriating habit of "cleaning up" and editing out Dickinson's idiosyncratic punctuation, etc., which completely changes the poetry!) There are also jpegs around of a couple of poems in Dickinson's own handwriting, which as Susan Howe has shown, adds a whole extra dimension by showing some of Dickinson's visual rhymes, further idiosyncracies, etc. The amount of historical public domain poetry now half-a-click away is mind-boggling, yes? And of course, the large amount of recordings of poets reading, which always adds new dimensions to a poem. Of course, we are speaking largely of the European languages here, and that is also an issue. All this material in different media freely available now should give internet poets a number of never-before chances to engage with poetic tradition and thus, to transform it in a meaningful way. But-- the danger would be that poets are so bedazzled by their gizmos and the superficial enchantment of the contemporary they end up not reading very much historical poetry at all... Too old-guard a response? Vivek River . wrote: > Sometimes, I procrastinate. Like certain things I do, even > procrastination takes on gargantuan dimensions. So, after two (three?) ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? Donate or volunteer in the arts today at Network for Good! http://us.click.yahoo.com/pkgkPB/SOnJAA/Zx0JAA/yqIolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Did you get this mail as a forward? Subscribe by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTPoets/join. Members are encouraged to post poetry, their own and others', respond critically to the poems circulated, and participate in discussions. 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