---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Keith Hart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Apr 26, 2005 8:35 PM Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Re: Hypertextual Poetry: A Study of MSN Poetry Communities To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This all very interesting. Lots of things leap to mind when reading this exchange. I don't claim that what follows adds up to an argument. Somehow the triad of book/idiot box/hypertext doesn't quite cover the options. Let us assume that a contemporary poet will first draw on her own social and cultural expereince and hope through that to reach an audience whose scope is unknowable in advance. Today this will include above all movies and TV, recorded music and radio, newspapers and magazines, plus books of course. Poetry is one way of advancing the human conversation. But there is poetry with a big P (making things up that make a difference, perhaps poesis in Vico's sense) and poetry with a little p (the existing genre known as such). Then maybe she is drawn to hypertext because of its plastic capacity to combine different sources in new ways, as well as to create with others new forms of social interaction and communication. This could be an experimental venture limited in its social influence to a few avant garde artists or it could aim at having a popular impact, at the extreme to help shape the society that the internet calls into being. And many variations in between, esepcially in regard to the degree of continuity with existing practice. Movies are bound to have shaped the awareness of contemporary poets and their audiences. I resent film being called a visual medium because of the importance of dialogue and music. Hypertext offers new means of combining image and sound, movement and stability. This implies a critical understanding of the potential and limitations of the world wide web as a medium. The Cubists tried to put the viewer into the picture at several points simultaneously. Could hypertext be a vehicle for a new Cubism, combining Apollinaire and Picasso perhaps? Or is it stuck with the reader being always in one place only, whatever the sequence of moves? The exchange with Nitoo seems to be most concerned with the issue of individual authorship which does seem old-fashioned to me, even if I sometimes like to say that we shouldn't feel guilty just because they only hand out brains one at a time. The curren6 panic about plagiarism is really about the contradiction between private property and digital means of reproduction. The case of Homer is instructive. Modern scholarship suggests that 'he' was the eponymous author of a collective bardic tradition that took on a new significance with the introduction of alphabetic writing. We should expect the important poets of the internet age to be similar social hybrids. Speaking of which, Vivek brought up the dreaded question of dominance of the anglophone tradition. I was watching a Marx Brothers DVD the other day, with its repartee, song and dance numbers and painting-by numbers script and my wife remarked in astonishment that it was just like a Bollywood movie.... I would like abstract discussion of new possibilities for poetry to be anchored in specific cultural discourses rather than be abstract, like the avant-garde composers of 'serious' music in the twentieth century. Le Monde des Livres had a big article not long ago claiming that contemporary Indian novelists as a group are now taking the novel form further than any other comprarable category, much as the Russians or Latin Americans may once have. What struck me about Nitoo's essay was that she didn't bother with the issue of where authors are from. But I would hazard a guess that the mass audience is for English as a second language and that may have something to do with it. Apologies for rambling, but I could not begin to approach the fine essay writing on this topic that Nitoo shared with us. Keith Hart _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. 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