SansPoint

Starting last weekend, police at the University of California at Santa Barbara began receiving reports from around campus of a particularly academic form of graffiti — red spray-painted allusions to the work of the postmodern author Thomas Pynchon, whose 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 is (in typical fashion) a sprawling admixture of paranoia, counterculture and obscure literary references.

For the same reason, I expect, that I can never finish writing a long-form work, I’ve rethemed the site and did some more tweaking and fiddling with things. The new theme is simple, to the point, and makes the runPHP plugin work right (finally).

If you notice any bugs or unintentional use of the color pink, please use the contact page to inform me.

A lune is a poetic form Invented by Robert Kelly to be an English version of haiku. It uses a syllable pattern of 5-3-5, and is named lune because the shape of the right edge is reminiscent of a half-moon. A variant form uses words instead of syllables, and is 3-5-3.

These lunes were written during one hour of a poetry workshop class at Temple University. One is in the variant form.

this poem contains one
lune, poorly
written and unplanned

falling water drops
washes away
all your filthy grime

there is nothing there
one can’t fill
with a bit of work

please turn off your
television
go outside and think

simplicity is just
a more powerful way of
making a point

three in the morning
and only i
am walking these streets

stuffing my life in
tight spaces
you can’t even breathe in

emergent patterns
breaking down
into mere chaos

A world of genetically modified babies, boundless consumption, casual sex and drugs … How does Aldous Huxley’s vision of a totalitarian future stand up 75 years after Brave New World was first published, asks Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood of The Guardian Unlimited discusses Huxley’s Brave New World

A few months ago, I attended a lecture and performance by Daniel C. Howe, a digital artist and poet, at Temple University. He demonstrated for us a number of his projects and experiments in Electronic Writing. While his stuff was certainly appealing on a visual, sensual level, I found the actual textual part of the works to be lost in the shuffle of showing off interactivity, graphics, and bullheaded experimentation. Ultimately, poetry is primarily about aesthetics, and one has to judge a poetic work primarily on its aesthetic value, less on the quality of the text itself. Howe’s electronic writing seems to view technology less as a means of creating poetry, and more of a way of presenting and adding interactivity to poetry. It succeeds in adding an interactive element, but the writing itself falls to the wayside.

For me, Howe’s works call to mind Twenties by Jackson Mac Low. Twenties is a series of poems in which he wrote twenty lines of words chosen purely for aesthetic value, as they came to him. (Example) The work is spontaneous, yet somehow it doesn’t work for me. When I read a poem, I expect there to be a connection, a cohesion, something to link the words, lines, and stanzas together. Twenties failed in that its text was presented without any cohesion aside from each word’s aesthetic properties and the spontaneity of it. What leaves me lacking is the way Howe uses technology to seemingly supplant the role of the text, rather than emphasize it. Howe surrenders an element of authorial control which I admit I am uncomfortable with, however the intention if his work is to provide reader control of what is presented. I would be more comfortable if I felt he succeeded.

What happens in the majority of his projects is that a pre-existing text is presented in an interactive form which the reader/viewer is able to recombine and modify through interaction. Text Curtain, as pictured, is an excellent example of this. The curtain presents a poem of fourteen lines, and the individual columns of letters can be shifted and moved about. After enough agitation, a new line rises from the bottom, and the top line is removed from the view. No matter how many times this occurs, the poem maintains readability and cohesion—a difficult task! Here I question the presentation. The ability of the reader/viewer to play with the columns seems to be unrelated to what is actually delivered. The interactivity seems to be tacked on, a way to present the unique work, not as a way to develop the work.

When I consider technology and its relation to poetry, I am more interested in generative works, similar to Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings. I asked Howe about generative poetry and writing, and aside from technical considerations, as the processing power isn’t there to really deliver language synthesis into a way that actually feels like natural writing, he expressed that generative writing isn’t his interest. I can respect that. Howe does what he wants, and his work does stand as an example of the power of technology in presentation of poetry. I just don’t feel it succeeds as a way of changing poetry or writing for the Internet age.