SansPoint

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.