POETRY AND THE WEB – One
Technological change is not apocalyptic change. It was Paul Delaroche who, on seeing the first Daguerreotype, exclaimed: From today painting is dead! That was in 1839. A considerable amount of painting followed and continues to follow. I forget which poet it was who wrote that “in the age of the aeroplane we can forget about metre” and which it was that answered that “you still need two feet to run.” The heart does not cease working on a moving pavement. Neither does the development of the web mean that the nature of poetry published on it must be different. Certainly one can devise poems that exploit the possibilities offered by computers and the internet but the world and our bones will keep intervening and until the world and our bones become part of the e-fabric the web will serve more as venue than as actor.
What the web makes possible is the rapid transfer of ideas as embodied in texts, visual imagery and sound. It enables all but instant communication between those who share such ideas or are exploring them: it enables meetings. It is the great disseminator. Furthermore, it disseminates from individual computer to individual computer, from person to person. In that respect it is at the opposite end of the scale from TV, film and the newspapers, the media that created what became known as the ‘admass’, which, by the way, has not stopped existing.
The advance of globalisation in publishing as elsewhere has led to a situation where few bookshops stock poetry. The books aren’t there so there are fewer sales: there are fewer sales so there are fewer books in the shops. On the other hand books as physical objects are easier and cheaper to produce than they have ever been, providing you don’t have to make a serious profit and pay yourself as well as other people. People like books. I love books. Books are good objects.
It is not the simple production but the distribution and the degree of notice the books attract that matter to the writer. The web is in some respects like an infinitely large notice board on which anyone may post anything, but it is not just that. Anyone can pass around a manuscript too and used to do so, the manuscript travelling from hand to hand. So poets circulated in the Elizabethan period. Much depended on whose hands were receiving and passing on. In that respect the web is a partial restoration of a status quo ante. That which is worth reading on the web is passed from hand to hand by way of links and messages. We are only at the beginning of the process but there is clearly a rapid growth in certain kinds of publishing. Salt, for example, began with downloading and print on demand, but it has moved into mainstream publishing too now. All newspaper carry blogs that invite comment. The most interesting and active bloggers have already affected various political processes.
The power of the mass media is certainly being reduced and distilled. Not to an extent that will drive Rupert Murdoch out of business, but enough to create considerable ripples of protest and enthusiasm. Authority shifts and becomes more elusive. For poetry on the web values are up for grabs but the linking of sites – that handing on of manuscripts – creates bonds and associations that embody values. That is where we are now, at the beginning of a process of re-establishing and redefining that which the pressures of commercial publishing are on the way to driving out. From this day on the bookshop and the mass publisher are not dead, but their roles are being inevitably altered. The day of the pamphlet and broadside have returned. There is a new conversation in the air.
George Szirtes
www.georgeszirtes.co.uk
A very handy web-tool for the word-worker who adheres to the Horace philosophy of poetic composition – the placing together of plain words in unusual combinations – is to google the combos in parenthesis; with the return giving the verse smith – logic suggests – an approximate idea of how original ones wordplay is.
Thus, it can be argued; the closest we have ever had to a broadly scientific answer to this previously conjectural question.
For example, “know and knack” and “trope above conceit” are unique returns on google, and whilst not for a moment suggesting these combinations have never been placed in that arrangement before, the web does afford us a compositional insight hitherto undreamt of, it is my current position.
~
Another area of particular use for the poetic scholar with a passion for Irish myth, is the online CELT resource at UCC, where one can peruse and take on the various manuscript in the bardic tradition which effectively constitute – On Coimgne – which the self styled neo pagan Searles O’Dubhain terms:
“An elusive term used by the Druids and Filidh to describe the knowledge that they
held in common as trust for the people..”
Which logic also suggests is nought but the four cycles of Irish myth; the taking on of which constituted a poet’s training in the bardic culture.
And thus for the industrial strength bardic dreamer today, more possibilities for learning at source in a way undreamt of but ten years ago.
Though i suppose the greatest development is the interactive nature which allows the reader to respond, in a way impossible with traditional print methods.
The one sided address becoming increasingly obsolete as the margins and difference of separation between reader/writer become ever more blurred, the two merging and melding with an ever quickening frequency, almost day by day it seems, as the passive mind of the eye apprehending what offerings are proffered forth for consumption by the writer, becomes increasingly pro-active in the general empowerment for the overall good health of Literacy.
A position summed up by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet god Charles Bernstein, 13 years ago, in and address
“I DON’T TAKE VOICE MAIL”
Presented at a symposium, sponsored by the Parsons School of Design. on “The Art Object in the an Age of Electronic Technology”, at the New School in New York, on April 16, 1994, and posted onto the list on Wed, 20 Apr 1994 21:45
This was the second month the Buffallo Poetics List had been in existence, the first few years of which make fascinating reading – almost eavesdropping – on such American giants as Robert Creeley, Marjorie Perloff, Susan Schultz and Keith Tuam discussing stuff from the mundane to sublimely poetic in the pre-browser age.
But the portion of Bernstein’s address which struck me as being a very prescient bit of prophecy (for what are poets but diviners of what’s to come?) is this.
“The most radical characteristic of the internet as a medium is its interconnectivity. At every point receivers are also transmitters. It is a medium defined by exchange rather than delivery; the medium is interactive and dialogic rather than unidirectional or monologic.”
Proof indeed, this very response..
Posted by: Desmond Swords on August 13th, 2007 at 8:33 pm