[Reader-list] Re: Hypertextual Poetry: A Study of MSN Poetry Communities

[Vivek Narayanan]

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?) 
> months of silence, I am making a reappearance on the reader list. I 
> have a litany of excuses, but will refrain from unleashing them on you.
>
> I am back to cogitating on things like poetry and hypertext and this 
> post will incorporate three months worth of research. Don’t tell me 
> later that you were not warned.
>
> Since many people (some politely, some not so politely) posed this 
> question to me, “What (the $^<#) do you mean by hypertext and what 
> connection, if any, does it have to poetry?” my February post was 
> supposed to deal with the meaning and application of the term in 
> contemporary interdisciplinary areas. Therefore, in the first part of 
> this post, I will look at the history and definition of hypertext. In 
> the second segment, (my March portion) I will analyse a section of 
> Stuart Moulthrop’s essay, “You say you want a Revolution? Hypertext 
> and the Laws of the Media”. I apologise in advance for the rather 
> heavy theoretical stuff, but some things need to be done. On the 
> positive side, these “things” need not be repeated. In the final bit, 
> my post for this month, I will see if hypertextual formulations can be 
> used to radically subvert generic constraints of ‘traditional’ poetry. 
> For this purpose, I will briefly look at the architecture of MSN 
> poetry sites and try to see — (i) if the structure of a medium can be 
> seen as concomitant to the content of an aesthetic work, (ii) the 
> empowering possibilities of “incompleteness” and (iii) whether this 
> new, demystified poetic space can be a freeing one where linkages and 
> affiliations can be privileged and glorified.
>
> Theodore Nelson, who first coined the term, “Hypertext” in 1965, said 
> in his 1981 manifesto, “Literary Machines”, that “forty years from now 
> (if the human species survives) there will be hundreds of thousands of 
> file servers, and there will be hundreds and millions of simultaneous 
> users.” He had used the word, hypertext, to mean electronic textual 
> connectivity. Hypertext, or “non-sequential writing”, as Nelson puts 
> it, as a system, refers to the connective, interactive potential of 
> computers to reinvent texts, not as fixed symbols, but as a “variable 
> access database in which any discursive unit may possess multiple 
> vectors of association.” The collective, linked text was called 
> “docuverse” by Nelson and it held within itself the potential of 
> limitless expansion. Nelson’s new world, Xanadu, was the new textual 
> universe, an optimistic look at writing as an epic of recovery. He 
> talks of a “grand hope”, “a return to literacy, a cure for television 
> stupor, a new renaissance of ideas…a grand posterity.” In this world, 
> all work becomes “text”, not a closed, contained substance, but a 
> referential, open-ended connection.
>
> Apparently, Nelson was inspired by a 1945 essay by an American 
> engineer, Vannevar Bush. In this essay, entitled, “As We May Think”, 
> Bush envisaged a future in which mechanically linked bodies of texts 
> (which he called “memex”) would allow users to access information in a 
> non-traditional, non-linear, almost recurrent fashion. As George 
> Landow, one of the pioneering names in hypertextual literary theory, 
> puts it, Bush’s concept of connected textuality worked “to replace the 
> essentially linear, fixed methods that had produced the triumphs of 
> capitalism and industrialism with what are essentially poetic 
> machines—machines that work according to analogy and association, 
> machines that capture the anarchic brilliance of the human imagination.”
>
> Because hypertext, by definition, is a shifting, shimmering, 
> interwoven network of links, webs, paths, the reader is no longer 
> trapped within the authority of the page, but becomes a “virtual 
> voyager” through icons, film clips, animated archives. For example, 
> Landow, in his Hypercard Programme on Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”, says 
> that such a non-linear poem can best be read, not sequentially, but 
> through linkages and webbing. Each word, then, becomes a “hotspot”, 
> which, when clicked, opens up newer levels of information and 
> annotation. The marginal, the tangential, the contingent, all become 
> significant in this new system of knowledge. The fixity of the printed 
> page can be transcended to reveal different modes of learning. As 
> Landow states, hypertext “promises to have an effect on cultural and 
> intellectual disciplines as important as those produced by earlier 
> shifts in the technology of cultural memory that followed the 
> invention of writing and printing.”
>
> This takes me to the March section of this post. Here I will look at 
> certain portions of Stuart Moulthrop’s essay, “You say you want a 
> Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of the Media”. He begins by giving 
> an overview of Nelson’s “Vision in a Dream, Xanadu”. He explains with 
> some care Nelson’s use of the word, “populitism”. Populitism, for 
> Nelson, refers to the democratic space where “the deeper 
> understandings of the few (can) at last (be made) available to the 
> many.” Moulthrop says that a “populite culture might mark the first 
> step toward realisation of Lyotard’s “game of perfect information” 
> where all have equal access to the world of data. Moulthrop wants to 
> know if Nelson’s Xanadu and his vision of “populitism” can actually 
> change the existing shape of written texts into radical hypertextuality.
>
> For this purpose, he takes up four questions posed by Marshall McLuhan 
> for a framework of a semiotics of technology. These four questions can 
> be posed for any invention and they are: 1. What does it enhance or 
> intensify?, 2. What does it render obsolete or displace?, 3. What does 
> it retrieve that was previously obsolete?, 4. What does it produce or 
> become when taken to its limit?
>
> Moulthrop tries to answer these four questions by substituting “it” 
> with “hypertext”. So that the questions become:1. What does hypertext 
> enhance or intensify?, 2. What does hypertext render obsolete or 
> displace?, 3. What does hypertext retrieve that was previously 
> obsolete?, 4. What does hypertext produce or become when taken to its 
> limit?
>
> _1. What does hypertext enhance or intensify?_
>
> Moulthrop is of the opinion that, if hypertext is about connection, 
> linkage, affiliation, then it simply is an extension of what 
> literature has always been.
>
> _2. What does hypertext render obsolete or displace?_
>
> He wonders if he could answer, “the book”, but decides that the answer 
> should be “the idiot box”. It is the intellectual problem that 
> hypertext seems excellently suited to address. So hypertext renders 
> obsolete, not “literacy”, but “post-literacy”. It foresees a “revival 
> of typographic culture (…in a truly dynamic, truly paperless 
> environment).” Moulthrop knows that this may seem “naïve or emptily 
> prophetic”, but also knows that “it is quite likely, valid.” Since 
> “hypertext means the end of the death of literature.” He also makes it 
> clear that the hypertext culture must consider the incorporation of 
> images and sounds and other interactive multimedia texts along with 
> alphabetic script.
>
> _3. What does hypertext retrieve that was previously obsolete?_
>
> Here Moulthrop makes a rather startling comment about a second domain 
> in hypertextual literacy, what Jay David Bolter calls, “writing space” 
> as opposed to the ordinary, grammatical space of “literature”. This 
> “writing space” can be exploited by any literate person to become an 
> author. All readers can become potential writers. Anyone can publish 
> in hypertextual space and to write is to create a “secondary literacy”.
>
> _4. What does hypertext produce or become when taken to its limit? _
>
> There is the fear that hypertext, when taken to its limit, might 
> realise McLuhan’s prophecy of reversal, “an empowering technology (may 
> be) turned into a mechanism of co-option and enslavement.” As 
> Moulthrop says, perhaps Xanadu too would “sell out to Sony, 
> Matsushita, Phillips or some other wielder of multinational leverage.” 
> However, he is optimistic, as long as there is a possibility of an 
> “other place”, a heterotopia, which would not work according to 
> understood paradigms of property.
>
> This discussion of Moulthrop’s essay will be put to interpretational 
> uses in the third part of my post, my April post. For all intents and 
> purposes, this is where I start exploring the poetry sites run by 
> Microsoft Network, more commonly known as MSN. Poetry is just one 
> category among many other categories of discussion fora, which include 
> subjects as diverse as sports, movies, health, automobiles or 
> alternative sexual lifestyles. The groups are designed in a way 
> whereby the “What’s New” page shows links on the left, new pictures 
> posted on the right, sponsored links and advertisements on the top, 
> new messages below the welcome message and a list of new members 
> (which can be viewed only by people who are already members) just 
> below that. The slightest click by the reader/user will allow her 
> entry; allow her to play in a polymorphic space that could take her to 
> tangents of various kinds. It could take her to a decentred, dynamic 
> space with very few and indeed, unstable hierarchical impediments.
>
> [Links to the “what’s new” page of a few sites:
>
> http://groups.msn.com/themustardbastard/_whatsnew.msnw
>
> http://groups.msn.com/Blackwidowswindowofpoetry/_whatsnew.msnw
>
> http://groups.msn.com/ThePoetsPlace/_whatsnew.msnw ]
>
> The architecture of these sites is such that one has to travel through 
> complicated alleys of links to navigate the various boards and pages. 
> More often than not, there are categories within categories like 
> Haiku, erotic poetry, dark/horror poetry, comic poetry etc. this 
> categorization would only mean more links to be traversed, more 
> clickable pressure points to be negotiated.
>
> Open groups, where membership is unrestricted, can be joined by 
> anybody with the help of any hotmail e-mail account. One hotmail 
> account gives you 3MB of storage space and the use of one screen name. 
> You can use your real name, of course, but such instances are rare. As 
> I said in my first post, my aim is not to investigate the use of 
> disguises and constructed identities in computer-mediated 
> communication. Enough work has already been done in this area. Suffice 
> to say here that anonymous poetry, or poetry written under interesting 
> screen names or “nicks”, as they are called, can drastically change 
> certain existing definitions of poetry as a lyric/subjective medium. 
> The self-naming of the poet-persona can be read as an attempt to 
> unsettle ordinarily held assumptions that the poetically created 
> artefact is stitched to the body and the imagination of the individual 
> who created the poetic text. The very fact that once you use up the 
> 3MB of storage space allotted to you, you will have to rejoin with a 
> new hotmail account and a new nickname (since the old one will show up 
> as being already in use) proves that in this poetic space, the name of 
> the creator, the aura of the original writer, is almost lost.
>
> Even though this may seem unnecessarily anarchic to most people, there 
> is much to be said about the instability and the decentredness of the 
> authorial voice. This is a fundamental reconfiguring of text 
> production and I would argue, also of reception. The reader will have 
> to keep track of the polyvalence of the voices, read through the 
> shifting mass of identities, textual materials and stylistic 
> interweavings.
>
> The movement of the poem from the written version to the typed, 
> on-screen, what I call, the /fonted /version, is a tortuous one and 
> requires basic computing skills. For instance, a direct copy-paste 
> from MS Word to the posting pop-up would render the poem 
> unintelligible since annoying HTML tags would taint the /meaning/ of 
> the poem. It would be interesting to frame this slippery space between 
> technology and poetry according to Robert Pepperell’s Post-human 
> Manifesto (1995) where he says: (i) Human bodies have no boundaries 
> and (ii) Post-humans regard their own being as embodied in an extended 
> technological world. Though the manifesto is problematic in various 
> ways, these are formulations that we need to take into consideration 
> when we try to locate the literal embodiment of our poetic selves on 
> the computer screen. I may look at this issue more closely in later posts.
>
> In the MSN Poetry sites, we see a hypertextual privileging of 
> recurrence, a permeable boundary between selves and machines, a 
> confrontation with simultaneity (in so far as a poem can be read by 
> any number of simultaneous users immediately after it is posted). The 
> archives co-exist seamlessly with the present. Any poem in the 
> archives can be brought back into the “What’s New” page, can be 
> “pushed to the top”, “bumped” to the present. Because hypertext 
> resists closure, we see that the poems exist in a state of chaotic 
> incompleteness. There are no final endings; a poem can be infinitely 
> reworked, reedited, can exist in a perpetual workshop space. So the 
> reader is no longer an outsider to the text, but a richly interactive, 
> almost busily so, entity. Sometimes, a poem almost takes on a 
> “patchwork”-like quality, and I do not mean this in the pejorative 
> sense. Readers put in various inputs, delete lines, add new words, 
> change punctuation and line breaks, sometimes rewrite entire stanzas, 
> sometimes, the whole poem.
>
> This recombinant potential of hypertext, the usage of “writing space” 
> for “secondary literacy”, where all readers are potential writers (or 
> at least commentators, critics and editors) is something that we have 
> to keep in mind. It also erases commonly held suppositions that the 
> gift of poetry is granted by higher powers to only a selected few. 
> Hypertextually speaking, all accessors of data are poets in the 
> making. It is interesting that poetry is also freed substantially from 
> the tyranny of the written word and annotations can be visual or aural 
> links, animated graphics, movie clips, poetry readings/recordings. All 
> these can become part of the poetic text, in fact can become /the 
> /poetic text, making its meaning roll into formerly unimaginable areas.
>
> If we look at Moulthrop’s discussion of McLuhan’s final question, we 
> see that there is a fear of being co-opted, appropriated within the 
> existing power structures of capital. We cannot afford to forget that 
> these groups are run by managers and assistant managers. The 
> creator/manager of a group can design/change the front page, add or 
> delete pages/boards, delete single comments or whole discussion 
> threads, invite or ban members and also assign assistant managers to 
> help in the general running and maintenance of the site. Even though 
> the powers exercised by many managers are minimal, there are sites 
> where the rules cited by MSN are followed strictly. Moreover, 
> advertisers and sponsors are difficult to erase even though spammers 
> and porn-bots are kept out by frequent banning. Moreover, Microsoft, 
> after all, is a great wielder of power. So will the vehement 
> pluralism, the heterotopia of this space be compromised and lead to 
> reversal and enslavement? I will look at the problems raised by these 
> questions/observations in my May post.
>
> Nitoo Das
>
>
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