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

[Keith Hart]

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