poetry, intimacy, centre-periphery tensions, and the electronic transmission medium
1 The shift from paper to Internet
Internet poetry editors are usually editors of paper poetry magazines. Of course we aren't qualified to do the new job. What we have to do is to separate the essential from the accidental in the constitution of poetry: a basic exercise which is yet extraordinarily hard to undertake. High-level rules will remain valid in the new medium; low-level ones will have to be discarded.
The word physical occurs here: when we say that the width of a poetic line isn't given by the width of the screen but by the rules of the English language, the temptation is to describe the sound groups (technically, phoneme clauses) into which spoken English is divided as a physical given. However, comparison with other languages tells us that this division is not hard-wired; it is only a habit which is relatively stubbornly ingrained. And in fact the poetic line enjoys some autonomy vis-…-vis the phoneme clause of everyday speech. But in general the features of poetry which were inherent in the oral or written situations can be expected to get shed in the different situation of digital telecommunication. It seems helpful to analyse poetry as we know it into functions, groping towards functions which willl be constant in the new situation; thus obtaining a view of the shifting layer of implementation of the functions. Some of these might be:
setting of interpretative rules
establishment of the poet's personality
genre
scene setting
arousal of expectations
attraction of the reader
selection of a poem
the act of reading
publishing; editing; rejection
reputation
recommendation
marginalisation
Separation between these is remarkably weak.
2 Critical limits on consumer uptake
If there is more help prose then there will be more reader takeup. This assumes more reader-hours being expended on poetry. However, other sectors using the Net are also calculating on taking up more reader-hours. Unless poetry can generate publicity as persuasive as other genres, it may actually lose market share. If there are fewer readers, the complex called ‚litism, or overshadowing, will actually get worse. The weak link is availability of the reader's time, and this may not be improved by Net access.
For system behaviour, the function "generation of bad information" is perhaps the most important single one. The article on the Net in Poetry Review (London; give number) suggests that bad mainstream poetry is already being sprayed at the Net and may prevent anyone from wading through the dung to find the real poetry. Thinking back, to now, it's quite possible that it would be an improvement to wipe out all poetry magazines except ten (or even six), which would be of warrantable high quality.
3 Dislike
Since all social situations generate dislike, it seems perverse to deny this the status of an abstract function. It would be arrogant to try to analyse unpopularity without an adequate social theory of dislike.
4 The Train of Attention
At present one of the limits in Net publishing is the amount of data which a user can download in two minutes, i.e. without getting bored. The Net is a continuous-on thing, if you induce delays then people lose interest. We had to slice the magazine number up into bits convenient for downloading. It follows that every slice has to entice the reader enough to "reproduce itself" and get the next slice downloaded. Currently the functional unit is a block of twenty pages; to include windows (Hypertext links) into other files. This chain of files is not inherently closed. An obvious step is to include hypertext links between a single poem in a magazine and the whole book it belongs to: an eager reader picks up a Nigel Wheale poem, or our review of his book, and then downloads the whole of Phrasing the Light. These strings can't be very long while so little poetry is on the Net. It may become conventional for poetry files (olim books) to include Hypertext links-out to other books (files) which they recommend as "related". This may become the standard path of poetic shopping. It is an open question whether poets will include Hypertext links within poems. Poems could be constructed out of HT links only. The Net is especially favourable to sampling and montage.
5 Poetry without an audience or poetry before an audience
Small press poetry - which no-one gets paid for - could be put on the Net in its entirety, for the cost of server storage. The term "small press" is obsolete, because it can't apply to unpublished poetry and all poetry is written before being published. In future, most of it may be electronically disseminated. Replacement terms: unpopular poetry, counter-cultural poetry, intelligent poetry, specialist marketing poetry, unorthodox poetry.
6 Centre and Periphery
It is impossible to contemplate the early history of poetry in Australia without stumbling over topics like prestige, marginalization, backwardness, peripherality. In fact, the virtual voice which utters poetry was drawn into the world of prejudices and valuations which affects the reception of speaking voices of English. We have to question the geographical perceptions which meant that a listener hearing a regional accent, or a colonial accent, projectively heard inferiority rather than just locality. If the space of which the world is composed is uneven, it is presumably because of the existence of metropolitan centres, where cultural interaction is more intense, creates new forms and value, and sharpens the individuals living there. It is possible that in 1910 there were only two English-speaking cultural metropolises, New York and London; this may be the wrong number, but the number has ben added to in probably every decade since then. However, the majority of literary intellectuals still live outside the big cities; the Internet may offer an end to their exclusion from up to date cultural life.
For Australians, the metropolis moved to Australia in the 1960s, if not the 1940s, making this whole universe of discourse obsolete. But the problems of a small and far-flung population scattered over a whole continent, and that very far away from other English-speaking markets, remain; you can't cut distance to market but you can cut time to market. It seems to me that the Internet offers more to literati in big empty spaces, such as Australia outside the big cities, much of southwest USA, English-language writers in Singapore, than to most people in (say) the Netherlands or England.
7 Pressure on
The sleeve notes to a reissue album (Raven RVLP01) of The Master's Apprentices, one of the most successful Australian bands of the 1965-72 period, recalls their experiences of coming to England in 1970 via 7 weeks as house band on a Sitmar liner: 'England shook The Masters Apprentices to their boots. In a long letter to Go-Set, Glenn Wheatley made plain 'As far as we are concerned, there is no originality in Australia. No group can go straight from Australia and set the world on fire-there are groups over here decades ahead.' [Jim] Keays concurred: 'After six weeks here we realised we were facing a crisis-The Masters had to start all over again or split up.' Such despair had emerged after a whirlwind gig crawl which took in performances by the likes of Free, East of Eden, Audience and Edgar Broughton Band." Scary stuff, but if the local groups were good, in that year of singular flamboyance and optimism, it didn't mean it wasn't scary for them too. Maybe the London music world wasn't a pressure cooker forcing people to innovate and research, but ask anyone if they'd rather be in the pressure cooker and find out! Even the possibility that someone else is going through that kind of formative excitement, while you aren't, is unbearable. If you're surrounded by other people doing what you do only better, you not only have the best possible atmosphere to learn and imitate from, but you also have to invent something new: a year of this will wrench more brilliance out of you than ten years of isolation where you are your own environment and every failure of perception repeats itself forever.
It may be academic now, but I think The Masters Apprentices were better than Audience and the Edgar Broughton Band. The masters in their name were John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, etc.: apparently records were good enough for them to learn their whole trade from.
8 Sending status down a wire
M.A.K. Halliday remarks: "The essential characteristic of social structure as we know it is that it is hierarchical; and linguistic variation is what expresses its hierarchical character, whether in terms of age, generation, sex, provenance, or any other of its manifestations, including caste and class." (Language as Social Semiotic, 1978, p.184) When Halliday wrote that, the unspoken codicil was 'and this will change in a better society', whereas now we know that there is an eternal return and that status is almost as intrinsic to speech as teeth. Whatever messages you send down the Internet will be like other human messages; in this new and uncoded moment of technology, we have to identify the area of decision open to us before it is open to us. I'd like to quote a 1944 piece by John Sommerfield, a Marxist-oriented novelist writing in Penguin New Writing:
'Boy, bring me some more cakes, and jaldi karo!'
The accentuation and distortion of the vowel sounds, the assured tones of the voices, the phraseology of the conversations, gave so clear a characterisation of the speakers that I didn't need to see them. As an experienced hunter can tell from an animal's tracks and droppings its species, size and condition (etc)... For some reason or other my mental picture was without faces. But I knew their expressions by heart, the lines and curves and wrinkles engraved on the mobile flesh by time and experience were shaped by the code of behaviour and thought that governed their lives (.)
Sommerfield was a thirties radical moving here into the wartime world of egalitarianism and aspirations to a more just society. Of course, the class revolutions of the 1940s and 1960s disrupted the system which guaranteed his perceptions; social historians of the affluent society stress, from the later fifties on, the greater choice of lifestyles available to people in Britain, so that the predictive information contained in speech patterns simply evaporated. Sommerfield clearly disliked the people he was writing about, but it seems likely that, for many of the poetry readers of that time, the sound of a privileged voice was the thing which attracted them. If Betjeman's Summoned by Bells sold 100,000 copies, this wasn't in spite of being set partly in Kensington and an Oxford college. We should think very carefully about what context signals are being sent in poetry. I think this taste of the old middle class dissolved in the sixties, but also that it was replaced by the tastes of the new middle class, adequately complacent and aggressive despite the influx of people from working-class origins. If you don't understand the message, you can't understand how the message system is working.
9 Zeitgeist
If one looks at the big changes in British, North American, and Australian political opinion this century, the effect of world market changes is clear, but it also seems that the less bound ideas are shifting in synchronization; and this has to be attributed to individuals, also newspapers and other forms of print, and recently filmed and televisual artefacts, moving between the three societies. What seems normal or extreme shifts from decade to decade based on contextual cues from the people around us. The term Zeitgeist has a very dubious origin in the mystical and spiritualist side of romanticism, where common shifts of mood were interpreted as due to a Spirit (literally, Geist) emitting moods through some kind of ether. I'm not persuaded that the Internet will make any difference to politics, but something is being transmitted between cultural centres and, if the rate of transmission is changed, it's reasonable to suppose that other system features will change too.
10 Archaism reinforced by technology
The virtualisation of dealing on the London Stock Exchange at Big Bang, in 1986, involved a great deal of expense and a panoply of new technology. Did this bring anything new? It permitted the aggrandisement of a few wealthy families and their servants at the expense of virtually everyone else. It helped to increase the inequality of distribution of wealth, putting back the clock of recent decades. It reduced the power of labour, because it improved the response capacity of organised capital without an equivalent improvement in information quality and speed of response on the part of unions or working people. The semantic patterns which the new computers were so exactly tracing were property rights and the names of individuals owning them, kinds of information dating back to the Neolithic if not before. Archaic functions of power and appropriation were being carried out more swiftly, and perhaps more nakedly and brazenly.
Changing the message system will not change the archaic functions of poetry. Quite plausibly, it may make the archaic patterns clearer by sweeping away obstacles which hindered them in other systems, without adding value of their own.
Giving hi-teck to the owners of capital is like giving some Afghan warlord a Kalashnikov. Isn't the computer industry like the forward arms market in Peshawar? only a bit quieter.
11 Fine time intervals
The rise of vers libre and dialect poetry in England came about at the same time and for the same reasons: to achieve precision in notating very fine variations of the movement of the voice. This was the Georgian period, when a certain nostalgia for the body defined the mind as the source of inauthenticity. Harold Monro, the main inspirer of the Georgian Books, also arranged series of poetry readings, something novel in 1912; and wanted to reach an uneducated audience. Live readings imply an anxiety that the printed word is inauthentic because the poet isn't physically there. Decalations bring deceit; or, truth requires time as the force which holds it together.
There isn't necessarily a connection, but let's note that the realm of reaching an idea first and dominance also has to do with short time intervals. In fact, the dethroning of the centre implicit in the Georgian cult of peasants, animals and the barbaric is a revolt towards the periphery. Nominating the body as the source of authenticity (as Lawrence, most notably, did) abruptly switches out access to Classical literature or to Parisian ideas as the path to poetry.
Personal identity is altered by altering time relations just as selective slowing or speeding of tapes makes a voice sound completely different.
Poetry needs a theory of subjectless action so that the influence which the poet exerts over the reader's mood and ideas isn't simply domination. If you weaken your idea of personality boundaries then the fact that the poet gets there first doesn't imply dependence: you are both immersed in an ambience. Whereas the historicist belief in a remorseless rail of time implies not only that the periphery merely imitates the centres but also that the reader is passive and a follower.
Altering the dissemination rates alters the prestige relations between centre and periphery. Our ideas of relations between centre and periphery may be based on the physical qualities of existing media, so that the almost zero-delay molecular flow of the Internet will change the rules of the literary world.
12 Phonemes and prosody
Whereas speech comprises both phonemes and prosody, our writing system barely takes notice of prosody. That is, when we see a written text (including one that has come over the Internet) we supply the prosody ourselves. If we can do this successfully, prosody is implied in the phonemic level (but not vice versa) and so the speech flow is redundant (says things twice). It would be excessively easy, using multi-media PCs, to restore this redundancy, and even multiply it; the first theoretical question is whether print has benefited from its bareness and minimalism, and in fact less is more.
Sometimes, entire stretches of poetry can be described by simple terms, containing far less information than the original and yet not misrepresenting it. Underneath the surface changeability of a poem, or a volume there is perhaps something much less changeable; a tone, a mood, a character, an atmosphere. It is remarkable that this should be so. It is reasonable to connect these underlying gestures with prosodic functions, which are also overall, sustained over entire messages (i.e. suprasegmental), and relatively archaic and few in number.
It unnerves me that a message can contain so many elements which aren't specified in any way. It's the less visible thing which are likely to go wrong-and the wrongness won't be invisible.
13 Printed poetry and the loss of voice
Which parts of the original speech signal does writing suppress? Volume, timbre, pitch, intonation; some data of dialect and class; in general, all details about the physiological means of production. I consider that these lost parts correspond to pre-human signals, carying data about body weight, sex, age, vigour, hormonal levels, mood. The voice, being written down, is disembodied. People can feel starved and cut off when reading poetry; but, out of the disappearance of the body, we can create imaginary bodies. Tacitus describes the Germani of the 1st century AD as warming up for battle by chanting heroic poems: asperitas soni et fractum murmur; they amplified their voices by holding up their shields before their mouths. This boomy effect was terrifying because human instinctively relate voice to body weight by its physical qualities: the boom created the spine-chilling illusion of giant bodies. The illusion affected both the Germani and their opponents; I consider that the whole history of poetry involves the creation of imaginary body images with incalculably exciting effects on poet and reader.
Print is a 'cold medium' but it delivers much faster. You can scan a bigger area for the patterns you want. You can move back and forth inside it much more easily. Part of the rapidity of print is due to its elimination (non-utterance) of prosody. Poetry clings to the oral medium by partially representing prosody: the line break, representing the juncture of two phoneme clauses.
14 Less is more
In New Scientist for 30/5/93 p.30, John McCrone reports that "subjects were shut in a ganzfeld, a simple sensory deprivation chamber where bright, red lights are shone onto ping pong balls taped over the eyes and white noise is played into the ears. For subjects the effect is much like staring into a formless fog. After a quarter of an hour or so of such blankness, most people begin to experience brilliant dream-like images, much like the so-called 'hypnagogic' images that are often seen on the point of falling asleep."
There is a second world of vivid hallucination waiting outside the real one. To reach it needs intense concentration, going under in the words.
The neurological effects of duration interest me, the required end state cannot be reached quickly. I dislike pamphlets for this reason; I like poetry which goes on for a long time. Something interesting has to be happening all the way through, but I like the idea that you have to concentrate, and be absorbed, for 15 minutes before the necessary physiological changes set in and you start to hallucinate.
If all humans have this faculty, we can see the poetic mood as an autotelic vibratory state of the brain; and ask why it ever doesn't come about. If it's a physiological thing, it's got nothing to do with class status, education, or living in the metropolis. We can speak of the poet getting in the way of poetry. It becomes democratic-like alcohol.
Obviously poetry isn't a formless fog, it is full of shapes and the images it inspires are profoundly directed by its own semantic structures. But it's hardly worth it unless it makes the reader see things.
You can rewrite just about any difficult poem to be easy to follow; but you shouldn't do this, because obstinately difficult work can be so suggestive and have such a powerful effect on the imagination. The concept which minimalists are working towards is not totally stupid, just badly achieved. The theory of demanding poetry is given by JH Prynne in his 1962 essay 'Resistance and Difficulty', where he says among other things (quoting Abelard): 'Where is the battle if the antagonist is away? For a contest, an opponent is needed, not one who simply submits.'.
If sensory deprivation makes you hallucinate, supplying more information will tend to hinder and stop the hyperassociation process. So printed poetry may be more effective than spoken and performed poetry because it is less sensuous.
15 Post-sensory data
There is no kind of information which is unique to poetry. Even the moment of perfect (alleged) intimacy is claimed by the interview, the pop song, and even the advertisement-in its direct address, shared jokes, its setting of domestic impromptu, sly sharing of infantile wishes. The question of what poetry essentially is, what is its homeland, can only be answered in unsatisfactory terms: words can describe anything at all, what they can't be is sensuous in the way that painting or music is. No subject matter is excluded from poetry. The more information is available in society, the more is available for poetry.
Language is transparent, like a camera lens; it takes in everything but has no identity of its own. It can compete only by bearing a signature so intense that the memory of alternatives fades. A strong artificial and formal organization must be burnt into it, down to its smallest units.
So what is the difference between words and images? Words represent (not are) an abstract system of traces which can be scanned, excerpted, re-organized, and so forth, by virtue of their abstraction. A revealing feature is the ability of words to be indexed; if you have a million words on computer, you can search them automatically and retrieve key words; this isn't so for pictures.
If poetry tries to be 'sensuous' it is partaking of the discourse of the weak, and the sites where they are weak. I find this a quite unattractive idea. Should the poet be someone who knows what colour the new car is but doesn't understand that the car factory is about to be closed down and restarted in a Third World country? Poetry shouldn't be writing about objects, but about the way society is organized. Literature is quite unlike (say) photography in its various forms; poetry is close to the abstract control language in which the social structure is encoded.
The serial nature of words means that each word is foregrounded at the moment of its occurrence. This makes the relation of foreground to background quite different from any picture. The perpetual disappearance of the verbal string as it moves puts weight on temporary memory; opening up the suspicion that cinema tends to drug people by blasting them with data the whole time and numbing their minds.
The problem with primary sensuous reality is that it isn't how we apprehend the world. There is no doubt that a cat tracks its prey by smell, sound, and sight, simultaneously; although these senses are physiologically separate. Evidently there must be a combined symbolic language into which these raw data are translated in order to locate them and locate the mouse with precision; it must be "symbolic" because it is no longer sense data. The cat successfully uses the auditory data of a mouse scrunching through leaves to move its gaze to where the mouse is about to appear. If a cat can integrate inputs from several senses at once, how much more can a human being do! Now that we have posited this combined symbolic language, we can see that it is like words. Language has got nothing to do with direct sensory input, it is an abstract totalizing synthesis. It may in fact be not only a means of sharing information with comrades, but also the means by which the brain talks to itself, at the highest and most powerful level of meaning. Language is both less capacious and accurate than photography, and more powerful: it is more handy to manipulate because it was specially designed for manipulation. It differs from any merely sensuous representation. Perhaps a degree of attenuation of input is needed in order to prevent flooding, and to acquire some independence from the turbulence of sense data. This can be expressed in terms of a familiar paradox of navigational processing: if the Analyser takes more than a second to process a second's worth of input, then input has periodically to be suspended to let the Analyser catch up. If where time=t the Analyser is still processing the raw data of t=100 at t=105, then it is essential to throw away the input data of t=101, 102...105. So perhaps our intake of the world is discontinuous; if we have to think sometimes (which seems to be subjectively true). Analysis implies freezing. So the suppressor function of consciousness may be as important to health and survival as its analytical function. A constant stream of sense data is not unmediated bliss, actually it's a form of psychological discomfort and even violation. The more fecund our senses, the more it is necessary to uncouple them and throw their information away. All models of bits of the world are less complex than what they model; but if they were perfectly accurate, they would be quite useless.
16 A message delivered at two different times
Printed poetry is a message delivered in two parts. The prosodic realization is inherent in the message because you are a native speaker of the language, but not sent along with the message. You acquired the phonological rules during early childhood. (We can neglect the differences between, say, Australian speech melody and middle-class English speech melody, taking the printed version as 'definitive'; although in reality there may be a melody of Australian poetry animating it-and missed by British and American readers.) This situation is easily understood by comparison with computers; e.g. you download a font and then a print file using the font, which may be much smaller, in bytes, than the font file.
I wonder what the extent of this stored code is. I don't have a measure; although observations on head injuries make it clear that prosody is a right-hand cortex function and lexicon and phonemes are left-hand functions. Is there a possibility of writing to it, changing the code as we use it? Setting words to a tune does just this.
17 A program which writes to itself
Clearly, it isn't just prosody which is unspecified within the poem, but also the rules for reading it in general. We may become aware of these through noticing that they change between one historical epoch and another, or from trying to explain why serious poetry is so little understood.
If a single word implies a social context, and therefore a set of behavioural rules, it is like the single character which pulls a whole font program with it. If you string together a dozen characters in a dozen different fonts, the font becomes foregrounded and the literal value of the literal sinks into the background.
A single poem from the 11th century contains explicit information-say 200 characters, for a little song. But you can also consider it as containing the whole historical milieu around it, all the interpretative rules with which you read 11th C poems; so how much information does that little character string contain? If you read a comprehensive anthology of the present day, there are a dozen different literary systems contained inside it; if you jump from one poem to another, you change your internal state, reconfigure your reading faculty, at huge speed; it's already a psychedelic experience.
As the text itself is reduced to a serial Raworthian intermittence, coherence migrates to subsystems, parts bound to each other by structural resistance, and embodying interpretative regimes. If you start to make the application of interpretative rules, and the encapsulated triggers which tell the reader which rule set to apply, conscious, you can start writing to the rule sets rather than just generating sentences which obey the rules of one or other of them. All writing is specifying a situation; the writer can specify also how to read. Structure becomes narrative.
Raworth fulfils the mandate of saying a lot in a small space by context switching. This either privileges the unconscious by foregrounding its functions, or degrades it by forcing its functions into the conscious realm. When planning things for the Internet, don't confuse the byte count with the complexity of the message.
What if we attempt to codify Context and devise a notation by which we could encapsulate and transmit it? is it possible that the underlying logic of reviewing is to encapsulate contexts and teach them to the reader, who can then read successfully (and make their own mind up)? Note that different poets share contexts; much of our critical vocabulary is a weak attempt to point to this. Can we describe some of the actions that contexts include? Perhaps descriptions of context are richer than descriptions of incidentals.
18 C'est l'ambience
In the oral, rock-oriented culture of the post-1956 period, we can describe poetic context as the trace of an atmosphere, the internal mood of an intimate group; a vibe. Poetry somehow contains a virtual space into which the reader can immerse although remote in space and time. Poetry must work in this way and we can argue that, of many thousands of European poets, the ones who survive do so because they succeed in doing this. Perhaps like a song capturing the atmosphere in a club.
We can compare social being and prosody because they are both affective, pre-rational, durative, noncontrastive, relating to the body image and affective signalling and transmission of mood. describe a few flavours of groups.
19 Assimilation and suggestibility
When a flock of pigeons takes off from the ground, you can watch the motion rippling across the group; perhaps the first one actually saw a threat, but the others just followed suit, and their perceptual environment ceased to be the outside world and became only the field of creatures of their own kind, and behaviour consists of imitating what they do. Art is the realm, not so much of mimesis of the physical world, as of mimesis of other people, altering one's inner state to become like theirs. Is it information which is being transmitted? not exactly. In this gramar of assimilation, we have to position radical art, which defined itself by dissimilation, political, social, and cultural.
We read of the 15th century friar Capistrano that a hundred thousand people would go into hysteria and set out on a mass crusade when he preached. This power didn't come from his words, because he preached in Latin, which almost one of them understood. The hysterical suggestibility was a subjectless action, transmitted by all infectiously and originating in a nutshell. The Internet isn't there to transmit information.
20 Suggestion and fine timing
The good poet has the power of suggestion more than other people. Given that bad poets use the same ideas, emotions, images, and rhythmic patterns as good poets, we can suggest that goodness resides in the fine timing of intrication of events in different levels of the linguistic signal: the signature of the poet is located within contexts which are momentary. Success is self-same, self-confirming; parts matched. The termini are cohesion and rapid change: if you have both, you are going to be successful. You have to move the reader's attention along. Anticipation is another small-duration timepipe thing: emphasis, something archaic and subtle, moves through the text in millisecond-fine slices. Prosody signals emphasis in speech: but speech melody isn't notated in the print medium.
A poem is made of information, but it is also made of information that can be discarded, and its identity dwells in the higher levels of organisation, or simultaneously in the micro-slices of the momentary universe of discourse (to use Jakobson's phrase).
21 Dolphins
Bateson remarks of the acoustic communication of whales and dolphins that land mammals interact a lot by grooming, which cetaceans can't do because their skins are poor in nerve ends, to do with insulation in cold waters. They can't huddle together and exchange warmth as, say, rats do, building solidarity. They have no sense of smell, either. So the sensory stimulation or emission is forced through the remaining channel of hearing. This theory of loss and compensation assumes that there is a prior message volume which precedes the channel by which it is, in fact, made real. This theory of compensation is highly relevant to print or electronic transmission of words, which set out, after all, from an initial loss of signalling channels. No embraces, no eye contact; a spectre state. When formatting a Net message, or magazine-programme framing a swarm of messages, you have to ask: what is the burden of the message? and: are we sending something inherently scant, bleak, thin, and inauthentic?
22 Cultural paranoia
Speech is dialogic; we can treat dialogue as the Absent of literature. This means that recognition of the listener's status in the speaker's speech, one of the archaic and indispensable streaks in language, is missing from the written word; so that reassurance and paranoia are not exactly unimportant in literary relations.
Dialogue depends on short time relations: the reply is recognizable as such only by temporal proximity to the first move. There are obvious problems with storage of time-based matches in the frozen form of a text. The reader can be symbolically acknowledged via proxies: dialogue takes place within the text and you feel yourself considered by it.
For the insecure person, everything is a metastatement about status. I have three different dishes on the stove; someone phones me and wants to read a poem aloud over the phone; I say I've got three dishes on the stove and he says "You don't like me". These status conflicts are boring and exciting at the same time. The overt tautology of statements of 'I'm me' and 'I'm great' can nonetheless lead to visible contests-the most interesting things to watch. It seems that status is the main burden of mammal communication.
This paranoia is like the writing to the program which we discussed above. The message aims to rewrite the unspoken rules by which messages are read or reconstituted. Insofar as modernism is an attack by a younger generation on their elders, or as the poetry of the last 25 years pursues personal politics and aims to grind up and redistribute social prestige (and economic rights), they have conflicts over status in their artistic foreground.
23 Stored and entrained memory complexes
Cultural experiences may not be so much discovering something new as recovering a stored, temporarily lost, state. The work of art may induce the return of pleasurable moods through control of cognitive boundaries. Guattari describes these repeatable bounded moods as ritournelles, refrains. People who grew up with TV don't think in terms of aura-indued objects, but of episodes signalled by theme tunes. These refrains can be thought of as obdurations: the fluid substance of awareness is broken up by boundaries and we see the emergence of objects.
The physical details of the art experience may trigger the retrieval of moods. The moment when the front lights go down; the evocative charge of theme music; the book as object. These signs are self-referential (more exactly, the tenth occurrence of them arouses memories of the first nine occurrences). The Internet publication may need something like theme music to create a mnemonic affective boundary. Part of making a phone connection is seizure, meaning that the recipient phone can't receive other phonecalls while you're on; the Internet magazine has to make an affective seizure.
24 The Time Rail
There is an image of a time rail, never turning back on itself and ceaselessly making styles obsolete. This is terrifying for someone away from the cultural centres where the next rail is being forged, because you suspect that, by the time you've heard about the new thing and worked out how to do it, it's already the old thing. I suspect this is an anxiety hallucination, and that it is circulated by people who are deluded into thinking that where they are is the centre, the in place, there there, the inside of the inside, and who have a convulsive need to regard everyone else as hicks. It's like the fashion industry in this way. You can't simultaneously believe in 'being up to date' and in 'the pluralism of cultural achievement'.
What we seem to have in England is a fear of thinking about technique in case you're behind the times. This means people fail to develop their own technique, never mind what might be happening in some glittering, imaginary, metropolitan culture nightclub.
Some other interpretations of being 'out of date'. Perhaps a poet makes stylistic breakthroughs when they have no job and no family; and then writes dully and infrequently when they do have those things. So the indifference of their later volumes might not to be to do with the inherent decline of a certain style, but with their way of spending time. Actually, what is noticeable is the insensitivity of critics to poets younger than themselves; typically, they go on liking the poets slightly older than themselves and assuming that history stops just after them. Because of the career structure, the prominent critics at any moment are therefore twenty years out of date in their enthusiasms; this arouses deep resentment against the previous poetry generation at any time.
If style X of 1960 goes "out of date" in 1980, how is it we can still read the books of 1960 in 1996? Doesn't this imply that someone could still write in the style of 1960 in 1996? Perhaps the weakness of retro styles is the boredom and fatigue of the poets using them, not problems internal to the style.
It would be wrong to repeat a stanza in a poem. But the stanza was good the first time. Perhaps, on the larger scale too, there is a set of anticipations and possibilities at any moment, which must be realised or forfeited. The release of information destroys the inchoate tensions and glimpses from which it is generated.
25 A world caf‚
Why shouldn't there be a thousand such tense states all over the English-speaking world, rather than just one?
One answer might be the difference between a live literary milieu, and an isolated, provincial poet, relying on print for stimuli and linguistically alienated from the society physically around him or her. The first instance generates its own atmospheres and its own time line. The second is dependent on the centre where the books and magazines come from.
This is divisive, because it means only the in-group have access to liveness. In the thirties, for example, Auden and Spender were hanging out with other up-to-date poets all the time, while some working-class poet in Manchester wasn't, or had to hang out with people of archaic and dissimilar poeticb persuasions if they did find someone. Only the people blessed with literary culture and the right social background were allowed to get away from the literary culture and write poetry which belonged to the current decade.
What the Internet could offer is a live literary milieu even for people in regional cities and with original and marginal literary tastes. If that fruit isn't too sweet to be eaten.
26 The importance of independent producers
I accept a viral competition theory that multiple small sources mean all fruitful niches are investigated and individual loci are pushed and exploited to the maximum, creating new value. So, not a million cans of beans, but ten thousand different cans. My view of modern British poetic history is that access to cheap reprographic methods meant that there were 2000 poetry magazines in the sixties (counted by Wolfgang G”rtschacher). This astonishing manyness meant the rise of equally astonishing diversity, as poets realised they didn't have to conform to narrow Christian-academic ideals to get published; which created a diverse audience. I say 'my view' because the official view is still that this never happened.
The era of uncontrolled freedom gave rise to the greatest diversity that British poetry has ever known. I take it that the optimum situation for the reader is fantasy rafts of mutual facilitation, so that you have endless diversity and for every mood you and find a group of poets who have taken it through to it logical conclusion. Of course, it didn't work like that; only a few poets were really interested in experiment and development. (Yes, but there are a hundred exceptions!) The zones of suggestibility weren't hot enough, or the developable ideas were missing somehow.
Smaller unit costs mean faster evolution, more generations in a shorter time. Pressure from the audience was missing: but the Internet's nature could make this feedback ultimately efficient, and so speed up and direct evolution. The Internet offers small batch, high end, highly customized production, and the revolution could happen all over again.
The same historical shift meant that there were groups of poets in virtually every university town (and some others). The 'live' interactions were available for thousands of people; but there is a formal problem, since the stimuli you really need are other people who think like you. If you're a surrealist, it's no good meeting in a pub with a lot of domestic realists, however polite. The pressure to conform to a centre, and not to perfect your personal, non-central style, was and is crushing. The Net potentially allows you to contact people all over the world, making your milieu much more precise, and much hotter and more stimulating for you as a poet. I presume what the audience needs is finished styles rather than compromised ones.
27 Consonance and specialisation
I edit a magazine which includes very diverse poetry. I often wish it was specific and repetitive, which would put pressure on poets to hit a specific goal and, because of the visible competition, to hit it incredibly well. This is true of the bands of 1970, they specialised in order to compete. But for me this would mean turning down lots of good poetry and banking on material from a narrow spectrum which probably wouldn't arrive. But if there was a huge mass of material, I would specialise: so if poetry becomes deterritorialised, we might see all magazines specialising and any broad-band ones just disappearing. There are about 215 poetry magazines in the UK, but I would say their specialisation is minimal: there are very few which give an experience strong enough to be remembered and repeated; to form a refrain. And this gives the poets no aesthetic instruction; it leaves them in a blurred awareness. I don't believe in a line of artistic progress, but any poem has to be pushed for a thousand miles to become what it needs to be. I would like to see poetry magazines which are narrow spectrum but totally saturated.
I think at present we have loyalty groups which don't really represent sensibilities.
28 The recognitions
It's unlikely that the artist's personality will be less important in the Internet than in print. The personality goes around the utterance and gives it its qualities. Recognisability triggers the reader's retrieval of a responsive mood. You are attracted, you want to be where the interesting people are. This is archaic, it goes back to the playground.
Poetry becomes completely different when you print it without the author's names; the difference is too primal to be defined. We can't wash the personality out of poetry, although we can notice that the preference of readers for names already popular biases the milieu against anyone new, and editors have to add the counter-bias. We can hope that the signature being transmitted through ultra-modern technology is a mode of perception, a window on a larger world, rather than just a personal appearance as himself, a thorough-bass of "I'm me and so am I".
I don't accept that it is a robust personality which makes art repetitive; I think it's the self-imitation of poets. Technically incompetent artists also repeat themselves. Searching through a file of poems to help us proof Angel Exhaust 13 on screen, I recognized someone's typescript and visual layout through the back of the paper. Timelapse? a fraction of a second. As radical gestures become recognizable, innovation gets reduced to Meness.
29 Acts of behavioural grace
We not only recognize poets, we are attracted to them and wish to repeat the first encounter with them. Why we find certain faces attractive is a mystery; it's not easy to define attraction except in a circular fashion. It's something humans do, and it's certainly the basis of aesthetics. But what is it? Andrew Sarris identified in the films of Frank Borzage a 'behavioural beauty'; the beautiful style of poets is (all too) human, signalling goodness, kindness, and intelligence.
Art reduces itself to the minimal, what we would be frustrated if it were withheld, and that minimum demonstrates something, probably the quality of someone's character. Whatever precedes the existence of channels of communication, is conservative. And so again we will perceive what we wanted to perceive.
30 Minstrels
Joyce Youings has written about the move of the English gentry, in the course of the 16th century, away from expressing and acquiring social power by lavish public feasting, and towards leading a quiet and private life, while accumulating money and land protected by the stable rule of law rather than by pre-eminence in the district. There is a connection between the disappearance of minstrels, hired for big parties, the rise of reading (demanding solitude and quiet rooms), and the decline of the use by the gentry of armed force to seize assets and intimidated judges and juries to obstruct the course of justice. This displacement of upper-class cultural energy towards reading was one of the factors bringing Elizabethan literature about. The gentry stopped leading their life in public, and domestic architecture dwelt on smaller, more luxuriously furnished, rooms.
The move away from formal eulogy and visible, public display of assets, and the rise of sobriety and rationality as, really, means of self-aggrandisement, has had a great influence on English poetry, tending ever since to become more private and rational, and less communal and lavish and boasting. The sixties of this century tended to reverse this change out, with television's new visual-oral intimacy bringing new minstrels. Some of their foppish get-ups had a mediaeval air. How the Internet will affect boasting and display remains unclear, but this is one of the most powerful and unstable values in poetry.
So the gentry were becoming more internalised and contemplative while thriving on the land released by the dissolution of the contemplative orders. It's confusing. And so will this be.