Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Verb Centered

As if I could sit
And write about this
I sit and write about
Sitting
Quietly listening
And so
But I quit that
Eventually
In favor of sitting
Naturally quiet
Making the noise
Of created silence

JM

5 comments:

keed said...

am sitting. the mortals made me giddy.

Old Fogey said...

Marjorie Perloff
Digital Poetics and the Differential Text

From New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, ed. Adelaide Morris and Thomas SwissI (Cambridge and London: MIYT Press (2006): 143-64.

"As in the case of any medium in its early stages, digital poetry today may seem to fetishize digital presentation as something in itself remarkable, as if to say, 'Look what the computer can do!' But no medium or technique of production can in itself give the poet (or other kind of artist) the inspiration or imagination to produce works of art. And poetry is an especially vexed case because, however we choose to define it, poetry is the language art: it is, by all accounts, language that is somehow extraordinary, that can be processed only on re-reading. Consequently, the “new” techniques whereby letters and words can move around the screen, break up, and reassemble, or whereby the reader/viewer can decide by a mere click to reformat the electronic text or which part of it to access, become merely tedious unless the poetry in question is, in Ezra Pound’s words, 'charged with meaning.' "

Old Fogey said...

Perloff (continued)

(http://marjorieperloff.com/articles/digital-poetics-and-the-differential-text/)

I want to say something about the new dissemination of poetry and poetics that is occurring on the internet. Here a real revolution is taking place right in front of our eyes. Consider Kenneth Goldsmith’s beautifully designed site Ubuweb (www.ubuweb.com), where one can access an astonishing variety of avant-garde poetries from the early twentieth century to the present: from Russian Futurism and Dada to Fluxus and Ethnopoetics, to contemporary movements in visual and sound poetry. There are also critical essays on the poetries in question and, most important, portfolios of otherwise inaccessible work. Thus Craig Dworkin has produced “An Anthology of Conceptual Writing,” with a superb introduction and examples from Samuel Beckett and Robert Barry to Christian Bök—an anthology actually much more adequate than anything currently available in print format. Again, Goldsmith has obtained the entire archive of the avant-garde “magazine in a box” Aspen (1965-72), which is unavailable even in leading research libraries, and has posted the entire run (10 issues) on the web. And on Ubuweb, one can listen to Marinetti intone Zang Tuum Tumb, Henri Chopin recite his sound poetry, and Ron Silliman read his macabre question poem “Sunset Debris.”

Old Fogey said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
jec1958 said...

very nice. i like it a lot.