I met Moscow poet Ekaterina Zakharkiv in St. Petersburg in November 2016, at “Other Logics of Writing: Arkady Trofimovich Dragomoshchenko at 70,” the Second International Conference on Dragomoshchenko and experimental poetics. Ekaterina was co-winner of the Dragomoshchenko Prize for younger experimental writers, presented at the new Alexandrinsky Theater on the Fontanka in St. Petersburg. Recently we began an exchange on digital poetics from our respective cultural, linguistic, and theoretical perspectives. This is a first attempt to speak of digital/media poetics across two distinct “regions of practice.”

September 12, 2019
Dear Ekaterina—

Hello! You asked about my approach to analyzing the internet poetic discourse.

I’ve cut and pasted your letter as you will see to create conditions for dialogue:

I am a graduate student of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, so my methodology is only starting to form, in general it may be said that the study is conducted from pragmatic-linguistic positions, in particular—the theory of speech acts, and also the linguistic poetic method.

My own basis in poetics is heavily indebted to the Formalist tradition, especially Shklovsky, Tynjanov, and Jakobson. There is a disconnect between that method—which influenced early Language writing, particularly with Hejinian, Silliman, and Harryman (and was very much in play when we had our “Letnaya Shkola” in Petersburg in 1989)—and the influences of critical theory, cultural studies, and now digital theory. I am trying to work at these intersections while being “language-centered.”

Today (after a dream in which I receive a telephone call from N. Katherine Hayles), I was thinking about the semantics of the digital “bit” through information theory, and how the binarism of the “bit” went along with the binarism of structuralism in the period. It is even the case, I believe, that Jakobson knew about the work at the Bell Labs, as it involved phonology. The two accounts I would rely on for “information theory” would be Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, and Gleick, The Information. I have written on Language writing and the poetry of Larry Eigner in terms of information theory and theories of meaning that may derive from it, also information and “knowledge.”

I explore the specifics of poetic discourse in the Facebook or any other social network. For example, in my latest work I analyzed various ways of introducing the addressee of a poetic text into the communicative context of a statement, taking into account the space of its actualization.

The way poetry can be seen as “networked” goes a long way back, to any form of intertextuality and reinscription. Modernist long poems like The Cantos, Paterson, “A,” and the work of Stein certainly are networked; I read Paterson by sampling it and reprocessing it as “information” (a poem titled Zone). Language writing, in any case, created networked texts, and there is a book titled Networked Art by Craig Saper that talks about art in the same period (conceptualism, fluxus, mail art) as a form of predigital networking. Then comes the internet, which for poetics first of all offered a means of rapid communication with a network and was enacted on various listservs, particularly the Poetics Listserv. I wrote a piece on Hejinian titled “Hejinian’s deen,” about a nonexistent word, which appears in The Constructivist Moment. The next move in poetics was the construction of texts using html and Flash that could be read online; I think the greatest work from this period is Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia. Due to the rapid development of the technology, however, this was a brief moment, as the DIY aesthetic of making your own poem/page was overwhelmed by the sophistication of digital media. Poetry and poetics became mediated by digital interfaces, but not necessarily in a form of making poetry itself. Two large exceptions would be the rise of conceptual writing (which develops the poetics of the database) and flarf (which uses search engines to generate language to write with). There are anthologies of both. What is interesting is that it is important for poetics to remain at the DIY level as the technology gets more complex.

The analysis of addressing revealed such features of poetic discourse as instant interaction of the addressee and the addressee, performance of the utterance, actualization of contextual dynamics, imitation of advertising, business- and blogging-strategies, the equation of appeal and expressive functions.

This strikes me as a very fruitful combination of reader-response and reception theories, with the addition of digital forms as mediating or preconditioning both. What you get is a focus on different kinds of reflexivity, on the one hand—so that the entire internet becomes a kind of subjectivation—and rapidly evolving platforms and frameworks. Subjectivation is challenged by the overwhelming amount of content that is accessible, but also by the virtuality of the medium, which leads to a kind of “deindividuation.” This can be frightening and lead to all kinds of negative political outcomes.

For example, a poem by Russian young poet D[ima] Gerchikov which is written in the form of CV or another poetic text created on the basis of a “sincere” Facebook post that follows the modern fashion of talking about personal, in particular, psychological problems in public (presumably inspired by the initial flash mob #metoo and #I’m not afraid to say—Russian flasmob).

For now, digital poetics in our environment (which includes yours, as I see many Russian friends on Facebook) focuses either on making works apart from the medium, after flarf and conceptual writing (see also the Tumblr-inspired work of Trisha Low), or the politics of community. That is where the negative aspects of the “mob” come in; not the earlier utopianism of the “flash mob,” but the phenomena of internet “calling out,” “mobbing,” and “canceling.” I have now the experience of three moments of being “called out” and “mobbed”—once concerning on conceptual writer Vanessa Place in 2015; once on African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey in 2018; and now concerning my teaching at Wayne State. You can find material on the first two at my own site [here], and it would be difficult to avoid the current controversy, which could not have happened without the intersection of poetics and social media. My web site, in any case, may be seen as an intervention in the social construction of meaning in poetics communities.

Also I analyze the linguistic creative potential in contemporary poetry that uses linguistic ends similar to Internet-discourse: eclecticism, syntactic and semantic shifts and strata, heteroglossia and so on.

Here, the primary examples are flarf and conceptual writing, and both go back to Language writing; my chapter on “Presentism and Periodization” in Questions of Poetics deals with that. Then there is my poem “Plan B,” which was presented in part in Petersburg; I will send you the text but also the metacommentary, which is a kind of interpretive form of metadata. This was written in the media environment of the Trump election, and refers directly to the media interventions in/of it.

I hope I’ve answered your question. I know that in USA the situation is different—poets don’t usually post the poems for free, but I also know about such phenomenon as micropoetry in Twitter or Instagram.

Here, your research will find things I don’t know about. I am not sure about monetizing poetry, however; if there are places where that happens (clicks on poems to get advertising revenue), I have not seen them. Micropoetry would be another phenomenon to assemble and analyze.

So, maybe it isn’t so important to analyze facebook-texts, but any texts which reflect the features of the fast communication era from the linguistic positions.

What’s needed is a full development of the poetics of digital media, as they are reflected in and generate texts that partake of, but also diverge from and contest, those media. A couple of recent academic studies I know of: Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics; Kris Cohen, Never Alone, Except for Now; Seb Franklin, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic; and Katherine Hayles, Unthought. Also there are several prose works (all of them by Asian-Americans, interestingly) that create a digital interface with the form of the novel (and poetics can learn from them): Tao Lin, Taipei; Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs; Karen An-hwei Lee, Maze of Transparencies—the latter novel “written” by the cloud!

Thank you for your help!

Let us keep the conversation going. I will send you “Plan B” and its paratext; let me know what else would be helpful.

Yours, Barrett