TextSpace

Given the change in our plan for the last class, I thought I should advise you on the collection of the portfolios. So please, sometime before 12/9, collect your contributions to this community blog space (and anything you added to the wiki), print and leave with me or in my LEO 110 mailbox. Think link with your name on this page should pull up all of your authored posts (but not comments).

Instead of printing the screens, which may result in a long think column that stretches a hundred pages, you may find it easiest to cut/paste from the blog into MSWord. It's often interesting when students include a cover-letter reflecting on their use of the blog; but I won't require it.

If you discover an easy way to list all the comments you've posted, please let us all know! I'm missing how to do it myself. Search doesn't work; this link may.

What a pleasure to see the flurry of posting even in the last leg of the marathon, and congratulations to W.H. for inspiring it. There's a few minutes until class and no one at my door, so I'll jot a few thoughts....

Is Auden serious or humorously provocative in throwing stones at would-be writers? Probably both ... to put in elitest context, he probably would also say that there are only 10 or 15 living poets of talent writing in the English language today. In that light, the fact that hundreds or thousands are employed in Creative Writing Programs, where thousands of students pay serious money to become writers, publish in a 1000 or more literary journals suggests to me he'd find the situation unchanged.

I took the more scathing point to be his observation of how little else in contemporary life has the potential to be fulfilling, as he contrasts craft from assembly-line work. The notion is that the "idea" of writing now has to serve the psychic/emotional needs that might have been met by many many ways of life "once upon a time."

It has the element of a fable to it, sure. But at a poetry slam, I sometimes ponder what doing writing or being a writer means to the participants. Few can reasonable hope, do aspire, or perhaps would even consider it goal worthy to approach the model of Auden. Some are not interested in reading other's poetry, perfecting "their art," not concerned with making something timeless or any of the other dimensions of what makes a writer a writer in Auden's eyes. And it's not primarily the space for social resistance of the powerless -- though slams do have a bit of the agonistic quality and social consciousness Cronyn sees in South Africa. For most, there seems a pleasure in the play and the authentic making of "my" poem. The pride and pleasure in an individual act.

Here for me Adorno comes in, as he suggests not the poet but a poem or poetry takes its value from its partial (and very complicated) distancing from the dominant value system in society. A poet whom we have not read but whom Bernstein quotes, Steve McCaffery, celebrates the power of poetry as representing a "wasteful" econmony ... where one devotes amazing energy into the creation or reception of a "product" that won't sell. There's an analogy with the gift-giving ritual of potlatch where a family gives away all its possessions, with no guarantee but an expectation of receiving reciprocation in the future.

After reading Veronica Forrest Thomson and McLaughlin, I started questioning myself, “Can I comprehend the 20th century poetry for I use my ear instead of eye to under stand poetry and can not see “punctuation and typographical design” which according to Forrest- Thomson “have a decisive role in composing our sense of what a poem is about.”

I have no problem in agreeing with her ideas of ‘continuity’, ‘discontinuity’, or “the way in which poetry retains its contact with the world articulated by ordinary language while distancing itself from these customary modes of articulation.” I don’t have any problem in following her argument of language based on Wittgenstein's remark, 'the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.'

One of the interpretations of ‘know’ is ‘mastery’ of a technique and her suggestion, “The knowledge of both the poet and the reader of poetry is a kind of mastery, an ability to see how a use of language filters external contexts into the poem and subjects them to new distancing and articulation. To see what is involved in the achievement of continuity and discontinuity, to see how poetry modifies and distances itself from the external contexts it assimilates,” reminds me of Wordsworthian and Colridgian concept of ‘Imagination’.

However, one idea that I cannot digest is the idea that a piece of prose can be transformed into poetry by changing ‘typographical design’. No doubt, twentieth century poetry “has evolved a whole new set of conventions for showing which words are dominant on any scale” but how only the change in typographical design can change a piece of prose into poetry is beyond my understanding.

What about the poetic diction and figurative language, which McLaughlin has discussed in detail in his essay and other requirements of poetry, are they only the complementary to what is termed as “semantically non-meaningful devices”. After reading Forrest-Thomson, I feel that poetic diction, rhyme, meter and other elements of poetry could not convey the reader the totality of the meaning of a poem if he or she does not take into consideration the physical appearance of the poem under study. However, the change in typographical design can produce specific meaning as she has pointed out in her example of Sir Michael Swann’s order of appointment as the head of BBC.

Here are some further notes -- in which I try to broadly sketch the stakes and just a few key terms that might help us with a global understanding of the book. Hope it's helpful!

-----

1. To consider poetry as a form of “discourse” requires at least the suspending of our belief in several conventional truisms:

1.1. poetry is an expression of universals, not of varied (and motivated) time-bound practices;
1.2. literature, with poetry at the head of the line, rises above and functions independently of the language and politics (ideology)
1.3. the ideal of poetry is achieving a voice: identification or union between poet and reader;

2. The discourse perspective allows for investigation of how poetic conventions are historically grounded.

2.1. It sees the elements of poetry as functioning like other language structures in the constitution of a discourse;
2.2. the importance of this extends because discourse is the enabling ground of subjectivity (loosely defined as how I come to know myself, have meaning and agency, act as a self within a social context).

3. Easthope’s theoretical framework and analysis of ballad meter (4-stress accentual), pentameter, and modernist poems draws from Saussurean linguistics in continually inquiring whether the signifier is foregrounded or supressed in favor of the signified.

3.1. This reflects his notions that poetry is distinguished by the prominence of the signifier (ex. rhyme is an effect of the material signifier, not of meaning); and that so-called “transparent meaning” is actually achieved at the cost of suppressing this.
3.2. Recognizing the production of meaning is seen as a preferred alternative to the false “naturalizing” of myth (p. 64, cf. Roland Barthes)
3.3. Poetry involves two process of meaning production, composition and reception.

4. Double processes: When we encounter a text, it has been composed (past tense); and then it needs to be read--present tense context

4.1. The enunciated subject exists within the poem or story; the subject of the enunciation (reading, performing) is you or I the readers; i.e. an “I” within the poem and the person (me) who now speaks it (or reads it to himself).

5. Easthope focues on whether this double process is acknowledged or hidden--whether the subject is presented as relative (contingent, mutable) or absolute

5.1. he equates the hiding of the process, the subsumption of enunication and ennounced, with the suppressing of the process by which the subject is constituted (cf. Althusser, ideology, interpellation: notions that we don’t define individual selves but that we respond to invitations to take up positions vis a vis a social order, an acceptance that we may mistake as natural or inevitable or freely chosen)
5.2. Revealing this ideology at work through analysis AND/OR reading poems which disclose it has liberatory potential.

Reading Notes
Poetry As Discourse, Anthony Easthope
Part I
Sherwood 9/28/2006

Ch. 1 – Discourse as Language

• Conventional criticism relies on intention or personality as the foundation for meaning;
• Structuralist system of langue/parole describes how a sign works; it also functions at a higher level, as discourse
• Consequence of taking a linguistic/structuralist view is that language becomes a material sign system, not a transparent medium for communication (10-11)
• Poetry can be distinguished from prose in terms of its emphasis on the signifier; (repetition, condensation, lineation); (16) but poetry, prose, et al are (or would it be better to say “participate in” ) discourses

“All discourse, including a poetic discourse, occurs only in specific local and national forms … always historical … determined … not just materially but at the same time ideologically” (17)

“To theorize poetry as a discourse entails that attention will not be focused on individual texts or even several texts grouped as the work of a single author…. The more closely analysis is directed at the signifier (rather than the signified) and at the level of discourse (rather than the single text), the more likely it is to produce a systematic understanding” (18)

Ch. 2 – Discourse as Ideology

• Discourse is a SOCIAL (emphasis) fact; and it is a social FACT (emphasis). (19)
• The term discourse reframes Eliot’s idea of the “self-consistency of a poetic discourse;” it is not ideal, not a tradition that can exist simply and always; it is a product of (or would it be better to say? “is intimately entwined with”) ideology.
• At the level of discourse (words, into sentences, in social contexts etc.), language is most clearly “material, historical, and relative” (19)
• The poetry of certain period is both “an expression of…” the larger discourse of the time, and a semi-autonomous “internally coherent expression”. There’s a seeming pardox that’s crucial for A.E. (20);
• Poetry has “relative independence” in Althusser’s framing (21); it’s not simply determined by material world, nor is it completely cut off from it.

Why is discourse ideological?

• Discourse entails the idea that language continues to produce meaning through the reader; that it partially produces readers themselves! (24) even historical texts, which are now reproduced by (and within) contemporary readers (25)

See esp. pp. 24-29 for a fundamental discussion of SUBJECTIVITY. This is Lacanian/Althusserian territory – a major 20th century idea that’s not easy to digest if this is your first encounter. If it is new to you, looking in the Hopkins Encyclopedia of Literary and Critical Theory could be helpful. An approachable, undergraduate textbook called “The Theory Toolbox” also gives a very good introduction.

• Ideology can be seen as the tool by which we can be led to mistake an illution for the real; specifically, Althusser has it that it works to ALLOW the subject to misperceive herself as a Free AGENT. (28)

“How does the social mask come to be lived as though it were a face? … [by being] produced as a subject in language and discourse …” (28) What A.E. terms bourgoise discourse aims to produce an image of a transcendental subject, a role that denies producedness. At alternative possibility is that discourse offers/enables one to inhabit a relative position, one in which there is some awareness … “aware[ness] that the ego is determined by forces beyond itself on which it is dependent” (29)

Ch 3 – Discourse as Subjectivity

• reviews: problems of equating poem and poet; poet and personality; cf. laundry list problem (30)
• conventional (read even New Critical) criticism uses “irony or ambiguity” to “reduce the heterogeneity of texts into a version of the author’s (complex) self” ; “it tries to solve a problem it shouldn’t” (31)
• The Subject isn’t the origin but an effect of language; “it is language which speaks”;
• Language needs a subject, without which it is an empty system; marks can only become “signs” if there’s the presumption of an “addressee” (31)
• Despite needing the “subject,” language is not a transparent tool for communication of ideas; it is still material – a sound system!
• Discussion of Freud, infantile pleasure in language and its repression; the emphasis gets to the pre-communicative core of languages – an aspect that remains in all language use, is particularly exploited by poetry and literary discourses (33-4)

Key Terms: Enunciation, Enounced,

• Enounced: the narrated event
• Enunciation: the speech event
• Subject of the Enounced: participant in the narrated event
• Subject of the Enunciation: speaking subject, the producer of meaning,

The writer takes the role of the subject of enunciation (the one, in the METAPHOR, who is speaking). But the special term is necessary because we aren’t talking about a traditional speaker in/of the poem. When I read the poem, I become it’s new SUBJECT of ENUNCIATION. There will still be a subject within the poem, the one signified by the “I’ who may be IN the poem …. but the terms allow us to perceive these as two different roles. They often SEEM to overlap or are MADE TO SEEM SO, which is a crucial point for Easthope.

In loose terms, we need Easthope to remind us that Enunciation is taking place, since poems sometimes seem to have simply been enunciated, all by themselves. Sometimes the markers of the subject are clear – the “I” and “you” . We may even intuit a tension when the enunciated “you” is one we don’t feel comfortable identifying with.

Two more terms: histoire and discourse

• These two French terms risk confusion, as the second one sounds the same as “discourse”; the essential point is that there is a custom of imaging language use can be divided between: language without a speaker (i.e. journalism, objective description, science, history) and language with a speaker (when some “I” is clearly speaking to some “you”). For Easthope this is a false distinction! He doesn’t abandon the terms, because sometimes language does SEEM TO ACT (or want to pretend) to be without a speaker, object, purely enounced. But one key plank of Easthope’s projects is to persuade us this is an error, that we’re only dealing with an ABSENCE of obvious MARKERS of enunciation. Furthermore, this ABSENCE is more like a suppression, a deception.

Consequences of the doubleness; or, the disjunction between the Subject of Enounced and Subject of the Enunciation:

• discourse can deny disjunction, which he argues is characterstic of poetic discourse in English for 500 years! (46), producing a misrepresentation (which is ideological)
• the reader’s role in discourse production (i.e. the way we assume the role of subject of the enunciation) can be suppressed, producing alientation.
• Or it can foster an opening via which the reader may exploit the space, gap, tenuousness of seeming stability (47).

(With regard to the last point: My sense is that Easthope finds this interesting because one could thus gain a window into the production of his/her own subjectivity within the culture etc. If our subjectivity is always being produced, reproduced via discourse, then the poem becomes a site to see it and be produced (or resist being produced in a certain way.)

Some of you may want to use a service like bloglines.com or plugins for your web-browser. The following FEED address will allow you to subscribe. Then you only read a blog post when there's new content:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Textspace-CollaborationNetwork

Students who have purchased Brooks' _Well Wrought Urn_, please be advised that the for focus this coming week are: 1, 4, 7, and 8. In class, I believe I mis-spoke. (You are of course welcome to read other relevant chapters, but we will not discuss chapters 2 and 3). Ken

Hopefully you won't have trouble getting into the system and registered. (It's waiting for you!)

Once you register, you should be able to login and then use the Blog or the Create Blog Entry options to add new material. What you publish through this means will show up on the front page, and eventually be moved into the archive. Remember you can always sort your entries or those of another writer by AUTHOR ... just click on the name of the sender.

Final tip ... I found myself having trouble logging in today, then I realized that the red "security" icon was blinking; my computer was blocking the cookies needed to login. So, if you have this problem ... here's the solution on Explorer:
Select Tools/ Internet Options/ Security/; click on the trusted sites icon and add this one.

Do email me at sherwood AT iup DOT edu, if you have questions or trouble (of a technical or scholastic nature!)

I hope you find the readings for this first full class interesting and varied. I thought it would be useful to gain a grounding by both reviewing some of what we might know about classical forms and also by asking paradigmatic questions about poetry.

For me, the Princeton entry on "Poetry" in particular introduces a relativity into the term, a suggestion of the varied associations and expectations of poetry in particular times and places. Is it poetry by virtue of its forms, its sources, its intimacy with tradition or its detachment from it (i.e. originality).

While we will not conduct a survey of literary movements in poetry, such a survey could be organized based on such questions ....

I'm looking forward to seeing some of your initial thoughts posted here folks. Remember that this is an open journal, not a high-stakes performance space ... so give it a try. And do comment on each other.

Welcome to the class blogging Textspace. Here we'll be able to share ideas, upload material, and sustain a dialogue outside of class.

The first step is to register, which you can do by creating a link to the left. Once you've done so, you can create a test post ... (don't worry, I'll clean up for you later; the point is to see that it works for you.)

You'll be able to read classmates work and also access an archive of your own. More later....

On her behalf, I'm posting Terra's final powerpoint and artists statement.

Terra raises a brilliant set of questions in her post on Presentation vs. Language . I think she's right to note that we have been very captivated by the "presentational" aspects of new media. The time we've spent with flash-based pieces, including PoemsThatGo, may be partly responsible. There are other, less visually arresting examples, we might have looked at. On the other hand, I'm not sure we should or could have avoided this flash dazzle -- as it's maybe also a function of the encounter with the new. It is, after all, what's seduced many writers and some of you to dabble with the dazzle.

[Note: this is a revised and expanded version of an earlier comment]

Myspace is quite interesting. There are some less popular alternatives (Lifebook?) that give users a great deal more control of who can see what, i.e. you must invite before someone can ready your page.Beyond the question of privacy and danger -- which, by the way, I'd be interested in some realistic assessment of ... as I don't believe much of what I see on the news about this--what to make of the presentation of self?

Lindsay's game is interesting, but is it really anything more than an exaggeration of the role-playing we enact in daily life?

Some of you may be interested to check in with UBUs homepage, where there's new work by Brian Kim Stefans and others (some archival).

Also I note a link to the Center for Literary Computing at WVU, where there's a new installation and even a talk coming up by Alan Sondheim, who's in residence there.

http://www.ubu.com/

The "dekama" presentation today brought up a number of interesting points about public/private and the emergence of standards in new media art and networked communication. Since y'all had plenty to say about it in class, I'll add a few of my comments below ... to keep the conversation going.

SELF - PRESENTATION : Networked communication and access to it creates a new zone for self-presentation. Who am I, how do I acquire a public self, do I control it? In one respect these aren't new questions. Erving Goffman writes extensively about the Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; the notion is that we present different selves in various contexts and that we know how to interpret the selves presented by others, as a consequence of the "codes" through which behaviors make sense. Extended to networked space, we see a new or parallel space in which

I just posted to informational links in my comment to Majid, places where one can access alternative wikis (our class one may go away someday, or you may want to use one in your own teaching).

But I thought I'd also share a resource with all of you, namely the place where I learned about much of this stuff ... the blog of a graduate school friend of my:

DanToday http://dantoday.blogspot.com/

He teaches at a highly technologized campus. But he's a very accomplished composition teacher who experiments with many of the newest web technologies, for their own sake and for their usefulness in teaching.

After our very interesting discussion about the prospects of including NMP in the curriclum, I did some more thinking that began to clarify possibilities as to where it might be at home.

Setting aside the big questions about standards-based education, we can begin with the fact that the BEST articulation of key elements in skills/content of a dynamic discpline will always be retrospective. In general terms this is something that graduate student / K12 teachers always encounter -- i.e. much of the most current thinking in the subject area has not yet filtered down into the standard curricula. Is there a 10-year lag? More?

Kodachrome Blue Syntax

Kenneth Sherwood

Genre: Non-linear Installation / Digital Poem

Optimal Viewing: Designed for installation experience, as an extended audio/visual loop. (Body loops 3:20) User can interrupt to view leader and trailer information (5:03). This should be setup with high-quality, stereo sound and the maximum possible separation between speakers.

Summary:

One’s memory resonates in sympathy with personal media, the diary, home movie, photograph album. This digital composition explores how a sense of one’s past -- perhaps the aura of childhood -- is imagined and represented, and how those representations re-inflect the past. A psychologically suggestive montage of archival film clips joins a chorus of looping, poetic voices -- as the material objects to which memory is anchored grow more distant, through copying and transcoding across multiple media formats.

This is another audio test