CONTACT WITH POETS

graphic consciousness through their work with the page and with the
typewriter, visual poets today tend to be many steps behind rather commonplace
explorations of software by visual artists and industry hacks.
Brion Gysin’s famous line that Kenneth Goldsmith and Christian Bök like
to quote is that literature is 50 years behind visual arts, but the problem
for visual poets today is that they are now suddenly thrust into the same
(digital) terrain as the visual artists in an era gone graphic mad because of
the visual orientation and possibilities of the computer. Consequently,
visual poetry is not nearly as shocking as it once was, nor as disruptive of
our sensory biases: it has become somewhat symptomatic.
A similar problem haunts all of the old avenues of experimental
writing. New ways will emerge to incorporate medium-consciousness,
including things like search functions—which out of all technologies has
probably had the biggest impact on how I read. Copy/Paste has been the
biggest impact on how I write. There are so many directions that new
medium-conscious writing could go, and I suppose right now it is anybody’s
guess. Appropriation and the conscious sculpting of source texts
seem like useful applications of the new software. I’ve also been thinking
lately about all of the software that archivists and editors have developed
to track and trace the genesis of a text. These applications have started to
change how we read canonical writers, most forcibly Shakespeare. When
you can see his source texts exposed on the same screen as you read his
plays, they start to seem like the work of a masterful proto-collage artist,
which of course he was.
All of which is to say that, yes—let’s let the physical act of writing
and publishing be constantly in mind, and let that self-consciousness
infuse and inform the art. That still seems to me to be an ample exit door
out of the narrowing psychosocial conditions of life in the transnational
capitalist bubble. Which raises a danger, of course, in the extent to which
innovations in textual practice are determined by access to expensive
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