Exhaust All Poisons

I first programmed on a Sinclair ZX80, a computer released in 1980 that plugged into a television set. With an expansion card, it had 16 KB of random access memory (RAM), and its programs were stored on a cassette tape. I really went to town, though, on a Commodore VIC-20, a computer released the same year, that had a whopping 32 KB of RAM and, rather than displaying only in black and white, offered the full range of colors—all 256 of them. I was about 11 years old at the time, and my science–fiction addled mind seemed (after several failed novels) to have found its calling. The programming language was called BASIC, and, as one can imagine, it was quite simple, but it educated me in the fundamentals of coding: variables, control loops, goto statements, and so forth. My greatest achievement was programming a passable version of the arcade game Lunar Lander.

I often think that my obsession with Ezra Pound’s poetry was due to his well-known formula “DICHTEN = CONDENSARE” (dichten means “to write poetry” but also “to seal” or “to tighten” in German) or to those chestnuts from “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” such as “use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation [of the thing],” all of which was appealing because I was well practiced in reducing these programs to the bare minimum while still achieving their effects. No one wants to play a video game that is too slow or too easy or ends up in an uncontrolled loop (an early version of the spinning pizza of death) because of sloppy coding. One pleasure of programming is reducing many lines of unwieldy code to a few elegant ones, maybe as a function that can be called upon repeatedly. In some ways, I think this is a central pleasure in writing poetry as well—cutting lines, swapping out dull words for lively ones, interjecting a tonal shift that renders some strictly explanatory lines superfluous, and so forth—all while seeing the effect increase as the poem gets smaller.

Programming and making art back then were, to this kid in New Jersey (and probably to anyone not involved in university research), miles apart. The first Tron film didn’t appear until 1982, for example, and those graphics—slender by today’s standards, if nonetheless charming—were produced on state-of-the-art, specially programmed machines and took days to render. Yes, a few video games, such as Tempest (1981), made a strong aesthetic impression, but it was hard to see how this related to culture, at least to culture not confined to a bunch of dweebs with pockets of quarters. Sitting in my room watching dandruff fall from my head onto the keyboard (as in the Breakfast Club) while the kids outside, my peers, hurtled toward adolescence didn’t seem to offer much of a future unless I tried to learn assembly language (which I won’t explain except to say that it’s like making hamburger into a steak). I eventually decided computers and art—my art, which became poetry when I was 14 or so—had nothing to do with each other.

***

Fast-forward to New York City, circa 1994. I’m walking into the basement of the CUNY Graduate Center, then located on 42nd Street, off Bryant Park. I’m carrying a slip of paper scrawled with something called an email address and, even more baffling, a password. I remember logging in; looking at the inbox, where a single, lonely email from the administration awaited me; and then logging off. I didn’t log in again for the rest of my stint at CUNY. I still believed computers were mundane tools that ran counter to the artistic impulse, and even as I heard that “poetic discourse”—the latest thinking but also flame wars and dramatic positioning and posturing—was occurring on the Buffalo Poetics listserv, my Luddite attitude toward computers (well-earned, I believed, because I used to program) kept me at a cool distance. I didn’t move to NYC to spend time in front of a terminal. I wanted to hang with bohemians in smoky loft parties! So I did.

I’m writing autobiographically not because my situation was unique but because the details—programming with 32 KB of RAM, discovering email through an academic computer, being wowed by Tempest, etc.—can help concretize an understanding of the ubiquitous now of the internet. But outside the technology itself, there were the ideas: among the earliest theorists of digital culture was a legion of techno-anarchists who saw the internet as a sort of wilds that could never be policed, where subversive forms of politics and art could thrive far from the government’s prying eyes and free of the strictures of such centralized media as print and television. “Gone to Croatan” (a reference to the myth of the “lost colony” of American settlers who went to live with Native Americans) and the “Temporary Autonomous Zone,” or TAZ, as imagined by the anarchist writer Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), were catchphrases then. People discovered seductive, suggestive corners of the internet—the sickly fascinating Mouchette.org website, a Flash piece by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, or Keith Obadike’s “Blackness for Sale,” which was merely an eBay post (“This heirloom has been in the possession of the seller for twenty-eight years”)—simply because an email had dropped into their inboxes. I remember thinking it would be impossible to turn the web, then composed nearly entirely of hand-coded HTML pages, into an ordered, commercialized space.

I eventually did participate in the Buffalo listserv, which the poets Loss Pequeño Glazier and Charles Bernstein started in 1993 at SUNY Buffalo. One participated in a listserv (a primitive form of social media) by sending an email to a central address that then distributed the message to other participants, either as single emails or in digest form. I was a real latecomer. By the time I arrived, folks on the list were already reminiscing about the good old days and debating who was, or should be, moderating the listserv and whether certain powers were being abused.

In a review I wrote of Poetics@ (Roof Books, 2000), a compilation of posts from the Buffalo listserv edited by Joel Kuszai, I wrote, “The writing in Poetics@ [is] an explosion of the issues, anxieties, enthusiasms, intellectual rivalries, contentions and cross-cultural camaraderie—all the barroom talk that can be, if taken seriously, the living critical culture of poetry.” At the time I thought the listserv was a corrective to the various quasi-academic “poetics” statements that poets were prone to write in the wake of Language poetry. I also applauded the range of subjects in the volume:

New Zealand poetry (N.Z. poets like Alan Loney and Wystan Curnow were active early participants), Diane Ward’s book Imaginary Movie (and an ensuing debate on the relevance of the “pleasure of the text” in reading it), the meaning of “experiment” in “experimental” poetry, a debate over the journal Apex of the M which had appeared at the time (possibly the most controversial first issues of a journal to appear in the ’80s and ’90s), why “few women post” (i.e. write criticism from a sort of activist perspective despite the activist motivations of much feminist writing) and why the “boys” are always engaged in verbal sparring, what sort of role the academy plays in the continuation or nurturing of avant-garde activity and whether it can any longer be called “avant-garde” [etc.]

With the exception of New Zealand poetics—still a hot topic in Auckland, I imagine—and Apex of the M (we can swap in Lana Turner Journal today), it’s clear that poets tend to circle persistent topics when engaged in these forums: why their self-regulated discourses often divide along lines of gender (and race); what relationship poets have to the academy (this when MFA programs in poetry were relatively scarce); how the academy can serve “avant-garde” poetry (which, on the Buffalo listserv, was the only kind of poetry); and, finally, what being radical means and how one should properly stage that radicalism.

Later in the review, I observe

Of course, in real life, the poetics list is far from this happy utopia of fleshy vectors engaged in an experiment of radical democracy. Because of the ontological crisis about the place of these texts in the universe of time and space, writers on the list often engage in ad hominem attacks on individuals, usually with a brand of rhetorical strategies that want to be intellectual pyrotechnics, or seem born of a falsely self-convinced strategy of neo-romantic, improvisational brilliance, but are unfortunately something like a private, perhaps therapeutic, activity gone public.

This sounds as though I’m describing hell (I probably was), but even so, I believe there are virtues to even the worst elements of the listserv—and, today, to the various controversies and implosions that occur on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere. One virtue was something I already alluded to: there really wasn’t time to be overly artful in a mass-distributed email or to engage in esoteric language and ambitious system building, all of which I love in writers such as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. To my little “DICHTEN = CONDENSARE” brain at the time, this seemed a good thing.

***

To explain the other possible virtue of even the more violent aspects of poetics discourse on the listserv, I want to take a detour through Susan Sontag’s 1967 essay “The Pornographic Imagination,” not because I want to argue that the listserv was a form of pornography but because of how Sontag describes what I consider foundational to algorithmic/database/network culture of all stripes.

Sontag writes, “It’s well known that when people venture into the far reaches of consciousness, they do so at the peril of their sanity, that is, of their humanity” and “[b]eing a freelance explorer of spiritual dangers, the artist gains a certain license to behave differently from other people. … His job is inventing trophies of his experiences—objects and gestures that fascinate and enthrall, not merely … edify or entertain. His principal means of fascinating is to advance one step further in the dialectic of outrage” (emphasis mine). … Any student of Modernist art and literature can fill in a few blanks here. Among the artists Sontag is thinking of are Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, the surrealists, Antonin Artaud, and the subjects of her essay: the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Pauline Réage, and other literary pornographers. But what is this “outrage”? The French philosopher Alain Badiou writes in The Century (2005), “[W]e are in the realm of suspicion when a formal criterion is lacking to distinguish the real from semblance” and “[i]n these conditions, what is the only certainty? Nothingness. Only the nothing is not suspect, because the nothing does not lay claim to any real.” Is there a way in which contentless outrage is the only possible outcome of this movement toward nothingness, to a state beyond suspicion, or does this state of suspension between the real and the semblance simply render all outrage contentless?

“The prominent characteristics of all products of the pornographic imagination are their energy and their absolutism,” Sontag writes, continuing

The universe proposed by the pornographic imagination is a total universe. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative. All action is conceived of as a set of sexual exchanges. […] The bisexuality, the disregard for the incest taboo, and other similar features common to pornographic narratives function to multiply the possibilities of exchange. Ideally, it should be possible for everyone to have a sexual connection with everyone else.

A cynic would say that this seems to describe the internet at large, at least in terms of porn sites, Instagram “fitness” models, seedier dating sites, and the cesspool that is 4Chan. But if we remove the word sexual from the above while retaining some element of its primordial libidinality, then Sontag schematizes the base logic of the internet: trivial impulses (moving an index finger, ogling a product) offered as information (tap tap tap) that can readily be translated into a cash exchange. How many more categories can be added to Amazon before Jeff Bezos—a real idealist!—makes it possible for “everyone to have a sexual connection” with everyone, or everything, else?

But what does this have to do with writing? Sontag goes on:

Most pornography—the books discussed here cannot be excepted—points to something more general than even sexual damage. I mean the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend “the personal” is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society serves that need poorly.

Sontag is saying what most of her readers already know: nobody wants to be trivial in the grand scheme of things, a cog in the machinery of capital, a tool in the network of social relations, a mere vote in the maelstrom of election year (which seems to be every year in the United States). What she adds, though, is this notion of “concentration and seriousness,” something akin, in her mind, to the religious imagination (“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds”) but which can also be linked to the fact that we all want to believe that our labor, whether artistic or simply the everyday agonizing about life’s difficulties, counts.

To my mind, Sontag offers some insight into the potential purpose of the Buffalo Poetics listserv: it was not only a venue for staking out new positions on poetry, for making distinctions that would help us appreciate under-recognized authors or otherwise inscrutable poetic tactics, or for exchanging information but also a place to experiment with “absolutist” rhetorics that ask us to be serious about something in a way that will always be unamenable to normative discourse, whether literary or political. Granted, it’s much more fun to read such writing when it’s confined to a book—everyone likes to take a peek at Artaud’s “All Writing is Pigshit” and his rants about Hitler, the more nauseating passages of Naked Lunch, or Kathy Acker’s playful appropriations of pornographic language—and certainly no one wants to be a target of ad hominem abuse, especially if it’s not well-written. But Sontag has a point: the job of poets is to be “freelance explorer[s] of spiritual dangers” in their art and to “exhaust all poisons,” as Rimbaud wrote. Dangers are attendant to it, but they are worth it if the poems themselves are “trophies of [one’s] experiences—objects and gestures that fascinate and enthrall.”

In the heyday of Modernism, the primary prose outlet was the manifesto, an “absolutist” statement, often written by groups, bemoaning some aspect of society that can be corrected only with such and such tactics with such and such intensity, written with flair and often typeset (in the case of the futurists and Wyndham Lewis) quite dramatically. My sense is that “we” (I hate to generalize) have lost the knack for manifestos, even modest ones. We often confuse them with sales pitches or, when they are lazily written, strident Facebook or Twitter posts. I’m not arguing that poets need to return to writing manifestos, though I might argue that a manifesto—or at least a pungent, well-thought-out essay—is a more satisfying expression of philosophically coherent, left-field, complex takes on art than memes and tweets. Even as I get annoyed (often at myself) about the cat fights that periodically animate the internet, I’d like to remain agnostic about whether poets can, or are, fruitfully using the internet to satisfy “the perennial human flair for high temperature visionary obsessions.”

I suppose the point is that these stagings of beliefs are not intended to be “useful” at all but in some general, but of course particular, way are to be valued merely as actions or events regardless of “content.”

***

I haven’t written anything here about other major aspects of the internet that have affected the way poetry is created or distributed. A plethora of interactive poems, Flash animations, iPhone apps, crazed poetry generators, and other digital creations are worth looking at, all of which I’ve written about in previous essays and books. I’ve tried over the years to explore a critical language that would allow me to write about these digital objects as existing in the same world as the page-based objects that have obsessed me since my teenage years, namely poems, most recently in a long volume called Word Toys: Poetry and Technics (2017). Given the length of the present essay, however, I don’t want to rehash these ideas here. Yes, I’ve been frustrated at times since “The Dreamlife of Letters,” my long-form animated Flash poem that first appeared in 2000, became so well-known that, in many cases, people who admire what I’ve done on the internet with digital technology have no idea that I am, ahem, a writer or that they believe my primary concern in life has been figuring out how to make words float around like dandelion fuzz.

But I’m grateful that, as a digital artist, I and my peers in the world of “electronic literature” have been participants in an international community in a way that stands in contrast to more purely local (i.e., American and Anglophone) configurations. Some of my most fruitful experiences have been because of invitations to Barcelona, Norway, the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Mexico to show off my stuff. I was always a little annoyed during my years mucking around in the Lower East Side by how much poets seemed to be concerned with a particular “American” tradition or “lineage,” and the internet gave me, and no doubt others, ways to interact directly with poets and artists outside this psycho-geographic box. In the end, however, the poem—perhaps as an instance of literary technology, perhaps because of my “visionary obsessions” best expressed in static text—is still my primary fascination.

There are, of course, countless poetry sites that many visit frequently, such as this one, that have exponentially increased readers’ access to poetry and the thinking around it. I can’t imagine, for instance, teaching (or showing to friends) Amiri Baraka’s “Dope” without the audio to accompany the long, sprawling, seemingly intractable text. Sylvia Plath sounds awful when she reads (to my mind), and John Berryman was often drunk—who knew? One of the first major poetry websites, after the Electronic Poetry Center from SUNY Buffalo, was Jacket, created, edited, and entirely coded by the Australian poet John Tranter (it first launched in 1997). As mentioned above, New Zealand poets were early participants in the Buffalo Poetics listserv, and certainly the internet helped give the impression that the apparent “margins” of the Anglophone poetry world (if we accept the United States and the United Kingdom as the “center”) were about to achieve a sort of cultural parity. Many poetry websites took as their model the journals of the “mimeograph” revolution, such as Ted Berrigan’s C Journal, by laying the means of their production bare, embracing ephemerality, and promoting an egalitarian, perhaps even communitarian, ethos. But Jacket seemed to want to take on the more official side of print poetry—the Kenyon Review, Sulfur, or whatever—by caring about typography, editing sections devoted to particular poets, and introducing new poets from all over the world while keeping relatively established poets in circulation. The Poetry Foundation website might owe as much to Jacket as it does to Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine itself.

Frankly, I often bemoan, as a closet techno anarchist myself, the extended safe space that the internet has (or aspires to) become and wonder whether the visionary, aesthetic absolutism of the type that drove Rimbaud, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and countless others can ever have traction again in a world in which surveillance—on countless levels, both voluntary and involuntary—is the call of the day. As William Blake wrote at the end of his “Proverbs of Hell”: “Enough! or, Too much!”—something we all face with the infinite canvas (to use the phrase of comics theorist Scott McCloud) of the internet. Deeper reflections along these lines will just have to wait.