Unreadability (Part III)

So far, in this essay, I’ve been tracing the practice of “unreadability” in poetry of the 20^th century, focusing especially on US lineages of concretism and Language poetry. Part I dealt with visuality and the devolution of reading into looking, and Part II dealt with orality and queerness. Now, I want to move into the 21^st century and engage a field of poets writing through digital materials in (post)conceptual experiments. Here, “unreadable poetry” becomes something like an  “unreadable interface,” a multimedia encounter bringing together the form of poetry and the disturbance of the internet.

One could spend many joyful hours going through examples of this kind of work in the archives of GaussPDF, a multimedia publishing experiment by J. Gordon Faylor that ran from 2010 to 2022. Influenced by sources as diverse as Dada, conceptualism, microblogging platforms, and Internet art, the authors of GaussPDF created 300 works that existed mostly outside of the physical form of the book, in .pdf, .doc, .zip, .mp3, .exe, etc. To give just one example, Joey Yearous-Algozin’s Air the Trees (2013) places the text of Larry Eigner’s Air the Trees (Black Sparrow Press, 1968)—a classic of Language poetry—in Microsoft Word, and renders it white, so that the text is invisible unless highlighted. All that remains visibly of Eigner’s text are the squiggles of Word’s spell-check engine in reaction to Eigner’s idiosyncratic spelling. This kind of digital bibliophilia is emblematic of GaussPDF’s house style. What is also emblematic of GaussPDF is that Yearous-Algozin’s piece only sometimes works. Updates to the spell-check formula on Word’s software and the aging of Air the Trees’s 2013 .doc file have changed the distribution and frequency of its already sparse visual information. Add to this any of a number of variables that could interfere with the reader’s experience and render the piece entirely blank or inaccessible: a lack of Microsoft Word, a device that blocks href download links, or the fact that in some years the site itself may no longer be maintained. The unreadability of the interface in Air the Trees begins as an artistic embrace of software’s ability to simultaneously obscure and reveal the original text; but its unreadability also becomes a confrontation with digital fragility. With GaussPDF, we have a kind of digital In the American Tree, faced with the same kind of obsolescence that all digital presses are. 

A clear predecessor for a project like GaussPDF is the work of Tan Lin, a poet who successfully rewired the principles of “uncreative writing” into a body of work that is tender, formally adventurous, political, and—in his term—“ambient.” Let’s end this introduction to unreadability with a look at his monumental HEATH (Zaesterle: 2008), a work that continues to have enormous influence on the writers of digital poetics. HEATH describes itself as “a novel inside a network,” a curious description being that it contains almost none of the formal properties historically associated with the novel, and being that it’s not so much “in” a network but instead adopts and reproduces the ephemera of networked interactions. In other words, HEATH is a book in plain text collaging browser screenshots, “plagiarized” blog posts, text from RSS feeds, digital logos, hyperlinks that lead nowhere, and “original” writing on the history of search engines and writing through technology.  It rejects standard narrative and typesetting to accommodate a visually loud, almost overwhelming conglomeration of found Internet text and image. It may be more accurate, then, if somewhat less provocative, to call it a “poet’s novel” composed of networks.

For the most part, HEATH is organized by the digital footprint of the death of actor Heath Ledger. Lin writes:

Heath: or Samuel [Pepys]: was not “ something inserted into the video: they were watching on You Tube ” ” (i.e. storage) but something taken away or outsourced (dissemination), i.e. the process was more like erasing each other (plagiarism) rather than viewing

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Ledger is represented here by a lengthy array of search terms and tabloid articles, replete with the crowded visual landscape of ads and links to related articles. Danny Snelson writes on HEATH that it “traces diverse mediators from the digital event (the non-events) of Heath Ledger’s death into an actor-network in material book format.” In this sense, HEATH is a eulogy not so much for Heath Ledger himself, as for Ledger’s readability in the interface. Ledger is rendered unreadable by his compulsive readability, the ability for any internet user (Lin included) to read voraciously the remediations of his death in the infrastructure of digital tabloids. What HEATH accomplished, which determined its influence on the field of writing that GaussPDF exemplified, was a stylistic adoption of the very un/readable materials it sought to critique and explore.

In this three-part essay, I’ve tried to present an introduction to the poetic possibilities of unreadability, a category whose very name implies the negation of poetic possibility altogether. I have only been able to trace one lineage of unreadability here, an American formalist lineage stemming from concretism, Dada, and early conceptualism, up through Language poetry (in its queerer iterations), and into the digital techniques of 21^st (post)conceptual poetics. I could have talked about others—Douglas Kearney and Harmony Holiday’s recent takes on typography and jazz, the history of erasure poetry, the meta-obscenities of New Narrative, the sound poetics of Jaap Blonk or Tracie Morris, the disability poetics of orality in Eigner and Jordan Scott—and, unfortunately, I can’t do more than gesture at them. But I hope that this introduction reveals a toolset that makes this only the start of a readerly exploration of unreadability and its many iterations in poetry.