Orchid Tierney's Data-Driven Analysis of Poetry Community in the Segue Reading Series
Orchid Tierney, current 2017–18 Price Lab/PennSound fellow, focuses on the Segue Reading Series to conduct an inquiry into patterns of poet networks as deciphered through particular reading series: "I anticipate that this initial inquiry will bloom into larger, more robust exploration into the artificial environments of the reading series (in the plural sense) and the way that sound, discard, and ecology are deeply interconnected in the digital archive," writes Tierney at Jacket2.
Tierney starts with a look at the introduction:
... Daisy Atterbury’s introduction to Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s reading at the Zinc Bar, in New York City, for the Segue Series on October 3, 2013, marvelously exemplifies the kind of critical force that a paraphonotext can produce.[3] Atterbury’s epistolary address to DuPlessis touches on the gendered, sexual, and literary desires circulating in the latter’s oeuvre. In the context of PennSound’s author and series pages, Atterbury’s letter is framed as a prefatory remark since it’s not currently segmented from DuPlessis’s reading. Yet, if Atterbury had her own author page on PennSound, I wonder if this letter ought to be segmented and included on it. Certainly, it seems clear that Atterbury’s address to DuPlessis destabilizes the borders between preface and the main event, the introducer and the poet, since it produced a delighted reaction in Rachel Blau DuPlessis when she finally took the stage. At any rate, such instances invite us not only to underscore the unique performances of the paraphonotextual object but also to reassess what we consider is the principal ‘event’ in a poetry reading.
Tierney's research also includes a program called Gephi, the better with which to map the Segue series poetry community. Findings:
Inconclusion
This possible next step leads me to the following point. I’d prefer not to read too much into these maps, without considering other variables involved, although they do allow me to ruminate whether we can revisit Robert Creeley’s idea of ‘company.’ In an interview with Mông-Lan, Creeley suggested that “poets generally collect as various “groups” or company whereas novelists — while they may share techniques or general effects — are seemingly much more singular.”[6] Thinking more generally, I wonder to what extent we might revisit the early iteration of Segue series, with its origins in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E milieu, as a company that has now shifted into a dynamic community with sprawling weak ties when the series became iterant. Over the next year, I intend to expand my proof-of-concept to include other reading series such as the Belladonna Series, St Mark’s, and SUNY-Buffalo Wednesdays @ 4 Plus and Walking the Dog to identify the nomadic poetic cartographies on the Northeast. What, for example, would it mean to consider the mobility of poets into new environments? How nomadic are performances? Can poems travel in other ways outside of print or web distribution? By mapping these series, I hope to build a better picture of the possible relationships between readers, based on the information available in the PennSound archive. More to the point, expanding this project will grant me the opportunity to critically tighten the questions that sparked my initial inquiry.
Indeed as I hinted earlier, DH [Digital Humanities] can offer new perspectives and test the critical strength of old ones. In this regard, my explorations with Gephi have happily upset my fixed understanding of categories like discard, excess, archive, and collection. If we accept Creeley’s formulation of a company as a collection of poets, then I wonder what design features in a digital archive can best reflect the messy, strong, weak, and undifferentiated ties that frequently comprise a poetry series and a poetry group. In other words, how can digital design render legible the otherwise messy associations between poets?
Find the full analysis (and maps!) at Jacket2.