DIKULT 103: DIGITAL GENRES Lecture 6 Digital Poetry Part 1 February 9, 2016 Scot Rettberg, Professor of Digital Culture

New Media Poetics

Adelaide Morris “New Media Poetics: As We May Think / How to Write” “The most generative approaches to the discussions of the computer as an expressive engine tend to be those that work from bottom up rather than top down. Instead of mapping categories developed in literary or cinematic studies onto new media compositions these approaches start with the characteristics of the machines digital composers use to generate textual experiences as physical artifacts.”

Adelaide Morris “New Media Poetics: As We May Think / How to Write” “What makes digital poetry different from poetry that takes place in the air or on the page is the coding used by the poet and/or her collaborator to prepare the information for display on networked and programmable machines.” “Because programming languages can be interpreted by both humans and computers, code is the link between the wetware and hardware or human brains and programmable machines. Accessed by a programmer, poet, or “interactor,” a digital poem’s source code can be parsed, tweaked, snatched, sampled, altered, and/or recycled into other programs.”

Adelaide Morris “New Media Poetics: As We May Think / How to Write” “Of the three inseparable components of a digital poem—data fields, code, and display–only the final element, the display, is immediately accessible. For this reason, critics of print poetry often underestimate the otherness of new media writing, its resistance, excess, or supplementarity to print poetics, even to experimental poetics.”

Six Categories of Digital Poems proposed by Morris Literal art Poem-games Programmable procedural computer-poems Real-time reiterative programmable poems Participatory networked and programmable poems Codework

Poems for Discussion and Response

Brian Kim Stefans. “The Dreamlife of Letters” (2000) http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/stefans__the_dreamlife_of_letters.html

Brian Waber. “Strings” (1999) http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/waber__strings.html

Allison Clifford. “The Sweet Old Etcetera” (2006) http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/clifford_the_sweet_old_etcetera.html

Stephanie Strickland. “The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot” (1999) http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/

Carl Banks. “IOCCC Flight Simulator” (1998) http://blog.aerojockey.com/post/iocccsim

David Jhave Johnston. “Sooth” (2005) http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/johnston_sooth.html