“Reading Writing Interfaces” Book Project Description

I recently submitted a grant application which would give me time off from teaching to work on finishing my book. Of course I hope my application will be successful but even if it’s not, I’m pleased with this description of my book project which I expect to use as a book proposal. Comments and suggestions welcome!

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“Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Bookbound to the Digital” focuses on the notion of ‘interface’ – a technology, whether book or screen, that is the intermediary layer between reader and writing; broadly, with the interface as the cornerstone of this manuscript, I account for both how the reading and writing of poetry have changed in the digital age and how the digital age has in turn changed the way in which we understand what I call “bookbound” poetry. More specifically, by discussing digital poetry in terms of interface – a discussion whose methodology is driven by the field of media archaeology – my book is a crucial intervention into both poetry/poetics and media studies in that it meshes these fields together to make visible the Human-Computer interfaces we take for granted everyday.

“Reading Writing Interfaces” presents an historical grounding for digital poetry, which in turn affords us a deeper understanding of how these poems read contemporary digital culture. The book provides insight into digital poetry’s ties to media savvy nineteenth-century and twentieth-century writing – writing that engages with interfaces such as the fascicle in the 1860s, the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s, and the command-line in the 1980s. I use this historical grounding as a way to then make sense of digital poetry’s response to the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century move, in Human-Computer Interface design, toward increasingly invisible digital interfaces in the name of accessibility. We have become so familiar with the interfaces we use everyday that they have become practically invisible; as such, we often no longer see how these interfaces define what and how we read/write. Thus, my examination of certain historical antecedents to contemporary digital interfaces both demonstrates that digital poetry continues a literary tradition of interface critique and brings the digital into view once again. In later chapters I turn to contemporary digital poetry to argue that by making access to the interface difficult, contemporary poets such as Judd Morrissey and Jason Nelson advance a 21st century media poetics – or, simply, their poems enact a critical exploration of media. Morrissey and Nelson create interfaces that frustrate us because they seek to defamiliarize interfaces we no longer notice; in turn, this defamiliarization forces us to re-see the interfaces of the present moment – digital computer interfaces come back into view once again.

Thus far, only two scholarly books have been written exclusively on digital poetry (poetry created on a computer that not only necessitates reading and interaction on a computer but that also exploits the capabilities of a digital computer) and only one has been written on electronic literature more broadly. Loss Glazier’s Digital Poetics (2002) was the first to provide a much-needed broad introduction to the field; the second, Christopher Funkhouser’s Prehistoric Digital Poetry (2007), is an impressive account of digital poetry from 1950 up to the advent of the Internet; and finally, N. Katherine Hayles’ Electronic Literature (2008) provides both a short overview of the field of electronic literature (which includes some digital poetry) along with readings of select works via fields such as informatics, global finance, and codework. However, while all three are defining works, the fields of e-literature and digital poetry are now ready for a book such as mine that is both a more specific intervention as well as one that takes up particular tenets of media studies to better account for how certain kinds of bookbound and digital poetry exemplify what I call above a media poetics.

The primary methodology from media studies that implicitly underlies my book is the burgeoning field of ‘media archaeology,’ based on the early work of Michel Foucault and articulated by theorists such as Geert Lovink and Jussi Parikka. Crucially, for Lovink and Parikka, media archaeology does not try to escape the vantage of the digital present to get to an untainted understanding of the analog past. Rather, it reads the digital into or even against the past, uncovering a history of stops and starts, overlapping media eruptions. Further, for media archaeology the study of media history is conceived of as a shifting practice of uncovering the ways in which media themselves, in a very physical sense, engender and delimit what can be said, what can be thought. However, as no book on media archaeology has yet to thoroughly engage with the literary, my book is an innovation in the field of media studies insofar as it uses this methodology to read “writing interfaces.”

Chapter one, then, uses media archaeology to discuss the fascicle – the art of the handmade booklet as perfected by the nineteenth century poet Emily Dickinson – as a specific instance of an earlier writing medium. I make the case that Dickinson’s use of the fascicle as an interface shows she is aware of it as a writing medium – one that defines how and what she writes. Fascicles, for example, are obvious (because they often appear to be idiosyncratic) instances of the pen/paper interface and so they ineluctably frame what is and can be said just as much as digital interfaces. As such, in this chapter I move the definition of ‘interface’ outside its conventional usage in which it refers to the intermediary layer between a user and digital content. Here, then, ‘interface’ applies to writing media more broadly and designates the layer between a reader and any content; the interface allows the reader to interact with the text itself. An interface could therefore be a handwritten scrap piece of paper or, as I discuss in chapter two, an 8^1/2 x 11 sheet of paper that has been typewritten on with a Smith Corona. By simply widening the definition of ‘interface,’ I move the fields of media study and literary studies closer together. However, I do not signal a mere shift in terminology. Instead, hybridizing these fields enables us to move beyond a repetitious pointing out that “the medium is the message” and so get at precise qualities of media (such as the fascicle) as well as the particularities of interfaces in individual works of digital poetry. Furthermore, as I point out above, because digital interfaces are so familiar to us now that we no longer even notice how they define our interactions with our computers, another underlying premise of this first chapter is that attending to an older interface such as the fascicle helps bring the digital back into view.

I continue to implicitly use media archaeology in chapter two to focus on how so-called “typewriter poetry” from the 1960s and 1970s draws attention to the typewriter as a profoundly influential analog reading/writing interface. It’s my sense that typewriter poetry broadly and so-called “dirty concrete poetry” in particular (visual poetry created with a typewriter that intentionally courts illegibility) best draw attention to the limits and possibilities of the typewriter-as-interface. As such, when Andrew Lloyd writes in the 1972 collection Typewriter Poems that “a typewriter is a poem. A poem is not a typewriter,” he gestures to the ways in which poets enact a media-analysis of the typewriter via writing as they cleverly undo stereotypical assumptions about the typewriter itself: a poem written on a typewriter is not merely a series of words delivered via a mechanical writing device and, for that matter, neither is the typewriter merely a mechanical writing device. Instead, these poems express and enact a poetics of the remarkably varied material specificities of the typewriter as a particular kind of mechanical writing interface that necessarily inflects both how and what one writes.

Chapter three then explores the shift from the command-line interface in the early 1980s to the first mainstream windows-based interface introduced by Apple in the mid-1980s by looking at digital poetry created on both interfaces. The argument of this chapter is a crucial turning-point in my book manuscript: I argue that the broad adoption of the Graphical User Interface, or the use of a keyboard/screen/mouse in conjunction with windows, fundamentally changed the computing landscape and inaugurated an era in which users have little or no comprehension of the digital computer as a medium. One of the most recent and well-known unveilings of what is now commonly referred to as an “interface-free interface” came in 2006 when research scientist Jeff Han introduced a 36-inch wide computing screen which allows the user to perform almost any computer-driven operation through “multi-touch sensing.” Han describes this interface as “completely intuitive . . . there’s no instruction manual, the interface just sort of disappears.” However, the interface does not disappear but rather, through a sleight-of-hand, deceives the user into believing there is no interface at all. Thus, in chapter three I discuss early examples of digital poetry by writers such as bpNichol, Deena Larsen, Jim Rosenberg, and Michael Joyce which indicate an equally early sense that the computing industry would, from the moment of the mainstream introduction of the Graphical User Interface, only accelerate its attempts to make interfaces invisible. These digital poems from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s work against the GUI interface to prompt us to think about how these interface-free interfaces do not offer us the ability to transcend the interface itself but rather serve as an ever-more insidious form of control on creative expression.

This historicizing then allows me to account for, in chapters four and five, the opposing pulls in contemporary culture between a move toward transparent, “accessible” digital writing/media and digital poetry’s enactment of media poetics. Chapter four delves more deeply into interfaces that attempt to be invisible to the user such as multitouch, augmented reality, and ubiquitous computing. In this chapter I make the point that writers such as Judd Morrissey and Jason Nelson create texts that are precisely positioned in opposition to this troubling move toward transparent or invisible computing. I argue that it is precisely against this troubling move toward invisibility that Judd Morrissey create texts such as “The Jew’s Daughter” – a work in which readers are invited to click on hyperlinks embedded in the narrative text, links which do not lead anywhere so much as they unpredictably change some portion of the text before our eyes. The result of our attempts to navigate such a frustrating interface, structured as it is by hyperlinks that do in fact usually lead somewhere, is that the interface of the Web comes into view once again. Likewise working against the clean, “natural,” and transparent interface of the Web, in “game, game, game and again game,” Jason Nelson creates a game-poem in which he self-consciously embraces a hand-drawn, hand-written aesthetic while deliberately undoing poetic and videogame conventions through a nonsensical point-system and mechanisms that ensure the player neither accumulates points nor “wins.”

Thus, chapter four leads into the argument of the fifth and final chapter of my book which is that at the heart of the most provocative and the most successful works of digital poems lies a thorough-going engagement with difficulty or even failure. By hacking, breaking, or simply making access to the interface trying, digital writers work against the ways in which these interfaces are becoming increasingly invisible even while these same interfaces also increasingly define what and how we read/write. Further, I assert that as a result of the visual, interactive, and/or algorithmically generated nature of literary artifacts produced by a digital computer, we are witnessing the end of the poem as it has traditionally been conceived and the burgeoning of a new practice of literary interpretation that is equal to this new digital medium. Most acts of literary interpretation are entirely tied to the idea of a text whose words, whose content and physical form, are stable, not to mention readable. But in this chapter I ask: what do we, as literary critics, do with a digital text that is not legible in the traditional sense? That changes every time we look at it? What do we do when we are confronted with a text that calls for viewing rather than reading? Thus, building on my discussion in chapters one through four which maps the shifts in reading/writing practices that have been brought about by interfaces from the bookbound to the digital, the final chapter attempts to outline a new critical vocabulary equal to the new textuality emerging from an engagement with the digital interface.