women dirty concrete poets
Posted: May 4, 2011 Filed under: bookbound, criticism, poetry | Tags: dirty concrete, typewriter poetry 2 Comments »I would be blind indeed if I didn’t notice or acknowledge the fact that these dirty concrete/typewriter poets – Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, bill bissett, John Riddell – I’ve been writing about here and in my book project are all men…and nearly all them reference or acknowledge other like-minded men (though of course not always – I gather McCaffery has written on Beth Learn). I’m not entirely sure whether it’s my own unintentional bias. But I can say for sure that in many of the collections of typewriter/dirty concrete poetry I’ve looked at the vast majority of contributors are men. I asked Judith Copithorne, who has written a small book of dirty concrete called Horizon, to speculate on the absence of women and she replied to me something to the effect that back in those days, dirty concrete was considered pretty ‘out there’ and women were already having a hard enough time getting noticed for less ‘out there’ work.
However, thanks entirely to the assistance of Darren Wershler and Judith Copithorne, below is a short list of women from Canada and the U.K. who are or were dirty concrete poets. Perhaps this can serve as a kind of bookmark to myself and others about the archaeological research and writing that has yet to be done on these women:
- Bettina Adler
- Mirella Bentivoglio
- Jennifer Books
- Paula Claire
- Jennifer Pike Cobbing
- Jo Cooke
- Judith Copithorne
- Patricia Farrell
- Maxine Gadd
- Beth Learn
- Peggy Lefler
- Maggie O’Sullivan
- Sylvia Ptak
- Betty Radin
- Rhoda Rosenfeld
copier machine poetics
Posted: April 25, 2011 Filed under: bookbound, criticism, poetry | Tags: concrete poetry, copier machine, dirty concrete, Sharpfax, typewriter, typewriter poetry, Xerox 6 Comments »bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire is a series of typewriter poems, not simply poems written on a typewriter, Nichol wrote between 1975 and 1979. In its relentless exploration of homolinguistic translation, it has become something of a cult serial poem in certain experimental writing circles, spawning iterations such as Stuart Pid’s Translating translating translating Apollinaire and Andrew Russ’s Translating, translating, translating Apollinaire, or, Translating, translating bp Nichol (both from 1991). Writes Nichol by way of an introduction:
May 27th 1975 en route from London England to Toronto with Gerry Gilbert…in a mood of dissatisfaction re certain aspects of my writing (always the feeling there is more one should be learning – more limitations one should be pushing against & breaking down) i began this present series. In my mind was the idea of a pure bit of research one in which the creativity would be entirely at the level of the research, of formal inventiveness, and not at the level of content per se i.e. i recalled the first poem i had ever had published — Translating Apollnaire in Bill Bissett’s BLEW OINTMENT magazine circa 1964…& decided to put that poem thru as many translation/ transformation processes as i & other people could think of. I conceived of it as an openended, probably unpublishable in its entirety, piece. As of this date (August 29, 1978) i have elaborated 55 different systems & or results with TTA 16, 26, 27, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 50, 54, 55 & some other tentative ideas still not fully executed. But it seemed a good point in time, particularly when Karl Young expressed his enthusiasm & support, to issue a preliminary report on discoveries made in terms of the results arrived at. Thus this present selection from the inevitably titled TRANSLATING TRANSLATING APOLLINAIRE.
(You can find the original version of the poem here along with the rest of the selection from The Alphabet Game).
I want to call them typewriter poems instead of simply poems written on a typewriter because it’s clear Nichol understood precisely the ways in which the grid of the typewriter page and the typewriter’s non-proportional font lend themselves to investigations of form – even form freed from the burdens of content. Not surprisingly Nichol’s entire oeuvre is defined by his experiments with the limits and possibilities of different writing media – to such an extent that I have become convinced that Nichol wasn’t simply reading his fellow Torontonian Marshall McLuhan (by the mid-70s, who wasn’t reading McLuhan? but as it turns out McLuhan was reading Nichol as evidenced by his inclusion in the General Bibliography at the end of his 1977 City as Classroom). But he was absorbing McLuhan’s writing wholesale. Before this week, I had only come across a few fleeting references to McLuhan by Nichol – one in Rational Geomancy and a short 1982 memoir Nichol wrote of him titled “The Medium Was the Message.” Several days ago, however, I obtained a copy of Nichol’s Sharp Facts: Selections from TTA26 and was astounded to read this series of poems that are both typewriter and photocopier poems – given his love of the pun, a love he also shared with McLuhan, not surprisingly one of his favorite photocopiers is the Sharpfax Copier. Writing as an experienced writing media technician, a mere two years before his McLuhan memoir, Nichol declares in the introduction:
The translative system involved here entails the use of…copying machine disintegrative tendencies. Which is to say that an image fed through a copying machine over & over again (feeding the image of the image, & then the image of the image of the image, & so on) thru a great many generations, disintegrates. & it does this differently depending on which type of copying machine you’re using.
And he concludes, “In this case the machine is the message. The text itself ultimately disappears.”
These are poems of the machine – poems that aren’t so much interested in their own illegibility as they are invested in reading, vis-a-vis writing, the typewriter through the copier machine.
media studies and the typewriter poem
Posted: April 19, 2011 Filed under: bookbound, criticism, poetry | Tags: beaulieu, concrete poetry, dirty concrete, McCaffery, riddell, typestract, typewriter 1 Comment »Media studies is commonly associated with the study of digital media structures and related phenomena. But the more media theory I read (and lately I’ve been voraciously reading everything by Marshall McLuhan that’s outside of the well-worn Understanding Media) the more drawn I am to thinking through the defining effects of earlier analogue and digital writing interfaces as instances of media – from paper/pencil to typewriter to command-line. As such, I’ve been pursuing my interest in dirty concrete poetry – poetry I’ve written about here that courts illegibility and a kind of non-representationality as a way of drawing attention to the limits and possibilities of the typewriter as a writing medium. In that very small world of people who write about dirty concrete, Steve McCaffery’s “Carnival” is as well worn an exemplar as McLuhan’s Understanding Media. But, partly as a result of reading work by derek beaulieu (a contemporary Canadian visual poet who identifies with dirty concrete), I’ve stumbled upon the typewriter poems of John Riddell – a figure known, it seems, only to a handful of poets and critics in Canada.
Of Riddell I only know that he was McCaffery’s partner in his airport limo business as well as his housemate for a brief time; I believe he is now a lay therapist. Of his work, all I’ve so far seen is E clips E (Underwhich Editions 1989) – a startling book of concrete poems that reads like evidence of Riddell’s hell-bent mission to push writing media from xerography to the typewriter, the lettraset, stamps, cut-outs and cut-ups to the breaking point of legibility and interpretability. But that’s not to say they’re not comprehendable or meaningful – they are meaning pushed to another register, that may defy close-reading at the same time as they court a reading more properly sensitive to both its marks and the process of marking.
“coda” is, for me, one of the more intriguing pieces in the book – perhaps because it gives me more of an interpretative foot-hold than a piece such as “in take” does:
“coda,” on the other hand, has much more of what I can only call “alphabetic patterning”. Below is a scan just of first of this four page poem:
Still, it’s appropriate that the definition of “coda” is most firmly tied to music – an art, I learned from R. Murray Schaeffer, of notation as much as sound – not literature. I can’t help feeling the point, the meaning, is purposefully just a little out of reach. Yet, at the same time, I also feel sure there’s a pattern in those columns of text – on the upper left of the first column on the first page, ‘t’ and ‘f’ appear side by side yet it has clearly been written on a typewriter, on which ‘t’ and ‘f’ are diagonally stacked on top of each other, ‘t’ up and to the right, ‘f’ below and to the left. Likewise ‘b’, ‘u’ and ‘j’ are similarly slightly mis-aligned on the page versus their placement on the keys.
Surely this is a media-studies-inflected poem as I’m forced, for the first time since I learned to type in grade 8 (when I was punished for paying too much attention to the keys), to scrutinize the visual arrangement, the alignment of the typewriter keys in relation to their written characters. It’s typewriter poetry that rejects Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” declaration that the typewriter can “indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends” while it relentlessly courts Olson’s claim that “For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had.”
E-Poetry Festival: May 17-21st, Buffalo NY
Posted: March 20, 2011 Filed under: archeological media lab, criticism, digital, poetry | Tags: Apple II, bpNichol, digital poetry, e-literature, e-poetry, electronic literature 4 Comments »I’ve just received a copy of the preliminary program (pdf) for the upcoming 10 year anniversary E-Poetry Festival in Buffalo, New York and it’s little short of astonishing. With critics, poets, and performers from Canada, the U.S.A., Scandinavia, the U.K., France, and Australia (among others), it promises to be yet another field-defining event. (And you can get some sense of how far the field has come in just ten years by looking at the program from 2001 – clearly, a much broader and even more resolutely international group of writers are beginning to identify as digital workers now.) My first time participating in E-Poetry was in 2003 when it was held in Morgantown, West Virginia. I had been a PhD student at SUNY Buffalo for two years at that point and I presented my first conference paper whose title was far more intriguing than the paper itself – “Computer Kiss: Mechanical Love and the Digital Poem.” And while my paper was nothing to write home about, as the expression goes, I will always value that first defining experience as it didn’t introduce me to the mores of conference-going so much as it introduced me to a lively, intense, cutting-edge creative and critical community of like-minded people. And it’s this community that I identify as one of my homes.
This year I’ll be presenting a paper on the Archeological Media Lab – a paper which I expect will approach the pressing issue of preserving and maintaining access to early works of e-literature through a discussion of the challenges and opportunities presented by the creation of this lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I expect I will discuss how the AML is propelled equally by the need to maintain access to early works of electronic literature (and note too that, given how quickly technology changes, sometimes an “early work of electronic literature” may have been created as recent as 2001 and is similarly no longer viewable on current platforms) and by the need to archive and maintain the computers these works were created on.
Here is an example I often use to illustrate what I mean: from the perspective of a literary scholar, Canadian poet bpNichol’s First Screening – created in 1983-1984 using an Apple IIe and the Apple BASIC programming language – cannot be understood if we view it with an emulator, with Hypercard, or via a Quicktime movie version of the twelve programmed poems. First Screening is a series of poems whose meaning is actually activated through the writer/programmer’s invitation to the reader/view to type in commands; for example, in line 110 of the code for First Screening, Nichol writes: “REM FOR THE CURIOUS VIEWER/READER THERE’S AN ‘OFF-SCREEN ROMANCE’ AT 1748. YOU JUST HAVE TO TUNE IN THE PROGRAMME.” Furthermore, even though First Screening has been preserved via emulator, hypercard and Quicktime movie on the Electronic Literature Directory, there is simply no substitute for the unique interface and physical structure of the Apple II computer; as Matthew Kirschenbaum points out in his groundbreaking 2008 book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, the Apple II computer has no hard drive; instead, “a program is loaded by inserting the disk in the external drive and booting the machine. In practical terms, this meant first retrieving the program by going to one’s collection of disks and rummaging through them…Consider the contrast in affordances to a file system mounted on a hard drive: here you located the program you wanted by reading a printed or handwritten label, browsing like you would record albums or manila file folders, not by clicking on an icon” (33). Everything about the Apple II system offers both writer and reader an utterly different set of experiences than when they read or write on, say, a MacBook or a PC or when they read/write a poem such as First Screening by way of Windows.
I will post the entirety of my e-poetry paper here sometime in mid-May. I hope to see many of you there!
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history of the term “dirty concrete”
Posted: March 12, 2011 Filed under: bookbound, criticism, digital, poetry | Tags: concrete poetry, dirty concrete, DIY, typewriter poetry, visual poetry Leave a comment »Earlier today I wrote a long-ish blog post on netpoetic (a communal blog on digital poetry/poetics and e-literature) on my (not-over-yet) search for the origin of the term “dirty concrete.” I have been trying to figure out who first came up with this term for an essay I’m working on, “Marking as Meaning: Reading Steve McCaffery’s Dirty Concrete as Digital D.I.Y.”; in it I’ve tried to delineate a history of the term “dirty concrete” – a term which is frequently used to describe a messy, typed-over aesthetic of concrete poems by McCaffery as well as bpNichol and bill bissett. I thought it worthwhile posting some of the bits and pieces I’ve picked up along the way on this strange, long journey to discover the origin of the term – “the origin of the term “dirty concrete poetry” (en route to digital D.I.Y.).”
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