processual

Herberto Helder died. Helder is one of the most consistent and innovative Portuguese poets of the second half of the 20th century. Even if his later œuvre has been marked by a traditional experimentalist reworking of crafted language, whose poiesis engages with a very idiosyncratic vocabulary, one should not forget Helder’s eclectic trajectory. Having been influenced by, among other movements, Surrealism and international avant-garde experimentalism, Herberto Helder was, firstly together with António Aragão (1964), and secondly with Aragão and E. M. de Melo e Castro (1966), the editor of two important anthologies or cadernos (chapbooks), Poesia Experimental 1 [Experimental Poetry 1] and Poesia Experimental 2 [Experimental Poetry 2]. Both these anthologies opened up most of the major pathways of literary and artistic experimentalism in the 1960s, from which the PO.EX (Experimental POetry) movement emerged. Several genres, formal and thematic threads were originally tried out in these two anthologies and further work of the movement, namely concrete and visual poetry, ‘film poetry,’ sound poetry, ‘object-poetry,’ ‘poetic action’ and happening.

(Source: Author's introduction)

Poetic writing for programmable and network media seems to have been captivated by the affordances of new media and questions of whether or not and if so, how certain novel, media-constituted properties and methods of literary objects require us to reassess and reconfigure the literary itself. What if we shift our attention decidedly to practices, processes, procedures — towards ways of writing and ways of reading rather than dwelling on either textual artifacts themselves (even time-based literary objects) or the concepts underpinning objects-as-artifact? What else can we do, given that we must now write on, for, and with the net which is itself no object but a seething mass of manifold processes?

Part one of the essay presents a brief analysis of recent experiments in "writing to be found" with Google, making some claim that such writing may be exemplary, that its aesthetic and conceptual engagements are distinct, and that there is something at stake here for "the literary" or rather for certain practices of literary art. After very brief discussion in part two of some broader implications of writing with the Google corpus and its tools, part three addresses more examples of writing to be found, and introduces a collaboration with Daniel Howe, The Readers Project, many processes of which engage with "writing to be found" "in" Google and making use of its tools.

(Source: author's abstract)