experimental poetry

Since the 1980s, experimental poets of Asian descent writing in English around the world have created works informed by both their experiences of being in the Asian diaspora and their subjectivities in the age of advancing computing technologies. Studies of these works have been scarce and few have put them all together in order to make an argument about how to read them in connection with each other. The aim of this dissertation is to make a case for what I call the diasporic reading framework, and to argue that this way of reading fills in crucial gaps in our understandings of experimental Asian poetry.

The diasporic reading framework uses diaspora, in this specific case the Asian diaspora, as a concept that helps us interpret the techniques, forms, and content of digitally-influenced poetry produced since the 1980s. In turn, this reading also allows us to see how the experimentations of these poets enrich the conventional categorizations of Asian diasporic writing. To this end, I gather an archive of literary works that includes the poetry of more renowned and canonically accepted poets (e.g. Leung Ping-kwan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Fred Wah) as well as less easily categorized genres by lesser known individuals and groups (e.g. multi-media works, blogs, public projects) in order to read them together productively.

The first chapter of my dissertation uses poetry from Hong Kong as a case study to establish my definition of diaspora and build a theoretical basis for using it as a reading framework. The second chapter takes this framework and applies it to works beyond Hong Kong, demonstrating its portability as well as showing how the abstraction of shared land into non-physical spaces is a powerful way to understand works that have previously been considered only post-colonialist, only nationalist, or only feminist. Chapter three applies this reading further to works that experiment with form using digital technology, and the final chapter revisits previous themes in light of new advances in social media. I conclude that the political stakes of diaspora as a reading framework is its function as a tactic against hegemony.

Czechoslovak literature always kept up with literary trends, which were trying to combine texts and possibilities of new medias. Whether we speak about a period of literary avant-garde, or about a period of experimental poetry of 1960s, works of Czechoslovak authors were always at the forefront of domestic literary-theoretical and literary-historical reflection and had strong (in case of 1960s even initiative) cultural impact abroad. However, after the rise of digital literature the situation and position of Czechoslovak (and Czech and Slovak) literary production have changed. Domestic theory and praxis in digital literature have become marginal issue. Even if there has emerged a piece of work with potential to interest international readers and theorists, it has never crossed borders of former Iron Curtain in nearly 100% cases. Czech and Slovak digital literature has found itself at dual perihpery at the same time – domestic (internal) and foreign (external).

The aim of this contribution is clear then. First – to briefly sketch an evolution of CzechSlovak digital literature and introduce its (im)potentiality to leave the external periphery and get into the digital literature’s spotlight more. Second – to propose concepts and possibilities of researching and making the digital literature more international and attractive in an environment, in which there is a general lack of creative and theoretical interest in digital literature at all (pushing it to internal periphery).

Even though Czech-Slovak digital literature produces insufficient number of works on an average (even less of that noteworthy), such pieces of works which could succeed in an international gauge still can be found. Whether we speak about a field of computer-generated literature, interactive literary installations, hypertext novels or collaborative projects, CzechSlovak digital literature manages to follow international trends as Czechoslovak literature managed it during an era of experimental literature in 1920s and 1960s. So why is it not able to break through these days in the period of digital literature? Why is it not able to leave the sphere of overlooked external periphery? What is the Czech-Slovak digital literature missing? And finally: How to deepen the tradition of digital literature in those countries? And is it possible at all?

All of these questions will be briefly answered within the contribution and by using Leonard Flores’ idea of postnational phenomenon, it will try to outline the concept and approach, which could be ideal for deepening tradition of digital literature in „peripheral“ country and for taking the digital literature „from the internal periphery to the center“.

The following discussion aims to reflect on how electronic literature and affiliated or related fields describe themselves paratextually. I will argue that the social construction of ‘electronic literature’ is dominated by its systemic self-description. The paratextual construction basically works with the ascription of the genre name ‘electronic literature’ and discursive descriptions or reflections to phenomena of artistic practice and has been institutionalized in no small part by the Electronic Literature Organization. The argument is developed by observing paratextual practices in founding narratives, archives and collections related to the ELO. This perspective is contextualized by looking at self-descriptions in the pre-history of e-lit within the artistic program of poietic experimentation.

At least since Mallarme, if not before, poets in the Western tradition have responded to changes in media technologies by reflecting on their own relationship to language, and by reassessing the limits and possibilities of poetry. In the German- speaking world, this tendency has been pronounced in a number of experimental movements: Dada, particularly in Zurich and Berlin between 1916 and 1921; Concrete poetry, especially its Swiss and German variants in the 1950s and '60s; and finally, digital or electronic poetry, a genre that is still developing all around the world, but has roots in Germany dating back to the late 1950s. For each of these movements, the increasing dominance of new media technologies contributes to an understanding of language as something material, quantifiable, and external to its human users, and casts doubt on the function of language as a means of subjective expression, particularly in the context of poetry. However, this poetic engagement with a materialized, quantified language does not only pose a challenge to older conceptions of the lyric subject; rather, a new sort of subjectivity may emerge through the interaction of human authors and technological media. Thus by engaging with new media technologies, the experimental movements considered here have raised fundamental questions about the nature of subjectivity in a media-dominated age. This argument is developed here in the form of critical surveys of all three movements, together with case studies of works that have received relatively little scholarly attention to date. The introduction to the Dadaists' media poetics in Chapter One is followed, in Chapter Two, by a closer look at how print media and advertising fit into the Berlin Dadaists' political program, focusing on the collaboration between George Grosz and John Heartfield in the June 1917 issue of Neue Jugend. Following the survey of Concrete poetry in Chapter Three, Chapter Four focuses on the role of information theory in the works of Max Bense, particularly in his 1963 book Vielleicht zunaechst wirklich nur: Monolog der Terry Jo im Mercey Hospital, as well as the 1968 radio-play adaptation, Der Monolog der Terry Jo. The final chapter pursues this trajectory further, tracing the development of digital poetry in the German-speaking world from its earliest experimental phase in 1959 up to the present day.

(Source: Abstract by the Author)

The text is set within the poetics of a technical report, used to communicate the final results of projects in the digital media field. Its subject is the poetry collection of my authorship, Wiersze za sto dolarów (One-Hundred-Dollar Poems), written in Polish in 2017 using the crowdsourcing tool Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). The project is discussed in the context of other literary works created with AMT, among others On the Subcontract by Nick Thurston. The paper discusses the features of the literary work created by the Mechanical Turks, the phenomenon of Decentring Digital Media and questions of authorship, art project appraisal,and creation as paid work.