glitch poetics

The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-Performance in Digital (and Non-Digital) Poetry explores a few ways in which digital poetry, poetry that is written in programmable media and is intended to be read on computers or other digital devices, is acting to tactically resist various forms of oppression through what I am calling “breakage.” Breakage is, in this sense, an error or disruption in a perceived continuity. For example, I look at digital poems that take advantage of the fact that, because of software or hardware upgrades, they have a limited functional life. The poets’ embrace of their poems’ ephemerality actively resists market forces, cultural or professional demands on the poet to participate in processes of canonization, and the like. I also explore the idea of “glitching poetic language,” in which existing texts are digitally manipulated, digitally “broken” through a process in which the poet provokes errors. This is a remix strategy with aleatoric results that shifts the reader’s focus from the referential elements of the text, or the fragments of text, to an error, a break. I argue that these poems, by breaking, challenge systems that support institutional racism, violence, economic disparity, and other unjust social phenomena. I then explore poetic breakage in live performance. I look specifically at the Black Took Collective, a group of performance poets who utilize digital media in live performance to subvert expectations that an audience might have regarding race, gender, and poetry’s place in the academy. The final chapter is a demonstration of practice-based research and a discussion of the role of this kind of research in an evolving English department. I offer two examples of practice-based research in literary studies: Poemedia 2.0 and The Denver Poetry Map.

This paper performs a reading of the ‘glitch poetics’ of Caroline Bergvall and Erica Scourti pivoting between analyses of their works via two specific contemporary technologies. As well as reflecting on the artworks themselves, the paper aims to show how the various of forms of error they employ, allow for new perspectives on conditions for contemporary textuality. Glitch poetics is a framework for reading and writing, it refers to a set of tactics in which errors are captured, mimicked or induced to produce moments of “critical sensory encounter” with the technics of language. This perspective on linguistic error is influenced by the ways that glitches and malfunctions have been valorised in media arts’ “glitch art” movement – particularly the way these practices reveal the formally withdrawn aspects of ‘black-boxed’ devices and software. But the glitch is a highly subjective categorisation, and new media – by their very newness – can also be said to constitute ruptures in what was formally inaccessible. Our encounter with new media, in this sense, is often indistinguishable from the unsettling encounter we associate with glitch.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)