THE TECHNOLOGY OF WRITING

When Nathaniel Mackey came, he talked about the relationship between how he writes and how he reads aloud. He pointed to a passage in Paracritical Hinge, in the chapter called "Sight-Specific, Sound Specific...":

This is the poem performing on the stage the page amounts to (and on the stage the reader's mind amounts to by way of the page). I don't, however, feel obligated to read the poem aloud in the manner such placement might suggest--obligated or even able. What, after all, do varied margins sound like? (What, for that matter, does an unvaried margin sound like?) To avail oneself of graphic amenities peculiar to the page is not to disallow the poem behaving differently when read aloud but to recognize that it does. The ultimate untransmissibility of vocal dynamics timbre, accent, pace, volume, inflection, and so forth) by print--and vice versa--makes variance inevitable. The poem's articulation is as various as its locations.

From there, he went on to how writing the way he writes has gotten more difficult over time. That sentence is not meant in a metaphyisical way, but in a material way: with an electric typewriter, he could drop a word to the next line and hang an indent at the push of a literal button. Now he has to use tabs and spaces and eyeball it to get the same effect. A step forward for technology, but backward for the technology of experimental poetry.

We may be used to thinking about the effect of technological and material developments on poetry. We may understand how the declining price of paper allowed for formal poetic practices now considered second-nature, such as line-breaks. When Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 prefaces a batch of twenty poems with "紙墨遂多。辭無詮次。聊命故人書之。以為歡笑爾。 The paper and ink have multiplied, words without order or sequence. I've asked for an old friend to rewrite them, so we can laugh and delight in them," we might remember how much a hermit in fifth century China must have paid for such pleasure.

But we may not be used to thinking about how technology affects our own writing habits. Now that paper is so cheap and available that we don't even need to use it for poetry, we face other constrictions in word-processors and html. I told Mackey that when I typed up his poem in my last post on this blog, I couldn't get the right justification based on spaces alone. Instead, I had to fill in the spaces with periods, and then color them the same as the background. In other words, I had to write this:

.....................................Flesh beginning
to go like wax, we sat like Buddha,
.....................................................breath
an abiding chime, chimeless,
...........................................bells
had we been................................
rung ......................................................

so I wouldn't have this:

Flesh beginning
to go like wax, we sat like Buddha,
breath
an abiding chime, chimeless,
bells
had we been
rung

If technology is debilitating, rather than facilitating, advancements in poetry, it may be because the owners of technological advancement are not interested in poetry, let alone poetic advancement. We could, of course, compose our poems in programs like Quark rather than Word, laying-out our writing more than typing, or even writing (though perhaps better than processing). The page/stage freedom there, of course, comes with a certain technical savoir-faire (or, as my dad sez, subway fare), which is not exactly the kind of democratizing trend that we imagine both technology and poetry to have prepared us for. And if the owners of technological advancement are de-democratizing poetry, then what will happen (and what has happened) to the other areas of cultural production under the ownership of similar technocrats and businesspeople?