To briefly synopsize historical and theoretical
aspects of the previous essay, a framework is built on Walter Benjamin's
idea that, "One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation
of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later" (237). The
creative atmosphere of Black Mountain College is detailed. I suggest
that the slow mechanical nature of a linear, sequential process fails to
deal appropriately with an environment whose circuitry provides a total
electric field and a simultaneity of events. I equate the Black Mountain
vision for education and poetry with Michael Joyce's sense of hypertext,
that it requires "a capability to act, to create, change, and recover particular
encounters within the developing body of knowledge" (41).
The maximization of resources which occurred
at Black Mountain is posited as an important and direct influence on performance
art and poetry in the United States after the second world war. These
developments in twentieth century art and poetry, undoubtedly influenced
by dada and other precursors, result from the technological ability for
the composer to allow and/or control numerous variables of the human senses
within the framework of a performance situation. A preoccupation
with and desire for effect upon an audience is what leads creative minds
to multimedia. As former Black Mountain faculty member Robert Creeley
writes in the Introduction to the Poetry In Motion II cd-rom, "...poets
particularly need to be heard, need an active and defining presence, need
physical sound and sight."
A trajectory of multi-layered poetry in the United
States has kept in-step with the localized activities at Black Mountain.
Through the late 50s and 60s, the arts were juxtaposed through the activities—the
"Happenings"—created by Allan Kaprow and FLUXUS, predominantly in New York
City. Kaprow was a student of John Cage's, and saw the importance
of breaking down separations between the arts. Many writers began
to use multiple voices and sounds in formal or informal communal poetic
events. Allen Ginsberg describes the "glorious ferment" in New York
in this period in the "Foreword" of the Out Of This World anthology,
writing, "The literary, musical, and cinematic avant-garde, as well as
civil rights, censorship, and minority problems, all came together at one
point, one spot in time, in the early sixties" (Waldman xxvi).
Particular aspects of the Black Mountain continuum
solidify and make clear poetry's status as a potent performative and intermediary
form in the latter part of this century. Performance poetry blossomed
in North America in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Its most active practitioners
(of that period) are chronicled in Ron Mann's video Poetry In Motion
(subsequently converted, with additions, to a pair of cd-roms). This
project has been extended into the 90s by the recent The United States
of Poetry video series. With the "mimeo revolution" (extended
by the xerox machine), the publishing of poetry in print also proliferated.
Loss Pequeño Glazier's annotated history of small presses reports
that the number of poetry magazines increased by 1900% between 1965 and
1990 (from 250 to 4800) (2).
In the most recent decade a severe de-centralization
of creative energies has happened. In part, this is due to the "technology"
of culture and the expanding demographics of American poetry (including
disagreement around issues of form amongst poets). Charles
Bernstein, in A Poetics, describes recent literary history as
being "characterized by the sharp ideological disagreements that lacerate
our communal field of action" (1). The near void of interdisciplinary
cultural and educational institutions such as Black Mountain presents practical
difficulties in the creation of a kinetically-minded community. Naropa
Institute, New College of California, and The Poetry Project at St. Mark's
Church in New York, all of which have direct foundational ties to Black
Mountain, are among the few places where an integrated, collaborative approach
to poetry has been encouraged and able to ferment in the past several decades.
Yet their relative distance from one another as well as other symptoms
of cultural atomization prevent the ideal presence of a communal field
of action and inquiry. This condition, however, may not be as problematic
as it seems if, as Don Byrd points out in his study Charles Olson's
Maximus, "The Center is not a place as such but an engagement
of attentions which is necessarily located" (64).
A capacious alternative approach to intermedia
arts—mostly speculative at the time—began to develop in the 70s.
Ted Nelson writes in Dream Machines [1974]: "...a very basic
change has occurred in presentational systems of all kinds. We may
summarize it under the name branching, although there are many variants.
Essentially, today's systems for presenting pictures, texts and whatnot
can bring you different things automatically depending on what you do"
(44). Nelson promotes the computer as a mechanism which collects
and organizes disparate texts, and suggests the generic terms "hypertext"
and "hypermedia" for presentational media which performs in multi-dimensional
ways. Several writers have subsequently chosen to adopt cybertext
as a term which attempts to broaden yet create a unified field for computerized
and other interactive texts. [see Espen
J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1997) and John
Cayley, "HYPERTEXT / CYBERTEXT / POETEXT." ]
Digital systems have developed substantially since their conceptualization, and a few efforts have been made in the name of poetry. Contemporary artists using digital multimedia gain the ability to mechanically process and cross-index amounts and types of information inconceivable to artists, writers, scholars of previous generations. A movement toward encompassing multiple forms through electronic networks is appropriate in a country whose artistic milieu is energetic, varied, and surrounded by various forms of media. Texts developed using hypermedia bring sonic, alphabetic and visual (static and kinetic) materials together. Though poetry has always been layered, has "branched" in certain senses, increasingly computer technology has come to play a role in the projection and performance of a poetry of layers. With hypertext, writes Michael Joyce, "The text becomes a present tense palimpsest where what shines through are not past versions but potential, alternate views." (3) A range of intertextual associations, and graphical combinations are possible via the computer screen.
Of course, it is a radically different situation
to be in front of a computer "reading" than it is to be in an audience
witnessing a performance: an abstraction exists in the absence of
the presence of a group or human energy. Though perhaps no more than
in other forms of literary transmission, such as books, television, radio,
and so on. Other concerns exist regarding the new media's ability
to effectively enact a transference of experience and art. Digital
multimedia cannot carry the gestalt or community of Black Mountain much
more than Voyager's cd-rom, THE BEAT EXPERIENCE carries the spirit
of the Beat poets. It can, however, carry the blend of media in publication
form and, more importantly, lend itself to some of the important artistic
methods and philosophies at the core of Black Mountain poetics. In
fact, technological / hypermedia manifestations of literature and art practically
demand intermediary collaborations. Creative modes of "interactivity,"
expansive databases, and knowledgeable designs for digital multimedia will
relieve some of the obvious concerns about a poetry relying on computer
interface for effective transmission. What is happening is not some
sort of post-human poetry: someone or someones invent the work, write
the codes, broadcast and receive vision. Meaning is revealed or evoked
through the programmatic, yet malleable, transmission of the "performance."
Both creative and critical texts are layered in new ways. Mutational
layers such as color graphics are obvious, as are the benefits of various
forms of linking.
Artists associated with Black Mountain were able
to create a matrixed/non-matrixed multi-layered field for poetry.
With the development and proliferation of mass-media, electronic networks,
and hypermedia, terms for performance have unquestionably shifted since
the 50s. It is impossible to suggest that computers are a catalyst
for various circumstances and ideal possibilities described above.
Still, the increased number of parameters in simultaneous projections and
sounds enabled by new media imply new combinatorial creative procedures
resulting from art, music, and writing which cannot rely implicitly on
either unique approach. Nevertheless, nothing like a Black Mountain
poetry or poetics exists in cyberspace to this date. The investigations
of Jim Rosenberg,
John Fowler,
Diana Slattery, Charles
O. Hartman, Christy
Sheffield Sanford, Alterran
Poetry Assemblage, Betalab,
the Electronic Poetry Center,
Eastgate Systems, and others, no
matter how sophisticated they are, include but the earliest efforts in
designing digital intermediary compositions.
In The New American Poetry, Black Mountain
faculty member Robert Duncan writes, "A multiphasic experience sought a
multiphasic form." Duncan describes how he seeks, "those forms that
allow for the most various feelings in one, so that a book is more than
a poem, and a life-work is more than a book, yet they have no other instance
than a word" (435). His own "multiphasic" work stems from mythological,
philosophical and other sacred texts as well as writings from his favorite
contemporaries. In his poetry, Duncan successfully weaves language
and an integrated vision into a dense and expansive array of verbal lyricism,
which he had no other way to produce than by type set on a page or by reading
aloud.
Whether or not cybertext truly allows "various
feelings in one," or allows a book to be more than a poem (or a life work
to be more than a book) still depends on content and a constructive and
passionate energy put forth by the author. Conceivably, it could
be decades before anyone finds a way to synthesize a grand poetic vision
and the computer. We do know for a fact that electronic composition,
vast storage and telecommunications systems now allow for different types
of poetic literature to be designed, created, and distributed. These
new systems in part transplant the most effective attributes of the old
techniques into the new in a process of using "a word" to absorb and transmit
a poet's vision outward.
It is apparent that several cybertext authors
have engaged with what Gerrit
Lansing describes as "the unchosen weather of the paradigmatic and
syntagmatic forces of present language" so powerful in Duncan's work (198).
We see this foregrounded in works which adopt the icons, metaphors, and
terminology of computers and networks in order to "subvert" them.
These self-reflexive texts intend to critique the media itself. This
is not an absolute praxis, however. Many forms of cybertext earnestly
attempt to use new media to advance poetry into the electronic realm.
Phases, forms, and interpretations of cybertext have been produced;
more will be. Some may already be read as "multiphasic," but as Duncan's
poetry and methodology grew out of many years of living research, reading,
conversation, and careful consideration of all of the aspects of writing
poetry and being a poet, surely we have not yet seen the maturity of dramatic
open forms in electronic work.
Using Black Mountain as a model for such poetry
certainly demands further scrutiny. Charles Olson, directing Black
Mountain at its very end, states his conception of the school: "What
Black Mountain College sets itself to do is to breed the first-rate alone.
And it does it by opposing, as of knowledge, the particular to the general;
as of the person, the common to the special; as of culture and belief,
the active to spectatorism..." (Harris 180). The first consideration
here, toward the development of progressive forms for poetry, of favoring
the particular over the general, is not as much of a problem as the specialized
and spectatorial aspects of the highly technologized forms under discussion.
Questions of access and effective modes of interactivity perhaps undermine
my proposal of them as such. At the same time, according to Harris,
just before Black Mountain closed, "Olson formulated what was by far the
most visionary of his schemes for the college. The new college, described
by Robert Duncan as the center of a 'dispersed force,' would retain a nucleus
faculty...and sponsor a program of satellite projects...located in cities
all over the world" (180). The location of such a poetics may be
precisely and effectively enacted through the electronic passages and connectivity
enabled by machines. Conflation of these electrifical communities
may be debatable because the artistic activity at Black Mountain stemmed
from a physical and living space. A digitized presentation of poetry
in a non-spatial, non-cotemporal form might even be considered by some
to be antithetical to the purposes of Black Mountain. I see contemporary
methodologies as opportunities to renovate an innovative poetry and poetics,
useful to persons interested in an art comprised of varied activities happening
independently of one another. Spontaneous, creative, potentially
globalized approaches may be simulated by computer processes, as a disembodied
poetics grows cross-culturally.
Multiplex is precisely the word which defines
the context of cybertext in the current creative and technological moment.
Multiple layerings, and the use of telephone circuitry and television receiving
equipment capable of carrying two or more distinct signals, are symptomatic
of a growing body of literature today. A potential inclusivity, anthological
and transgenral, exists through the media's layering abilities. A
practical and focused example is built in to the electronic version of
the previous Black Mountain essay. Its first link, the "Prologue,"
is an example of what a colleague affectionately called a "pre-emptive
strike" against a basic feminist critique which might be levied upon regarding
the school (and my pinpointing it as the orgins of multimedia poetry in
the United States). This "Prologue"
includes relevant commentary on the subject as well as links to missing
past and present counterparts to this lineage. This effect enables
considerations to be pixel-by-pixel in the present.
We have reached a point in the age of mechanical
reproduction where the demands of the multi-layered poetry born at Black
Mountain can be at least immaterially satisfied by manifestations from
the new machines. It is an extremely demanding, highly processual,
type of work but the tactics and machinery are in place to invent a vibrant
poetry as a result of the invention and proliferation of digital media.
Given the computer's ability to be programmed to create, change, and recover
particular encounters within a textual body of knowledge and forms, it
is possible that creative effects born at Black Mountain may be cooperatively
carried to the present.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections.
Hannah
Arendt, ed. New York: Shocken, 1969.
Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Byrd, Don. Charles Olson's Maximus. Carbondale, IL:
University of Illinois
Press, 1980.
Duncan, Robert. In The New American Poetry, Donald M. Allen,
ed. New York:
Grove Press, 1960.
Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Small Press: An Annotated
Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1992.
Harris, Mary Emma. The Arts at Black Mountain College. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987.
Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext, Pedagogy and
Poetics. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1995.
Lansing, Gerrit. "Robert Duncan and the Power to Cohere."
Scales of the
Marvellous.
Robert J. Bertholf and Ian Reid, eds. New York: New
Directions, 1979:
198-199.
Nelson, Ted. Dream Machines/Computer Lib. Chicago:
Hugo's Book
Service, 1974.
Waldman, Anne, ed. Out of This World. New York:
Crown, 1991.