Instruction

Thus far, out concept for the Instruction tab has involved either creating a form of sorts that users can follow in constructing their own poetry or simply adding definitions of different verse forms that they can consult during their writing process. I wonder if at some point we could make this section of the website even more interactive, especially since it seems pretty static at this point. Here are a couple ideas, I thought up (though they’re based on what I’ve seen on other websites):

• Interviews with poets that focus on their writing process that users can watch to get tips on their own process.
• A chat function so users can either workshop live with other users or a featured poet (I imagine this latter option would be limited to a set number of users).
• In-person workshops that we, the creators, organize in various cities. The leader of the workshop would be required to video it and attendees would submit versions of the poems both before and after the workshop for the website.

Overall, I think this would make the website much more dynamic and interactive. Perhaps we could even start publishing our own poetry magazine to take advantage of features unique to the print medium, like whitespace.

Whitespace

Jacob's mentioned in a couple of our meetings that code doesn't do well with whitespace. He's commented on the fact that were we to post a poem on the site where spacing is of particular value, we might lose some of that value because code is unable to handle it correctly. What do we lose by being online? Offline? Were the site to continue beyond our project, would we address the constraints (and freedoms) of our chosen medium more directly? What would this look like?

To Spring Quarter and Beyond!

Jacob asked Renee and me to think about the possible directions that wordtoys.net could take once its use for English 260 has been accomplished. In other words, thinking about the site in terms of "Virtual Darwinism," which of our sections will "win out" or become the dominant element? I think that this site will continue, in some manifestation of its current state; each of its three creative/functional aspects of the site (everything but the blog) is the respective brainchild of each one of us, and we all have a vested interest in theoretically seeing our own feature blossom into something larger. In the form of www.wordtoys.net, however, the future, as the site's name suggests, belongs to Jacob: Renee and I may go on in collaboration (or separately) to develop a creative/educational poetry site (or sites), but despite the interesting conceptual connections this current collaboration has allowed us to make, the central thrust has developed into textual manipulation through (Flash, etc.) Toys. In this specific case, this likely inevitable transition into a text game/program site is logical, given that even the poetic and educational elements came to encompass some degree of visual textual manipulation (e.g., the integration of the poetic workshop with the refrigerator magnets Toy). Generally, though, if we couch this transition in "survival of the fittest" terms, it elucidates a governing principle of internet economics: those who know code are more equipped for success than those who don't. This seems self-evident, but it highlights an axiom (that I just made up) regarding presence in the virtual--and therefore, by extension, the physical--world: get busy developing, or get busy frying. As in, working the fry machine at McDonald's. Business and intellectual arenas must adapt to incorporate new media capabilities into their core functions, or risk rapidly falling into obsolescence: poetry, poetics and literary studies are no exceptions.

Another Idea, Thought of Too Late: Wikis

One of our inspirations for our website is a political blog that my friend writes for, politicalbase.com. Though the site doesn’t do quite what I think it should in terms of wikis, creating wikis would be a good addition to the website if we were to continue to tinker with it. Users could go beyond writing poetry and blog posts to contributing to our base of knowledge from writing bios of their favorite poets to tips on scansion and definitions of terms. Perhaps the teaching / instruction section could be revamped so that this aspect of the site is entirely wiki-based.

Who's who in cyberspace?

The wordtoys.net user profile for "Tim" is constructed solely via googlism.com, a site that searches for and produces lists of descriptive items under the parameter "X is"--in this case, "tim is…." I simply plugged "tim" into the search bar, selected the radio button "Who" to define the search results to relate to people, and then culled the following page for interesting/relevant/eye-catching googlisms that I could organize by gradually decreasing length until the final short line, "tim is." Why did I do this? To underscore the instability of online authenticity.

Depending on a site's purpose, user profiles range from ostensibly standing in for physical (non-virtual) reality (e.g., Facebook) to representations of exclusively online personae (e.g., Digg); however, the fictional manipulability of profiles is more or less limitless, and a page summarizing a user's non-virtual persona (interests, educational info, etc.) may be far less "authentic" (in the sense of adherence to factual data) than a page that bears no obligation or expectation of authenticity. In other words, online reality makes lying easy, often to heinous ends (as MSNBC's *To Catch a Predator* sadly exhibits). In my case, "Tim" is not me; "Tim," the user display name, is also not "tim," the googlism-generated subject of the user profile; nor is "tim" "tim," as each descriptive clause derives from a different source.

To touch on how this relates to our general concerns, the question of virtual authenticity hits head on the question of virtual authorship. Who is the "author" of my profile? Can an online persona be a separate author from a human being? Copyright can become a tricky issue, as well: "publication" of an original work only has to involve uploading or typing text to a webpage, leaving it vulnerable to unauthorized usage or even republication by someone else. Is the latter case legally considered plagiarism, since the original publication cannot be attributed to an individual by copyright? And collaboration: did I collaborate with googlism to create Tim's profile? Did I collaborate with the other sites' creators, even though googlism's lack of transparency disallows me from knowing their sources? Did I collaborate with Tim to create tim?

Divergences

I've been thinking about the manifesto and whether or not we're actually making the “code” on the site transparent. We had discussed at some point making the actual code visible on some of the web pages, but it doesn't look like we're going in that direction anymore.

I had also recommended that we take a look at the work Robert Olen Butler did where he chronicled his writing process (partly on video) to show every keystroke, every modification he made from the beginning to end of his short story writing process (http://www.fsu.edu/~butler/). However, it seems that we're short on resources and time, plus video is apparently difficult to put on the website.

It's interesting to note that in order to have some degree of transparency, we need to have access to certain materials, time, experience, and money. However, it also made me think that maybe instead of starting from the ground up, we should have started with preexisting tools like Googlepages to create our website. Browsing Googlepages, I couldn't find where to upload something like video, but I assume that could have been quickly remedied by uploading videos to youtube.com and then linking to or embedding the video onto Googlepages (or even blogspot.com).

Yet another way we could have increased our transparency using this method would be that since a blog would already be live, we could have responded to each other's work and posts more organically. As it stands now, we write our posts on our own computers and save them until they can be added to the site as it finally comes together. Because of this method, we don't know what each other has written and can't respond dynamically to issues raised in each other's blog posts. It's a one-sided process that doesn't seem to sync up with our vision of creating a community --each member attached to his or her computer, writing, but not exchanging.

Profiles

In line with our idea of mixing a poetry website with social computing, we've been mulling over the idea of allowing users to create their own profiles. They could list their poetic interests -- which would allow them to connect with users with similar interests – while also linking to their contributions to the website, from poetry to pictures, to video. They could potentially create their own blog posts to the site as a way of encouraging and participating in critical discourse around poetry while also cuing us, the creators, to features they would like to see implemented.

During one of our meetings, we discussed the “problem” of community on the website: namely, that the site isn't up yet for us to have even the semblance of a community. However, we still want to gesture towards the site's potential, so we thought of creating multiple, very basic profiles for ourselves, so that we could demonstrate what we imagine this community would like. For instance, Tim would maybe write a poem, and I (or one of Tim’s other profiles) could comment on it, making suggestions for revisions.

In fact, I wonder if Mark Shepard's "Tactical Sound Garden" used to same concept to a certain extent -- I didn't look too deeply into the site, but I suspected that the users who planted sounds might have been different usernames created by Mark himself. From a theoretical standpoint, it doesn't seem as important to actually have this community (either through our site or his) so much as to show what the ideal community would look like and how they would use the tools and resources given to them.

Intentions

Perhaps Jacob or Tim will talk about this a bit more, but part of what we've done with the picture idea is use this "toy" to help create a bank of words for the site. Along similar lines, I thought it would be interesting to keep an index for the site, which would include a search box that shows every instance of a particular word or phrase on the site. It would be a wonderful resource for anyone interested in poetry if we were able to build up a substantial database of poetry. Users could then find how other poets, both on the site and off (poets whose work we have digitized for our database) have used a particular metaphor or phrase. This could help poets to research the literary tradition they are working with while also giving scholars a resource for their own research.

Contemplating such a database made me think of John Batelle's Database of Intentions which he describes as “The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result.” We, as producers of the site, could then archive these searches and pathways in order to show what other users became interested in once they began to search the site. This is yet another way in which we examine the relationship between database and narrative -- are the pathways random? What makes a person go from searching word A to looking up poem B? Is there a story here?

From there, taking yet another cue from Google, we could create our own zeitgeist to reveal the primary poetic concerns of our users.

By combining the features of a search engine and a social networking website, we can maximize the value gained from such a hybrid. We could set ourselves up as the central source of information and community for anyone interested in poetry.

Wordtoys

By calling the "games" we've created for the website "toys" we've emphasized their play qualities over their content qualities. Why do we (not the creators of the website, but people in general), consider the output of such “toys” as not worthy of the name “poetry”?

What makes poetry good? How do we establish criteria with which to judge poetry? How does that criteria change as we’re able to manipulate text more and more? Should we even make guidelines? How would the community and "vibe" of the website change if we did?

1000 words (or at least one)

Although the photo caption Toy will likely still be in its beta phase when this project reaches its presentation stage in Week 10, I'd like to take up a cue from Renee and explore, at least in text form, some of the possibilities and utilities that it will eventually present when it goes live. Summarily summarized: you(sers) see an empty text box underneath a photo, implicitly inviting the insertion of relevant text. A title, a description, a joke, a punchline, a pun. This information then enters a database, from which it is available to populate other Toys (e.g., as text for the magnet generator, or for the random word flasher, or for the Asteroids Toy), either with or without user transparency (as to which photo the text was supplied for, which user supplied it, etc.). The conceptual implications of these functions depend, to a degree, on the details of each usage. For instance, the issue of whether or not a Toy allows users to view the source (code, or the user who posted the text) can determine the degree of interactive permeability--that is, the degree to which a user can view and thus communicate with the text's (texts') multiple valences. For instance, "User U" views the "Closed due to Oscars" photo, and enters "a perfect example of the entertainment-industrial complex" into the text box. "User V" enters "I drink your milkshake" and "User W" enters "hahaha lol." Each of these textual segments automatically feeds into the central database. When "hahaha entertainment-industrial milkshake" flashes randomly across the screen when "User X" is navigating a separate section of the site (say, this blog), they will not be able to view the sources of this manufactured phrase, and will experience some degree of "user-response" association based on the words alone. If, however, the user can trace these words back to specific data input for a specific picture, their understanding of the words' significance/meaning is altered--the user arguably develops a fuller, more contextualized perception of the information flashing across the screen, but has done so as a result of manipulation by the program. The program(mer) can thus control a user's interpretation more effectively than an author can control a reader's, because the element of continual manipulability allows him or her to adapt to user trends and responses; this is one hermeneutic advantage that code poetry holds over print poetry--one that can be exploited in the context of this site's poetry workshop feature.

Images

While thinking about the image section of our project - where users are able to provide captions to pictures and see what other people have written for captions - I was reminded of the following quote from Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": "The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones" (226).

The pictures we took were fairly random - signs, images that looked cool - but I wonder if users who look at them will try to construct a coherent narrative around them or try to figure out relationships between the pictures. In short, will users see a picture as prescribed by the surrounding pictures?

This question brings to mind the perspective of the pictures as well. After all, while users are able to create their own captions, the limit on their abilities is already set because a caption presumably relates to the picture above it (think of the cartoon caption contests in The New Yorker). Though the caption may give a framework for how to look at the picture, the perspective of the picture has already been framed by the person who took the shot. In this way, it doesn't seem like the piece is truly participatory. The only way I can think to make it more engaging to users would be to allow them to upload their own photos to the site that way their perspective is more a part of the picture project. However, this poses an entirely new set of questions, primarily regarding limitations on what people can send and what they can't. Of course, even if people were to upload provocative pictures, perhaps that could turn into a much larger discussion on not only perception, but also the nature of these "readymades" themselves.

In addition to the question of whether or not users will try to come up with a word or string of words to “capture” the picture, I also wonder what their submissions will look like – will all the proposed captions for any given picture taken together provide a story in itself?

Minutes, 1/29/08

Interconnectivity of communities/people

Collaboration: with each other, with community

anonymity versus identity

Avatar; anonymous identity

embarrassment/faux pas

inhibition

Connections as art; art as connections.

Language: coding...language: poetry

blog as: assertive

creative

identity-constructive

dissociative

discrete connected units

conversation/group identity

Various modes of commentary:

Digg, Youtube, Myspace, etc.

Manipulability

Communication systems/transportation systems

literal cables, bandwidth, etc.

Coincidence versus Intentionality of language

why puns/rhymes/etc. are interesting

A poem for the grinder

Following up to my previous post about Merrill's "B O D Y," here is the text of my own poem that I will enter into the workshop portion of our project--it's called "C I T Y," and as its title suggests, is directly influenced by Merrill's poem:

C I T Y

"Bang a uey, go two blocks;

it's right across from the Y":

the response; a paradox

still to come.

The question posed: where is art?

Here, wherein excess expands,

one might perceive form apart

from the mess.

If, however, one submits

to the belief equating

chaos to order, then it's

not so, b—

Cut off; back where we began:

the question implied is not,

therefore, where? but—if you can

see it—why?

Like Merrill's, this poem's semantic mechanics derive from the materiality of its letters, but my interest is less about the hermeneutic "light" that Merrill's deconstructive massaging casts on them than the ways in which pun and riddle can underscore points of contact between graphemic, phonemic and phonetic meanings. The quotation from the first two lines, for instance--staged as colloquially phrased instructions to a lost driver--describes a spatial representations of the title's letters. "Uey," slang for a u-turn, represents "C"; "two blocks," a straight line, depicts "I"; "right across" (a right cross) is "T"; and "the Y" (the YMCA) is, well, "Y." My intention was to hide a couple other "Easter eggs" in the poem. Line 12 reveals the specific city: "not so, b--" is Boston, reversed (like the Curse). The question, "where is art?", serves as an *ars poetica* type of instigator, doubles as an abbreviated real-life directional query: "art" represents Avenue of the Arts, a street in Boston that is caddy-cornered from a YMCA. Lastly, perhaps most obviously, the final line, "see it--why," phonetically spells out the title letters. (NOTE: This is a poem that I have already submitted to another (face-to-face) poetry workshop that I participate in; despite having received critiques and subsequently altered the poem, I maintained the original text in order to maximize opportunities for subsequent critiques.)

I want to submit this poem to the workshop tab when it's available, and then (like Merrill's) run it through the magnet Toy. Once I have then been able to play around with it, I can comment more on the conceptual advantages or serendipities that it produces for the critical process.

Manifesto

Part of our project's intention is to encourage users to not only look at the poetry on the site, but also to participate in the creation of poetry in a number of ways, from writing their own poetry to playing with the various games we have created for the site. In order to foster the creative urge among users, we have implemented a teaching component in which users can look up various poetic forms to gain familiarity with pre-existing structures while using those structures as a guide for users to write poems on the site. Our hope is that users will find writing poetry to be less intimidating because the "code" to the form is transparent and can be easily replicated.

At the same time, we hope to publish some of our favorite poems on the site so that users can see how established poets have executed these poetic forms in their own works. An additional value to this is that users will then become familiar with famous poems - it will be a "greatest hits" album of sorts, featuring selections on the villanelle, the pantoum, the sestina. Rather than a site intended for the presumed elite, I imagine that the site will allow users to work on both creative and critical levels in their evaluations of established poets, their own work, and the work of other users. By freeing the code of these poems, baseline knowledge will increase, which will allow users to approach the works more analytically.

A Poetics of Disjunction

My passion for this project stems from a longtime interest in creating and maintaining an online community for poets. I foresee, in certain aspects of Word Toys, a potential for such an undertaking to develop, though the inclusion of multiple, seemingly disparate segments on this site suggests an indirect path toward this outcome. A more efficacious or proper attempt to create such a community site would likely exclude "extraneous" materials such as our educational section, or especially extra-poetic Word Toys (though the debate about the relationship between code and poetry is a ripe one, which I have touched on in my previous blog post). Existing sites such as the Poet Sanctuary and Poets.org (run by the Academy of American Poets) would provide workable models, incorporating discussion forums, poet biographies and (in the case of the former) uploading and critiquing functionality. I want to argue, though, that our site's heterogeneity reflects rather than confounds some of the central concepts of a straightforward publication/discussion site; this current project's collaborative efforts represent theoretical connectivity to the ideas of communal review and recommendation that a site more specifically intended for poets. As I have gestured toward already, the fridge magnet Toy may be considered in itself a code poem, or a mechanism enabling the creation of code poetry (any poet who claims to do so may credit Jacob Burch as their collaborator, thank you). Thus its poetic function qua poetry is, though debatable, credible; we can progress this discussion by considering its function as an interpretive poetic device. We may be able to perceive conceptual connections, along the lines of fragmentation and interaction, between the scrambled/reset text in the magnet Toy and the disparate/cooperative forces both behind this project (Renee, Jacob and me) and participating in future workshop exercises.

Let us consider, as potential fodder for the magnets, a poem that embodies both the categories of text-based poetry and textual materiality--James Merrill's "b o d y":

b o d y

Look closely at the letters.  Can you see,

entering (stage right), then floating full,

then heading off--so soon--

how like a little kohl-rimmed moon

o plots her course from b to d



--as y, unanswered, knocks at the stage door?

Looked at too long, words fail,

phase out.  Ask, now that body shines

no longer, by what light you learn these lines

and what the b and d stood for.

Merrill's poem is boldly, baldly (though not bawdily) bodily, both in its materiality and its presumptive subject matter. Its meaning is contingent on its textual placement, even its font (the "kohl-rimmed" o must have thin cusps that round out into thickened lateral portions, mustn't it?); the hyper-spaced title word, by the poem's end, can only fully lose its luster once it has been masterfully and concisely destabilized to "shine no longer." The ultimate recontextualization of its b and d into their implicit referents underscores the letters' (and the word's) materiality as an analog for the bookends of life (not to mention its connotative meaning of corpse as well as *living organism* or structure). These deconstructive meanings, without which the poem collapses, disappear under the thrashing segmentation of the magnet creator. Even the letters of the title become segmented, because the mechanism recognizes them, not as inseparable components of a single word, but as distinct units separated by white space. But then, isn't the Toy performing the same function as Merrill, only placing interpretive control in the hands of users? Just as the Toy fragments the existing poem into a non-semantic checkerboard, it simultaneously enacts Merrill's proposition that the decontextualization of a word can create a new hermeneutics in which interpretation occurs under a different light. This the juncture at which I perceive theory melding with utility: while the rearrangement of an existing poem, created as a textual gestalt without the intention of cyber manipulation (the current example or any other), can on its surface merely produce semantic continuities by happenstance or even interpretive revelations by serendipity, it provides more deeply a theoretical reconfiguration. It is a demonstration of the fluidity, even the arbitrariness, of words' constructedness; it allows perceptive users to not only rearrange poems for fun (ah, again with the ludic), but to wax interactive on the artificial nature of textual poetry, and perhaps even to employ this interpretive perspective in evaluating the workshop participant's contribution.

Pun and Games

The concept of the ludic implicitly informs our project at a level as comprehensive as its title. Toys can be components of games, though it's neither true that games employ toys by necessity nor that toys function ludically. Games, by definition, involve the goal of victory through skillful competition. Toys, by definition, are objects whose purpose is the amusement of either adults or children. The unifying concept is play. Rephrasing our project, then, along this conceptual line, we might think of an alternative title: Word play. Wordplay. What's this if not poetry; what's poetry if not this? As W.S. Merwin said, "Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing." In one way, these word toys are exercises of coding and program design, models of visual phenotypes overlaying genes of source code; their linguistic and poetic functions bear equivalent essential implications. What happens to words, at their linguistic base, when we subject them to physical manipulation? Does the burgeoning category of code poetry even "count" as poetry, or is the easily overlooked (by poetic critics) code portion a distinct category only linked by a superficial (though correctly labeled, in this case, "subficial") correlation? Particularly considering that code poetry is often collaborative, how is it possible to distinguish the creative forces (this is a question that we will address in the context of our current work, as well)? It's not only a matter of which collaborator constitutes the text's (you can't call it that--say "work") author, but also of what, exactly, this hybrid thing is. Consider "Fields of Dream" by Nick Montfort and Rachel Stevens, which allows a user to fill in a text box with words or phrases that then "populate" previously created "dreamfields, "or to create one's own dreamfield that can then be populated by others (the example given is "*first name* woke from a horrible dream about being eaten by some animal. He was on the adjective ground somewhere in country."). Is this poetry? How is it poetry more than "Wacky Mad Libs"?

To an extent, "Fields of Dream" is a type for our refrigerator magnet toy: it involves user-defined textual manipulation. I conceive of this program as, primarily, a means to clarify or rethink existing, text-based poems; however, given its affinity with such works as the one above, as well as its basic definitional elements of text and code (and interactivity), we can quite easily conceive of it as a code poem (or code poem generator). The text, though extricable from the code initially, nevertheless becomes engaged in an interplay with the Flash data that alters it (by dividing it into discrete, outlined units) and allows for it to be altered (rearranged) by users. From this intersection of utility and amusement, does a new definition of poetry emerge?

Some Stimuli

How far can electronic media stretch the limits of poetry?

Where is the line between literature and art drawn? Is a painting containing a poem "literature"? Is a Flash movie containing a poem "literature"?

Why is poetry our chosen generic format? Is prose less responsive to electronic manipulation?

What occurs at the confluence of the ludic and the lyric?

Can ludic poetry, or poetry-based games, exist as games qua literature, not just literature qua games? Is there more than "mere" ludic pleasure at the intersection of literature and games? Can games create a greater understanding of literature? Can games be essential to literature?

Do games create narrative? Must this narrative be playful? Must it be ironic? Can it be serious? Can it be literature? Can video games be literature? Can video games create literature?

Can the explosion/recontextualization of a text function as a hermeneutic technique? Would this carry broader implications regarding the definition and interpretation of poetry in general? When text gains fluidity, does it lose primacy?

What are the implications of user-defined literature/art? What are the implications of user-controlled literature/art?

Who's the author of a magnetic poem whose words are discrete, fragmented elements of an existing poem? Are the primary and secondary authors collaborators? Can you collaborate with yourself, as both primary and secondary author?

In a code/poetry collaboration, how significant is the creative tension between coder and poet? Who's the author of a code poem, when coder and poet are distinct?

What's good poetry? What's good poetry shattered? Is it still good? Is it still poetry?

Is non-textual literature possible? Can literature outgrow textuality?

Is non-linguistic literature possible? Can literature outgrow language?

Is non-alphabetic literature possible? Can literature outgrow alphabets?

Is there poetry in money? Is there money in poetry?