The Question of Organization

Lo!(ss) Pequeno Glazier, writing in the forgotten annuls of 2002…

While Digital Poetics is applicable to the present in the same way the Magna Carta still has purpose, Glazier’s book does reveal an underlying quest for organization among the nodal divergences in digital poetics. The question Glazier tries to disguise seems to be: where are the boundaries for digital poetics?, and even though it uses the word “boundaries”—a word which, if you are and Literature graduate student, is customarily required to be said at least once every three sentences—such a restrictive question would surely in the lit community mean banishment (“Away with thee to the boundaries!”). English people do not like to limit possibilities, which is one reason we never get real jobs. (When I say English people, I do not mean the British… probably… maybe… I don’t really know how much commonality they share as a whole with literature scholars.) But nevertheless a double-step seems to be occurring where we want to rope off digital poetics so we can talk about it without getting bogged down in all the old stuff, but it is a mortal sin in modern lit theory to declare a real boundary, anywhere. Quite the dilemma.

Underlying the question of boundaries is the more interesting question of how do we organize this stuff? Hopefully, so as not to offend the poets (Dave) by assigning subjective titles like innovative and non-innovative, I will address the problem of organizing digital poetry in terms of print poetry, or analog poetry. In the introduction to New Media Poetics, Adalaide Morris says, “What we think is conditioned by concepts developed, for the most part, in a world of print,” and Glazier even addresses the organizational systems used for print like the Dewey Decimal System and alphabetical arrangements. So far these same systems have tried to corral digital poetry in the same way they managed with print, but I do not know if they are going to succeed. For one, there are no categories in digital poetics with everything crossing over into every other thing. There is one category so far and it is any combination of the words, New, Media, Poetics, and Digital.

Talan Memmott said in his essay in NMP that “because digital poetry cannot be reduced to a genre of poetry, we must begin to consider the applied poetics of the individual practitioner” (294). In terms of categorization, this could mean that each reader is a category, a notion which seems very bizarre and unhelpful in terms of a library setting (“I am looking for the ‘What Todd Seabrook enjoys section’.”)

How useful is that? Perhaps in a digital world it is more useful than alphabetizing. I don’t know; I’m not a scientist. But I do believe there exists a useful categorization for digital poetics, although I bet it is not one that looks anything like a categorizing system. We already know that our brains think in terms of association (this was pointed out in one of the essays, somewhere), and the million-dollar Netflix algorithm that tells you what you might enjoy is probably closer to wielding this new subject matter effectively than the seemingly unsurpassable alphabetizing system that has worked so well for so long.

In conclusion, boundaries.