CHRIS FUNKHOUSER Published in I AM A CHILD (Buffalo:Tailspin, 1994) "Takes a lot of voices to sing a millenial song."<1> The majority of poetry people are familiar with small, relatively intimate scenarios, and many truly like it that way. Nevertheless, with hi-tech communications capabilities, and various forms of electronic text processing, the potential topographies<2> of our interactive communities and activities have widened substantially over the past few years. To begin to bring what is a newfledged concept out in the open, it is important to stress our use of the idea of technopoetics as a specific term, the concerns of which we would like to make very clear. Technopoetics proposed here is not a literary movement. It involves collaboration, with other people as well as the machines. This process itself is changing and dividing pervasive notions of what "author" and "publisher" are. "The electronic age now enjoys this time of awkwardness before the age itself disappears along with its name into the day to day of what at Xerox Park they've taken to calling 'Ubicomp,' ubiquitous computing..."<3> As the field(s) we find ourselves before expand, we remember what was written in _Convivio A Journal of Poetics_: "Poetics is a labor and a threshold where we are working to make an actual thing...," which "is a continual reformation.... Above all it treats of inclusion,...poetics, 'in the plural,' as Robert Duncan says."<4> To echo these notions, as we move into time, and, as a culture, succumb to technology (television, automobiles and such, as well as computers and digital intermedia), the work, our actions must be pluralized in order to maximize the potentials of the technology and not let them contribute to social fragmentation. In no way would we want to speak purely of technopoetry or the technopoetic. "Poetry," "technopoetry" is now, in its potential, something more than a poem, or a book of poems, in its blending with other forms and other media. Will Alexander, introducing a segment of the _We Magazine Issue 18_, describes the work presented as "...a mix of the poetic and essayistic...like opening up an artery of twilight, and opening up and walking through this vast new expanse where one is neither one [i.e. poetic] or the other [i.e. essayistic] but something completely different."<5> To state the apparent, this report comes from what considers itself a "first" world. As one writer has already pointed out, I am speaking from the perspective of an "unintentional elitism," of a "...live by the modem die by the modem future of poetry as an electronic medium."<6> This is true, but needs to be contextualized within the reality of the newness of this technology. We flail through the infancy of new technological spaces. New electronic networks begin to enlarge their envelopes beyond the corporate, military, governmental, academic milieu which it has benefitted until now. My position is a result of the priviledge of birth and guidence, of research and exploration, and is accepted as responsibility. Among the things revealed in the processes of technopoetics is a new kind of wear and fatigue of the body. We are in the age of a physical and mental/consciousness transformation caused by technological phenomena. In fact, sitting in front of video screens and computer monitors especially might be likened to what George Oppen once described as "the bright light of shipwreck" in the poem "Of Being Numerous." Clearly, the predominant scenario in this and future age is a movement towards "The absolute singular/The unearthly bonds/Of the singular", our own type of "Insanity in high places..." in our homes, with the beam of the computer's screen on our faces as well as those of the police helicopter searchlights above our cities and suburbs..."By the shipwreck/Of the singular."<7> This points to one of the obvious advantages of collaboration: that the time spent by any one individual can be spread out over a collective. There is little chance that our civilization is ever going to be less reliant on computers. "Ours is a time in which ontological questions of truth and falsehoods are less relevant than issues of control--control of meaning, control of context."<8> We have been inspired to "seize the media."<9> The alternative would be to leave it to the disposal of the military industrial complex. As managing editor for _Electronic Journal_, an on-line (Internet) academic magazine concerned with electronic communication between computer users and the implications thereof, as editor with We Press (where a group of editors conspire to "publish" poetry on compact disc, cassette, video and Internet as well as on paper), in addition to my role as a teacher, I am intimately involved with high-tech approaches to both poetry/poetics and the presentation of electronic text. In the spring of 1993, We Press used the Internet (harbinger of the so-called "Information Superhighway") to circulate a poetry journal. After this experiment I wrote an essay regarding the frontier of cyberspace, "We Maga/zine XVII: (A) Textual Experiment." The essay is a theoretical and practical investigation of the po(e)tentials of producing a magazine on an electronic network and the attempt to incite a global community instantaneously through network connections. The essay's simple conclusion is that there is not a doubt that any publisher with a computer connected to the Internet (or the digital--video and audio-- networks which are soon to come to many, many households in America, and the much of the rest of the "first" world) can exponentially increase the circulation and audience of their publication--and otherwise make connections which they would not normally make<10>--by transmuting what they are already involved with to include cyberspace. Of course there are severe socio-ideological concerns with regards to access to the technologies now available, and any fully legitimized network system must make room and provide equal access for everyone. This is not nearly close to being a living reality, but with "Ubicomp," and other systematic plans such as the Information Superhighway, it is likely that we will see millions more Americans become reliant on on-line services over the course of coming decades. It is important that we concern ourselves with equilateral space and learn to cooperatively communicate within the interactive electronic arena now. This, of course, is easier in theory than practice.<11> Before going further, I wanted to briefly connect technopoetics with what Donna Haraway speaks of in "A Cyborg Manifesto." Haraway writes, "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation."<12> What we find most liberating in Haraway's work, in addition to its pointed ideology ("...cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century"), is its recontextualization of our species as a whole. How anyone can feel they are a part of the same corpus and mindset as those of the pre-industrial world is rather mysterious, to say the least. Do you not often feel constrained by the "metaphysical tradition" which is rooted in what is a truly archaic mode of thought and action? How much do we actually have in common with the mind and body set of pre-electronic culture? Cyborgs, "the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation," are concerned with "the relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination," and are troublesome because "they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism...often exceedingly unfaithful to their origin." Haraway's cyborg myth "is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work" in an age where "the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wide intensification of domination has never been more acute."<13> Furthermore, as Don Byrd explains in _The Poetics of the Common Knowledge_, "Our fascination to ourselves as cyborgian creatures is that we combine in our beings the predictability of machines with the wreckless, independence of singular [?] creatures."<14> As we are presented with both the predicament and the predictability of culture, as the computer and other forms of technology, ideological weapons all, begin to dominate our work places, and other places, we must familiarize ourselves with them and use them in a project of creating a better society. Purkinge is a technopoetics writing collective with whom I am currently working in Albany. Purkinge improvisationally rends and resews texts in printed and oral forms,<15> producing a particularly angular "writing" "centered" from different perspectives. The group--at present, a quartet-- invents and promotes new modes of authorship and anti-authorship, blooming melodic conversations in opposition to a system grown entropic. In our experimentations, enabled by technology (linked computers and multitrack recording equipment), we insist on the necessity of interactive, intercorporeal elements in our communication. The group's gatherings reflect a moment in the drift, theoretically and poetically fusing concept and action. Nathaniel Mackey, in an essay on Amiri Baraka, writes of the poet's "obliquity, the sliding away from the proposed we find in many of Baraka's poems." Baraka's method "complies with a fugitive, perhaps idealist impulse, as though 'the mind, moving' might if not outmaneuver such constraints [i.e. social 'conditions whose limits one cannot escape,' and, by extension, the poetry produced within such conditions], at least register the need to do so." The "Obliquity or angularity" of such writing--and the lyric which rises from the implementation of such a poetics, which also typifies the type of work done by Purkinge--"challenges the epistemic order whose constraints it implicitly brings to light."<16> In Purkinge, a multiplicity of elements, textual modes, and personalities come together in an intertextual play between sound and voice, meaning and obliquity. We develop a tangential "writing" style pointed towards the creation of a new mode of authorship in the movement away from a non-existent center. It is a conversation, a collaboration, melodic in its ideal. We inhale as well as we exhale, hearts dialate as well as contract. The group wants poetry that shows similar signs of life--and we turn the machine on. In addition to expediting interpersonal communications, computer/digital technology has been used technopoetically in the form of hypertext, and through interactive textually based virtual reality spaces--known as MUDs and MOOs--on the Internet . According to George Landow, "Hypertext, a term coined by Theodor H. Nelson in the 1960s, refers also to a form of electronic text, a radically new information technology, and a mode of publication.'By "hypertext," Nelson explains, 'I mean nonsequential writing-- text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen...'" <17> MUD is an acronym for "Multiple User Dimension," which is an interactive textual-based virtual reality software being used in cyberspace. MOO stands for MUD Object Oriented, in which characters are created and whole electronic dimensions--including a type of hypertexts-- are built. A writer is able to compose by themselves, or with others, in these spaces. We recently spent a few hours with hypertext writers Michael Joyce and Caroyln Guyer. Michael is a novelist, a cybernovelist, and one of the co- developers of Storyspace, "the premier hypertext program available today."<18> Carolyn is coordinator of the woman's hypertext collective High Pitched Voices. Michael gave a talk, "(Re)Placing the Author: 'A Book in the Ruins'" in Albany. He reads the Czeslaw Milosz poem "A Book in the Ruins," drawing metaphors between it and what he perceives as the condition of literature today. He promotes hypertext as the frontier of literature, a re- writing of the process of reading and writing, where the reader, in a sense, is able to write and rewrite any given book. It is an extreme concept for most people, who have quite a linear and perpetualized relationship with literature of all sorts. Joyce reads from Milosz--and interprets: "The poet stands in the ruins...it's the modernist moment...but no...this is not what we see...the poet makes his way into the ruins of a dark building." The building we read metaphorically as technology, "in so doing the movement itself reads barrier as gate. What he reads, he writes." The screen is the barrier, a "gate"--not passable by all. According to Joyce, "Electronic texts present themselves in the medium of their disolution. They are read where they are written and they are written where they are read." A mantra throughout his talk was "print text stays itself, electronic text replaces itself."<19> We see hypertext as technopoetics in light of its process, which actively promotes the decentering of singular author, and hope the next phase in the development of hypertext software will allow for collaborative interaction in real-time. An article in the recent issue of _Poets & Writers Magazine_ paraphrases Carolyn Guyer, noting the "text chunks," which "replace" themselves, are "called lexia, which may be images and sounds as well as paragraphs and their electronic links empower the reader either to submit to the writer's ordering of the story or to collaborate by manipulating the elements into an entirely new story."<20> High Pitched Voices is working together in a collaborative manner on-line. They have a hypertext discussion set up (in the same manner as the Buffalo POETICS conference), and they work together to composing hypertext in a MOO.<27> When one enters this particular electronic space, by issuing a few simple keyboard commands, they are greeted by the formation of an arch, a pair of mirrored, upper case "I"s as columnar bases. An inscription reads: "A roof over our heads, she said. Appropriate, I thought. Yonic symbol as protection and sign. And....there are two "I"s here. What more could we want?" A "reader" is invited to follow links, and, if interested, add to existing texts and create links between lexia. The group of women involved with High Pitched Voices also holds real-time meetings in this space, open to anyone who is able to log in. We see tremendous poetentials in such an interactivity such as this. Technopoetics resists the exclusivity of the technology in general, and maintains a historical awareness that it is merely a forerunner to what will be customary activity to future generations of writers and artists in the post-electronic age. With due respect and admiration for the PRE-FACE of _Technicians of the Sacred_,<28> which asserts PRIMITIVE MEANS COMPLEX, technopoetics enacts the reversal of that phrase, certain that complex can mean primitive. We are in age marked by the power of information, the dominance of technology, yet it is also important to note we're in the juvenility stage of what will become Ubicomp culture. It is a very complicated time. We must study and act upon what is happening now--& stake some grounds here. There are a few collectives and publications already in this realm, in addition to the aforementioned entities, there are a number of poetry oriented journals on the Internet (_RIF/T_, _Grist_, _Core_, _Taproot_, and _Inter/face_ come to mind). Other publishing groups such as Xexoxial Endarchy and _The Aerial_ are consistently producing poetry in formats other than the printed page, and Eastgate Systems has been pioneering in their dedication to the promotion of hypertext publications. In 1986, I asked Ed Sanders about his vision of the music of the future: "It has to be, in electronics, the equivalent of the piano forte. That is, right around the time of Bach they were creating this new kind of piano, which was an outgrowth of the harpsichord, that allowed its player to be infinitely more expressive, using the pedals and playing softly and loud--it enabled the concept of the concerto to arise, where the piano was an actually powerful instrument that could act in concerto with other instruments. "So what's going to happen now...is the electronic equivalent of the piano forte. That is, there is going to arise a musical instrument sufficient for a new Beethoven, and it will be an electronic instrument. It will have, obviously, many aspects of the modern electronic recording studio and modern high-end synthesizer. I envision it like a giant church organ only instead of stops it will have fifteen or twenty thousand little buttons or knobs & x-y pads & pressure sensitive areas & theramin-like devices where you approach these little knobs with your hands. The proximity of your fingers to these zones & tiny little surfaces will indicate perameters & programs, moods & sounds, or whatever....It will be a "touch" thing; I guess the feet will have to be involved...in other words you'll have to use both hands, both feet, & perhaps a group of assistants. In fact it may be a collaborative thing....It will be complicated...you can use your touch to modify all these perameters instantly...make these sounds, these different layers of sounds, different sounds & chords instantly, as you create it..."<23> As we find ourselves increasingly--and without much choice--having to making use of the synthetic strands provided by our civilization's penchant for technological living, we need to envision ways to weave the threads given by such an unusual but very real circumstance into a tightly meshed net which alternatively keeps us warm and catches our breath. Among the questions raised by the possibilities implicit in our future immersions is the question of which we want to priviledge, the production of artifacts or the actual engagement of people in a process of living and creating as an outgrowth of daily life. To draw an analogy between technopoetics and other technologies which have long predated the computer, I refer to a collection of essays called _Radiotext(e)_, the introduction of which reminds us "that radio existed long before its receiver did."<24> Bertolt Brecht, in his essay "The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication" suggests we should "Change this apparatus [radio] over from distribution to communication," and that "Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction."<25> These are among the ideas we would like to claim as a basis for a technopoetics in the current historical and technological moment. ===PostScript=== "Takes a lot of voices/to sing a millenial song" was prepared specifically when Ed Foster invited me to speak at "The New Freedoms" festival ("celebrating contemporary American and Russian poetry"), 8 April 1994, on the topic "Presents and Future in Poetry: Technopoetics '94." The paper was presented to 20 people or so, and was prefaced by remarking that "the things I am talking about have never been explained to me." Also, I admitted to not having the "answers to some of the questions which problematize the hegemonic anti-natures of technology," though I was willing to engage in a conversation about them. The essay has unquestionably stimulated several healthy conversations in the hours and days following the festival. Several listeners immediately responded positively to what was said, airing their own stances such as "people need to get over their fear and loathing of technology because it is nothing but a human creation--a creation which comes from deep within the human psyche & nature--it's just a tool which has become improved over recent centuries."<26> This notion puzzled others who were present, who questioned, appropriately, the "newness" of these "writing tools," as well as the fetishistic nature of cyber- rhetoric. Other concerns focussed on whether or not the various upcoming technological growths were actually going to change writing ("...which didn't change much in the period between Homer and Olson...") in any significant way. Most seemed interested in discussing how the effects of the technology (wrecknology?) would alter the way people write and/or how it might be able to "improve the quality" of poetry in general. One woman reminded the audience after my talk that "the potential of technology affects readership and broadening communities," while another complained of the fallow "socio-politico criticism," the "flip art" and "superficial approach and popular sensibilities" of the people who have been producing electronic art in the last decade. This person wondered how we would go about making a "book that's charged," and wondered if the abovementioned circumstances were a result of the current generation of "artists" or the media itself.<27> Cybernetic poetry has been happening for decades. The complicated systems of construction and structure--both form and content (i.e. mythopoeia)--we see in the work of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and others pay testimony to this idea. These poets, according to Don Byrd, were involved in the "making of a poem always in a feedback loop." We see a clear instance of cybernetic machinations at work in Duncan's sermon in a 1982 issue of _Credences_.<28> In this text, Duncan (whose religious sympathies were wide-ranging) adopts the position of a Christian preacher and his presentation of becomes--given the form(ula)--a self- organizing, not imposed, "natural, cybernetic" presentation.<29> Additionally, a connection can be drawn between technopoetics and the projects of Olson and Duncan by realizing that some of the issues we find ourselves discussing in the realm of technological media are issues of embodiment and what it means to inhabit a body (with electronic counterpart). Certainly if we are going to find ways in which to make the media work as poetry, as a registration of poetic/breath/line, we need to figure out how to make this breath/line/picture become a registration of the body in the same way that it had for Olson, Duncan and other creative forebearers. All of the above questions are worthy of a search for answers, if that is what we are seeking in the developmental stages of what I dubbed "technopoetics." Indeed, as I ascertained during the question/answer session following my presentation, there needs to be "an elevation of the constituency" of poets and poetry in the electronic mediums currently available. In this protean period we shall also constantly question our need/desire to be watching and participating in the process of inventing Ubicomp culture. At this juncture of the process I am able to empathize with skeptics, and occasionally offer my own views of the underbelly of the techological beast. Ultimately, a couple of particular questions persist: What does technology do? What can we do with it? Nathaniel Mackey, in full agreement with the idea that any music, or poetics was "a 'touch' thing," pointed out that one can be in the process of collaboration with many elements, even as a singular writer. Mackey also mentioned he needed to see more evidence of "breath and bone" in technopoetics as it is outlined here before signing up for a work brigade.<30> Such substance in our technopoetics remains to be attained, perhaps, and it is these qualities amongst other spirits we continue to seek and unify in our collaborative endeavors. --Chris Funkhouser ***Notes*** <1> Don Byrd, _The Great Dimestore Centennial_ (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1986), p. 109. The concept is echoed in other places in the poem (i.e. "Takes a lot of penny whistles to play/a millennial tune." p. 13, etc.). <2> This is a term I've heard used in this context by Michael Joyce and others. <3> Michael Joyce, "(Re)Placing the Author: 'A Book in the Ruins," SUNY- Albany, March 23, 1994. <4> Louis Patler, "A WORD/AN INTRODUCTION," _Convivio A Journal of Poetics - Number One_ (Bolinas: Tombouctou Books, 1983), p. 7-8. <5> Will Alexander, _We Magazine Issue 18_ (Santa Cruz: We Press, 1993). <6> Tony Door, _The Poetry Project Newsletter_, October/November 1993, p. 9. <7> George Oppen, "Of Being Numerous," _Collected Poems_ (New York: New Directions Books, 1975), pp. 152-60. <8> Gene Youngblood, "The New Renaissance: Art, Science, and the Universal Machine" p. 15. <9> Advice and phrase Peter Lamborn Wilson, Naropa Institute, 1989. <10> Among other previously unknown correspondents for _We Magazine Issue 18_ were Arkadii Dragomoschenko and Armand Schwerner. <11> While the POETICS list at SUNY-Buffalo was thriving for the first month I was a part of it, interaction has decreased substantially for more than another month now. There were some unusual and fiery interactions which may have contributed to the current status and general awkwardness of the list. In Albany, we hope to see POETICS revive itself. My essay was posted to this list, resulting in a few personal correspondences but nothing out in the "public" forum. <12> Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," _Simians, Cyborgs, and Women_ (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 150. <13> quotes are from Haraway, pp. 149-154. <14> Don Byrd, _The Poetics of the Common Knowledge_ (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), p. 16. <15> Purkinge uses the Daedalus software program in its computer jams, and a four-track cassette system in its spoken/sound work. The group is an outgrowth of the Awopbop Collective, which was started by Don Byrd and Derek Owen in 1991 (see _The Little Magazine Volume 20_). <16> These quotes are by Nathaniel Mackey, _DISCREPANT ENGAGEMENT Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 43. <17> George Landow, _Hypertext The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology_ (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 4. <18> Ted Jennings, introducing Michael Joyce, University at Albany, 3/23/94. <19> These quotations are taken from an audio recording of Michael Joyce's Sesquicentennial Lecture, "(Re)Placing the Author: 'A Book in the Ruins,'" at University at Albany Uptown Campus, 3/23/94. <20> _Poet's & Writers Magazine_, March/April 1994, p. 25. <21> This project is based at Hotel MOO, Brown University (telnet duke.cs.brown.edu 8888). <22> Jerome Rothenberg, ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1969). <23> Ed Sanders, excerpt from interview with Chris Funkhouser, _We Magazine Issue 3_ (Charlottesville, VA, 1987), p. 6-7. <24> Neil Strauss, _Radiotext(e)_ (New York: Semiotext(e), 1993), p. 9. <25> Brecht quotes from _Radiotext(e)_ (New York: Semiotext(e), 1993), p. 15-16. <26> John Noto, panel participant, "The New Freedoms," 8 April 94. <27> all quotes are responses from various members of the audience 8 April 94. <28> _Credences New Series Vol. 2 No. 1_, (Buffalo: SUNY-Buffalo, 1983). <29> quotes in this paragraph from Don Byrd, conversation, Albany, 17 April 94. <30> Nathaniel Mackey, conversation, Sullivan's Bar, Hoboken, 8 April 94.