Presentation Proposal for Visionary Landscapes

Title: The (Vis)poetics of Jim Andrews: “A Pen”

Submitted by: Leonardo Flores, Assistant Professor, University of Puerto Rico: Mayaguez

Proposal:

Jim Andrews latest e-poem, “A Pen ” (2007) presents letters twirling on the screen, leaving colorful traces of their passage as they fill the space provided them by the window. On the lower end of the window a menu bar provides options for readers to customize the experience: iconic controls affect the speed, color, nib size, and other variables in the three poems that constitute the piece— “Niolog,” “O,” and “Time.” All this information is displayed in a small text box on the left hand side of this menu bar when the pointer is placed over them, but if left alone the words of a poem occupy this space, appearing sequentially every few seconds.

How does one approach such a work? Does one look at the animated words that fill the screen and read the text below as it cycles through? Does one analyze the motions of the letters on the screen, as well as the traces they leave behind? Doing both only begins to unpack what this poem is all about, because it is about much more than what the texts spell out. “A Pen” is a Letterist exploration of text as a tool for writing, rather than as the result of writing. It is about the interpenetration of code and language in programmable media to imbue letters and words with behaviors and allowing the poem to emerge from their play. It is about creating tools for the readers to become involved in the process of shaping the poems that arise from these processes. Last but not least, it is the latest expression in Jim Andrews’ lifelong exploration of the visual characteristics of written language, and the capabilities of computers to both render it and reinvent statuesque letters as dancing signifiers.

Jim Andrews is a programmer, poet, and musician who explores the poetic potential of language in the computer by synthesizing his interests in arts that are often kept separate. He creates poetic texts that can be described in terms of their programming codes or behavior as well as by their linguistic and graphical codes. His writing is as much about interface, permutation, chance, music, and animation as it is about what the words say or mean. As a matter of fact, some of the linguistic texts are consciously prosaic or antipoetic—not “poemy poems” as Jim Andrews would say—perhaps to focus the reader’s attention to some of the other features of the text. I would argue that the beauty and wit of his poems often lies in what his language does, which is inseparable from what it says.

When defining Jim Andrews’ poetics, three main traditions stand out: Concrete poetry, Letterism, and Language poetry. All three movements are avant garde in the sense that they engage language in small units: that is, they are more interested in the poetics of phrases, words, letters than in the rhetoric of sentences and the measures of the poetic line. Poets within these poetic schools also tend to write open works, inviting readers to participate in the completion and interpretation of their poems. Most importantly, these movements seek to bring the reader to examine their use and understanding of language through the experience of the poems, though one could argue that all poetry worth reading reinvents language for its readers.

In an age in which readers increasingly read and write language in computers, Jim Andrews does not see computers, programming, and poetry as necessarily separate fields. For him, writing poetry that is purely auditory and is recorded in magnetic tape, writing poetry that is primarily visual and inhabits the page, or writing poetry that dances with its readers in computer screens are all explorations of the materials and capabilities of language, wherever it may be found. His awareness of the medium, materiality, and formal properties of language is a major influence on his poetics.

The possibilities that programming places at Jim Andrews’ disposal are another source of inspiration for him. He loves to program spaces, environments, and behaviors for his texts to inhabit and take life in, and he will often create all that before he has written a text, as he states in the source code for his “Millenium Lyric.”

I wrote the engine before I figured out the content of the poem. With some of this sort of work, you first write the engine thinking there's a poem in that engine somewhere. Then you try to figure out the best poem the engine has in it. Like a piece of stone to a sculptor.

This process of programming and composition seems to apply well to “A Pen,” and can therefore point the way towards a methodology for analysis and interpretation. My presentation will explore this poem in a variety of contexts:

My approach integrates the contexts mentioned above in order to establish the poem’s signifying strategies and support one or various interpretations. I believe this approach to reading electronic poems by Jim Andrews can both serve as a model for other readings of his work and as a way to read, analyze, and interpret e-poetry in general. Most importantly, “A Pen” is a timely statement about the nature of electronic poetry, and it comes from Jim Andrews—a writer of electronic poetry for over 10 years whose work embodies many of the practices and poetics of this emergent scene in contemporary poetry.



Abstract

“A Pen” is a Letterist exploration of text as a tool for writing, rather than as the result of writing. It is about the interpenetration of code and language in programmable media to imbue letters and words with behaviors and allowing poems to emerge from these. It is about creating tools for readers to become involved in the process of shaping the poems that arise from these processes. It is the latest expression of Jim Andrews’ exploration of the visual characteristics of written language, and the capabilities of computers to both render and reinvent statuesque letters as dancing signifiers.