Digital Poetry and Collaborative Wreadings of Literary Texts

Rui Torres


1. The Discourse of Poetry

In order to provide a definition of digital poetry, it is important to clarify
what is meant by poetic discourse. One promising approach is contrasting
poetry with prose. In reality, the narrative structure of prose involves logical
and chronological descriptions, whereas in poetry the verse evokes spatial
formations which break with prose’s linear arrangement, enabling not only the
spatial form (which corresponds to the concept of constellation introduced by
French poet Mallarmé, and later developed by concrete poets like Eugen
Gomringer and Max Bense), but spatialisation of content as well. Where
narrative informs, poetry suggests; where prose invokes the linearity and the
arbitrariness of the written word, poetry promotes non-linear configurations.
Furthermore, in poetry language is not transparent, but rather opaque, and it
reveals the construction and the becoming of meaning itself, entailing the
wreader in its own production.1
As Todorov has pointed out, in poetry signs are intransitive symbols, i.e.,
they do not take anything as a direct object besides themselves.2 In the lyrical
text, symbols form an expressive system of correspondences, and unlike with
communication, ambiguity is not a burden, but a rationale.
This sense of vagueness is the result of a blending of contrasts: in poetry,
there is not a clear distinction between abstract and concrete, ideal and
material, or general and particular.3 Instead, poetic words remain in-between:
they are both redundant and ambiguous. Poetry is thus circumscribed only by
indeterminacy, and it is this indeterminacy which makes of poetry an
expressive medium to speak the unutterable.4
Poetry is then the expression of the ineffable, stimulating the reader to
look for new semantic configurations, promoting unusual relationships
between that which is represented as abstraction, and that which is represented
by the concrete materiality of the media involved.
Nevertheless, one should not forget that this tension is inherent to
language itself. However, these tensions can only be fully grasped within
poetry, because in our daily use of language, they are neutralized, for the
matter of communicative efficiency. Let us not forget that for numerous poets,

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Digital Poetry and Collaborative Wreadings of Literary Texts

language is poetry, and Ralph W. Emerson has well suggested that languages
were composed of fossilized metaphors:

We are symbols and inhabit symbols (...) and being
infatuated with the economical use of things, we do not
know that they are thoughts. The poet (…) gives them a
power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes
and a tongue in every dumb and inanimate object.5

That is why a definition of poetry may perhaps correspond to Viktor
Shklovsky’s definition of art, which “exists to make one feel things, to make
the stone stony (…), to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and
not as they are known.”6
The distinction between poetry and prose is developed by several other
literary theorists. Summarizing, the poetic sense privileges the affective and
the obscure, and the prosaic favors the conceptual and the transparent.7
Contrasting with the prosaic use of language, poetry upholds the creation of
innovative correspondences, opening up discourse for dynamic recreations of
meaning.
This poetics is better accomplished by innovative (experimental) attitudes
towards poetry. Essentially, experimental poetries of the twentieth century
have pursued non-linear (re)presentations of both form and content. From
futurists to concretists, many poets have gone beyond the conventions of line,
page, and book. Print, as Walter Ong has suggested, brings closure to texts, as
well as a commodification of the word.8 The book is bound to a fixed and
permanent vehicle that ends up by closing down new possibilities of
signification.
Contrastingly, experimental poetry is based on the notion of open work. In
the definition provided by Umberto Eco, the "open work produces in the
interpreter acts of conscious freedom, putting him at the center of a net of
inexhaustible relations among which he inserts his own form."9 Eco contrasts
the open work with the conventional closed work, which leads the reader to
pre-defined interpretations, insinuating that the former rejects conventional
views of the world, proposing instead an awareness of the fragmentation, the
discontinuity, and the dissonance of our media-saturated environment.
Another important characteristic of experimental poetry that is relevant
for the aesthetics of digital poetry is the convergence of text, image and
sound. This aspect was materialized in a word introduced by James Joyce, and