Part of Traces for an upcoming Medium Review: The Problem of New Poetics and Old Tech
Why isn’t there a better best coding practice for online poetry?
for more information
please scream
they’d rather curse
the dark
the ones that tilt at
spirals
than replay
the tape
I say the day is more sonorous
when
it is
relived
in real
time .
Just a note, because what’s I’d really like to write could fill a pamphlet juicy enough to nail to a church door. There aren’t true limitations in coding that make something like the above and below too tough to render online—it’s just a lack of…well fill in the blank. End result is that poets’ work (or the work of certain poets) ends up being pushed as a screenshot, into the blindspot of search engines and the past the margin of readability the farther you deviate from a traditional left-aligned piece. Somehow I think the poem gets nudged even further (technologies of quietude silence change in somber little shrugs just like this), ghettoized but on a trajectory toward something less than prose, always. The net result is that we are collectively rewarded for pulling the art form back towards the centre.
What’s to be done? Really. Asking.
This all came us as I was laying out Julia Madsen’s amazing review of Traces of a Fifth Column for Anomalous press. Coming soon. So I guess I’m a little talking to you, Medium.