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Scott Ellis

CAP Presentation

Perloff, Marjorie. “Screening the Page/Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text.” //New Media Poetics.// Ed. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. 143-162. Print.

“Screening the Page/Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text.” By Marjorie Perloff

__Summary__

//“Art is a series of perpetual differences.” Tristan Tzara//

Perloff, in her meditation on the different styles of text and literature, focuses her section in //New Media Poetics// on the different aesthetics a piece can exude when presented within a different material. She starts her argument with the understanding, derived from a comment by Peter Bürger, that forms can be adapted from their original format for different authentic purposes, as shown between the relationship between Picasso and German Dadaist poet Raoul Hausmann (Perloff 143). This is essentially Perloff’s argument concerning **//differential text//**, which are, “texts [that] exist in different material forms, with no single version being the definitive one” (Perloff 2002b). Though acknowledging the possible “fetishized” attitude towards the emergence of electronic poetry concerning a lack of creativity because of the boost in technological advancements, she states that the transition from print to electronic is a good thing. She sites Kenneth Goldsmith for his work on creating UbuWeb (a collection of work and hard to find journals online) which is much easier for new readers to come into contact with than say, the //American Poetry Review.// To accentuate her argument of differential text she looks at three artists and their works. First is Brian Kim Stefans’s sequence //the dream life of letter// (1999). Here she draws differences between the conception of the work (from a poem by Rachel Blau DuPlessis), which evokes the harsh phonetics of the original writer, a concrete poem by Stefans which again focusses on the way the words mingle with soft and hard sexuality, and the third which is composed in e-lit. The third version, though using same lexicon that was present in the first two, grants the reader a different interpretation of the text which was only possible with the medium switch. Perloff writes that Stefans “uses exactly the same sixteen words or syllables as Concrete Poem #4, but the units now become actors in a more complex drama” (Perloff 150/151). She goes on to make similar association when looking at Caroline Bergvall’s //ambient fish// and “Flesh,” where Bergvall herself talks about her work saying that “the traditional strong link between the identity of and art object and its medium becomes broken” (2001b, 3). Another work Perloff looks at in these spheres in Kenneth Goldsmith’s group of works called //Soliloquy//. She comments and tracks the three modes this piece has been presented in: a text installation, book form, and an electronic text online. She goes on to say that the book form of Goldsmith’s work is essentially a “talk form” of the piece, whereas the digital version plays more, giving a “hidden text” feeling to the reader at home.

__Commentary__

As I read Perloff’s essay about differential text, I found that what she was theorizing was not only interesting to me, but was also relatively easy to grasp. If a work has been transcribed in many different mediums, each work has a beneficial (possibly negative) aspect to itself and none of the work is deemed greater or lesser. Though her personal ideas weigh in on some of the texts that she comments on, see her sections on Kenneth Goldsmith, I found that her look into the switching of medium was satisfactory to solidify ideas that she has raised. Though sticking close to the ideas of differential text and its aesthetics, she does veer at the end when confronting the reader with the question, “Are Goldsmith, Bergvall, and Stefans electronic poets?” Herpurposing this question seems to be strictly based upon the differentiation with their works, not what would elicit a title of “digital poet.” Though I feel with the knowledge that we have gained throught the semester might help in working out the kinks in such a question, the information they she grants merely defines one dimension of digital poetry. In her final paragraph she finds footholds for her original idea in Bill Viola’s quote pertaining to differential text, “Chopsticks can either be a simple eating utensil or a deadly weapon, depending on who uses them,” which eludes to the power an artist has when manipulating amongst different mediums. Though well written, Perloff seems to make little cathartic movement on differential texts.

__Questions__


 * 1) With Perloff’s identification and theories pertaining to differential text along with the knowledge about digital poetics that we have gained throughout the semester, can we say that artists like Goldsmith, Stefans, and Bergvall are digital poets? What kind of questions would we propose along with the theory of differential text?
 * 2) What if someone chose a canonical text and utilized a different medium to express a new aesthetic awareness such as the electronic literature piece concerning E. E. Cummings? What piece would you choose in the canon, if you would choose one, and how would you modify it in terms of medium, and what will be the aesthetic benefits?