Hello.
My name is Wendy Burk.
I'm the Poetry Center's librarian,
and it's a real pleasure to be with you today.
I'm going to present, as I said, a brief
talk that I'm calling "Text Messages--
Notes on Johanna Drucker's Artistexts."
And I hope that you'll have the time
over the course of the weekend to look at the Artistext
exhibit in the library, along with all
of the other beautiful exhibits that you're going to hear about
in just a few minutes.
It's curated by Drucker, and it includes
holdings from her personal collection
that she's generously loaned to us,
items loaned from the University of Arizona
library's special collections, and holdings
from the Poetry Center's own LR Benes Rare Book Room.
And some of those we acquired especially
for Drucker's exhibit.
And might I say that everything the Poetry Center
has is available for the public to read that any time.
You don't need an appointment.
You don't need to be a student.
You can just come and find me and my colleague Sarah.
And we will share with you these books so
that you not only can admire them under glass,
but you can also, of course, read them.
So what do I mean by text messages?
Well, as you know, this is the poetry off the page symposium.
And shortly after the symposium was announced,
I started getting texted by all of these different texts--
texts written by Walter Hamady, Johanna Drucker,
Emily McVarish, Dieter Roth, Augusto de Campos.
And understandably, O-M-G, these beautiful texts--
we're wondering, is there any place
for on the page work at an off the page symposium?
I think so.
The most conventional printed book
is A Space and Time Machine.
In addition to the linear progression of time and space
as the pages are turned from start to finish or finish
to start, there is the independent unfolding
of time and space occasioned by the text
within, the story within any story, many stories.
And, of course, you can always skip
ahead as far as you want to.
But artistexts, as Drucker defines them,
mess with your time travel.
They bring you to the page, and they hold you on the page.
They make you ask, what is the page?
And then they leave you with the thought
that the page is the something somewhere where and when things
like this happen.
As Drucker writes, in Intimations
of (Im)materiality--
Text as Code in the Electronic Environment, quote,
"Think of the page or screen as a force
field, a set of tensions in relation
which assumes a form when intervened
in through the productive act of reading,
a set of elements in contingent relation, a set of instructions
for a potential event."
End quote.
Materiality is probability.
10 poems, in this case, are a hundred million million poems.
So if materiality is probability,
when we close the book up, do the words go away?
To invoke the Heisenberg uncertainty principle--
which I'm sure you all know very well
and have invoked on various occasions with those you love--
is it impossible to know both their position
and their momentum?
Well, to this, the scholar in me confidently answers, meh.
Dan has showed us this morning, and Amaranth
is going to show us in just a few minutes, that materiality
is probability is very much at play in digital poetry.
But I'm curious how far does materiality is probability
extend on the page, and how can we know?
If we open up the same book to the same page
on a hundred different days, and the textual elements
appear in the same order each day,
is it the same page each time?
And will it be the same page next time?
And can we be absolutely 100% sure about that?
Artistexts often address this question obliquely at times,
by calling attention to, and at times
by calling into question the conventions of the printed
book.
For example, the title page, footnotes,
in this case, the colophon, the very sense
of the page as a two-dimensional plane.
In other words, artistexts put into probabilistic play
all of those elements that attempt to reassure us
that it is the same page.
It's always the same page.
A book is a book is a book.
And other artistexts slice through the conventions,
giving language a different way to move.
So they acknowledge that language
has many bodies, danced, sculpted, coded, typeset, sung,
breathed, unspoken.
And isn't it amazing that these are all bodies
that we're going to experience this weekend?
And we've already seen almost all of them
in the presentations last night and this morning.
Language and its many bodies--
does this mean that it all comes down to form and content again?
[LAUGHTER]
No, not really, not if the page is a force field,
a set of tensions in relation, a set
of instructions for a potential event, as Drucker puts it.
It's more about "typopoeisis," a term also coined by Drucker.
This is her words.
"The making of a poetic work in and through typographic means."
We draw near to the force field of the page,
or we're absorbed into it.
Or we co-produce with it.
We see what has been made, and we make something too.
And I think that we are enjoined to make something as readers,
as writers, as artists.
We see what is in that case, but we're not going to stop there.
And then we will take what we have seen further.
And on the page, off the page, we
are all participating in this process,
and moving into the future.
So the book is A Space and Time Machine--
[AUDIENCE MEMBER SNEEZES]
Bless you.
Excuse me.
--really comes to fruition.
And that's a good text message.
Thank you all very much.
[APPLAUSE]