WEBVTT

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Hello.

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My name is Wendy Burk.

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I'm the Poetry
Center's librarian,

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and it's a real pleasure
to be with you today.

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I'm going to present,
as I said, a brief

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talk that I'm calling
"Text Messages--

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Notes on Johanna
Drucker's Artistexts."

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And I hope that
you'll have the time

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over the course of the weekend
to look at the Artistext

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exhibit in the
library, along with all

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of the other beautiful exhibits
that you're going to hear about

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in just a few minutes.

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It's curated by
Drucker, and it includes

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holdings from her
personal collection

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that she's generously
loaned to us,

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items loaned from the
University of Arizona

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library's special
collections, and holdings

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from the Poetry Center's
own LR Benes Rare Book Room.

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And some of those we
acquired especially

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for Drucker's exhibit.

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And might I say that
everything the Poetry Center

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has is available for the
public to read that any time.

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You don't need an appointment.

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You don't need to be a student.

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You can just come and find
me and my colleague Sarah.

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And we will share with
you these books so

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that you not only can
admire them under glass,

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but you can also, of
course, read them.

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So what do I mean
by text messages?

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Well, as you know, this is the
poetry off the page symposium.

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And shortly after the
symposium was announced,

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I started getting texted by
all of these different texts--

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texts written by Walter
Hamady, Johanna Drucker,

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Emily McVarish, Dieter
Roth, Augusto de Campos.

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And understandably, O-M-G,
these beautiful texts--

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we're wondering,
is there any place

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for on the page work at
an off the page symposium?

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I think so.

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The most conventional
printed book

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is A Space and Time Machine.

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In addition to the linear
progression of time and space

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as the pages are turned from
start to finish or finish

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to start, there is the
independent unfolding

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of time and space
occasioned by the text

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within, the story within
any story, many stories.

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And, of course,
you can always skip

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ahead as far as you want to.

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But artistexts, as
Drucker defines them,

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mess with your time travel.

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They bring you to the page,
and they hold you on the page.

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They make you ask,
what is the page?

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And then they leave
you with the thought

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that the page is the something
somewhere where and when things

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like this happen.

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As Drucker writes,
in Intimations

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of (Im)materiality--

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Text as Code in the
Electronic Environment, quote,

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"Think of the page
or screen as a force

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field, a set of
tensions in relation

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which assumes a
form when intervened

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in through the productive
act of reading,

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a set of elements in contingent
relation, a set of instructions

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for a potential event."

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End quote.

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Materiality is probability.

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10 poems, in this case, are a
hundred million million poems.

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So if materiality
is probability,

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when we close the book
up, do the words go away?

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To invoke the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle--

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which I'm sure you
all know very well

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and have invoked on various
occasions with those you love--

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is it impossible to
know both their position

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and their momentum?

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Well, to this, the scholar in
me confidently answers, meh.

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Dan has showed us this
morning, and Amaranth

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is going to show us in just a
few minutes, that materiality

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is probability is very much
at play in digital poetry.

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But I'm curious how far does
materiality is probability

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extend on the page,
and how can we know?

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If we open up the same
book to the same page

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on a hundred different days,
and the textual elements

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appear in the same
order each day,

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is it the same page each time?

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And will it be the
same page next time?

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And can we be absolutely
100% sure about that?

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Artistexts often address this
question obliquely at times,

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by calling attention
to, and at times

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by calling into question the
conventions of the printed

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book.

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For example, the
title page, footnotes,

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in this case, the
colophon, the very sense

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of the page as a
two-dimensional plane.

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In other words, artistexts
put into probabilistic play

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all of those elements that
attempt to reassure us

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that it is the same page.

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It's always the same page.

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A book is a book is a book.

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And other artistexts slice
through the conventions,

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giving language a
different way to move.

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So they acknowledge
that language

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has many bodies, danced,
sculpted, coded, typeset, sung,

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breathed, unspoken.

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And isn't it amazing
that these are all bodies

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that we're going to
experience this weekend?

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And we've already seen
almost all of them

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in the presentations last
night and this morning.

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Language and its many bodies--

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does this mean that it all comes
down to form and content again?

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[LAUGHTER]

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No, not really, not if
the page is a force field,

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a set of tensions
in relation, a set

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of instructions for a potential
event, as Drucker puts it.

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It's more about "typopoeisis,"
a term also coined by Drucker.

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This is her words.

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"The making of a poetic work in
and through typographic means."

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We draw near to the
force field of the page,

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or we're absorbed into it.

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Or we co-produce with it.

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We see what has been made,
and we make something too.

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And I think that we are enjoined
to make something as readers,

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as writers, as artists.

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We see what is in that case, but
we're not going to stop there.

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And then we will take
what we have seen further.

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And on the page,
off the page, we

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are all participating
in this process,

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and moving into the future.

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So the book is A Space
and Time Machine--

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[AUDIENCE MEMBER SNEEZES]

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Bless you.

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Excuse me.

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--really comes to fruition.

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And that's a good text message.

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Thank you all very much.

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[APPLAUSE]

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