A background to Crawford’s work: ‘The Human and the Computational’ in Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science. Ed Robert Crawford. & ‘Modernist C

Crawford outlines his approach in ‘The Human and the Computational’ and confirms my reading of his work. He cites a major influence on his work is Ossian (which I had to look up). Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson published. He claimed to have collected word-of-mouth material in the Scots Gaelic said to be from ancient sources. His published work was his translation of this material. Ossian is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a character from Irish mythology. Crawford describes this work as a’ great poetry of mourning’ with ‘a flickering world beyond the text’ and ‘music of echoes and loss’. He says it has ‘a fey, tissue thin quality’ and compares it to Yeats’ Celtic Twilight. He describes them as seeming like ‘a kind of dematerialization of reality and so did the computer’ Computers are part of the material world but also present a ‘kind of constant simulacrum’. In the paperless office computers denote an absence of things, rather than a presence. (p 62)

Crawford also discusses his notion of ‘Deincarnation’ – the sense of ghostliness that accompanies bereavement and connects it back to the Ossianic / Celtic Twilights Highlands and a computational, virtual reality world. ‘The computer is, metaphorically at least, both a means of remembrance, preservation, and a kind of estrangement, a screening out of the muddily or bloodily tangible.’ (p 63)

Crawford describes his work as ‘Informationist’ – ‘stealing from informational, scientific and quasi-academic texts and modes.’ (p 63) I’ve requested an interloan book with more details about Informationists. Finally, in what I see as a vital statement, he says:

Particularly now in our ‘information age’ the distinctions between ‘science’, ‘technology’, and ‘culture’ all seem oddly artificial. If a poem codes information and involves delicate balances, so does an equation, a formula, or a gene-string, and so does a computer; that is not to say that a poem or a person can be reduced to the computational, but all may be related, focused in new ways. Poems, like gene-strings, are all about ‘strands’ and have their molecular repeats, complex internal bondings and minute, intricate refrains. (p 65)

In ‘Modernist Cybernetics and the poetry of Knowledge’ Crawford establishes a tradition of an influence of cybernetics going back to the modernists, particularly Eliot, Pound and Auden (although the word cybernetics, literally meaning ‘governing knowledge’ was not coined until 1948 by Robert Weiner). He links Pound to cybernetics through his ‘scientifically expressed preoccupation with the governing of knowledge’. He claims that ‘Modernist verse, so nurtured by and alert to academic channels as well as to the relationship between knowledge and power, is very much a poetry of the governing of knowledge.’ ( 182)

The Waste land is framed by Crawford as proto-hypertextual:

The Waste Land projects a neural network that is a cybernetic system on the edge of running out of control. It convinces us by its poetic music, yet we can understand it only with notes, guides, commentary. Drawing on all Eliot’s earlier knowledge and training, it is written out of these things. The details of Eliot’s academic career are made luminous with pressure. In one light it is heartbreakingly human. In another, in terms of its ultimate textual and intellectual ramifications, it is a hypertext that only a computer could read. (p190)

And then:

Modernist allusion functions as a hypertext system, taking the reader continually from one reference to another, setting up complex relationships among texts within texts. The older, manuscript-based analogy of the ‘palimpsest’ is too simple to express how a poem like The Waste Land works. It sets up so many simultaneous relationships, transmits such a multitude of messages, that it offers us a vast database, a growing library of texts, bridges between them, and connections between cultures. Its complexity is a cybernetic one which anticipates the computer age at least as much as it derives from earlier forms…. The modernist poem is a deliberately coded work. (p190)

I was pleased to read this as I had been contemplating the history of this kind of writing after hearing Rachel Blau Du Plessis read on the 22 of March. It struck me that her work was very much a product of the internet age - had a very hypertextual nature. She had quoted Pound as an influence on her also. I hadn’t known what to call this kind of writing and described it to myself as analog hypertext.

In my notes about her I said:

Rachel talked of the whole epic as a brain trying to remember what’s going on, hence some repetition and looping back. She sees the whole poem as a grid with 19 poems in a column and 6 columns = 114 poems. The initial reason for this form was to combat the fear of a blank page. She wrote the first two pieces – ‘it’ and ‘she’, and they were in discourse with each other, she knew there would be more but wasn’t sure how many to do. At first she thought he’d do 100 like Dante (Pound also) then after she’d done 19 she saw them as a long string without a break (she described it like a long string of French knitting!) and decided to insert a column break of sorts. This was a random number but turned out to be fortuitous in that it’s a prime number. She said George Olsen does that too (see wide-open page).

She spoke of drawing coloured lines of connected and re-occurring themes and ideas through the grid to create streams or weave. I said that I thought her work lends itself to hypertext and she agreed. Her work is like a precursor to hypertext, she’s asking your brain to create and recognise the analog hyperlinks (I guess many poets do this in a way but hers seems very intentional).

So I now feel like I’ve confirmed a starting point to trace this kind of writing back to and that it is a valid notion. I am also relieved that it seems to begin with the Modernist, since that is as far back as I wanted to go when exploring the influence on the contemporary poets.

Crawford ends his chapter on Modern Cybernetics with Hugh MacDiarmid:

Yet the experience of reading MacDiarmid’s mature poetry of knowledge is often like surfing on the Internet or moving on impulse through a vast database or hypertext system. We are given aesthetic access to computational textures and the ever-reforming patterning of hypertext knowledge long before computers themselves reached such a level of sophistication, and before non-classified access was possible….Our acquaintance with computer systems makes us readier to accept this work whose form seems in constant flux as it reconfigures repeatedly along new nodes of connection. (p217)