http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org/ The Journal of Electronic Publishing http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.201 Aaron McCollough Fall 2011 Digital publishing—loosely defined—has had a remarkable impact on the world of poetry and poetics. This shouldn’t be surprising, of course. “The digital” has transformed nearly everything. Why should anything be spared? In the minds of many, I think, poetry does stand in some kind of Platonic orb, though; a high culture fetish object, removed from the rest of pedestrian culture. Although it would be hard to find lots of practicing poets who think this way (or admit they do), the casual observer of poetry likely considers it boring enough to be immune. The interested observer, alternatively, particularly the one interested in protecting some ideal of poetry from the Internet’s demotic ravages, simply doesn’t credit digitally published poetry as “real” poetry. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.201 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.202 Richard Nash Fall 2011 It is commonplace that pornography is the avant-garde of all media. When new technologies arise, the pornographers are there first, too. Every time there has been a significant shift in marketplace rules, even if the technology is broadly unchanged, the pornographers are the first to figure it out. What is however far less frequently discussed is poetry. Poets and pornographers have nothing to lose. No commercial opportunity in the former case, no prestige in the latter. Conversely, they have very clear goals, too: prestige in the former case, money in the latter.  The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.202 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.203 Michael S. Hennessey Fall 2011 This article chronicles the transition of the well-established online poetry journal Jacket to archival status hosted at the University of Pennsylvania and the parallel launch of a successor publication, Jacket2. The author addresses the new journal’s mission with special attention to the opportunities and challenges afforded to this digitally mediated resource. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.203 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.204 W. Scott Howard Fall 2011 This article addresses a selection of accomplishments from RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry/Literature & Culture. Reconfigurations cultivates a vigorous blending of conventional and non-conventional forms of communication. Our work turns upon generative contradictions. We are both outside of established institutional hierarchies of process and production (we are online in the form of a blog) and we are the epitome of such systems (we are peer-reviewed). We seek to gather and present a judiciously selected diversity of genres/modes and forms of discourse. We exist as a dynamic space for readers, artists, writers, and scholars invested in tradition and innovation. Such dedication to both/and, such inclusion of opposition, is required by our project of reconfiguration. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.204 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.205 Aaron McCollough Fall 2011 Aaron McCollough interviews author, programmer, and critic Ian Bogost about his recent book of “machined haiku” (including a game poem programmed by Bogost for the Atari 2600 VCS) and about the intersection of poetics and games studies more broadly. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.205 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.206 James J. Brown, Jr. Fall 2011 James J. Brown, Jr., interviews author, programmer, critic Nick Montfort about his work as president of the Electronic Literature Organization and multiple projects including Curveship (an Interactive Fiction authoring tool) and the new volume of the Electronic Literature Collection. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.206 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.207 Brian Kim Stefans Fall 2011 To date, small effort has been given to create a general critical vocabulary for describing the wide range of digital literary works. This paper attempts to describe a range of effects in digital literature—relating to time, power, scale, duplication, being, and the ontology of the database—and introduces a new concept, the “simple,” here understood as a node of text/algorithm interaction. Several small-scale works that operate on one or two new media principles can be grouped under these simples. Cumulative works (such as the magisterial “88 Constellations for Wittgenstein” by David Clark) here known as “ludic books,” are described as being composed of several of these simples.  See also the accompanying slides. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.207 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.208 Darren Wershler Fall 2011 Beginning from the formative influence of Marshall McLuhan on the discourses of communication studies and media studies, this essay argues for a re-examination of the importance of poetics to these discourses. This re-examination would consist of two projects: an historical assessment of McLuhan’s own use of modernist avant-garde poetics (because of the deformations and transfigurations that McLuhan visits on poetic texts); and an investigation into the relevance that contemporary poetry and poetics holds for communication studies and media studies. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.208 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.209 Antonio Roque Fall 2011 Computer poetry generation has historically been pursued from a number of different traditions: Digital Poetry, Oulipo, recreational programming, and language research. This article makes several suggestions for distributing interactive poetry generators given the contemporary technological environment. A number of case studies are provided to illustrate these points, and the popular n-gram poetry-generation technique is described. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.209 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.210 Ben Gunsberg Fall 2011 N. Katherine Hayles suggests that prolonged interaction with networked and programmable media may be tuning young people’s nervous systems toward hyper attention, a cognitive mode that manifests in preferences for high levels of stimulation and multiple information streams. This essay responds to Hayles’ call to examine interactions between hyper and deep attention, through an analysis of the poetry website QuickMuse.com. Focusing on relations between temporality and modes of attention, I argue that the site’s configurations of time foreground the role hyper attention plays in creative written expression, while simultaneously diminishing the role of deep attention. In light of Hayles’ pedagogical agenda, I conclude by proposing classroom-oriented “attention mapping” activities meant to encourage students to reflect on the styles of attention instantiated in and appropriate to different reading and composing practices. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.210 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.211 Benjamin Paloff Fall 2011 This article addresses the problem of how hypertext poems composed in the late 1990s have aged relative to their counterparts in traditional print. The author pays special attention to the rapid pace with which digital modes become outmoded and to the relationship between this process and lyric poetry’s inherent ephemerality. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.211 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.212 Amaranth Borsuk Fall 2011 This essay provides a critical analysis of the way pervasive data culture impacts the form of poetry and conceptions of authorship for those print and digital poets who let it enter their work. As depicted in popular media, the data cloud is a confusing and disordered space in which we lose all sense of privacy. However, a number of contemporary poets seek to get lost in this ether, reveling in the network of language that surrounds us. They do so in part because the very technologies that make such data visible in turn make the writer invisible, an authorial position more comfortable for poets of the networked age. Examined alongside the recent surge in interest in infosthetics, conceptual and digital poetry can be seen as embracing a “data poetics” attuned to the materiality of language. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.212 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.213 Michael Rudin Fall 2011 With every status update and tweet, the millions of individuals on social-networking sites are more than staying connected—they are reading, writing, editing, distilling, and interpreting the written word more than any generation in history. In doing so, they are helping develop Fiction 2.0: a fascinating marriage of character-count restrictions and the network effect that has created a new category of short-form content and narrative experimentation. This paper explores five of these new fiction prototypes—twitterature, nanofiction, crowd-sourced narratives, infographics, and $0.00 stories—in order to better understand how the e-age will cross-pollinate foreign concepts like “install-base” with familiar ones like “readership.” The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.213 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.214 Jim Andrews Fall 2011 In “Why I am a Net Artist,” long-time “media poetry” practitioner Jim Andrews reflects on the consequences of computation on language, the fundamental virtues of networked digital computing as a poetic medium, and computing’s facilitation of combinatory operations that drive poetic work into emergent territories. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.214 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0014.215 Thylias Moss Fall 2011 Building on her notion of “Limited Fork Theory,” the author considers the implications of recent and forthcoming user-friendly developments in new media delivery systems. In the author’s view, nothing short of poetry’s utter redefinition will be obliged by the next wave of digital environments. an ode to milk dot fire The Journal of Electronic Publishing 14 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.215