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networks and scenes
More thinking on the Internet and contemporary poetic culture.
Ever since the AWP conference, I've been spending enormous amounts of time exploring the blogs of poets, using K. Silem Mohammad's limetree as a central node to explore from. It's been fascinating to try to mentally map out all the interconnections; I'm giving serious thought to taking all of this data and running it through some network visualization tools to try to see which poets constitute the network's "hot points." (It's worth noting that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently published a special issue focusing entirely on similar work being done within the field of the sciences. Brief overviews can be read here and here; these links courtesy of Boing Boing. Also related: Data Mining the Amazon, a project which uses Amazon.com data to generate stunning graphics of strange findings.)
Like any other dense network, the poetry network is one in which memes can spread rapidly: perhaps the key example to date is the "New Brutalism." New Brutalism may or may not exist as a coherent movement (the New Brutalism group blog has been dead for nearly six months at this point), it may not, in fact, have ever existed as a coherent movement (as Mohammad's list of myths about New Brutalism nicely hints at)—but one thing is certain: the rise of the meme was notably, perhaps fatally, accelerated by the growing number of poetics blogs.
This insightful article by Stephanie Young traces the rise (and fall?) of the New Brutalism meme, and uses it as a lens through which to discuss the influence of poetry blogs in general, as well as the politics of temporary ("soft") assembly and the friction generated when offline or institutional sources attempt to document online networks. Fascinating stuff, resistant to excerpting, since there are so many good bits, but a must-read for anyone interested in this sort of material.
Related: Ron Silliman on networks and scenes (1977). |
Thursday, April 08, 2004
2:58 PM
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