Digital Poetry as Scrabble: Making from Given Materials

A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, September 18, 12:30-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Digital Poetry as Scrabble: Making from Given Materials”

by CHRIS FUNKHOUSER

In the various realms of digital poetry, chance and intention blend within a given structure. Authors create patterns, use collage, make links, sample media during the creative process, and readers are faced with the task of responding to a set of textual circumstances. While illustrating and introducing the basic mechanics of digital poetry, this presentation engages with works as if moves in a game of Scrabble, suggesting how expression can be further propelled using digital and analog media. Beyond the role of influence and inspiration, the output and data presented in digital poems can often be seen and used as a basis for myriad sorts of projective, progenerative language, image, or sound, which can be combined and recombined in so many variations. If literature is to be interactive, we must cultivate ways to respond to what is given, and in the process may find ourselves able to remediate materials in order to build something original.

Poet and scholar CHRIS FUNKHOUSER is an Associate Professor in the Humanities Department at New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 2006 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to lecture and conduct research in Malaysia, where his CD-ROM eBook Selections 2.0 was produced at Multimedia University in Cyberjaya. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, a history of pre-WWW computerized poetry, has just been published in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series at University of Alabama Press. In 2008, a bi-lingual collection of his technology writings, Technopoetry Rising: Essays and Works, will be published in São Paulo (Musa Editora). He was on the Summer Writing Program Faculty at Naropa University earlier this year, where he co-edited a volume of We Magazine focused on Creative Cannibalism (http://www.wepress.org/19). For more info see http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous

Coming up @MITH 9/25, John Tolva (IBM): “Architecting Cultural Spaces: Case Studies of Virtual Representation in the Humanities”

View MITH’s complete Fall Speakers Schedule here.

All talks free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).