On Verse by William F. Lantry What I'd like to do is to construct, somehow, a poetics relative to what we're doing and where we're going. I am not interested in some kind of reactionary 'return to the source', such a project is better suited to anthropologists. I want to know where we're going and how we're going to get there. Remember, I have several activities. I write verse, but I'm also a classroom teacher of rhetoric, literature, someone who does educational technology, and someone who builds networks which empower students and teachers. What I want is something that takes the lessons learned from *all* of these activities, and uses them in a new poetics. A few years ago, I stopped writing poetry and started constructing texts. I had little idea of what I was up to, but I knew I was dissatisfied with poetry as we know it. I wanted to break away from the expression/communication paradigm, and move toward something that had an effect on the reader's thought and emotions. I knew I was using allusions to call up references to other poems, works of fiction, and experiences in the reader. I think of this now in terms of machine code. A work with allusions to Ovid, for example: what goes on in a reader's mind when she comes to a line like "gray dawn, and I was lying on my bed"? Well, several things: the reader's mind calls the set of experienced works of Ovid, which Lott has called Ovid_Oeuvre.lib, as well as the whole tradition of latin love poems, and the reader's physical and emotional experiences relevant to the line, and the progression of the poem. Thus on and on, throughout the poem, and all the traditional and non-traditional elements of the poem combine to create what we call an 'aesthetic experience.' Or do they? Many of the poems had to do with a kind of spider, an orb-weaver, but I have no desire to entrap a reader in my web of signifiers. Am I writing code, which simply grabs hold of a reader's 'cpu', and directs it? This cannot be right, as semiotics tells us: each 'word' is a sign, and signs are arbitrary, negotiated within a community of discourse, and constantly renegotiated. And every platform, every OS, every reader, is different. If there are a thousand readers, there are a thousand different versions of Ovid_oeuvre.lib. Can a poem be the aesthetic equivalent of java? Can the 'code' run on whatever platform it finds, in spite of all the differences? Is this what we want anyway? Clearly not. What we want, what we need, is for the reader to actively construct the poem as she reads. This is where Stone's work on 'tokens' comes in. Observing phone-sex workers, she stumbled onto something which has surprising implications for poetics. What I want to do is quote her here, inserting the term [poetry] for the subject of her research... "[Poetry] is the process of constructing desire through a single mode of communication.... [Poets] draw on a repertoire of cultural codes to construct a scenario that compresses large amounts of information into a very small space. The [poet] verbally codes for gesture, emotion, {etc.}, and expresses these as extremely compressed 'tokens'. The [reader] uncompresses these tokens and constructs a dense, complex interactional image. [...] Out of a highly compressed token of desire the [reader] constituates a meaning that is dense, locally situated, and socially particular." So perhaps this is what we do, and what the reader does. There are a couple things to notice here. First, the reader's mind is not taken over by the code, but actively constructs the poem as she reads it. Second, the experience of constructing the poem is then added into the reader's 'cache', and influences any subsequent experience, in a way comparable to machine research on 'intelligent agents'. But this interactive process of encoding and reading leaves out a few things. First, there's much more going on than simply writing to the 'cache'. Second, the interactivity is not sufficiently intense, and in some ways still resembles linear reading. In answer to these objections, we may point out that the experience of hypertextuality, or three-dimensional reading, goes at least as far back as Beowulf's leaps to histories of swords and their owners and their own histories... and perhaps even go as far back as Homer. After I set up a networked classroom, one of my colleagues noticed what I call the 'gaze': she saw her students learning how to click on links in hypertext, and after awhile they were so completely engaged that she was hard-pressed to break them away from their constuction of a text. She, as a teacher, wanted to 'direct' them, to lead them where she planned. But they were so involved, so engaged in their three dimensional reading that her 'plan' became useless. She describes the 'gaze' as a disaster... but I've never seen anything so encouraging, in all my time as an educator. In some ways, I can compare this to my work in rhetorical analysis. Years ago, I became dissatisfied with 'expressivist process composition'. It wasn't helping students succeed. I moved toward 'constructivist rhetorical analysis'. Students examine a text, take it apart, see how it works... and then construct their own argument, based on the text. They then look at each other's constructions, and begin constructing a collaborative argument. What I've noticed is that at some point in the semester a strange thing happens. They are decidedly *not* learning skills, their modes of thinking are actually changing. Almost literally, their 'kernels' are 'recompiled'... and the resulting 'procedures' are highly valued, both in academic settings and beyond. Just so, students who have been trained to linear reading change their 'procedures' shortly after they are introduced to three dimensional reading. They become actively engaged in (re)constructing a text, not following but rather creating links... and this active engagement results in 'the gaze': they move completely into the text, the 'tokens' are reconstructed, combined in complex ways, until they are completely 'transfixed.' Barth writes of an 'Ocean of Story', a narrative which is inexhaustible and all-consuming, in which a reader may swim in her own direction. Borges wrote of an infinite library. The ideas outlined here may lead towards an infinite poem. The phenonmenon of 'the gaze' leads me to believe that we are now developing a generation of readers susceptible to complete immersion in such a poem. Last year, I began the electronic poetry project. My idea was to create 99 poems, and of the poems create a labyrinth, in which every word was a clickable link to another poem. The idea was to construct Borges' garden of the forking paths. I wrote all the poems in 'vi', either in sVr4, or later in Linux. But the demands of a 4/4 load, as well as building a pedagogical electronic network, and writing and presenting papers and verse, kept the project from completion. And lately I think that's just as well. For I was 'still' creating the labyrinth... it was still an author constructing the links. 'Glider guns' and 'life' have given me a better idea. What if the set of data, of 'tokens', were expanded to include a much wider range of authors? And what if the links were generated anew with each reading, and based not just on a single word, but also on the set of words around it? And what if the 'agent' remembered the previously generated links, and generated different ones with each reading? A new poem would be created. Years ago, the French developed what they call the 'poeme fleuve', but this new poem would resemble an ocean... All this makes me return to Lott's remark as we discussed this idea: "What would such a poem look like? Not much like the ones we have been reading until now, I bet..." The answer? I don't know what such a poem would look like. But I am moving towards it, we, as a culture, are moving towards it. It will be much different from what we've seen so far. And I want to be part of constructing it... thanks for reading, Bill