With plenty of gifs and sound, it’s a poem that weaves your mind in... Pick Hit for finding the cyberpoem of your dream, really!

“don’t grow backwards any longer she pleaded”

“I’m again the complicated cell the nation extracts”

Bob Holman

bH: Here in the booth are miekal and with Maria Damon, whose new poem, an interweaving called “Literature Nation,” is the most fully developed HTML poem on the Net.

ma: I would like to point out, Bob, that one of the beauties of virtual space is that we don’t have to be in a “booth” to conduct this interview. I would like to propose that this interview is conducted under a waterfall with all partipants using megaphones & ear trumpets in order to hear above the roar of the water while a very large clock in the distance is ticking off the seconds until the millennium.

bH: [now thru megaphone, into ear trumpet, above waterfalling from miekal and Maria’s poem] Touché! What do you call this form?

MD here: Miekal calls it “interwriting,” which I like. We have another piece, though, “pleasureTEXTpossession,” which to my mind is even more truly “interwriting” because we continue each other’s sentences, adding and twisting, disrupting and elaborating each other’s words from inside the structure of the sentence. “Literature Nation,” by contrast, is a fairly straightforward trade-off where we alternate passages, finding evocative links in each other’s offerings and then riffing off of them.

ma: I was born making neologisms; the term “interwriting” seems especially functional as a way of characterizing our interactions & I was interested in making a distinction between a hypertext (which can be created by many different methods) & our particular process of trading off. Also, the word is suggestive of the kind of intertwining of emotions, moods, exaltations, & retreats that are best conveyed by intercourses of word musics.

bH: How did you come to it? Did you ever work in real space together?

MD: A few years ago right after my sabbatical I met miekal and he suggested a hypertext collaboration. To me, writing opportunities are sacred and I very much respected the work he’s done both as a writer and as a publisher, and all-around practical visionary. So even though I am not nearly as computer literate as miekal, and although my relationship to hypertext is not as technologically up-to-date (as a scholar I regard all texts as hypertexts, because any word you focus on will take you on a journey through the history of consciousness, and scholarly writing is the interwriting you engage with a “primary” text -- in other words my concept of hypertext is not computer-dependent), I was happy to embark on the textual adventure. We have worked in real space together; our first piece, “pleasureTEXTpossession,” started in my basement office at the University of Minnesota. And we wrote part of “Doll Goddess” together on a hillside in Wisconsin during a sugar bush (maple-syrup making marathon). Most of the time now, though, we don’t actually compose text when we get together, which is few times a year; we mostly make decisions about links, map out the text and then actualize the links into a hypertext. In other words, we are dealing with text we’ve already written. I’m responding to this question in miekal’s office at Dreamtime Village, so you caught us in one of our rare real-space moments.

ma: I was trying to think of how we came to the title of the work. Over the years, I’ve found that most of what I’ve created, whether it be text, music, hypermedia, performance or permaculture design always begins with the naming. The title for me evokes the promise of digital literature, that the historical passage of writing thru time & across the planet does not have to be limited to an official verse culture. That this writing & digital lit in general can mingle with someone I will never meet in someplace I could never travel to in realtime, and not be dependent on institutionalized media for its promotion. Ted Nelson’s Xanadu is an unfulfilled digital fantasy that is alive & well, an out-of-control bastard of the original hypertext visions.

bH: You both are activists, yet this poem seems formal rather than political. Is there revolution in the form?

MD: Interesting question. Personally I go round and round about this issue of the politics of style. In terms of social or even arts activism, it’s limited; I feel, for example, that this is far less “political” or “activist” than, say, teaching writing in a housing project GED program. And I hear the critique all the time, from my colleagues in cultural studies, that the “avant-garde” is apolitical, precious, esoteric. I guess in my critical work I’m working to redefine the “avant-garde” precisely to include writing from the social margins; here, in “Literature Nation,” I’m playing in a field of potential literary democracy.

ma: I would color myself an actionist rather than an activist. An early credo I had was image > object > action which was my very young interpretation of projectivist poetics. It analogues nicely with the action of naming bringing something which hasn’t existed into existence. Tho I am devoutly apolitical, my passion for social & cultural remapping is best modeled by images of wilderness. Maria’s colleagues are right when they say those things about the avant-garde; unfortunately I bet they would be unwilling to recognize that failure describes a lot more than avant-garde poetry.

I think the formalness Bob speaks of is our 2 very different writing styles cohabiting an invented space. The text as it has evolved would have read much differently if we had created it to be read only as a book. Memory & anticipation play a more central role in electro-writing, because navigation, mapping & reading patterns no longer need be confined to the sequence of the left hand margin. This is a distinguishing mark that will become all the more evident as the metaphors of monitor, screen, keyboard give way to more invisible forms of an information interface. Is there a revolution of form? Only if the reader & the author disappear into a text that takes on a life of its own.

bH: How much time spent writing words vs. laying words/images in (HTMLizing) vs. beta-test w/ browsers/systems?

MD: Writing the words is the fun part. I’m not a Web sophisticate, so miekal has bravely shouldered the burden of HTMLing the work, though I’m learning little by little to do some of the more rote tasks like making the links.

ma: Specifically the time taken to fashion a coherent framework for correlating the 500+ sections is quite out of proportion to the time it took to actually write the work. & in the final production stage it took almost 3 weeks full time to get all the links working, create the documents, map & digitize the works for the mediawindow. One thing I’ll say for all the production work is that I got to know the text intimately, in far more detail than I would if I was simply desktop publishing a book. One original vision of the work remains unrealized & that is that I wanted each section (there are 7 sections) to be on a different server in a different physical location, so that the act of reading this “Literature Nation” expressed the virtuality of traveling through information. But a number of the sites that individual sections were placed on were not maintained & access was unreliable. The realm of network-distributed texts is still something I am very much interested in. As for beta testing the beast, I leave that to all my pals on the wr-eye-tings list to give it the once-over.

bH: How deep was collaboration? Maria, did you do digitizing or selection of images, have concept or veto?

MD: On the writing end, collaboration was pretty engaged and profound, though, as I said before, we weren’t actually creating the same text from the inside out as we were in “pleasureTEXTpossession”. For “LitNat,” I took a bunch of photographs of the rich natural life of Cape Cod, where I try to spend as much time as my schedule will allow, and sent them to miekal. Together with Allegra Fi Wakest, miekal did most of the selecting of images and all of the image manipulation/animation, and he and Allegra did the sound track (she also took some of the photos that are featured, including the building demolition on the main page). They did a lot of work in November and December, while I was traveling to various academic conferences, teaching full-time, writing papers, etc., and when he finally sent word that “LitNat” was up and running I was amazed and totally blown away by the multi-ness of the imagery, design, sound, animation. Every time I accessed the Web site I found more and more stuff... it was an aesthetic rush; I couldn’t believe I’d helped to create this world. I imagine I’d have veto, but I haven’t felt the need to exercise it yet.

bH: The leaping labyrinth from section to section recalls the “dividing road” of early interactive novels. Yet it’s a sweet poetic construct, and the image/sound correlatives also soften this binary system. Do the frames give you enough room to play?

MD: Not sure I understand this question, though I like the spirit of it. To me there’s not so much a leaping labyrinth feeling as one of intertextual density made up of recurring words or even whole phrases, themes, and concepts.

ma: The webworld seems divided between those who find frames a valuable way to multi-layer & organize digimation & between those who think frames are the World Wide Web’s answer to the Edsel. I’m a frames junkie, & for many of my works, frames, background sounds & automated cycling of documents play a big part in the work’s performative half-life. I should point out with “LitNat” that all of the sound reduces to less than 20 seconds of samples, so that the sounds would load in reasonable time with a slow connection.

bH: How does “Literature Nation” “fit” with your other work? What next?

MD: Good question. It seems a far cry from my main professional agenda, to bring poetics and cultural studies to bear on each other -- which I do primarily through critique and commentary rather than poetic invention. Methodologically, it is a far cry, but I imagine an argument could be made for their conceptual adjacency. In fact, people used to tell me that my critical writing was very “poetic;” now that I’m writing more “poetry” I think my critical style has become more “prosaic.” I’d like to keep the poetry in the prose, since theoretically I don’t especially believe in those binaries, even if experientially I can “feel” a difference.

ma: Maria has mentioned our other collaboration, “pleasureTEXTpossession,” which remains unfinished though it’s the first project we started. Getting that up, & probing “Text’s” juicy attractions will sew up some loose ends. In my mind, it is related to “Literature Nation,” though their relation in electronic space is best enacted by a dark & forgotten hypertext tunnel.

I have a number of other projects going. I’m finishing up a remake of a 1988 Hypercard audiotoy called “30 Samples for Orchestra.” In its new incarnation it will use Flash. I’m also slowly digitizing an 800 page intermedia long poem I wrote in the late 70s called “Samsara Congeries” (containing text, sound, animation, scores, choreography, & ephemera). & I’m excited by a new Truetype font my 11-year-old son, Zon, is creating. Keep an eye out for SNAKE-TONGUE.

& a question from Joe Keenan:
JK: I’d feel confident in attributing certain texts to miekal or to Maria; others I’d be hard pressed: was every text written by one or the other or were some word-to-word collaborations?

MD: In “LitNat,” we pretty much alternated texts, though there are places where you can see the influence of one rubbing off on the other. Occasionally we’d use words mostly associated with the other person; as you can see, we have pretty distinct and characteristic syntactical styles and vocabularies; I tend toward the baroque and hyperbolic -- 19th century style almost; miekal is more abstract and at the same time more grounded -- more contemporary. When miekal used the word “gilded,” we both remarked that that was the kind of word I’d use.