The Kinetic Poetics of Sherwin Bitsui, Natalie Diaz, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and Layli Long Soldier (2025)

Kinetic Poetry

Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities, 2021

This chapter proposes a brief history of kinetic poetry as a transmedia and cross-artistic form. It connects the most relevant threads of a possible historiographic narrative of how kinetic poetry has been evolving since the beginning of the twentieth century at the intersection of literature, visual arts, cinema, animation, and technology, across various media. It argues for a transmedia approach because it does not place kinetic poetry at the heart of computational media and as a digital literature-specific genre, but rather as a temporal form that is media and language-specific, but also culturally and politically situated. Kinetic poetry is a form of poetry that relies on spatiotemporal transitions with expressive literary, visual and aural layers. Throughout the twentieth century, authors composed kinetic poems with varied media, such as motorized sculptures, celluloid film, video, holography, and computers. As it is unveiled, the origins of kinetic art and kinetic poetry can be traced back to the Constructivists’ "Realisticheskii Manifest" and the Dadaists’ praxis. When Marcel Duchamp staged puns via rotoreliefs in the 35 mm film "Anémic Cinéma" (1926), he opened up the way for hybrid works that can be experienced through the lenses of cinema, textual art in motion, and kinetic poetry. Later on, language went from projection to interaction, first with the investigations by the experimental poets in the 1950s-80s and then with the explorations by the digital poets from the 1980s onwards. Therefore, the discussion of kinetic poetry’s cultural and technological history goes back to early abstract films, mechanical poetry, film poetry, videopoetry, holopoetry, to finally present algorithmically programmed animation. Because this narrative is heavily Euro- and American-centric, this chapter invites readers to contest the following historiographic version of kinetic poetry’s trajectory, and to share knowledge about works created in other latitudes, especially by women and non-white authors.

Close Readings of the Historic and Digital Avant- Gardes: An Archeology of Hispanic Kinetic Poetry

In digital poetry, the innovative interplay of the figural and the textual has drawn on and magnified historic avant-garde notions of visual poetry. Despite the apparent newness of contemporary technological poetic experiments linking graphics, text, video, and sound, media theorists (such as Siegfried Zielinski, Erkki Huhtamo, or Thomas Elsaesser, among others) 1 have long recognized that the "new" in "new media" is part of a continuum with the past and that the digital can be better understood through an archeological perspective. I intend to examine several experimental poems through an exercise of "close reading," as announced in the title. The "reading" in close reading functions as a metaphor for other hermeneutic practices, such as close "listening" in the case of phonetic poetry or performance, and close "viewing" in the case of filmic and visual poems. One of the practices I examine-script animation-contradicts an ontological difference assumed to separate paper-based from digital media: the notion that the printed word in books and magazines is static, while the digital word displays kinetic qualities derived from time-based media (such as film). While time-based media have had a profound effect on the digital, e-poetry has also drawn on its so-called static antecedents: visual and concrete poetry, sound poetry, etc. The incorporation of moving text ranks among the more spectacular effects of digital poetics, and in combination with the use of anthropomorphic shapes, activates the viewer's affective response.

Depending or Transgressing? Kinetic Writing that Belongs and Breaks Away

2021

This essay explores the relation between the avant-garde and the popular in kinetic writing. To do so, it draws on Alberto Pimenta’s argument on the degrees of “dependence” and “transgression” in literary art. It questions whether specific examples of kinetic writing seem to depend on or transgress, or whether they belong to a previous tradition while, at the same time, breaking from it with innovative aspects. First, it provides a working definition of the terms “avant-garde” and “popular”, since they generate multiple interpretations. Second, it discusses possible ways of going beyond the notion that the arts are based on the distinct zones of the “avant-garde” and “popular”, by shifting attention to the coexistence of various streams of influence between the two. The debate around popular forms of kinetic writing across such a wide spectrum as literature, art, cinema, and design entails an understanding of function, the pragmatics of language, artistic expression, communication, and commercial constraints. By zooming in on works of early animation film as well as film titles, this essay then proposes a complementary narrative to how kinetic poetry by avant-garde artists and experimental poets coevolved with other forms of kinetic writing during the twentieth century.

CONTEMPORARY POETICS edited by Louis Armand

2007

Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study--a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and cybernetics--this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary. In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a poetics that extends beyond our own time, as a mere marker of present-day literary activity, their work addresses the limits of a writing "practice"--beginning with Stéphane Mallarmé in the late nineteenth century--that engages concretely with what it means to be contemporary. Contributors: Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Kevin Nolan, Donald F. Theall, Bob Perelman, Simon Critchley, D.J. Huppatz, Michel Delville, Andrew Norris, Ricardo L. Nirenberg, Keston Sutherland, Nicole Tomlinson, Julian Savage, Bruce Andrews, Augusto de Campos, Darren Tofts, Gregory L. Ulmer, J. Hillis Miller, McKenzie Wark, Alan Sondheim, Louis Armand, Steve McCaffery, Allen Fisher.

A Vanguard Projected in Motion: Early Kinetic Poetry in Portuguese

This essay serves to promote a broader awareness of the pioneering efforts in videographic poetry produced in Portuguese in the decades leading up to the formation of the WWW. At

Somatic Poetics

Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 2022

This article considers scientific data and methods taken as a vocabulary for a visual language of poetics, shaping an artistic practice exploring the liminal poetics of space, time, science and mythology, equally considered. These artworks focus on the moving image as an immersive, architectonic construct, one that makes it possible to blur the boundary between space and time. They are cinematic environments that create a space of spatial and temporal ambiguity, open to the performative role of the viewer in composing the unfolding narrative. The artworks presented here began in the crossover between art and science, technology and society, exploring topics and incorporating methods from each area. Transdisciplinary processes play a critical role in this artistic research. These works reflect cinema approached as a multimodal field of possibilities in which montage motivates movement and focus through this field, creating a participatory composition of sight, sound, movement and memory that immerses viewers by actuating somatic perception. Shape, scale, immersion, interactivity, simultaneity, embodiment, implementation and the manipulation of time create concrete metaphors that echo the multivalent content of the works: a collaboration with 300 tropical spiders to create a Kino, then letting the audience walk freely among them (or the spiders freely among the audience); an immersive environment enacting the space-time of glacial ice to experience the time of a different form of matter as somatosensory experience; a journey through the human history of the Moon, transcending time, political ideologies, realities and cultures as an encompassing field of simultaneous views and sounds; performing a 2000-year-old act of Thessalian magic on the skyline of Hong Kong. Combining the technological tools available to cinema and science, contrasting magnifications and speeds of observation reveal a material poetics beyond appearance. The artworks presented here elaborate the details of cardinal subjects, diving deep into fundamental domains to unravel the cultural implications embedded within the aesthetics of their data artefacts.

Slow Lightning: Image, Time, and an Erotics of Reading

Remapping Latina/o Litrature, 2016

Poetics, that is to say, poetic form and function, forms the weft and warp of the fabric of the cultural politics of el movimiento and its aesthetic-political legacies. You can trace it from the earliest articulations of the ide-alized masculine Chicano subject as in Corky Gonzalez's "I am Joaquín" through the Chicana feminist revisions of the 80s, as in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera : The New Mestiza , and onward. The racially marked and gendered bodies in which Chican@ writers move through the world surely shape their perceptions and their poetics-the making and circulation of poetic texts. This essay takes up the question of how the body becomes textualized, and conversely how texts take on a kind of embodiment. This dynamic, I suggest, gives us ways to think about sub-jectivity that accounts for both the material conditions in which we live, as well as those affective bonds (like those found in desire, in grief, and in the nation) that complicate how we understand that materiality. Rather than autobiographical identities that are affi rmed, I suggest that Eduardo Corral's poems articulate affective modes of being. His poems are driven by forms of desire, memory, and intimacy that textualize the ways in which subjectivities are embodied.

Risking the Perception of Poetics: An Introduction

Waiting for Omar Gatlato, 2019

Catalog essay for "Waiting for Omar Gatlato: A Survey of Contemporary art from Algeria and Its Diaspora," an exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York, October 26th, 2019 - March 15th, 2020 and curated by Natasha Marie Llorens. Graphic design by Eider Corral.

"The Plasticity of Poetry"

Literature Compass, 2006

By comparing avant-garde visual poetry to the avant-garde architecture of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, this essay describes how one virtually “moves through” poetic space. Appealing to examples from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffery and Susan Howe and contemporary Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña, I steer the reader through complex visual poems based on the grounds that a disruption of the reader’s sense of space has aesthetic and political implications.

Agorapoetics: Poetics After Postmodernism

This collection of nine papers explores the possibilities of a poetics which, after three decades of postmodernist experiments, wishes to refocus on the social and political dimension of the creative enterprise. In the latter years of the twentieth century, poetics has seen a variety of styles and modalities that have both called into question the very nature and need of poetry, and put forth a number of hypotheses. Among these we can list performance art, hybridity with pop and rap music, parody and collage, multilingualism, and an apparently acritical recycling of older or traditional forms. The lyric tradition seems to have continued unperturbed, especially in university settings. What seems to have disappeared from the scene is a poetics of the public sphere, one which is more in tune with broader movements that grew from the smoking debris of the Twin Towers in 2001. In a way, suddenly even postmodernism collapsed. Within a few short years, new poetics emerge (clearly some had been in gestation for decades), such as immigrant poetry, hyphenated poetry, poetry in translation, prose poems, computer-generated textualities, memorialism, technoallegories, and in general political poetry after the void left behind by the Beat generation and European committed writings of the 1970s and the 1980s. The questions the critic and the philosopher ask themselves are: what is the meaning of this transition? What carries over, what is gone for good? And what prospects lie before us? This collection addresses the necessity, in the context of this problematic set of issues, of whether new critical models need to be devised in order to better recognize, describe and relaunch a poetics for the twenty–first century.