Juxtaposer

At the outset I apologize for this post being a bit slapdash: I've been preparing my presentation for this week, but I will not allude to it here. I want it to reach you (classmates) immediately when I present it tomorrow. Were I to mention it at all now, it would surely be compromised.

Now then, for Strickland: what interests me about her work is that it is first and foremost poetry, not programming - i.e. she has a way with words. Now if we can just ignore her interpretations of her own work, we'd be all set.

Furthermore, she is clearly a formalist. She gives herself constraints, writing many poems of similar structures, dividing 'em all up into discreet units. Even on the page, her segments have two general types of meaning: micro- and macrocosmic. Let's take V: WaveSon.nets & Losing L'una as an example. To start at the macrocosmic side, we can read the book as a whole. Then we can read each side as a whole (e.g. WaveSon.nets). Getting smaller, we can read a series of son.nets that begin with a new sentence and end with a period as its own unit (e.g. WaveSon.nets #12-14). Then down to the individual son.net, the individual stanza, the individual line, the individual word. Each unit means something on its own, yet that meaning changes as enters into any larger context.

This is classic enjambment: to use breaks to alter both sound & sense. The technique, of course, isn't anything new. John Milton's Paradise Lost employs it constantly, and his brief note on the verse structure of his epic is a classic defense of enjambment. He writes that most important to a poem is "true musical delight," which "consists onely in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings." The modernists, in opposition to the prim elegance of Victorian style, began extensive experiments with enjambment, and the technique's prevalence has only increased to the present day.

What's new with Strickland, however, is the enjambment between poems, and not just lines or stanzas, a fact that she foregrounds in the Losing L'una section by giving each tercet a unique call number. Strickland further amplifies this enjambment by the third Web part of V (Vniverse) cutting up her WaveSon.nets into tercets (even though they rarely appear as such in the book version) and assigning each a star in the sky. The reader can then explore by dragging his/her mouse over the stars and follow his/her own reading order.

Thus, by juxtaposing new segments of the poem, thousands of new meanings open up (some better than others). Yet this is not merely cynical fragmentation or resistance to interpretation: the new meanings only become possible because each unit works as a discrete entity which, when juxtaposed next to a different unit, creates a new meaning that proceeds from the two.

This method of juxtaposition is nothing new either. One of its more recent theorizations is soviet montage theory in film studies: juxtapose one image with another and their clash will create a third meaning. One of the older formulations of this kind of juxtaposition comes from the "Great Preface" to the Mao edition of the Chinese Classic of Poetry (詩經), which dates (the preface, that is) to the first century A.D. at the latest. In this preface, the author writes that one of the primary techniques used in the poems is called xing (興) or oblique comparison, which is distinct from bi (比) or metaphor. The clearest illustration of this technique in English comes from Ezra Pound, who had read the "Great Preface":

In the Station of a Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

In any case, what makes Strickland interesting in this regard is that she uses new media to embrace this proliferation of meaning through juxtaposition rather than resist the accretion of meaning. Meaning (and yes, that means semantic meaning) is impossible to shuck off. Why not exploit it?