«Poetry as a Practice»

Rhizome launches Poetry as a Practice», an online project where six poets approach internet language as a bodily, social, and material process. New poetry works will be published every Monday through April 6, 2015. Co-presented by Rhizome and the New Museum as part of the «First Look» exhibition series; curated by Harry Burke. In his 1976 series of Artforum articles, «Inside the White Cube,» Brian O’Doherty made the simple but powerful claim that the art gallery is not a neutral context. Despite its presentation as invisible or natural, the white-painted gallery space asserts a distinct ideological bearing onto the production and exhibition of art.

In similar fashion, the computer and the internet shape the production and reception of poetry. Any text document is supported by a complex ensemble of code, hardware, and infrastructure. On the web, as on paper, there is no such thing as a «blank page.» Through the work of six poets—Alex Turgeon, Penny Goring, Tan Lin, Ye Mimi, Melissa Broder, and not_I—”Poetry as Practice” considers online poetry as a process embedded in material, technological systems, and everyday, embodied experiences. Released each Monday over a six-week period, these works are newly commissioned, with the exception of Ye’s, and play out across a range of media, including online video, JavaScript, and NewHive. Through this hybrid approach, poetry is considered as media, and digital media—which can be thought of as a linguistic form or computer code—is activated as poetry.

Whether it’s in the use of vernacular styles (Goring’s selfie collages, Ye’s home movies and postcards, Turgeon’s computer illustrations), rule-based composition (Lin and Broder), or self-erasure (not_I), the poets downplay individual authorship and underscore the influence of the surrounding conditions that shape their work. However, they refuse to be overdetermined by these conditions: the works are often introspective in their approach, systematically yet lyrically evoking particular moods and points of view.

One can never remove the speaking subject from the semiology of the system, to paraphrase Julia Kristeva. Poetry cannot stand outside of the conditions of its production and circulation. Instead, poetry as practice speaks within them: embodied, performative, incomplete, often collaborative, and in a constant state of coalescence, always negotiating with the worlds, forms, and subjects that surround it. (from press release)

To the gif poems combined with the animated calligrams by  Alex Turgeon,with his  Better Homes and Gardens Revisited (published on March 2),an to  DELETIA – self portrait with no self (2015)an epic poem published in seventy pages realized on the web platform  NewHive, it will follow works by  Tan Lin (today, March 16), Ye Mimi (March 23), Melissa Broder (March 30), Not_I (April 6). Stay tuned on Rhizome!