“An Archeology of the Future. E-Poetry before E-Poetry”

“An Archeology of the Future: E-Poetry before E-Poetry” addresses the contradictions and the dark sides of paleo digital mediated art before the advent of the world wide web. The role of the military apparatus in the development of the technology that elicited the archeological experiment in computer poetry, the active involvement of scientists and scholars over that of writers and artists in the generation of early digital permutational poetry, seen by many as more of an oddity than a legitimate literary practice, the belatedness of American artists in joining the international scene of those who tried to unlock the potential offered by the machine despite the difficulties to access the sturdy expensive mainframes of the 1960s and to obtain the assistance of specialized technicians are considered in the first part of the paper. There follows an appraisal of the reactions to a poetics of the algorithm that many found a threat to authoriality, especially after Barthes’s death of the author and Foucault’s dissolution of the humanistic idea of mankind, and even avantgarde artists approached cautiously. In the closing section, the focus shifts from the new medium to the various forms of remediation conceived by North- and South-American poets who, throughout the 1980s, looked at the keyboard of both the typewriter and the PC as the device guaranteeing continuity with their previous work on the materiality of language as exemplified by concrete poetry. Their adoption of the new writing interfaces to refashion for the screen early typographic poems and to create others anew resulted from the acknowledgement that the gears-and-girders world experienced by their Modernist masters was quickly disappearing in front of the deceptively immaterial universe of the digital. In the transition to the third millennium, when the global explosion of the world wide web completed the paradigmatic change that had begun in the aftermath of World War II, e-poetry could legitimately enter the canon as an other poetry, both in the Americas and the world over.