Christian Bök responds to the question posed by OEI (2001) on the future of poetry after language poetry. He expresses the anxiety that the electronic age brings to poetry, as well as evoking McLuhan’s expectation of a blurring of boundaries within not only senses but creative expression: artistic and romantic strongholds such as ‘inspiration’ have been affected by the electronic medium and environment:
"Poets may have to become advanced typesetters and computer programmers - technicians, polyglot in a variety of machinic [sic] dialects. Poets may have to learn the exotic jargon of scientific discourses just to make use of a socially relevant lexicon, and now that cybernetics has effectively discredited the romantic paradigm of inspiration, poets may have to take refuge in a new set of aesthetic metaphors for the unconscious, adapting themselves to the mechanical procedures of automatic writing, aleatoric [sic] writing, and mannerist writing - poetry that no longer expresses our attitudes so much as it processes our databanks." (Bök, 2001)
This posits the question as to whether the electronic age, with its cross-sensory perceptions has allowed for the kind of unity that McLuhan anticipated. In Counterblast (1969), McLuhan commented that, “By surpassing writing, we have regained our sensorial WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural plane, but on a cosmic plane. We have evoked a super-civilized sub-primitive man.” I would argue that the concrete poetry between the 60’s and 80’s offered something close to this goal of sensorial wholeness of the sub-primitive man, but that with the Internet age, for poetry at least, there exists an anxiety - which perhaps is simply characteristic of its newness – with regards to the sensorial simultaneity.
"Poets may have to become advanced typesetters and computer programmers - technicians, polyglot in a variety of machinic [sic] dialects. Poets may have to learn the exotic jargon of scientific discourses just to make use of a socially relevant lexicon, and now that cybernetics has effectively discredited the romantic paradigm of inspiration, poets may have to take refuge in a new set of aesthetic metaphors for the unconscious, adapting themselves to the mechanical procedures of automatic writing, aleatoric [sic] writing, and mannerist writing - poetry that no longer expresses our attitudes so much as it processes our databanks." (Bök, 2001)
This posits the question as to whether the electronic age, with its cross-sensory perceptions has allowed for the kind of unity that McLuhan anticipated. In Counterblast (1969), McLuhan commented that, “By surpassing writing, we have regained our sensorial WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural plane, but on a cosmic plane. We have evoked a super-civilized sub-primitive man.” I would argue that the concrete poetry between the 60’s and 80’s offered something close to this goal of sensorial wholeness of the sub-primitive man, but that with the Internet age, for poetry at least, there exists an anxiety - which perhaps is simply characteristic of its newness – with regards to the sensorial simultaneity.
