Concrete poets are particularly obvious pre-cursors to digital poetry; through an attempt to draw attention to the materiality of both word and the medium of the page as well as an emphasis on the physicality of language, the constructedness and flexibility of meaning.
But what if a poem is based upon a conception of space as “multiple, variable, and vibrant” — where the literal ground is always shifting and heterogeneous — then how are we to understand the text? Or, to put it in another way, what if the ground upon which the poem is built (and only a digital poem could accomplish this) is not Platonic—is not, as Brian Rotman puts it, an ideal realm “‘out there’ somewhere, existing prior to human beings and their culture, untouched by change, independent of energy and matter, beyond the confines and necessities of space and time . . .” (p. 127)? We could still try to use rhythm, rhyme, line-breaks and so on to understand the poem but only if it were assumed that the resulting reading would be utterly contingent and, since the text could completely change in only a brief moment, such a reading would also ultimately tell us very little about the poem — or it would only tell us that it is comprised of uncountable difference.
But what if a poem is based upon a conception of space as “multiple, variable, and vibrant” — where the literal ground is always shifting and heterogeneous — then how are we to understand the text? Or, to put it in another way, what if the ground upon which the poem is built (and only a digital poem could accomplish this) is not Platonic—is not, as Brian Rotman puts it, an ideal realm “‘out there’ somewhere, existing prior to human beings and their culture, untouched by change, independent of energy and matter, beyond the confines and necessities of space and time . . .” (p. 127)? We could still try to use rhythm, rhyme, line-breaks and so on to understand the poem but only if it were assumed that the resulting reading would be utterly contingent and, since the text could completely change in only a brief moment, such a reading would also ultimately tell us very little about the poem — or it would only tell us that it is comprised of uncountable difference.
