&Now 2019 Conference

What is revealed and reshaped within the process of recombining texts? Four panelists share the radical possibilities that emerge out of their remixing practices.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s “Forever Gwen Brooks & Intentionally Black Computational Poetics” explores the use of computation to reveal and challenge discrimination embedded at the level of computer code and to invent counter narratives that decolonize norms of race, gender, aesthetics, and language. These interventions find ways to use computation to invigorate and extend important works of Black poets into a digital future. Bertram will focus on two web-based generators: Forever Gwen Brooks, a poetry generator, and a work-in-progress generator of near-infinite Millie & Christine McCoy syncopated sonnets from Tyehimba Jess’s Olio.

Joel Katelnikoff’s “Lyn Hejinian Recombined: ‘everything is subject to visibility’” investigates Hejinian’s poetry and poetics applying a cut-up / remix / montage technique directly to the materials of her textual corpus. The result is an essay that is capable of simultaneously speaking about Hejinian’s critical concepts, speaking through Hejinian’s language and syntax, and producing a metanarrative theorization of the cut-up / remix / montage process. Katelnikoff creates a hybrid mind with Hejinian’s work, creating linkages that would otherwise elude one’s cognition, resulting in Hejinian-inspired aphorisms that reject closure, while also inviting the reader/listener’s own radical perceptual engagement.

Katie Schaag’s “The Infinite Woman” is a feminist post-conceptual erasure poetry project that performatively excavates the voice of “the infinite woman” encased within a male-authored, first-person fictional narrative: Edison Marshall’s novel The Infinite Woman (1950). Schaag extracts and rearranges sentences from the book containing the word “I” within a lyric poem to recontextualize the voice of the female protagonist, satirizing the novel with a melodramatic tonal and affective register and producing surprising moments of imaginative feminist agency. With a team of Georgia Tech computer science and computational media students (Alayna Panlilio, Ryan Power, Josh Terry, Alex Yang, and Jeffrey Zhang), she is currently developing a digital extension of the project: a cross-platform app that remixes lines from Marshall’s The Infinite Woman with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

Marci Vogel’s “Inside the Tree of Battles: A Dendrochronology of War [with a selection from «leavings»]" asks how critical scholarship, translation practice, and creative literary enactment might converge with knowledge production to uncover alternative modes of thinking and, ultimately, new solutions. Vogel’s contemporary study of proto-feminist poet Christine de Pizan (1365-1430) proposes innovative models for engaging with literary works, and for creating them. Influenced by Christine's unabashed mixing and merging of genres and multitude of rhetorical forms, this sequence from Vogel's book-length critical-creative study, XENO » GLOSSIA, follows a nested chronology of violence only to unravel formerly inscribed histories and introduce a sequence of lyrical erasures against war.