One well-known feature of the writing produced by poets associated with the Language school is the redirection of readerly attention to the materiality of the word. This interest expressed itself in multiple forms, but one underdiscussed form involves the visual component of Language texts. Visual and concrete poetries are widely cited as historical precursors to new media poetries, but the visual and (re)combinatorial component of Language writing forms a significant bridge or transition between these two projects, most especially in the work of the four writers to be discussed here: Steve McCaffery, Bruce Andrews, Robert Grenier, and Charles Bernstein. In their different ways, these writers all point us toward considering new media poetries as part of the ongoing project of, in the terms of McCaffery's coedited anthology, "Imagining Language" in all its textural and material variety. In their visual works, and in the online re-presentation of those works, they raise questions about seeing and reading, the mark and the sign, circulation and distribution, and the meaning of "materiality" that seem crucial to thinking about new media poetries. Meanwhile, new media poetries fulfil certain impulses towards different forms of materiality in Language writing that were perhaps only nascent or at least partly unfulfilled in the earlier stages of that movement.
In such works as the very early Transitions to the Beast and Broken Mandala (1970), parts of Evoba, "Gnotes," the Carnival panels, Modern Reading (1990) and his video poems, Steve McCaffery has been insistently concerned with "allowing a type of reading to develop that was much closer to the classic category of ‘seeing'" and with "a base sense of the materiality of the letter." He describes this aspect of his work in terms most appropriate to new media poetry, talking in terms of "animated letter shapes," "3-dimensional syntax," "a network of non-linear signifiers." In particular, the transposition of Carnival onto the web is a key moment in McCaffery's effort to make concrete these claims to materiality as the work "deliberately problematizes the simple distinction between seeing and reading and offers itself for both distant viewing and close reading." This web publication also reminds us that works like Carnival can now be circulated on a scale and in a form impossible before. Furthermore, they become readable in a different way, and in the process of movement from paper to monitor their nature as "texts" changes. With these texts, that process involves more than mere re-mediation, as their appearance on the web helps actualize kinds of reading already immanent in the original.
Bruce Andrews' work also exhibits an underacknowledged but substantial visual inventiveness, and Andrews himself has written "The way words fit into a sentence (or a line of thought) doesn't grab me as much as how they relate to the space and silence around them. I like the edges, discreteness, fragments, collision." The visual range of Andrews' writing again represents a bridge between earlier and web-based visual practices in its manipulations of typography, in its use of such features as glyphic inserts, word shapes, pseudo-scientific diagrams and charts, and in the multiple ways in which Andrews places the edges of language fragments in collision on the space of the page. Consideration of the visual in Andrews (going beyond questions of page design to include such projects as his xerographic collaboration with the English poet and artist Bob Cobbing, his work with letter-based geometric signs in "Love Poems," and with the non-referential mark in StandPoint) opens up contexts for understanding his writing—concrete poetry, his intermedia work, his immersion in avant-garde cinema—that situate it both in the early Language school's preoccupation with material textuality and as a precursor to some of the forms of visual materiality characteristic of web-based writing. At the same time, some of Andrews' visual work does tend to remain static and page-bound, marking not just the potential but also the limit of one kind of visually oriented Language writing.
McCaffery and Andrews both trouble the seeing-reading distinction in ways relevant for our thinking about digital poetry. The appearance online of Robert Grenier's "rhymms," barely legible one-of-a-kind poems hand-written in four different pen colors, raises a different set of issues: the electronic circulation of unique texts into more-or-less instant availability and the consequent tension between reproducibility and aura, between current and earlier, even ancient, technologies of writing. Some of these works resolve into palimpsestic but legible words or phrases, while others are closer to the non-referential marks of Andrews' StandPoint or, more anciently, to the earliest cave scratches. As Karl Young, editor of the Light and Dust website where "rhymms" appear, writes, "Robert Grenier's illuminated poems, his main work for the last decade, present a number of problems in reproduction, distribution, and, for some, in reading. These poems are written in colored ink, and require color reproduction. Four-color process printing makes them too expensive to produce. . . . . I hope that the web will help bring Grenier's illuminated poems out of the small and restricted circle of distribution in which they have moved, and make them available to a larger audience. If multiple presentation also makes them easier to understand, so much the better." Far too pricey, as Young says, to produce in book form (though small color xerox packets of them have been published), these works—which Grenier calls his "drawing poems" or "scrawls"—derive considerable aura from the uniqueness, individual manual production, and unavailability of the original "hard" copies. To what extent can their online reproduction be seen as a fulfillment or a contradiction of the originals' impulses towards personalized signature and fiercely specific attention to material texture?
Charles Bernstein started out producing typographically manipulated palimpsests in the 1970s, and the visual explorations in his career since then have ranged from the many verbal/visual collaborations with his wife, the artist Susan Bee, to his co-curatorship of the Poetry Plastique exhibit, to colorful cyberpoems, to recent self-performing cyberessays that focus on the implications of new media for pedagogy and for what we teach about the "nature" of poetry. More than the other poets discussed here, Bernstein has started to theorize digital poetics, produce writing in that mode, and exploit the web's potential for circulation and as a site for discourse about poetry. The sheer range and probing inventiveness of Bernstein's visually oriented poetic activities make him the ideal case study for examining how an engaged poet, critic, teacher, and public intellectual uses his own developing work in digital media to test the adequacy of current pedagogical paradigms for poetry and the relationship of new media poetries to educational institutions.
These poets introduce into the critical conversation around new media poetries the idea of what one might call "transitional materialities": forms of visual text that go beyond traditional word-centered definitions of the poem and look forward to the possibilities and achievements of digital poetics. Marie-Laure Ryan associates print texts with terms such as "unity," "order," "monologism," "sequentiality," "solidity." Readers of Language writing will recognize easily enough the inapplicability of these terms to that writing. Far more applicable to the poets discussed here are Ryan's opposing terms for electronic texts: "diversity," "chaos," "dialogism," "parallelism," "fluidity." The work of McCaffery, Andrews, Grenier, and Bernstein helps move the discussion and historicizing of new media poetries beyond such binary oppositions between the material attributes of print and electronic texts.