Digital writing is manifestly not handwriting. Digital writing in fact emphasizes the distance between the scribe and the operator, between calligraphy and the entering of data. There are crucial material differences (in modes of behavior, in degree of bodily investment) between an act in which the hand, arm, and even shoulder exert pressure through a pointy instrument to produce marks on a flat surface and an act in which a set of fine motor movements restricted largely to the fingers reproduce through a keyboard pre-fabricated fonts on a radiating screen.
And yet, digital writing is nostalgic for the body. It misses the hand. The invention of fonts imitating personal or generic “handwriting” is only one among many manifestations of what I am calling digital writing’s “nostalgia” for the handwritten. Others include animation and dragging techniques made possible by software programs such as Director and Flash. My claim in this paper is that e-poetry, a small but significant subset of digital writing, is the forum in which such a nostalgia for handwriting—and its gestural/libinal/kinetic force—is expressed in the most imaginative ways. E-poets manifest—perhaps far more than their typewriter-bound predecessors—an intense nostalgia for the handwritten, and they do so despite their initial or explicit celebration of the technical mediations offered by the computer.
I therefore propose a corollary argument to the effect that e-poets belong to a genealogy grounded not in Concrete or Visual poetry, but rather in Gestural Abstraction (a movement in painting initiated in the fifties and sixties). I place digital experiments with animated lettering in juxtaposition with similar attempts on the part of painters such as Cy Twombly and Robert Morris to reveal the gestural energy embodied in inscription. In the spirit of these painters, digital poets also want to resurrect what the historian of writing James Février calls the “image-force,” the libidinally invested trace that constitutes the origin of the sign. This desire is manifested not only in digital reproductions of handwriting, as in the work of Sam Stark, but also in many other pieces that strive to restore a kinetic dimension to the letter. Interactive procedures that add movement to a letter or sign translate a nostalgia for embodiment, for performance, for the body’s investment in making signs.