Forms of textuality emerging on the World Wide Web are modifying some of the basic assumptions of language-centered poetics, even as many of these poetries predicted some of the attributes of new media textuality. My point of departure will be the genre of the "language text," an extended nonnarrative prose poetry produced by writers associated with the Language School (Clark Coolidge, Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, myself, and others). Theories of probability after Information Theory show how a relation of communication to certainty and belief motivates the alternation of information, noise, and redundancy in these texts. Indeed, one of the central political projects of the Language School in the 1970s and 1980s, before its partial relapse into decentered/author-centered lyricism in the 1990s, was the use of paratactic, nonnarrative texts to disclose and alter the ideological structures of everyday life under late capitalism. Such a practice of unmasking depended on sequence of poetic utterance for its analysis and its effect: though these texts renegotiate both narrative and lyric aspects of poetry, they depend on a strict succession of increments to engage their meaning effects. With the rise of web-based media for poetry and poetics, spatially and temporally disjunct forms of distributed/mediated authorship supersede the crucial aspect of in-time delivery. How have forms of the "language text" intersected with such a remediation of authorship?
Here I will suggest ways in which pre-digital precursors and practitioners of the "language text" begin to explore a distributed rather than linear authorship. Beginning with the work of poet Larry Eigner in the 1950s, the occasions of poetry are linked in ways that extend beyond the paratactic equivalences of serial form. The composition of "language texts" themselves often involved disjunct and nonsequential assembly; compositional technique in these works anticipates forms of distributed authorship and opens the way for nonsequential reading practices. But once the crucial aspect of a time-based poetics is distributed in new media, what becomes of the original project of ideology critique? Here I will suggest a danger: that a mediated relation of form (interface, search engine, listserv) to content (archive, database, documents) renders the "language text" as homologous to the commodified and unreflective service functions of "content providers." In order to repoliticize the form of the "language text," the politics of distributed authorship must be taken into account. I will contrast the web interventions of Alan Sondheim to the global political framework of Rodrigo Toscano's poly-lingual texts to assess these possibilities.