Màrius SERRA

Hail to cyber poetry, if a real poet made it

(Text of presentation of the CD ROM "Ciberpoesia Catalana 2.1")

Providing adjectives for poetry is like putting sugar on dry champagne. Readers do it in order to understand each other and historicists do it in order to make themselves understood. Sometimes, even poets do it, when they are already tired of poeticizing, but even if they dare to call it pure poetry, either concrete poetry, or visual poetry, or phonetic poetry, or surrealist poetry, or x-ist poetry, they say poetry and not much else. Thin patch poetry, this is what Joan Brossa called it. Short and thin patch. Thin patched. This is why providing adjectives for poetry is only useful for the time when we are not producing or consuming it, reading or writing it, creating or re-creating it. And perhaps this is why many poets have decided to transform these possible adjectives in prefixes, reducing their pomposity and making new derivates of the word ‘poetry’. This is how names such as polypoetry or cyberpoetry have been born. Cyberpoetry is surfing freely in this CD with a variety of proposals which expand from the simple illustrated poem to truly interactive poetry, finding a whole range of poems which seem to be aimed at proving that Brossian ‘words are the objects’.

The digital era has provided new expressive ways for poetic practice. The language fusion promoted by the 20th century historical avant-gardes increases its potentiality with computing tools. Sound and calligraphy go together like never before. Lets shake the five letters and the image of the word shake, they constitute a new image that will later be in motion and will allow sound to wrap it. Calligraphic animation brings letters, words and whole lines to life and vivifies them. Anaemic cinema converges with the friendly magic of the learned poetry on the computer screen. From this new habitat a furiously contemporary expressive form is born which, in my opinion, belongs to mimologic tradition founded by Cratil of Plato.

One of the most passionate debates in history is that of Socrates with the Platonic Cratil on the origin of language. The dialectic contenders are Hermogenes and Cratil. The former supports the so called conventionalist thesis (thései) according to which the names of objects are the result of an agreement and a convention between human beings (sunthèke kai homologia). On the other hand, Cratil founds the naturalist thesis (phusei) according to which every object has received a fair denomination which flows from natural cohabitation that etimologists will later identify with onomatopoeia. In mocking it, the debate can be reduced into someone capable to say: ‘if this is so clearly cheese I don’t know how on earth they call it fromage’ versus an apparent ‘organizing committee of social consulting (sic) aimed at helping Adam in his dark task as an onomaturgist’.

The heritage of this open debate is a remarkable one and it constitutes the so called cratilism. Among the determined conventionalists we can find: Aristotle, Boeci, Saint Thomas, Roger Bacon, Locke, Turgot, Hegel, Saussure… The non-conventionalist positions, also known as cratilists or mimologists, provide more heterogenic argumentations. Saint Agustine, John Wallis, Leibniz, Rowland Jones, Wachter, Brosses… constitute the range of degrees of opposition to absolute conventionalism.

The debate, in some of its multiple scopes, is still alive, because the enigmas around uncertain origins are always inviting and, in this case (as in that of the origin of life) we have missed all the trains that would have led us to certainty. At the end of the way of this fascinating sign system which allows us to communicate we can’t find the Nile springs. Not even a British colonialist adventurer whom we can ask ‘Dr.Livingstone, I presume?’. There is only hollowness, that of Babel. Speculation is born and mirrors itself in the object of study.

From the works of Gerard Genette, the critic, who has been one of the main promoters of Cratilist debate in his work Mimologiques (1976), we can infer that cyberpoetry is a part of this unsolved conflict of language, using the apparent verbal mimesis for the genesis of poems formed by calligraphy, sound and image. Cratilism maintains that if painting can imitate the represented model, a name can faithfully imitate the objects it refers to. Mimology, then, is a non-arbitrary relationship between the word and the object that can appear both in speech and in writing. Few sources such as the digital can bring mimophonies and mimographies together in a single poem. This is because, in the end, poetry proves that language in its wholeness is much more than a mere sign system in order to serve the purposes of communication. Genette even suggests that there is no qualitative difference between spontaneous and deliberate production. "Si l'écriture imite la parole, qui de son côtè imite les choses, il s'ensuit nécessairement que l'écriture, même sans le chercher, imitera les choses; et réciproquement, si la parole et l'écriture imitent les choses chacune de son côté, elles imiteront inévitablement l'une l'autre."

Therefore we claim in favour of cyberpoetry : ‘Hail to cyber poetry, if a real poet made it’.