From January 5th through the 7th at the Washington State Convention Center in Room 609, visitors will have the opportunity to view/read/interact with: e-literature from the Electronic Literature Collection Volumes One and Two; historically significant works such as those by bpNichol and those published by Eastgate; locative works such as Kate Armstrong’s “Ping;” formally experimental works such as David Jhave Johnson’s “softies;” multimodal narratives such as Christine Wilks’ “Underbelly;” literary games such as Ian Bogost’s “A Slow Year“; and mobile works such as Mark Amerika’s “Immobilité.” These are just some of many different modes of e-literature that will be on display. The complete list of works is available on the exhibit website.

Also, on Friday January 6th from 8pm to 10.30pm, there will be an MLA off-site reading of electronic literature at Richard Hugo House (1634 11th Ave  Seattle, WA 98122-2419). If you are in Seattle in early January, please make sure you stop by as it’s a rare treat indeed to have the opportunity to hear these extraordinarily innovative writers read together: Nick Montfort, Stephanie Strickland, Marjorie Luesebrink, Jim Andrews, Erin Costello and Aaron Angello, Mark Marino, Talan Memmott, John Cayley, Ian Bogost, Brian Kim Stefans, and Kate Armstrong.

Look at the table of contents and you’ll see that McLuhan’s piece, “Culture and Technology,” is nestled among contributions by pioneers of Dada such as Rauol Hausmann to pioneers of computer generated poetry Max Bense and Margaret Masterman; it’s also included along with essays and poems by “typescape” poets Franz Mon and Dom Sylvester Houedard, work by cut-up master William Burroughs, and even the more bookbound Robert Creeley.

In this single collection, we not only get a sense of McLuhan as engaged with poetics but we see the poets as writing thoroughly activist media poems. They are even activist in the sense that McLuhan was imagining when he wrote in his Astronauts of Inner-Space contribution that “…if politics is the art of the possible, its scope must now, in the electric age, include the shaping and programming of the entire sensory environment as a luminous work of art.” Politics as art and poetry; art and poetry as politics.

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It is remarkable that in just ten years, since the publication of the first book on electronic literature (Loss Glazier’s Digital Poetics in 2001), e-literature has firmly established itself as a thriving field. However, all too often, readings of e-literature (or digital-born writing that makes the most of the capabilities of its medium) take the form of accounts of what appears on the screen, with little attention to the material context of the writing – whether its hardware or software. Or, conversely, such readings point to how e-literature reminds us of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message. Instead, this panel takes up Katherine Hayles’ injunction for “media-specific analysis” of e-literature by focusing on the defining role of the interface in particular. Our argument is this: personal computers from the 1980s as much as the latest multitouch devices are finally revealing themselves not just as media but as media whose functioning depends on interfaces that frame what can and cannot be written. Further, e-literature often deliberately works against or draws attention to the strictures of digital writing interfaces and so it is an ideal site to explore this tight inter-connection between writing and writing interface. All four presentations, then, try to shift the definition of “interface” outside its conventional usage (in which interface is usually defined quite broadly as the intermediary layer between a user and a digital computer or computer program) and apply it to digital writing/media from the last twenty years to mean the layer between the reader and particular computer platforms which allows the reader to interact with a literary text.

As an example of this approach, Dene Grigar’s paper opens our panel with a detailed discussion of the exhibit “Early Authors of Electronic Literature: The Eastgate School, Voyager Artists, and Independent Productions” (now installed at the University of Washington). Grigar looks specifically at the major technological shifts in affordances and constraints provided by early computer interfaces and the ways in which e-literature writers from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s worked with and against these interfaces. For example, she discusses the command-line interface of the Apple IIe – which was released in 1983 – as an example of an interface that exemplifies an ideology wholly different from the now dominant Graphic User Interface. Thus, the command-line interface also makes possible entirely different texts and entirely different modes of thinking/creating such as that exemplified by bpNichol’s “First Screening” from 1984. Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink then offer a co-presentation in which they move the discussion into the 21st century by focusing on works included in the recently published Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two – an online anthology that highlights and preserves exemplary e-literature from 2001 – 2010. This collection features a stunning variety of interface choices in works of animation, generation, augmented reality, gaming, hypertext, AI-based interactive drama, interactive fiction, poetry and video.

Strickland and Luesebrink focus in particular on e-literature whose interface requires the reader’s bodily movement as a fundamental component as well as those texts whose reading calls for a knowledge of code as well as a familiarity with network forms such as the database, personal home page, Frequently Asked Questions list, blog, listserv, commercial website, wiki, or email. Thus, while they acknowledge the interface defines what is or can be written, Strickland and Luesebrink demonstrate that the interface also creates the reader.

I, Lori Emerson, will then take a slightly different approach in thatI argue recent e-literature by Judd Morrissey and Jason Nelson represents a broad movement in e-literature to draw attention to the move toward the so-called “interface free” – or, the interface that seeks to disappear altogether by becoming as “natural” as possible. It is against this troubling attempt to mask the workings of the interface and how it delimits creative production that Judd Morrissey creates “The Jew’s Daughter” – a work in which readers are invited to click on hyperlinks in the narrative text, links which do not lead anywhere so much as they unpredictably change some portion of the text. Likewise working against the clean and transparent interface of the Web, in “game, game, game and again game,” Jason Nelson’s hybrid poem-videogame self-consciously embraces a hand-drawn, hand-written interface while deliberately undoing videogame conventions through nonsensical mechanisms that ensure players never advance past level 121/2. As such, both Morrissey and Nelson intentionally incorporate interfaces that thwart readers’ access to the text so that they are forced to see how such interfaces are not natural so much as they define what and how we read and write.

Finally, Mark Sample provides a close-reading of one work in particular that in fact takes advantage of the “interface free” multitouch display: released just in the last year, “Strange Rain” is an experiment in digital storytelling for Apple iOS devices (the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) designed by new media artist Erik Loyer. As dark storm clouds shroud the screen of the iOS device, the player can take advantage of the way in which the multi-touch interface is supposedly “interface-free” – the player can touch and tap its surface, causing what Loyer describes as “twisting columns of rain” to splash down upon the player’s first-person perspective. In the app’s “whispers” and “story” modes “Strange Rain” unites two longstanding tropes of e-literature: the car crash – the most famous occurring in Michael Joyce’s Afternoon (1990); and falling letters – words that descend on the screen or even in large-scale installation pieces such as Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain (1999). Sample argues “Strange Rain” transcends the familiar tropes of car crashes and falling text, reconfiguring the interface as a means to transform confusion into certainty, and paradoxically, intimacy into alienation.

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Between the much-needed efforts of the Electronic Literature Organization‘s Electronic Literature Directory (ELD) and now the European-focused Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP), it seems our field has reacted quickly and seriously to Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s 2004 declaration in “Acid Free Bits” that “Preserving e-lit, and creating e-lit that will remain available, is essential to the very concept of electronic literature, the basic idea that the computer can be a place for new literary works that make use of its capabilities.” Certainly, one of the many benefits of these directories is that they’re built to preserve and provide broad online access to works of e-literature created since the advent of the internet.

However, no archive can ever, nor should it ever aspire to, be universal and complete; and while both the ELD and the ELMCIP also catalogue earlier works of e-literature, an obvious stumbling block that neither one can entirely overcome is the material specificity, through and through, of works created before the internet and the domination of the Graphical User Interface. The ELD and the ELMCIP wouldn’t exist if we weren’t already agreed on the material basis of e-literature – a materiality that can and must be preserved. And, as such, it’s not particularly revolutionary to point out that the materiality of a poem like bpNichol‘s 1983 – 1984 “First Screening,” whic was created on the Apple IIe for a command-line interface, simply cannot be preserved under the current model of online directories. Instead, what the ELD and the ELMCIP have done – in fact, all they can do – is point to works such as Nichol’s, gesture to them, but not preserve them.

My paper today, then, outlines how I have approached the pressing issue of preserving, maintaining access to, and – perhaps especially – how I’ve been thinking through early works of e-literature by creating what I’ve called the Archeological Media Lab, aligning it with the field of Media Archaeology (at the moment the best writings on M.A. in English are probably best found in Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka’s forthcoming Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications). The lab tries to take on, loosely speaking, a locavore approach to both sustaining and framing e-literature – one that is primarily hands-on and resolutely of the local, with only a very modest global or online presence. However, I should openly admit that the lab’s limited funding makes it difficult to build a lab on the scale of a project supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) or the Salman Rushdie archive that’s at Emory – both of which I’ll touch on shortly. Certainly I would be grateful to have the kind of online catalogue that MITH has for its collection of vintage computers. I am, in fact, hoping to build a more extensive online gallery of the lab’s holdings, modeled after MITH’s online collection, this summer but it’ll be framed in such a way that, through some sort of dissonance in the interface, viewers will be accutely aware that the most the website can ever hope to be is the equivalent of a catalogue of museum or gallery holdings. For now, I’ll just say that small scale of the lab dovetails nicely with its locavore philosophy.

Nearly all digital media labs are conceived of as a place for experimental research using the most up-to-date, cutting-edge tools available. However, this lab – which is, as far as I know, the only one of its kind in North America – is a place for cross-disciplinary experimental research and teaching actively using the tools, the software and platforms, from the past. There are a small handful of sibling organizations in the U.S. – though, notably, they are more akin to archives or special collections than they are labs in the sense of being an utterly open space for hands-on teaching and research. One is MITH’s collection of vintage computers which I just mentioned and which is unique, in my mind, because of its online catalogue of vintage computers which clearly and carefully reflects a dedication not just to the idea of materiality generally, but to the fact of materiality at every level of each computing device; as they describe it on their website, “Every item is accompanied with some basic descriptive and technical metadata…Where it is possible metadata on actual manufacture dates and companies has been given, and an emphasis on connections (external and internal) and the use capacity of the device (read/write abilities, OS affordances, etc.) is attempted.”

There is also the Preserving Virtual Worlds project – a much more large-scale project focused on preservation rather than access, involving the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Linden Lab. Their stated aim is “to investigate issues surrounding the preservation of video games and interactive fiction through a series of case studies of games and literature from various periods in computing history, and to develop basic standards for metadata and content representation of these digital artifacts for long-term archival storage.”

Finally, tackling both access and preservation, Emory University has launched their Born-Digital Archives program with the Salman Rushdie archive, making his digital files available to the public – files which include “forty thousand files and eighteen gigabytes of data on a Mac desktop, three Mac laptops, and an external hard drive.” However, it is not insignificant that all these digital files – including those from his Macintosh Performa 5500 – are available to the public only through an emulated environment.

By contrast, while the Archeological Media Lab cannot provide such broad and institutionalized access, what it can do is provide small-scale access to defining moments in the history of computing and e-literature. In addition to landmark computers such as the Commodore 64 from 1982, the Vectrex Gaming Console also from 1982, the Compaq III portable laptop from 1987, the NeXT Cube from 1990, the lab also houses working Apple IIe’s and an Apple Lisa. These last two computers are particularly important for understanding the history of personal computing and computer-mediated writing; while they were both released in 1983, the shift in interface from the one to the other, and therefore the shift in the limits and possibilities for what one could create, is remarkable. The Apple II series of computers all used the command-line interface and they were also the first affordable, user-friendly, and so most popular personal computers ever while the Apple Lisa was the first commerical computer to use a Graphical User Interface.

In terms of the literature created on these platforms from the past, I would say that a work such as First Screening by bpNichol – created in 1983-1984 using an Apple IIe and the Apple BASIC programming language – is exemplary in that it, like most other early works of e-lit, cannot be understood if we view it only via a media translation. On the one hand, where would we be if First Screening wasn’t first recovered by Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi, and Dan Waber, made available via emulator, Javascript, Hypercard and Quicktime movie and now preserved on both the ELD and the ELMCIP? But on the other hand, there is simply no substitute for the command-line interface paired with physical structure of the Apple II computer; as Matthew Kirschenbaum points out in his groundbreaking 2008 book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, the Apple II computer has no hard drive; instead, “a program is loaded by inserting the disk in the external drive and booting the machine. In practical terms, this meant first retrieving the program by going to one’s collection of disks and rummaging through them…Consider the contrast in affordances to a file system mounted on a hard drive: here you located the program you wanted by reading a printed or handwritten label, browsing like you would record albums or manila file folders, not by clicking on an icon” (33). Everything about the Apple II system, its entire hardware and software system, offers both writer and reader an utterly different set of experiences than when they read or write on, say, a MacBook or a PC or when they read First Screening by way of a Graphical User Interface.

Again, this is not to say that these media translations aren’t as important or as necessary as the emulated environment for Rushdie’s digital files. It’s simply to point out that one would never know from the quicktime emulation that First Screening is a series of poems whose meaning is actually activated through the writer/programmer’s invitation to the reader/view to type in commands – from the fact that you have to type “run” to initiate it (and of course there’s no instruction to “type run”) to the fact that in line 110 of the code for First Screening, Nichol writes: “REM   FOR THE CURIOUS VIEWER/READER THERE’S AN ‘OFF-SCREEN ROMANCE’ AT 1748. YOU JUST HAVE TO TUNE IN THE PROGRAMME.” As Jim Andrews discovered in the process of creating the emulations, “the poem is off-screen in the sense that to play/view it, you have to type in a command” – either RUN 1748, RUN 1748-, GOSUB 1748, GOSUB 1748 – “you have to engage with the language machine at that level to view the poem that remains off-screen until you summon it.”

Finally, I also see the Archeological Media Lab as a kind of thinking device in that providing access to the utterly unique, material specificity of these computers, their interfaces, platforms, and software makes it possible to defamiliarize or make visible for critique contemporary, invisible interfaces and platforms. It’s an approach to media of the present via media of the past that I’ve come to align with the small but vibrant field of “media archaeology” (which, incidentally, I didn’t know existed when I came up with the concept for the lab). In part influenced by the so-called “Berlin school of media studies” that has grown out of Friedrich Kittler’s new media approach, which is invested in both recovering the analog ancestors of the digital and reading the digital back into the analog, media archaeology has taught me that one can use older writing interfaces as a way to bring the digital back into view once again. One example of the invisibility of contemporary computing that I like to use comes in a well-known TED.com unveiling of a multitouch interface, during which creator Jeff Han proudly declares that “there’s no instruction manual, the interface just sort of disappears.” Another example comes from the Natural User Interface Group who define NUI as “an emerging concept in Human/Computer Interaction that refers to a interface that is effectively invisible, or becomes invisible to its user with successive learned interactions;” and they use “natural” to mean “organic, unthinking, prompted by instinct.” But just whose instinct is directing the shape of these interfaces? Or, more to the point, why would we – as users as much as creators or writers – want our interactions with interfaces to be “unthinking” so that we have no sense of how the interface works on us, delimiting reading, writing, even thinking?

In a sense, then, the reconfigured media archaeology approach I am trying to take up in the lab is a reconfigured media archaeology applied both to computing’s past and to a constantly receding present that masquerades as the near future. Without reading early computing devices and interfaces against their contemporary off-spring and vice-versa, the present slips from view for the contemporary computing industry – which is accelerating its drive to achieve perfect invisibility through mulit-touch, Natural User Interfaces, and ubiquitous computing devices – desires nothing more than to efface the interface altogether and so also efface our ability to read let alone write the interface. By contast, it’s the combination of the strangeness and the vague familiarity of artifacts such as the black and green command-line interface and the original Apple Basic version of First Screening that remind us of what our computing devices can do, of what we can do to and with them.

bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire is a series of typewriter poems, not simply poems written on a typewriter, Nichol wrote between 1975 and 1979. In its relentless exploration of homolinguistic translation, it has become something of a cult serial poem in certain experimental writing circles, spawning iterations such as Stuart Pid’s Translating translating translating Apollinaire and Andrew Russ’s Translating, translating, translating Apollinaire, or, Translating, translating bp Nichol (both from 1991). Writes Nichol by way of an introduction:

May 27th 1975 en route from London England to Toronto with Gerry Gilbert…in a mood of dissatisfaction re certain aspects of my writing (always the feeling there is more one should be learning – more limitations one should be pushing against & breaking down) i began this present series. In my mind was the idea of a pure bit of research one in which the creativity would be entirely at the level of the research, of formal inventiveness, and not at the level of content per se i.e. i recalled the first poem i had ever had published — Translating Apollnaire in Bill Bissett’s BLEW OINTMENT magazine circa 1964…& decided to put that poem thru as many translation/ transformation processes as i & other people could think of. I conceived of it as an openended, probably unpublishable in its entirety, piece. As of this date (August 29, 1978) i have elaborated 55 different systems & or results with TTA 16, 26, 27, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 50, 54, 55 & some other tentative ideas still not fully executed. But it seemed a good point in time, particularly when Karl Young expressed his enthusiasm & support, to issue a preliminary report on discoveries made in terms of the results arrived at. Thus this present selection from the inevitably titled TRANSLATING TRANSLATING APOLLINAIRE.

(You can find the original version of the poem here along with the rest of the selection from The Alphabet Game).

I want to call them typewriter poems instead of simply poems written on a typewriter because it’s clear Nichol understood precisely the ways in which the grid of the typewriter page and the typewriter’s non-proportional font lend themselves to investigations of form – even form freed from the burdens of content. Not surprisingly Nichol’s entire oeuvre is defined by his experiments with the limits and possibilities of different writing media – to such an extent that I have become convinced that Nichol wasn’t simply reading his fellow Torontonian Marshall McLuhan (by the mid-70s, who wasn’t reading McLuhan? but as it turns out McLuhan was reading Nichol as evidenced by his inclusion in the General Bibliography at the end of his 1977 City as Classroom). But he was absorbing McLuhan’s writing wholesale. Before this week, I had only come across a few fleeting references to McLuhan by Nichol – one in Rational Geomancy and a short 1982 memoir Nichol wrote of him titled “The Medium Was the Message.” Several days ago, however, I obtained a copy of Nichol’s Sharp Facts: Selections from TTA26 and was astounded to read this series of poems that are both typewriter and photocopier poems – given his love of the pun, a love he also shared with McLuhan, not surprisingly one of his favorite photocopiers is the Sharpfax Copier. Writing as an experienced writing media technician, a mere two years before his McLuhan memoir, Nichol declares in the introduction:

The translative system involved here entails the use of…copying machine disintegrative tendencies. Which is to say that an image fed through a copying machine over & over again (feeding the image of the image, & then the image of the image of the image, & so on) thru a great many generations, disintegrates. & it does this differently depending on which type of copying machine you’re using.

And he concludes, “In this case the machine is the message. The text itself ultimately disappears.”

These are poems of the machine – poems that aren’t so much interested in their own illegibility as they are invested in reading, vis-a-vis writing, the typewriter through the copier machine.

Of Riddell I only know that he was McCaffery’s partner in his airport limo business as well as his housemate for a brief time; I believe he is now a lay therapist. Of his work, all I’ve so far seen is E clips E (Underwhich Editions 1989) – a startling book of concrete poems that reads like evidence of Riddell’s hell-bent mission to push writing media from xerography to the typewriter, the lettraset, stamps, cut-outs and cut-ups to the breaking point of legibility and interpretability. But that’s not to say they’re not comprehendable or meaningful – they are meaning pushed to another register, one that may defy close-reading at the same time as it courts a reading more properly sensitive to both its marks and the process of marking.

“coda” is, for me, one of the more intriguing pieces in the book – perhaps because it gives me more of an interpretative foot-hold than a piece such as “in take” does:

“coda,” on the other hand, has much more of what I can only call “alphabetic patterning”. Below is a scan just of first of this four page poem:

Still, it’s appropriate that the definition of “coda” is most firmly tied to music – an art, I learned from R. Murray Schaeffer, of notation as much as sound – not literature. I can’t help feeling the point, the meaning, is purposefully just a little out of reach. Yet, at the same time, I also feel sure there’s a pattern in those columns of text – on the upper left of the first column on the first page, ‘t’ and ‘f’ appear side by side yet it has clearly been written on a typewriter, on which ‘t’ and ‘f’ are diagonally stacked on top of each other, ‘t’ up and to the right, ‘f’ below and to the left. Likewise ‘b’, ‘u’ and ‘j’ are similarly slightly mis-aligned on the page versus their placement on the keys.

Surely this is a media-studies-inflected poem as I’m forced, for the first time since I learned to type in grade 8 (when I was punished for paying too much attention to the keys), to scrutinize the visual arrangement, the alignment of the typewriter keys in relation to their written characters. It’s typewriter poetry that rejects Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” declaration that the typewriter can “indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends” while it relentlessly courts Olson’s claim that “For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had.”

Once again, uut of the research I have been doing on digital poetry and digital Do-It-Yourself (D.I.Y.) communities, I am coming to think that Steve McCaffery’s so-called “dirty concrete poem” “Carnival”  – as well as his lesser known but no less relevant typestracts such as “Broken Mandala” and “Vowel-Grid Sequence” – can usefully be read through, or alongside, both communities of practice. These groups comprise a movement not only to democratize the creative process, but they also reflect a desire to make this same democratization possible through techniques which draw attention to the literary artifact as both a created and mediated object – techniques which essentially turn the artifact inside-out. It is a philosophy of making, similarly exemplified by the dirty concrete poem, that erodes the division between surface and depth, inside and outside.

The term “dirty concrete” has become a fairly well-used term to describe a deliberate attempt to move away from the clean lines and graphically neutral appearance of the concrete poetry from the 1950s and 60s by the Noigandres in Brazil and Ian Hamilton Finlay in England (a cleanliness that can also be construed to indicate a lack of political engagement with language and representation). Yet, despite the references and discussion around dirty concrete, there is no clear, written account of who originally used this term. As Steve McCaffery wrote to the Poetics Listserv, this could be simply due to the fact that certain concrete poets were meeting in person and so I assume they were not at that time invested invested in writing down their thoughts and activities for posterity’s sake.

After corresponding with a number of poetry critics and practitioners, as far as I have been able to determine the term “dirty concrete” was first used either by the English critic Mike Weaver or the Canadian critic Stephen Scobie; however, there are no documents that prove this definitively. [1] Still, it is worth noting that the first written reference appears in a letter Nichol wrote to Nicholas Zurbrugg, the editor of Stereo Headphones, in 1970 in which Nichol claims he learned of the term from Stephen Scobie (and Scobie informed me in a recent email that he learned of it from Mike Weaver). The term was likely then put into broader circulation first by way of bill bissett’s 1973 “Quebec Bombers” in pass th food release th spirit book which, as Jack David describes it, “begins with the phrase ‘dirty concrete poet’ repeated twice, then changes to ‘the concrete is dirty dirty,’ ‘sum like it clean what dew they ooo.’  . . .  the comparison presents the clean ordered life of a capitalist system and the dirty chaotic life of the lower classes.” In the same article Jack David claims that Rosalie Murphy refers to “dirty concrete” in her 1970 Contemporary Poets of the English Language. (99) However: I inspected the Murphy book and could find no reference anywhere to either dirty or clean concrete poetry. In fact, Frank Davey informed me that David is in fact referring to Davey’s own 1971 definition of clean and dirty concrete that he includes in Earle Birney and which he wrote with the assistance of bpNichol: “Concrete is usually divided by its devotees into ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’. In clean concrete, the preferred and dominant type, the visual shape of the work is primary, the linguistic signs secondary. In this view the most effective concrete poems are those with an immediate and arresting visual effect which is made more profound by the linguistic elements used in the poems constituent parts. The weakest are dirty concrete, those with amorphous visual shape and complex and involute arrangements of linguistic elements. In dirty concrete there can be no immediate to the whole, only a cumulative interpretation gained by painstaking labour.” (65) In the same email correspondence, Frank Davey writes that “When I met bp in 1970, he told me that clean concrete was a kind you could understand by looking but not reading, and that dirty was the kind that had a visual shape made of phases or clauses or sentences that had to be read as well as viewed. (But he didn’t attribute that theory to anyone.)”

The term was also picked up in Stephen Scobie’s 1984 book-length study bpNichol: What History Teaches in which he aligns Mike Weaver’s use of the terms “expressionist” and “constructivist” with Ian Hamilton Finlay’s “suprematist” and “fauvre” and claims that “[m]ore simply, bpNichol spoke of a division between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ concrete.” (Scobie 35, 139)

I hope some of you find this history interesting – I am planning to interview Mike Weaver over the phone next week and I hope to put online the transcript. Some of you might recognize Weaver’s name because he was one of the first English-speaking critics to write about Concrete Poetry in 1964 and he also organized the First International Exhibition of Concrete and Kinetic Poetry also in 1964. He is a foundational figure in the history and development of concrete poetry which, in turn, has exerted tremendous influence over contemporary digital poetry and e-literature.

Incidentally, Frank Davey sent me scans of letters that Dom Sylvester Houedard and Zurbrugg sent to the Canadian poetry and digital poetry pioneer, bpNichol; one of the fascinating things about these letters is that they indicate that concrete poets were reading Marshall McLuhan as early as the mid-1960s and thinking about concrete poetry in terms of medium and message. I have posted these letters online at bpnichol.ca.

Given that, as Lisa Gitelman puts it, “media represent and delimit representing,” this special session seeks papers on how electronic literature creates, responds to, or reworks reading/writing interfaces; papers may also explore the relationship between electronic literature and the recent turn to the “interface-free.”

I would be grateful if readers would pass this CFP on to any e-literature scholars you think might be interested.