[-empyre-] el po

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

there's the battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness...

and this isn't new--poetry is forever fucking itself up, fucking up the poetry of the recent
day, on the move to fresher, more engaging language, whether it's speech or visual poetry or
what jenny holzer is doing, or whatever. that's the way it moves, that's poetry in motion,
battling for speech and expression that doesn't suck, that doesn't accept some honorary position
in an art of the past, that insists on being forthright. honest. and so poets fight like hell
amongst themselves also. but it's the ones who say what they really feel whom we recognize are
clearing away the garbage of language, respecting the capacity of language to actually mean
something . so much talk about art and the world means so little. and that's no good for
language or poetry.

it isn't the tech of el po that makes it interesting, it's the way that el po can take all that
complexity of language, that complexity of technology, and focus it into forceful, strong
language, clear language, however fucked up it is in some ways, that you just have to read. work
that discovers/creates the human dimensions of what is mostly a troubling, intimidating machine.
work that 'takes on' the machine and asserts the human in the post human.

i had problems throughout the making of arteroids because you shoot things in it and i normally
don't like shooting things. i shoot for art. sometimes i shoot long and sometimes i shoot short,
but that's what i shoot for. while i was bothered by the shooting, there was another part of me
that felt a need to go through to the other side of the shoot em up, to harness that basically
primal and violent energy of shooting and let it flow into some interesting direction. and also
take that energy of the game, of winning and losing, and take it in some other direction than
mindless and meaningless play. though there's a tension between poetry and game that won't go
away: poetry isn't a game that somebody wins--though with all the jockeying for position you
might wonder. and the slams. and the competitions of other types for grants and so on.

Apollinaire (1917):

"The divine games of life and imagination give free rein to a totally new poetic activity. The
poet is he who discovers new joys even if they are hard to bear. One can be a poet in any field:
it is enough that one be adventuresome and pursue any new discovery..."

"Typographical artifices worked out with great audacity have the advantage of bringing to life a
visual lyricism which was almost unknown before our age. These artifices can still go much
further and achieve the synthesis of the arts, of music, painting, and literature ... One should
not be astonished if, with only the means they have now at their disposal, they set themselves
to preparing this new art (vaster than the plain art of words) in which, like conductors of an
orchestra of unbelievable scope they will have at their disposal the entire world, its noises
and its appearances, the thought and language of man, song, dance, all the arts and all the
artifices, still more mirages than Morgane could summon up on the hill of Gibel, with which to
compose the visible and unfolded book of the future.... Even if it is true that there is nothing
new under the sun, the new spirit does not refrain from discovering new profundities in all this
that is not new under the sun. Good sense is its guide, and this guide leads it into corners, if
not new, at least unknown. But is there nothing new under the sun? It remains to be seen."