Let’s see. I think I remember how to do this….

There was a continental divide of sorts in my semester this spring, neatly marked by Spring Break. The Thursday before break, I did the Coleridge reading detailed in the preceding post. It seems to me now that I may have sensed how much was about to happen in the ensuing weeks. It would have been better for me to blog my way through it all, certainly; I know myself well enough to know that. Yet for reasons I’m still sorting through, I didn’t. I tweeted a good bit. I talked and traveled and presented and met. The blog, however, fell silent. Tending it in my mind, which I did every day, doesn’t count. But perhaps the fact that I did tend it every day, mentally at least, will be at least a little reassuring for anyone who wondered if something was wrong.

Fact is, a number of things were right, but I fell into a blogging trap. It happens sometimes. So that was then and this is now, and we move forward–well, sort of. I have some unfinished business to sort through and I intend to do it over the next few days. I’ll be jumping around in the chronology a bit, for which my apologies.

The stoppage began just after I did my talk at the University of British Columbia on “Computers as Poetry.” Here’s a page on Brian Lamb’s blog with an embedded webcast as well as many other viewing/listening options. As always, Brian is very generous with his praise and encouragement, for which I am eternally grateful. Cyprien Lomas, another ed-tech inspiration for many years, was also very warm, welcoming, and supportive; his introduction was humbling and deeply gratifying. My thanks also to Scott Leslie for his very kind and thoughtful remarks. Meeting Scott was a most soulful and satisfying experience. I sure hope we have some more face-to-face time very soon; I feel we’ve just gotten started and have some very cool places to go.

The whole experience was great for me, so why the stoppage? Hard to say, but I know that at least two factors contributed. One is that I wanted to do some justice to an overwhelming experience, which is my typical blogging trap. I wanted to do a fantastic post that would convey my gratitude, my excitement, my stimulation; I wanted to communicate soul and a head full of ideas. I also wanted to write a post on the process of writing the talk. It’s a peculiar talk in many respects, one of the most ambitious I’ve done. I confess that I felt a little self-conscious about it, both because it was pushing into new public territory for me, and because my love for poetry is very, very close to the essence of what makes me live and move and have my being. I thought that blogging about the process might help reduce the self-consciousness and reveal more to me about what I was going on about. I do feel as if there’s some interesting work to be done in this area and I feel I can contribute to it. (I owe Bryan Alexander some gratitude here as well: he heard a very early version of some of these ideas back in November, 2006 and encouraged me to push on.) So now I had two mother-of-all-blog-posts to do, both of which I was excited about, but both of which grew to Sisyphean proportions as time went on (as time is wont to do).

Well, enough of fatalism and Hades for now.

How did “Computers and Poetry” come to be? In outline:

• I tried out the “readers’ theatre” idea at the aforementioned NMC Regional Conference in 2006. I love the play of voices and will be trying this tactic again, even more intensely. I also got considerable inspiration from the Fear 2.0 presentation that Martha, Barbara, Barbara, Laura, and Leslie did at ELI 2008.
• I taught my New Media Studies course last summer (2007) and completely baked my noodle, as my son Ian would say. During that course I discovered Marshall McLuhan, a writer and thinker and artist whose sensibilities are hovering over “Computers as Poetry.” The whole thing threatened to become completely McLuhanesque at times, and it even became a bit of a struggle to keep my own voice sounding. A worthwhile struggle–fun, even–but I could feel the effort.
• As I prepared to teach the unit on poetry to my “Introduction to Literary Studies” students last fall (2007), I once again read the opening chapter in Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide to Poetry. This time, having come off of my “Digital Imagination” talk at James Madison University, as well as my conversation with Jon Udell on his “Interviews with Innovators” podcast series, my mind was prepared to see that much of what Kinzie says about poetry was powerfully analogous to what I’d been trying to say about my experience with computing, particularly networked computing. Then, when the invitation came to speak at UBC, I immediately accepted (of course) and told them my topic would be “Computers As Poetry.”
• Then, of course, all I had to do was write the presentation. Commit first, compose later; it’s a methodology.

In this case, I decided to write the presentation out. Lately I’ve been experimenting more with speaking from notes or even from slides, but for this presentation I wanted the words themselves to resonate a particular way, and I also wanted to frame the quotations very deliberately. The tradeoff is a little less spontaneity for a little more precision. Given the abstractness and even idiosyncracy of some of my approach here, I thought more precision might be helpful.

As one colleague remarked recently, this is not light listening. It’s not anecdote-driven, or particularly sparkling or entertaining. I wish it were a little more sparkling, frankly. Perhaps I’ll find a way to do that as it moves through more iterations. First I’ll have to listen to the whole thing again, something I’ve been a little reluctant to do. Like everyone, I wince when I hear my own stuff played back, though in my radio years I learned to get past the wince pretty quickly and move straight to the self-critique. This one’s a little tougher along those lines, however, given my hopes for the topic and my sense that I’m only at the beginning of what I want to say.

I suppose one is always only at the beginning of what one now knows one wants to say….

POSTSCRIPT: The experience really was overwhelming. Brian’s already blogged and Flickred about the record-shopping and jamming. (I’d never been in a rent-a-room band hotel before. There’s a novel there, or at least a short story.) I had lovely meals with Cyprien and his family and with Brian and his family. (Both Cyprien and Brian are formidable cooks.) I got to see some very beautiful land and water. And I had a truly great breakfast at Joe’s. Clearly I live a charmed life.