In glitch culture, the art being made, whether it be musical or visual, is concerned with the mistakes made by technology and circumstances beyond the artist’s control that change the work.

There isn’t really a glitch dynamic to poetry because for most of its history, poetry was concerned with rigid structures and purity of language. There are almost no machine errors involved in poetry’s creation, with the exception of typos that are now highlighted and fixed by most word processors. Additionally, poets are unlikely to make errors in language that would be required for interesting mistakes to develop.

That Was Epic takes comments from YouTube videos and places them in their own context so that they can be evaluated as segments of language. With these YouTube comments, the glitches are the result of a lack of understanding or concern on the part of the author. Obviously these deficiencies would be difficult for a “real poet” to duplicate in his or her work. If a poet writes from inspiration there is an inherent concern to their work, and poor language mechanics are difficult to duplicate.

In order to incorporate glitches into poetry, the author must allow a poem to be manipulated by an inhuman force, such as a decomposing pattern of language or some sort of computer manipulation. For example, consider this Babelfish translation of The Red Wheelbarrow:

So side of the white chicken where depend the red wheel wheelbarrow rainwater and gloss can be applied.

To create this version of the poem, the original text was translated into Japanese and then back into English. The Babelfish engine pays no attention to line breaks, and the purity of language of the original is lost while unexpected mutations occur. The poet could take this version of the poem as is, or break it into lines and stanzas, or use the mutations to influence a rewrite the original poem.

For example, the dissonant elements of language from the Babelfish version could be put back into the form of the original work, creating the Frankenstein poem below:

so the side of white
chicken

depends the red wheel
wheelbarrow?

rainwater and gloss
applied.

This may or may not be to your liking, but the point is to let mistakes enter the work and offer new possibilities. Another way to do this is through the use of a restrictive forms.

Recently I’ve been working on a few poems that have set character limits for each line. In some of these experiments, the form “degrades” over the poem by reducing the number of characters allowed on each line as the poem goes on. Below is “The Red Wheelbarrow” manipulated as an example of that form. Note that I’ve used a monospaced font so that the characters line up precisely and the lines are not influenced by typographic features.

so much de
pends upon
a red whee
l barrow g
lazed
with 
rain
wate
r be
side
the
whi
te
ch
ic
ke
ns

As the allowed number of characters diminishes, the language has difficulty expressing itself through the form’s constraints. The poet loses control of the work and purity of language is also lost, but the poet gains a form that is in some ways more reflective of technologically driven life.