Creating a Poetic Glitch

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…

# posted by Mark Elliot Cullen  tags: decay, literary review, process