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Baldwin continuedfrom previous pageis immediately visible" in new media poems amounts to a restricted definition, one built around the interpretive epiphany presumably associated with positing hidden code as a means ofrevelation. A whole range ofcodework is ignored here. Code and data may both be visible, or there may be no way to distinguish code and display, and so on. Further, to insist on hidden code as a means of revelation sustains the move from poetics to theory (i.e., theory thus "reveals" the por etic code as the "secret" of the medium). Given this troubling formulation of code, a shortcoming of the book is the absence of contributions from thinkers and artists more broadly concerned with code (e.g., Alan Sondheim, who put the term "codework" into circulation in the first place). The book is organized into three groupings that helpfully categorize the essays and force the underlying questions. The first, "Contexts," offers essays on the social setting ofnew media poetics. The emphasis here is less on particular artistic production than on networks of collaboration and facilitation. Kenneth Goldsmith's history of UbuWeb exemplifies the sort of critical work that helps to secure an institutional presence for new media. Such necessary histories frame and situate rather than define. Everything at UbuWeb—from Aztec poetry to advertisements for Ling-Ling the dog's missing head—falls within new media poetics in its most elastic and capacious sense. Calling the second grouping "Technotexts" seems to narrow the field by adopting Hayles's term for "texts that foreground and reflect on the inscription technologies used to produce them...." Yet the essays and their subjects are notably heterogeneous. Loss Pequeño Glazier's statement on "Io Sono at Swoons" discusses technology in passing and focuses more on linguistic play. Glazier's essay can be read as a reflection on the materiality of his poem with the help of Alan Golding's valuable notion of "transitional materialities." The result is a much more general notion oftechnotext, where the term appears as less descriptive or analytical than heuristic. New media theory is built on a presumption ofmimesis, and it is as an exploration ofthis presumption that new media poetics is possible. The final grouping of "Theories" offers the only direct consideration ofpoetics. Barrett Watten's concluding essay differentiates poetics "predicated on the positivity of its referent" from poetics involving "distancing or renegotiation of the practice of poetry." The difference is useful and reflects on the entire book. "Positivity of referent" appears in the book's frequent slippage when referring to the putative topic as new media poetry rather than poetics . Negativity, by contrast, questions the medium of new media poetics. Watten's extended analysis of Memmott's poetics concludes the book with an observation and a question. The observation is that the "hand of the maker," and thus the poetics of a work, are evident beyond technical specifications. For Watten, the maker is "neither technician, nor sales rep, nor venture capitalist, nor media theorist," a list that positions poetics in a productive and critical relation to the institution of new media. Following this is Watten's question, a question latent in every sentence of the book: whether Memmott's poetics, and by extension the other poetics described, are "specified by the nature of new media, or not?" Morris begins her introduction by rephrasing Gertrude Stein: "What is it that we know but do not yet know we know?" She rightly locates the answer in our "embodied knowledge" of contemporary "technoenvironment[s]." Yet the key to being "in one's time" for Stein was not theoretical knowledge ofthe current technoenvironment but "composition," or how life is conducted. This may be the "only thing that is different," but it makes all the difference, and the difference is poetics. New Media Poetics makes clear that new media poetics is up for grabs, and this is a good thing indeed. Sandy Baldwin is an Assistant Professor ofEnglish and Director of the Centerfor Literary Computing at West Virginia University. Difficult Made Human Sheila E. Murphy How2 Edited by Kate Fagan http://www.how2journal.com/archive/ Imagine the pleasure ofhaving full, free online access to a treasure trove of scholarship replete with...

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