Citizen Poetics

In The Wisdom of Crowds (2004) James Surowiecki summarized a great deal of evidence that had by then accumulated to suggest that under certain conditions a very large group of people will offer better or more accurate responses to a question or problem than that offered by one or a few experts. In this essay I ask: To what extent does crowd wisdom theory apply to a poetry network? And: Under what conditions can this obtain for, let us say, the close reading of a difficult, open-ended poem? It is hardly coincidence that Surowiecki's study, and then Jeff Howe's field-naming article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing" (published in Wired in June 2006), emerged when they did, just a few years into the era of Web 2.0 (the interactive or dynamic, collectively accumulating Web that succeeded the first Web of static presentation). How do credentialed scholars and teachers of experimental poetry fare, in particular—and what becomes of their profession—when presenting in the context of thousands of global, multi-generational readers with little overall interpretive experience yet strong voluntaristic motivation and a collective capacity for intense micro-attention? For starters: the hermeneutic and pedagogical roles of the expert, heretofore easily separated, almost entirely converge.

Really? A global crowdsourcing of poetic interpretation? Seems a mere progressive fantasy, and at the same time a practical nightmare—theorizable perhaps, yet what could possibly be entailed in the praxis? Certain modes of organization-led ("top-down" [Brabham 2013, xxi]) crowdsourcing that outsource answers to complex but answerable questions, or fact-gathering or confirmations, or discovering solutions to difficult yet solvable problems—such as crowdfixing and crowdsolving, which has reached beyond for-profit corporate projects to the fields of citizen science and citizen journalism—further extend to cultural archiving and curation (Ridge 2014) and even art-making (Bryan-Wilson 2016). Through distant reading practices introduced by Digital Humanities projects and literary history, these modes might even seem to succeed if applied to close rather than "distant reading" also—to a work of imaginative writing whose meaning is (supposedly or relatively) discernible, or at least for which an exegetical consensus can be formed. Here, however, we consider this: What of the poem that is multivalent, open, disjunctive and/or ambiguous, where consecutive logic and figuration, for example, seem to go off-course—a work for which consensus would seem beside the point? Which is to say: many if not most of the modern and contemporary poems admired, studied, and written about from within the academy by the expert few. What purpose could be served by deploying such a poem to a large crowd of geographically and culturally far-flung strangers?

Emily Dickinson's "The Brain, within its Groove" is such a poem, numbered 556 by the poet's editors. Participants encounter this work in the first week of a ten-week open online course on modern and contemporary poetry, hosted by the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, known as "ModPo":

The Brain, within its GrooveRuns evenly—and true—But let a Splinter swerve—'Twere easier for You—

To put a Current back—When Floods have slit the Hills—And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves—And trodden out the Mills—

(Dickinson 1960, 270–71)

In the current ongoing session of the course (begun September 10, 2016, and continuing at the time of this publication), "The Brain, within its Groove" has been discussed line by line, word by word, by hundreds of people while thousands viewed the proceedings (many of those who viewed the collaborative interpretation of "Brain" then commented elsewhere, upon other poems). The discussion of this poem has been organized—by the participants, who themselves create all the topics for commentary—into sixty-eight titled topical threads, many of them many screens in length. Within those threads there have been posted 620 comments, questions, responses, and direct replies. And a total of 9,189 people have read these comments. The only way one can grasp how the group collectively interprets this poem is to read, or at least read around in, the subforum devoted to it, sprawling...