In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

161 6 DANNY SNELSON’S DISCO OPERATING SYSTEM By using obsolete technology, the . . . poet can recuperate means of communication that have been rejected and trashed. . . . [T]he poet’s role has become as obscure as outdated machines, an un-needed and un-serviced “social error.” —derek beaulieu, Ithy (2010) Donna Summer, Love to Love You Baby (1975, mp3, 50mb, DOS). —Danny Snelson,“Heath, prelude to tracing the actor as network” (2010) The previous chapter examined in a sustained manner two particular features of much twenty-first-century avant-garde poetry: first, its movement away from a logic of montage to one of flow, and second, the ongoing value of print as a means of critiquing network culture as it has taken shape with corporate funding and guidance in the new millennium. Nobody’s Business now concludes with an extended analysis of another young avant-garde poet, Danny Snelson, who composes primarily in and for digital environments. The question of medium obsolescence, though, also preoccupies him greatly. After all, print versus cyberspace is far from the only tale of technological progress and supersession from the last century. Ou sont les VCRs d’antan? Exploring his peculiar—one might even say queer—poetics will illustrate how the assorted formal, political, and literary-historical arguments pursued throughout this book can coalesce to make possible the deep appreciation of contemporary, formally adventurous poetry that might otherwise remain unintelligible and irksome anti-art. Disco Tech On February 2, 2009, Snelson ended a reading at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project with a piece titled 1–100 #4, which he described as “a reworking of one of my favorite poems and a newer poem that I’ve just been working on a transcript for.” He also said that it was “for Charles, who’s here.”1 “Charles” referred to Charles Bernstein, the onetime New York City–based Language Poet who has 162 NOBODY’S BUSINESS since become the David T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania , and Snelson was alluding to two of Bernstein’s lesser-known works, the performance poem 1–100 (1969) and an audiotape collage titled #4 (1975).It was an extraordinary moment: one of the most exciting young avant-garde poets of the twenty-first century was paying homage to a mentor and inspiration. Rather, one assumes it was an extraordinary moment. Unless lucky enough to be there in person, one can only reconstruct the occasion via a digital recording, available either streaming or for download at the PennSound website. No written version of the poem is available. For many contemporary poets, these two facts might appear incidental.After all,PennSound’s MP3 file could be a somewhat accidental trace of an ephemeral event, and/or the writer may have been saving the print version of 1–100 #4 for a future collection. Snelson, however, does not resemble the typical AWP conference-goer and APR-subscribing poet. He happens to be a senior editor of the PennSound site,where he helps to digitize and curate a large archive of audio-based art and poetry. He is an editor, too, of UbuEditions, a series hosted by Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb that takes offbeat,strange,hardto -find experimental print-based works and makes them newly available for free as downloadable PDFs. He also works with Craig Dworkin on Eclipse, an online archive of selected small press publications of avant-garde poetry, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s. Digitization is as familiar to Snelson as the printing press was to William Blake; how and where his poetry appears on the Internet (or off it) almost always reflects conscious choice. Even more important, questions of medium and remediation are at the core of his creative sensibility. My Dear coUntess, a letter to lord kelvin (2007), for example , began with a found text—a“telepathic”letter to the eponymous physicist that appears in Alfred Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911)—which he then eccentrically translated into a video-based performance poem.2 First, he chose short passages from twelve works, including, in addition to the ones listed in the table,the screenplay of Jack Smith’s film Normal Love (1963) andthescriptforGertrudeStein’splayAnExerciseinAnalysis(1917).Eachof these texts was then assigned one of seven colors as well as a corresponding outrageous costume made by the artist Phoebe Springstubb. (Five of the color-plus-costume combinations were given out twice; orange, for instance, pairs with both Smith’s screenplay and Ron Silliman’s...

Share