Poetry and machine

Some years ago, how many?, I was in Paris and issue n0.2000 of "Le Point" dealt with the question if literature can be done with the aid of a P.C.
Most of those questioned spoke about the danger of writing without a pen.
But the machine is more than just a pen and the virtual space opened before us has a fantastic impact on creation and creativity:


David Avidan talked to the machine - this was 30 years ago - and the machine talked back. (Dudu Geva)
The Net spawns a shoal of poets
By Ofri Ilani
Avidan talked to the machine about ambition, loneliness, time, politics, sex and marriage, and "the electronic psychiatrist," as he called it, answered him as best it could, by means of dialogue software that was sophisticated for its time, which supplied answers in psychological style. The input and the output were published in almost raw form as the book "My Electronic Psychiatrist" (Hebrew) and was reprinted in 2001 by Babel Publishers. Eight quite amusing - if amazingly frustrating - conversations appear in the book in a kind of parody of psychotherapy. The computer gave Avidan a rather limited repertoire of replies, made up mostly of sentences like: "What are your feelings at this moment?" "What does this say to you?" and "Please go on." The computer that conversed with Avidan was a huge mainframe that took up the area of almost a whole room. It did not belong to Avidan himself: Personal computers had not yet been invented, and he had received the 15 computer hours as a gift form IBM Israel.
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"My Electronic Psychiatrist" was one of Avidan's most innovative books and apparently one of the first literary works in the world in whose writing the computer played a significant role. In the decades that have since elapsed, there have been few examples of such a creative use of the computer in Hebrew poetry. In this respect, it is hard to say that poetry here has leaped the futuristic hurdle set by Avidan. But even if the experience of digital existence does not usually appear in the verses themselves, it is present behind the scenes of the creative work: The Israeli Internet discovered poetry in the early years of its existence, and now the Net is an arena that buzzes with poetic activity. Novels and even novellas are still considered hard to read on the screen but short poetic lines work excellently with the dynamic movement of surfing. This coming Monday the Netvision Institute for Internet Research and the literature department at Tel Aviv University will hold a special evening at 18:30 in the Leon Hall of the university's management faculty, which will be devoted to a discussion: How does the Internet influence poetry and what place does poetry have on the Net? Entrance is free but advance registration is required at niis@post.tau.ac.il. At a time when poetry in print is being pushed to the cultural margins, and many titles sell only a few dozen copies, poetry is prospering on the Internet. At the Internet site Bama Hadasha (New Stage - http://stage.co.il) there are no fewer than 200,000 works in Hebrew in the poetry category. Even if the vast majority of the works published on the Internet would be thrown into the trash by any literary editor, the transformation of poetry from a highbrow art into a popular digital creative means is an interesting phenomenon, at least sociologically. The participants in the evening at Tel Aviv University, most of them poets and literary people who grew up in the world of printed poetry, will reflect on the prosperity of poetry on line with a mixture of anxiety and hope. On the one hand, the Internet apparently has been very beneficial to the written text, whose status had been undermined by television; on the other hand, it is clear that the spreading world of Internet poetry has entirely new rules. "In the contemporary world outside the Net, poetry is a kind of expression that has almost been destroyed," says Tomer Lichtasch, one of the participants in the conference and a founder of Dag Anonymi (Anonymous Fish - www.anonymous-fish.com), which is an online poetry journal that began in 2001 and appeared for three years, over 27 issues. "Poetry has become something very hidden and bashful," says Lichtasch. "Most people don't touch it. The literary world, in the serious sense of the word, is a kind of shrinking ghetto. At the same time, on the Internet you see an explosion of writing in short lines and rhyme - in blogs, talkbacks and e-mails." Lichtasch, who now edits the Hareshet channel at the NRG portal, says: "One of our experiments at Dag Anonymi was to create a more selective place than Bama Hadasha in order to continue the tradition of Hebrew poetry, which in my opinion has reached a dead end. It is hard for me to see any breakthrough, any free nucleus in Hebrew literature. I don't see how something can shake up this world. I see everything much more on the Internet. On the Net it is possible to shock, it is possible to strike a blow." Poetry in response to the cursorOn the World Wide Web, and especially in the United States, in recent years a wide variety of poetic forms unique to the Internet has sprung up that sometimes do not resemble any known form of poetry, even modernist. One such site, for example, is As/Is (www.as-is.blogspot.com) an experimental poetry blog written jointly by a group of American poets. Another is the radical poetry site Moria (http://www.moriapoetry.com). In addition to keyboard signs, emphases and fonts in different sizes, some of the poems that appear on the site include links to other poems and contents as an integral part of the poetic text itself (a genre that has already been given the name "hypertext poetry.") To these are added poems that are written, in part or in full, by computer programs or interactive poems that change their form and contents in response to movements of the cursor. "These are very interesting things, which raise the question of whether they can still be defined as poetry," says literary researcher Dr. Tamar Yacobi of the literature department at Tel Aviv University, who has organized the online poetry conference with Eli Hacohen of the Netvision Institute. At the conference Yacobi will present an overview of developments in the area of computerized poetry, among other things, various engines that create poetry in an automatic way. On the Hebrew Net the attempts to deal with poetry are usually more standard and still subordinated to the forms that have been bequeathed to it by printed poetry. Among the high-quality Israeli poetry sites it is worth noting the Snunit Shireshet site (www.snunit.k12.il/shireshet), which although it has not been updated for several years does offer a fine selection of poems by leading Israeli poets and also makes it possible to listen to them reading their poems. One of the only attempts in contemporary Israeli poetry to deal with the challenge of the Internet environment has been made by poet Zali Gurevitch. He defines his latest book, Zman Bab, which was published about a year ago by Am Oved, as poetry written "in screen time." Unlike most poetry books, this is not a collection of discrete poems but rather a semi-controlled continuum of text that came up on the screen one after the other and were printed, in an attempt to delay the situation of consciousness of sitting in front of the computer. Gurevitch has also included in the text the clock that is in the bottom right corner of the screen, which shows the time at which the poem was printed. He has also chosen to relinquish the standard look of a poetry book and printed it in the rawest Arial font, with the intention of imitating the way in which the text appears on the screen. "This is the real truth," says Gurevitch. "The moment I finished writing, what was written on the screen went into the book. This is running writing, with small hops, a few minutes between poem and poem. This says something about the pace at which we live - a kind of continuum of minutes, but also a kind of 'pile' of time." Gurevitch, who was born in 1949, is about to publish a new book, "Doubleclick," which will focus even more on the inspirational situation that takes place in front of the computer. It is hard to believe that before "Zman Bab" he published six acclaimed books that were originally written with a pen. "I lived until the age of 36, quite old, without knowing what a computer is. At a certain moment, a few years ago, I went from writing with a pen on paper to writing on the computer. This was a decision that astonished some of the poets. They think of this as a kind of betrayal of poetry, of the sanctity of scratching on paper and leaving real tracks of ink. But as I see it, there is something liberating and spontaneous about this."