[field notes] on the poetic web

This is a selection from my new newsletter: field notes from my desktop. You’re welcome to subscribe if you’d like, but this is the most important (and perhaps interesting?) bit, archived here. I have complicated feelings about what it means to run a newsletter as opposed to having a blog, but it’s a good learning experience either way.

🥾 Rambling on the poetic web

I’ve increasingly started to describe my current body of work as stewarding a more “poetic web”. A friend asked me what that means the other day, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to explain here.

A few years ago, I was a fellow with the School of Commons (who are currently looking for a new institutional host btw!), where I worked on a project called “poetic tactics to counter extraction (and other ways to train attention)” about developing tools to better engage with the attention economy. The project came from my own personal experience, and out of a kind of desperate desire for a better way to engage with the stream of noise intrinsic to digital life, which had intensified during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Amidst so many collective crises over the past few years, which themselves have emerged from many endemic crises before them, I turned to poetry to cope, to think, to feel without going numb. David Whyte reminded me that instead of feeling lost, “wherever you are is called Here”. Adrienne Rich helped me to remember that “words are maps” in the wreckage of it all. Mary Oliver’s perspective on the clarity of retrospection was a gift: “one day you finally knew what you had to do, and began”.

I came back to Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” (my constant companion in my 20s) and Audre Lorde’s Poetry is Not a Luxury, particularly the part where she says:

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled together by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives”.

This brought me to wondering about whether there might be more poetic experiences to be found on the web, and I soon found that I was far from alone in thinking about this.

Artist Chia Amisola calls the poetic web “a practice and process towards a place: a web that is more handmade, expressive, and intimate; where site-making is a political, personal, and poetic act”. Kristtofer Tjalve’s Naive Weekly has been collecting notes from the quiet, odd, and poetic web for years now. The School of Poetic Computation of course embodies this ethos in their very name. There are countless others.

Maybe all these projects, personal and professional, are all “poetic tactics”, organised with the hope of seeing things differently. In a time of mass surveillance, endless wars, and AI slop, perhaps poetry might remind us that all is not lost. It certainly helps me.