"New and future literatures"

The "new and future literatures" Alan Sondheim speaks of in “Introduction: Codework” in the September/October 2001 issue of  American Book Review variously impact e-poetry. It is a truism that e-poetry can be defined as poetry written in (programming) code. But poetry first circulated on paper and later published on electronic supports can also be termed e-poetry. When we define e-poetry in the first manner, we are using the word code “in a narrower sense [to mean] a translation from natural language to an artificial, strictly defined one” (Sondheim, ABR, 1). But a quick example of the second kind of e-poetry is Julio Cortázar’s “The Lines of the Hand” (as well as myriad other texts). Sondheim uses a tree metaphor as a rough classification for codework. Thus, there are “multi-media and hypertextual works” rather like leaves or flowers, he notes, and these “may playfully utilize programming terminology” without “refer[ring] to specific programs” (ABR, 1). However, work where “the language becomes increasingly unreadable at times” are analogous to “tendrils and branchings of the tree, half surface and half root” (ABR, 1). The works in this category, then, are “works in which submerged code has modified the surface language—with the possible representation of the code as well” (ABR, 1). It is obviously slippery ground we are on, for if natural language is also code, it would seem that even on a level of expertise that goes as deep as Sondheim’s, terms like code and codework are sometimes interchangeable. However, his third classification, the roots of the tree, involves “works in which the submerged code is emergent contents [and] both a deconstruction of the surface and of the dichotomy between the surface and the depth” (ABR, 1). In this third category, the programming language may actually run a program. So it’s important to distinguish between imperative programming (Sondheim’s first classification) and object-oriented programming (Sondheim’s third and, sometimes, second classifications). I think it’s good to return to Sondheim’s article today and to share his enthusiasm for codework’s movements around “vast uncharted domains [of] new and future literatures—domains that recognize the vast changes that have occurred in human/machine interaction—changes that affect the very notions of community and communality” (ABR, 2). The article, abbreviated here as ABR, is available online.