Nature Boy


Stem Harvest (writers forum, September 2002) was among last batch of chapbooks published by Bob Cobbing just before he died. Stem Harvest was subtitled "Nature Poems". I'm not sure Bob liked the book that much.

In fact I don't think Stem Harvest has been archived among Writers Forum publications. Book contains sequence 'De Eye On The Science That', 'Nature Boy', 'Flowers', 'Three Cells' and 'Leek Legion'. Though seeming end-of-era London-based avant-printing, Stem Harvest wears forward-looking simian smile.

Within final year of Cobbing-led WF publications - song 'It's a Small World After All' was translated into DNA fragments and imported into the genome of a living bacterium.

Possibilities of science and technology in the wake of genome cloning has been explored by the Fishbone Initiative (collective nod perhaps to community collaborative/anonymous science workers) - Deciphering Human Chromosone 16: We Report Here (information as material, 2007).

First referenced on Peter Philpott's Great Works, an introduction to performative possibilities of tuned-in poets Richard Makin and Sarah Jacobs was one highlight London's 'Sundays at the Oto' couple years ago.

Christian Bök's The Xenotext Experiment (with genetic vocabulary 'thread' and 'strand' already blogosphere-speak) has animated dead-clay into new encoded life. Real, virtual and poetic.

Curious thing is, programming seems counter-intuitive to designing poetry.

Amount of exacting characters, symbols and spaces required to make codes work seems disproportionate as literary practise.

But if long rule-based pattern encryption is required to make poem feed off its own organism - poetics of scripton & cybertexton may finally have come of age.




jolt




Songs Our Teachers Learn Us sequence