To say that the medium is the message regarding Stephanie
Strickland’s poetry would only be scratching the surface.
A 30-year-old veteran poet and currently a professor at Sarah
Lawrence College, Strickland’s work consists of collaborative
poetic efforts that cut across paper and digital media, ultimately
connecting an understanding of their meaning to their presentation.
Tonight at the UCLA Hammer Museum, she will be reading from and
presenting her latest multimedia work of poetry, “V:
WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una,” which was awarded the Di
Castagnola Prize by the Poetry Society of America for best
manuscript in progress.
The latest poetic effort of Strickland, who calls herself an
experimental poet, takes advantage of our technology rich climate.
The work exists not only in print as a book, but also via the Web
as an interactive, ever-changing entity. In its published form,
“V” is an invertible book, meaning that there is no
back cover, but rather two different sections that are
back-to-back, which can be flipped upside down and around, all of
which works together to contribute to the complex message that
Strickland is trying to convey.
“It’s this graphic gesture, this gesture that the
body makes that you have to turn the book over,” Strickland
said in a recent phone interview. “You read it halfway
through and then you come to a page that has the URL on it, but if
you turn the book over and start on the other side and read
through, you will also come to that page with the URL. There are
three beginnings, but there’s no real ending. A book ends,
that’s clear, but that’s not really the way we learn
things now.”
Dedicated to Simone Weil, a philosopher and mystic who was a
refuge from Nazi Germany, the poems of “V” were
completely recreated on the internet as “V: Vniverse”
with the collaboration of Cynthia Lawson, who will also be at the
Hammer Museum reading. This portion of the work consists of an
entire constellation of stars on which users can click to reveal
various lines of the poem, allowing them to individually create a
new dimension.
“The metaphor that goes through all of these poems is the
question of what’s happened to our knowing when now so much
of it is computer mediated and digitally mediated,”
Strickland said. “We have to make sense of the patterns on
our computer screens “¦ and you actually do that when you come
to the online part of the book.”
One single poem from the “Losing L’una”
portion of the book, “Errand Upon Which We Came,” has
also been given a new life of its own with the help of M.D.
Coverley who worked with Strickland to morph it into an interactive
flash poem. According to Strickland, “Errand” lives in
a completely different world in its visual arrangement apart from
its print form. This new light that cross-media sheds on poetry is
what she is trying to explore.
“The whole idea of translation needs to be broadened and
understood as what it means to translate across media,”
Strickland said. “Maybe poetry exists in between all those
systems, maybe any one system, any one media, is not itself the
whole answer.”
For Strickland, who said she grew up in a time when people
didn’t trust words, her muse is this question of the
evolution of poetry and language in general ““ how it has
changed over the years and how it will continue to change in
connection with its expanded use on the Internet. The Electronic
Literature Organization is currently based at UCLA, and Strickland
encourages students to get involved in this up-and-coming
literature form.
“It’s a really young field, electronic literature,
it’s just beginning, so students interested in going out and
finding more of this work, or finding out more about it can do so
through the design media arts and the English department both at
UCLA which are active in this field,” she said.