Slamming?  Couch surfing?  Keep up!  Find out what Jayne Fenton Keane discovered while she was on a tour of the United States.  Stylus' guest editor, Melissa Ashley, caught up with Jayne to discuss poetry, technology and her interactive website Slamming the Sonnet.   

STYLUS: For your honours project you created an interactive website, Slamming the Sonnet which, as far as I understand, is something of a world-first. Maybe you could talk a little about the concept behind it.

JFK: Slamming the Sonnet was such an enormous project. It took two years. My whole interest in Slam started out quite by accident because I was touring America and I ended up doing what they call “couch surfing” – a more elegant term than dossing -- and the people whose couches I was surfing on were all into Slam poetry. They were all big names in the Slam scene, the leaders, the coaches. So naturally I was exposed to a lot of Slam and I became fascinated by the whole thing, by its ironies and contradictions. I tried to find literature on it and there wasn’t any and I thought ‘oh good’, and ‘oh not so good’. So I decided to investigate it for myself. Through my honours research cyberspace seemed the perfect medium through which to explore the body and Slam. I have a preoccupation with the body that’s been going on for such a long time. Being exposed to all sorts of poststructural and postmodern theory about the reader and the author being dead, as well as feminist theory – it all came together in a kind of mishmash. Inside it were all the voices of Slam poetry, and quite remarkable things started happening. Cyberspace seemed to be the perfect vehicle because you could challenge a whole lot of things. You could raise the dead and make them compete against the living.

Clichéd ‘electronic literature’ is based around hypertext and cyborgs and the whole idea of tooling up the human body with machines and imposing a mechanistic idiom onto the body, so I decided I’d subvert that and actually flesh out cyberspace. So my site is composed of actual images of body parts. The microphone is made out of images I created from spinal tissue, vocal chords, and lung tissue. There is a pulse. There’s that whole idea of the eye, the gaze. As a performer, the relationship of the gaze, the panopticon is ever present – so to be able to play around with that and to be able to privilege the aural rather than the written text was exciting. Then to take the structure of Slam - the competition, the open mike - and use it to showcase experiments poets were doing with music, sound and poetry. The website was a way of engaging with an incredible scope of theory and demonstrating that poetry could be represented on the web in a non-hypertext way. Which I was really committed to because I think hypertext was a really nice idea, but it’s difficult to substantiate the rhetoric surrounding it. I just wanted to go in a completely different direction.

STYLUS: How have things progressed in terms of audience response, hits, and feedback?  Slamming the Sonnet been up for a couple of months now.

JFK:  The difficulty with my latest website is that it can’t monitor hits beyond the first page. It actually can’t monitor in the same way that the old one (the stalking tongue) did, but if the rates are the same as the first site it is about 13,000 visitors a month. I rely on my guest book to let me know how people are receiving the site. People keep hitting the guest book and not leaving any comments – just blank entries. It is quite interesting to think about that.

STYLUS: Slamming the Sonnet was showcased as an installation at an art gallery in California, can you tell me a little about that? 

JFK: Yeah. It’s over now. People could come along and interact with the website. It was showcased during a national American e-literature conference, at the UCLA. Then it was showcased at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago as part of the 2002 Electronic Literature Organization's Digital Culture Festival.

STYLUS: I heard the website won the Newcastle poetry prize in the new media section?

JFK: No, that was something else. Originally I did a whole new suite of flash poems, as part of the website, but due to technological incompatibility, they didn’t become part of the final project. So I entered one of the poems in the competition and it won.

STYLUS: Slamming the Sonnet did win a prize in South Australia?

JFK: The collection of flash poems from the first website won the Mayne Award for Multimedia, Adelaide Festival Award for Literature

STYLUS: Do you see any sort of a revival or any chance of survival in terms of poetry adopting hybrid forms that embrace new technologies?

JFK: I think the question that should be asked is, just because the technology is there does it add anything to poetry? That was one of the questions I asked myself, regarding my relationship to poetry and technology. Even before the technology was there I was thinking about my relationship to technology and poetry. I mean look at the amount of poetry on the internet. I think that’s incredibly wonderful. Then there’s also this other side that is open to criticism – too much bad poetry and not enough editorial regulation. Because technology can achieve certain things it’s attractive but I always ask myself the question, what does this mean for poetry? I don’t simply want to turn my books into electric page-turners. There are a lot of people who are taking the page and they’re just putting it in a different space. They’re not really bending the concept of the page. Also, clicking to infinity with no resolution is a very frustrating thing. I like destinations, signification. There maybe some people who like to go on infinite journeys nowhere, but I’m not one of them --

STYLUS: The postmodern nightmare --

JFK: Yes. I like journeys. I don’t necessarily like to chase my tail. I get really pissed off when people in cyberspace just make me chase my tail, clicking and clicking because that’s supposedly ‘interactive’ – that’s why I was attracted to Flash. It wasn’t necessarily interactive, but why should it be? Just because it can be –

STYLUS: it sets up a different relationship with words doesn’t it – by making you focus on the actual text – in Flash?

JFK: Before Flash came on the market I had been fantasising about ways of making text embody, having it move around in a particular way, so when I discovered Flash I went oh, I can make text move from left to right – whoopee. I started to learn the technology through the poems. Because I already had this whole conception before I encountered Flash, I was ready for Flash. It’s not like I came across Flash and went “oh I wonder how I can use that”, I was waiting for the technology. Because I didn’t want to learn programming, I knew that was something that didn’t interest me, I wanted a different way, it was like I was waiting for the person to design the car so I could drive it, but I didn’t want to worry about the pistons.

STYLUS: Who are your poetic influences? Books, texts, academic experiences, other writers, a combination? 

JFK: All of the above. If I hadn’t encountered Slam poetry, I don’t know what that would have meant for me. You know I was working in that (performance) idiom before I went to America – I was the only person around here doing that particular thing, and when I went overseas I discovered everybody was doing it. In a way I was “you mean I’m not unique!!” but it was also like I was coming from a different space. There was a collision and a merger, and I can’t tell you how I would have developed if I hadn’t gone there but I can’t tell you what I would have been like if that didn’t happen because I was already kind of in that space. It’s one of those ambiguous things. In terms of authors it’s very hard to pick any out. I must have close to three or four hundred books of poetry at home. If I start naming them I’ll be here forever. There are just so many excellent writers in this country and in the USA and I’ll feel terrible if I leave anyone out! I think some of the New Zealand Writers have a unique voice as well.

STYLUS: Reading your work, no one in particular stands out. Whoever has influenced you has been blended through your work. With some poets it’s quite easy to read influences – with you it’s quite diverse, and multi-textual, including technology, academia. Your poetry is very much based on ideas – it’s not primarily about an aesthetic space

JFK: It’s exploring and its political – that’s the thrill that writing gives me. I like to know where I’m going and to respond to things that concern me or that I need to process. I could be reading or I could be watching something on TV like South Park and a little seed is sown – and you know I’m a voracious reader – I’ll read anything from the cultural history of ventriloquism to the improvisation of music. And in between reading those texts I’ll be reading a poetry book.

STYLUS: And it all comes together --

JFK: Well it tries. At the moment I’m reading Liv Lundberg, a Norwegian poet. In Norway they have a system whereby the government pays the poets to write. She’s been selected to write.

STYLUS: That’s her job – wow!

JFK: Yes, she gets paid to write poetry. So I’ve been reading her work in between reading all sorts of other stuff. There’s no limit. On the internet I’ve been reading about neurophysiology, someone’s just given me an article on dyslexia – I don’t know at what point they’re going to wake up in my brain but they’re all there – and that’s what matters. None of them matter in a way that I feel compelled to copy them. I am constantly gobsmacked by the amount of amazing dazzling stuff, I can’t pick it out because everything I find that does that to me I keep.

STYLUS: What are some of your plans for this year, regarding poetry? Any secret projects you’re working on?

JFK: There are about five projects I’m working on now–never a dull moment – but I don’t know which ones will end up happening. There are two musical collaborations I’m doing with different people - Roland Adeney and Bernard Houston.  I’m working on a piece called Organelle Machine which involves mapping body movements during performance and it’s a collaboration with the Active Visualisation Lab. Hopefully I’ll get to do that at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival. I’m also developing a spoken word choral piece that may be performed in the new year at the Woodford Folk Festival. Next year I will extend my work on acoustic biospheres … then I have some ideas for performing texts. At the moment I’m too busy organising National Poetry Week and working on the Queensland Poetry Festival to dedicate much time to these ideas.

Jayne Fenton Keane will be performing at one of the finest festivals in Australia.  If you are in Brisbane don’t miss the Queensland Poetry Festival, September 22 - 29. 

For program details:   www.queenslandpoetryfestival.org or contact the Queensland Writers'  Centre on (07) 3839 1243.