Chris Funkhouser: New Directions in Digital Poetry

Synthetic in essence and brittle in terms of longevity, digital poetry’s fluid states prevent us from considering works as being plastic. Yet since they are never completely fixed, works of digital poetry always maintain plasticity in presentation on the WWW. They exist in a state of being molded, receiving shape, made to assume many forms – often seeking qualities that depict space and form so as to appear multi-dimensionally.

C.T. Funkhouser’s lecture “On New Directions in Digital Poetry” recounts the challenges and process of preparing a scholarly edition focusing on the pursuit of fully – and usefully – capturing the dynamics of this ever-changing genre. As poetry becomes a networked form, its poetics explodes and singular measurements of its pliancy resist finite definition. Recognizing plasticity as an aesthetic foundation establishes a valuable metaphor for generally qualifying the results of electronic writing to date, “On New Directions in Digital Poetry” explicitly stems from Funkhouser’s experience teaching Electronic Literature courses at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Bio:

Christopher Funkhouser, PhD, is an associate professor in the department of humanities and director of the undergraduate program in professional and technical communication at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Funkhouser is the creator of a proto-anthology of hypermedia poetry and is completing his dissertation on the subject. He edited The Little MagazineVolume 21 CD-ROM, and is responsible for two on-line poetry and poetics journals: Descriptions of an Imaginary Universe and Passages. His work has recently appeared in Talisman, Hambone, and Callaloo. His hypertext,POETRY WEBS, was produced in conjunction with the 1996 European Media Arts Festival. Funkhouser’s contributions to ebr are both found in theElectropoetics special (ebr5): The House of Poetry...:Recent Noticings*, andPoetry@The_Millennium: A Conversation with Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris.

Funkhouser was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in spring 2005 to travel to Cyberjaya, Malaysia, where he taught a course at Multimedia University entitled “Hypermedia Writing” focusing on the history of digital writing. He also led a creative multimedia workshop, a practice in which he has been involved for more than a decade. His research focused on database programming.