New Media Poetry: Lewis LaCook

Here’s a little Hallowe’en treat!

Since Samhain is yet again upon us, I decided I would finish up this track that I’ve been toiling away at for the past month. Haunted with spooky sounds and a near/neo disco groove, Grayson Hall rises up from the murky depths of the old house at Collinwood to boogie her way back into New Media Poetry. Yes, I know: another Dark Shadows themed bit of audio. But Grayson Hall seems intrinsic to the camp that was this gothic ’60s soap opera, and she deserves to get down with her bad self. Of course, I just couldn’t resist.

Samples used: “Planet Caravan” by Black Sabbath; some Bach Oboe Sonata;John Donne’s “The Ecstasy” from Classic Poetry Aloud; and some Dark Shadows

Barnabas’ Affliction

Excellent, somewhat trippy video art from Donna Kuhn!

“why-must-i-be-wasted-to-stay-in-your-world” operates via a set of tag words. A random number of tags are chosen when the application launches; the application then scrapes Flickr for the first image result in a search for each tag. This ensures the images in the piece will always be fresh, and will evolve as time goes on–or until flickr rewrites their HTML, and the whole thing breaks. In addition to this, the work also performs a profile search on myspace.com for profiles named after a randomly-selected tag, and displays the profile details for this person. I think of this work as a dynamic, kinetic poem; as the words and images dance and collide, associations are formed, and the result is a work that scans, appropriates and recontextualizes the zeitgeist surrounding each tag.

Slipping Through
is a fresh synthesizer improvisation. At times electronically percussive, quirky, and strangely happy.

I’ve often been accused of having a “junk” aesthetic, or an “everything-AND-the-kitchen-sink” style. This style can be off-putting to even the most hardy of new media practitioners; it often seemed that, during the early stages of New Media Poetry, poets were using the dynamic technologies available to recreate traditional figurative poetry in this non-linear space.

Of course, I don’t believe that my work is devoid of discriminatory criteria. These art objects come out of living in a Postmodern era–a huge, raucous pastiche of an age, in which no single ideology is dominant, thus allowing the poet to slip in and out of modes of expression like salmon struggling upstream. The postmodern poet often suffers from a compulsion to irony, and who can blame her: she lives in a world of kaeidoscopic shifts, where reference breaks down in the rush of styles, dictions, and ideologies.

Now, anyone TRULY familiar with my work can also see that through it all runs a pungent strain of the Romantic. This can seem at odds with much Postmodern art; after all, doesn’t that intrinsic irony imply a certain detachment? Can love really exist among all these shattered billboards?

I believe that this is the question I’m trying to answer.

For a while now I’ve been meaning to reimagine and redesign the http://www.lewislacook.org website. In particular, I needed a form that was easy to update, good for blogging, friendly for my visitors and amenable to Search Engine Marketing.

To that end I’ve chosen to use the immensely popular WordPress blogging software as my platform, as opposed to the previous incarnation of this site, which used Joomla. While Joomla is quite a robust and flexible system, I found that it had a lot of features I didn’t neccessarily need or want for this website.

This New Media Poetry website will focus exclusively on, well, New Media Poetry–my own work, of course (and those of you who wandered into this site looking for my new work won’t be disappointed–as the site gels I’ll be getting posts up about the old work soon enough), but also some reviews of other new media poems on the web, some thoughts on the technologies involved in creating these works, and anything else I want to throw in. This site aims to not only showcase my own work, but to serve as a periodic exploration of what new media poetry exists on the web, it’s direction, polarities, and practitioners.

To that end, enjoy the spiffy new design (handcrafted using the default WordPress theme, some custom markup, and the JQuery JavaScript library) and keep coming back for more news, reviews, and opinion on those poems that don’t quite fit on the page…