Months ago, I started drafting an entry on Jhave Johnston’s “human-mind-machine” for the Electronic Literature Directory. In the meantime, while the draft entry languished on my hard drive, Davin Heckman already drafted an entry.
I’ve been wanting to write about Johnston’s work for some time and have puzzled over the best way to do this. But what interested me most about this particular work by Johnston is its inextricable connection, in my mind, with another work of contemporary poetry, Rachel Levitsky’s Neighbor.
I added my notes comparing Levitsky and Johnston’s work to the comments field of Davin’s entry on “human-mind-machine.” View them there or after the jump.
While experiencing “human-mind-machine” I couldn’t help but think of Rachel Levitsky’s Neighbor, another work of contemporary poetry I deeply admire. Likewise, while coming across Levitsky’s title poem, “Neighbor,” on the web recently, it made me think of Johnston’s work.
Both Levitsky and Johnston are contemporary poets of distinction, not because of enormous bodies of work, but because of the singularity of their individual aesthetic approaches, their highly individual poetic modes. And except for this intersection of subject matter—the neighbor—, their work seems to have very little in common.
In the title poem of Neighbor (which stands as a sort of portal into the world of the book and the complex play with narrative subjectivity it employs), Levitsky writes:
- At the time I type this
I’ve been at it for one yearthe last six months
completely in my head all in my head
where there are many levels.
The problem is whether they
are connected or if
they are levels
at all. “A level” may connote a
piece in a unified structure,
or unity of disconnected parts
firmly housed.
Part of the challenge that Jhave Johnston’s work presents centers upon this “unity of disconnected parts” across the audio, visual, and textual elements of his digital poems. Levitsky employs both the first and third person while playing up the possibilities of this shifting of voice (which “I” is this? the “I” of the author, the “I” of a character? Both?), so too does Johnston’s work decenter the poem so that there are many voices (on many levels).
While Levitsky’s poems are meticulously constructed and feel very intentionally strung together as a book. Jhave’s work often has a loose and performative feel to it, but this is undercut by the networks of coding and technology that go into composing the works (and perhaps this looseness and performativity also serve to provide a living breathing core amidst all the technological processes the works require).
The morphic text of “human-mind-machine” seems to be composed of excrement as it deforms from “human” to “machine” to “mind.” Perhaps this is a fitting metaphor that weaves together the narrative voice of the poem, the bodies it references, and the reader/viewer of the poem: the output turned input churned out again from mind, body, machine in a network of transformations and transmissions. But can we access it? Can we (or the poet) speak clearly or be heard? Perhaps in this way, we are neighbor: bound together but separated by information, architecture, machines, our own feeble bodies, and our subjective interiorities.
Note: I intend to write more about Johnston’s work here, by connecting his 21st century approach to the tradition of the emblem book from the 16th and 17th centuries. Also, for more on Levitsky’s Neighbor you should buy the book or get it from your local library, but you can also see this interview here.
