Interface and Interface Problems

Hello everyone,

SO, I've lost whatever scrap of paper on which I wrote down what week I was supposed to do the blog.  I think it was this week because of a cryptic scrawl in my notebook... if it is someone else's week, I hope that this isn't a terrible usurpation.  I also apologize for my lengthy and out-of-place post in the first week--I guess I've been confused on multiple counts.  Here's hoping that I know what's going on tonight.

Post Proper:

There’s something delightful about flipping between all the various poetry websites that we were given to investigate.  I’ve seen most of them before (not the Electronic Poetry Center), but never as a complex, in each other’s context.  Looking at them to see their interface reveals a wealth of rhetorical moves—some of which are totally bewildering.  First example from Poets.org:

To me, this was the most interesting for its (for me) incongruities that I know are designed to create and maintain a certain powerful mystique of poetry.  Lorca’s gazing out at me, talking about a pretty girl and olives.  The poem of the day is one of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s early pseudocidal nature poems.  Lucile Clifton and Natasha Trethaway are “This Week’s Highlights.”  The banner asks me, “What do you see as the role of the poet in today’s culture?” before I realizes that it is actually asking a bunch of poets—answers they provide are more or less whimsical, more or less useful.  BUT the real payoff, the crème, is when I turned to the drop-down menu I’d never used before (over the search bar, which I had).  I was shocked when the drop down menu began sorting poems for me—what’ll it be, mister?  Nature or Poems for Every Occasion?  It gives the impression that all the poems on the website are shuffled into these broad and cliched categories.  For example:

Nature contains Animals, and Animals: Sharks, Birds, Fish.  The interface is directing me as if the only poems about animals were about sharks, birds, and fish.  No mention that sharks ARE fish.  I did end up figuring out that Poets.org works with Discovery’s “Shark Week.”  Why cats did not make the list is still vague (poor Geoffrey). 

To put Poets.org in conversation with Drucker:

I think it is clear that the page isn’t oriented to the “user” so much as it is oriented to shape the user’s perception of the content of the website.  By suggesting that the user navigate through pre-designed pathways, the site determines the sight.  This troubles me because the American Academy of Poets is in a powerful position of authority and exercises this authority most on the people who show up to the website without necessarily knowing what they are looking for.  It’s less “codependence and contingency, the performative experience of knowing produced in a relationship between environment and subject” and more just codependency: “a relationship in which a person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected with a pathological condition (as in an addiction); and in broader terms, it refers to the dependence on the needs of or control of another.”  The website gives the impression of being designed for the subjectivity of the user, but that’s not really the case.  Like when I got my first collected Millay when I was in high school and the dust jacket had not her picture but a picture of J.D. McClatchy, then head of the Academy (and who wrote the introduction). 

Not that the other websites are little utopias.  The Poetry Foundation’s iphone app adds a playful randomness, but still defines the input categories and the output content.  Penn Sound’s homepage troubles Charles Bernstein’s railing against “official verse culture” at Bothell a few weekends ago by being completely official (and listing him as the no. 1 “Featured resource”).