Contemporary Poetry

216 contemporary poetry

redrawn and reworked)’.^23 But most central to the work is that it
comes into being digitally and has not existed in any prior form:

The information (the essence of the web) becomes a new

piece of creative work in itself and is then, in turn, remade to

become further information as an end in itself... ‘The poem

is never fi nished only abandoned’ – certainly this one. And it

simply cannot exist in any other medium.^24

For Irish poet Trevor Joyce, electronic information technolo-
gies offer possibilities as well as problems of surveillance. Joyce
has approached electronic resources as a fi eld for exploration in a
collaborative project entitled ‘Offsets’. Including poets cris cheek,
Alison Croggon, Billy Mills and Mairéad Byrne, the project was
dependent on submissions to create a collaborative poem, using a
structure not dissimilar to a listserv and asking poets to compose by
free association. Marthine Satris comments that, as the electronic
submissions increased, the identifi cation of individual authorship
became more diffi cult:

One loses the fl ow that gives each series of poems its cohesion,

and so essentially what results is that in this mode of publi-

cation, the author’s individuality is subsumed to the group

poetics, as they are required to be infl uenced by someone

unknown, and that fi rst person’s words are then added to,

sometimes in very similar form to what they wrote. There

is no ownership of the poem, no copyright, and it would be

challenging to say the least to pick out the Irish vs. the British

vs. the Icelandic vs. the born in Ireland but now lives in the

USA, as each addition to the poem incorporates the idiom of

at least one other.^25

Joyce’s poetic sequence Syzygy ( 1997 ), was dependent for its
composition upon the transformation of twelve lyric poems by a
computer spreadsheet. The sequence also evokes medieval poet’s
Guillaume de Machaut’s cancrizans, which, as Joyce explains, is a
musical form where ‘one or more parts proceed normally while the
imitating voice or voices give out the melody backwards’.^26 Yet, his