Sporkworld is happy to announce the
publication of the e-criticism work Rilke
and the Archaic Torso, by Edward Picot. This project launches a new "Guest
Artists" page on Sporkworld.
Submissions for this page are open, and may be sent to Millie
Niss.
Edward Picot's work provides a series of responses to a poem by Rilke. We begin with the poem itself along with various translations into English, augmented by photographs illustrating the subject of the poem, a Classical sculpture of a bust with missing arms and legs. Next, Picot gives us a collection of commentaries about the poem. These commentaries set the poem in the context of the Modernist movement in poetry, relate the poem to older poetry, and give us some insight into the philosophical unederpinnings of the poem. Up to this point, the work is a well-executed piece of conventional literary criticism. In accordance with the somewhat academic tone of the commentaries, the pages are formal, spare, and largely free of new media bells and whistles. Picot is quite capable of making things interact and move arond, but in these pages of commentary, he chooses not to make extensive use of these techniques.
If you stare at the Commentary page long enough, you will notice that the links to the three sets of comments change their order every so often. This is meant to indicate that the three pages are independent and are not meant to be read in a specifc order. New media allows for non-linear structures, and Picot wants us to realize that when a menu of links is presented, it really does indicate a choice. We are not meant to move slavishly down the page from top to bottom as we would be required to in a print paper.
The fulcrum of Rilke and the Archaic Torso is the Undercommentary, which is the plainest page of all. On this page, Picot turns the whole notion of literary criticism on its head. In the guise of a commentary on the Rilke poem, Picot weaves in numerous references to books he says he hasn't read, and tells us that "Instead of sitting here in front of my computer screen, trying to make myself seem important, trying to think of important-sounding things to say about Rilke, and European cultural history for fuck's sake, I should be out there walking." The Undercommentary is less about the Rilke poem than about Picot himself, and makes us wonder how and why a poem such as Rilke's could be relevant to Picot's life, or to ours.
If the Commentary is focused on the poem, and the Undercommentary is focused on Picot, the final part of the work, which makes use of more digital fireworks than the preceding sections, is a synthesis of the two. It consists of a series of poems written by Picot that give us several interpretations (perhaps "reworkings" would be a better word) of the Rilke poem, using different poetic forms and making use of a varying range of tones.
Picot is the curator of the website The Hyperliterature Exchange, which features reviews and essays about new media literature, along with a catalog of work (by a large variety of authors) which is available for sale. Picot's own new media writing is available on his personal site, http://www.edwardpicot.com/.