Enc0d1ng poetry

Abstract

So-called “poetry in code” mounts a doubled claim to electronic-ness and literariness, and can be dubbed “literary” precisely due to its coded nature. It would seem, then, that code requires at least as much critical consideration as the linguistic and rhetorical devices normally employed in print literature. Insofar as a legitimate codework employs code at the scripting level as a language-generator and –animator, and at the surface level as either executable or non-executable programming, to what extent can E. E. Cummings’s I Will Be (1925) be considered a poem in code? What can be inferred from a comparison between this would-be proto-codework and a canonical digital poem such as Brian Kim Stefans’s The Dreamlife of Letters (2000)? What is it that makes Cummings’ poem a potentially more remarkable codework than Stefans’s? Is it the precociousness of his coded address, or is it the fact that he anticipates the links which N. Katherine Hayles makes between code and liminal somatic states in her essay 'Traumas of Code' (2006)?