prior
atom
Jukka-Pekka
Kervinen
2019
ma
press, Finland (lulu.com)
Unpaginated
(136 pp)
$5.00
Reviewed
by Clara B. Jones in Entropy, July 2019
“Where
technology leads, Art follows.” Kenneth Goldsmith
The
broad categories of digital poetry and electronic writing are
sub-genres of experimental literature which the Russian Formalist,
Viktor Shklovsky, defined as “extreme deviation from that which is
familiar.” In his view, experimental writing is
“strange”—“defamiliarizing” what we think of as the
conventional, particularly, the lyrical, emotional, representational,
or meaningful. Writing in the early 20th
century, Shklovsky could not have had the electronic methods of
Jukka-Pekka Kervinen in mind, but both artists' visions embody the
spirit of disruption of and resistance to the status
quo.
prior
atom,
in its author's words, is a “procedural/visual text” of
computer-generated compositions arranged on the page in a form
approximating traditional poems. Each mélange
of words, some overlapping, is presented with frequent white spaces,
a presentation highlighting every element as a unit capable of
standing on it's own from which meaning may or may not be derived.
Though it is not easy or necessary to categorize the compositions,
they may be understood in the context of “collage” writing, a
Modernist conception with origins in Cubist visual art (e.g.,
Picasso), as well as, in Dadaism and Surrealism. The Dadaist poet and
performance artist, Tristan Tzara, for example, advocated, in the
mid-20th
century, a “cut-up” method of composition, and, in the late
1990s, the poetry critic, Marjorie Perloff, stated, “Each element
in the collage has a kind of double function: it refers to an
external reality even as it's compositional thrust is to undercut the
very referentiality it seems to assert.” Collage poetry, then, is
characterized by a juxtaposition of opposing elements—the a word's
definition and a composition's formal radicalism. An example of one
of Kervinen's compositions, included in prior
atom,
follows:
[insert
jpeg composition here]
Jukka-Pekka
Kervinen is a Finnish composer, producer, writer, visual artist, and
publisher [ma press] focused mainly on algorithmic processes,
computer-assisted composition, and various other methods based on
cybernetics, chaotic dynamics, and stochastic systems, among others.
I asked him, via
Facebook, to describe his creative methods, curious, especially,
about whether the formatting of his compositions was intentional or
randomly-generated. In his own words, the author informed me that the
layout was “computer-generated” but that he wrote the programs by
himself, using the computer as an “extended pen, meaning that I
have very exact image of what I want to do. Instead of making them
'traditional' way by writing/typing/etc, I write a program or
programs to make and generate certain decisions and other
structures/forms.For 'prior
atom'
I wrote only one, longer program which generates whole book,
vocabulary is mine, i.e., I have maintained and edited this same word
selection ca. 15 years, it is very specific for me, and still
constantly edited.... All layouts of the pages and choice of words
and their placements are generated by my program, under constraints I
make beforehand running it, and the program makes finished PDF....”
Kervinen's
methods have historical roots in the textual and visual forms of the
OuLiPo movement's systematic, self-restricting means of making texts,
as well as, similarities to “asemic” writing's textual and visual
forms [“vispo”] having no necessary or specific semantic content.
Certainly, the author's procedures constitute “word play,”
yielding a type of “word salad” or coded mixture. The
compositions in prior
atom
are intended to be seen
in a manner similar to the visualization of Gertrude Stein's writing
discussed by the Stein scholar, Ulla Dydo.
Though
Kervinen's compositions resist interpretation and lack formal or
logical structure, a “reader” may impose meaning or significance
where these are not necessarily intended. A maxim of Postmodernism is
that interpretation is in the mind of the “reader”—or,
visualizer, in this case, and the human brain is designed to seek
order within actual or apparent disorder. Thus, some persons
accessing these constructs may discover that certain “devices”
[Shklovsky] unify the book. For example, references to animals occur
throughout—rodent, ferret, lynx, walleye, hen, emu, to name a few,
and it might occur to a poetically-inclined visualizer that a list
poem could be created from these, or other, repetitions. Similarly,
each composition's makeup lends itself to combination and
re-combination of words [e.g., “doable taxonomy,” “rainy
forest”] that might be employed as prompts or could be incorporated
into verse. While playing with a few of the compositions as if they
were databases, I created an original haiku without much effort
[“Homicide casework, / forbid unjustly person, / dread stalwart,
indeed.”]. Many other potential significations and associations are
latent in the text.
Perhaps,
it can be suggested, that the best way to approach prior
atom
is to allow the collection's layout, arrangement, literary style, and
format to speak for themselves. As such, each composition has what
the Formalist poetry critic, Helen Vendler, calls, “interpretive
power” with the potential to produce verbal, visual, and
“psychological transformations.” The consumer of literature is
fortunate that.Jukka-Pekka Kervinen continues to create experimental
writing producing unique formulations and theories of reality and
composition, emanating, as a case in point, from this collection that
can be “taken at face value,” as well as, richly interpreted.
prior
atom
is necessary reading for anyone interested in cutting-edge innovative
writing at its best.
