Colin Post
Distinctions by Colin Post is a letter to his daughter, Annot. Written in hyperlinks with Twine, the poem expands as she develops from months to years. The words mirror her stages of maturation from the gaze of a father who is changing right alongside her.
Distinctions
“In the long run, I’m writing this for Annot — something she might read, perhaps at different times in her life, and learn something about how she grew in my eyes, through the strange refractions of word play and hyperlinks. ”
First, congratulations on your recent graduation with your Ph.D. and for fatherhood. What a year! Can you tell us a little about yourself?
CP: Thanks! It's been a trying but ultimately enriching year. Outside of hanging out with my daughter, wife, and cat, I spend most of my time either cycling or consumed with baseball. During the pandemic, I've been playing in an APBA baseball league online with some friends. APBA is a dice-and-cards baseball strategy game, and it's got a pretty dedicated following, myself included now.
Your poem online is an interactive experience. When reading the preface, it states that the poem is ever-growing alongside your daughter. Each month in her first year and then each year following you’re adding on to the hyperlink poem. Can you talk about your experience writing this genre of poetry? One that has no end?
CP: I've always been interested in how artists experiment with new technologies, using the capacities of some new medium to achieve novel effects and aesthetic experiences. What can a poet do writing with computational and networked technologies that they could not do with earlier writing technologies? There's a really rich history of hypertext literature, and a lot of history at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill where I've been working on my PhD. StorySpace, one of the first pieces of software specifically designed to read and write hypertext literature was developed by John B. Smith and Jay David Bolter at UNC in the late 1908s. There are still a lot of possibilities to explore with this writing technology, and that excites me. It keeps me excited about writing, thinking about how the affordances of this technology can shape the sort of poem I write. So I'm expressly embracing many of those affordances in the structure and content of the work -- one that could be updated easily over time, one that could foster webs of connections, and one that could integrate different kinds of attention, different voices.
It strikes me that the poem is alive. There is no narrative arch or projection of where it is going. It is dependent on your daughter’s decisions, preferences, interests, and how you relate to those as a father.
CP: That sense of aliveness is definitely my intent. I take a lot of inspiration from poets who play with open-ended, chance-driven procedures -- Jackson MacLow and his partner Anne Tardos are perennial favorites of mine, and also did some early, fascinating computational poetic experiments. The poem becomes a record of these undetermined interactions. In this vein, Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day is a touchstone for this present project. Mayer records the mundane occurrences of a single day -- making lunch, writing, going to the store for beer. As with MacLow and Tardos, Mayer is deconstructing the position of the lyric poet as this fount of beauty, expressively and uniquely responding to the world. Mayer is responding to the world, but oriented to it as a series of chance events that she is recording. That said, MacLow, Tardos, and Mayer all arrive at moments of incredible beauty in their poems, beauty won through grappling with the mechanics, techniques, and technologies of writing. I'm really interested in how that diary-like aspect of Midwinter Day, the marking of time but through the lens of a poem, really puts Mayer into interesting and unanticipated stances. How do you write poetically about making lunch or going to the store for beer, especially as part of a long, sequential piece? The chance-driven form of the work -- that I'm not deciding what to write, but responding to events as they occur -- makes the poem a kind of artistic stand-in for my daughter. I'm (hopefully) not trying to overdetermine her or influence her too much but fostering her growth as a curious, bright, silly individual.
In reading the poem I realized, even as an adult, how similar I feel to her. Learning to readapt, move, breathe, discover. This line read hauntingly relevant to my experience in quarantine, “Between crusted and smooth, species either crack or curl. The fourth distinction concerns connections.”
CP: I'm in awe of biological development -- that awe is what initially motivated the poem, and over the months of writing, I've increasingly integrated my personal experiences raising my daughter. Watching that development play out day-by-day is such a fantastical experience that it definitely forces me to reflect on my own habits and behaviors. It's unavoidable that parents live vicariously through their children to some extent, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. The poem gives me a space to meditate on all of those developmental stages and milestones that I'm re-experiencing by watching my daughter grow. The poem also gives me a mechanism to connect up the specific trajectories of human development with the textures and consistencies of biological development more generally. I like thinking about crusts, skins, limbs, excreta, etc.
Has your writing changed at all now that you’ve become a father?
CP: One aspect of this work that's very different from anything I've written before is how much I've let my own experience into the work. I've never really written poems about myself or my own experience, and in fact, I've actively resisted that kind of writing. In part, I think that has changed because I now have a definite sense of an audience (my daughter) who might one day be interested in reading about her father's life. I don't know if anyone else will be interested in it, but she probably will be. The structure of this work, acting almost like a poetically-refracted blog, has enabled me to tap into that in a way that still feels genuine and still feels artistically exciting.
Colin Post is a poet and scholar who explores the potential of digital technologies for writing and reading.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Shepherd’s Pie
It wasn’t until I moved to the South that I tried Shepherd’s Pie. I love a good casserole and I can eat potatoes for every meal. Shepherd’s Pie and I are a match made in heaven. Click here for the southern delight.