SUMMER 1999

Of Weapons and War

Unstopped Mouths: Poetry and Hypertext

by Susan Hawthorne

In early 1997 I began to work on a series of hypertextual poems¹. In their print incarnation the hypertext appears as footnotes or annotations to the text. But in the various electronic forms which I have explored (and I am only at the beginning of this process) they appear as a poem with hyperlinks to key words, as maps, as PowerPoint slides, as charts of potential hypertextual pathways; they could also appear as text combined with photographic images or sound, or as moving images, such as animation or QuickTime video, or they could be accompanied by virtual images. These are only the possibilities I have imagined within the capabilities of current technology, although in practice I’ve not yet produced all of these forms.

At the current stage of development, the poems work in several dimensions: as linear text they can be read straight through without the hypertextual links; they also work across the poems, so that certain words recur in several poems. These combined vertical and horizontal readings, are further added to by the links created by the hypertextual footnotes, which may take the reader on to other materials, or through the poems in a different order. The complexity of the project increases with each new poem. The intention which lies behind the multilayering of texts is to allow the reader, in part, to see something of the process of creation. To turn the reader from a passive consumer of poems to an active pursuer of some of the sources of the poems. These sources in turn might generate new links, new insights into the production of culture, in particular, the production of lesbian culture. The final shape of the poem, and its genesis are thereby transparently linked for the reader. The multilayering, the creation of a matrix of connections, also allows the reader to approach the poem from different directions. The reader could begin with a single word and from there follow the text through a kind of linguistic/poetic labyrinth. The reading of the poem, therefore, shares some of the randomness of the writing of the poem.

In deciding to write a poem about lesbian culture, I was confronted with the inaccessibility of many of the images I was using. Would any of my readers understand me? Would lesbians understand that the imagery had been chosen specifically to reflect the culture which lesbians have developed, albeit much of it hidden? I introduced the hypertextual element as a way of expanding the number of readings of the poem, a way for the reader to go on exploring.

In the following extract a connection is made between words, poultry and lesbian sexuality.

The double entendre of goblin - its connection with that old word “gob” for mouth and “gobbling” for eating with relish or lust - would not be lost on a poet.

The dense text of lesbian poetry has had a twofold purpose. First of all, the density of poetry lends itself to disguise. Metaphor, allegory, linguistic and structural games are all a part of poetic practice. Secondly, dense text has become a protection, a code. In an effort to hide their meaning many lesbian poets wrote enigmatic, heavily coded, richly textured work.

In writing this series of poems I have been concerned as much with researching lesbian culture, finding the shards of lesbian traditions in the fragments of Sappho’s poems, the small collections of work by Nossis or Erinna, the Sanskrit and Indian traditions, so finely written about by Giti Thadani (1996), and much more besides. I know my work will not be encyclopaedic, it’s not intended to be. Rather I want it to be suggestive, to provoke further research, to make lesbians wonder about their history, to open up the field to further speculation and imagination.

For example, on the latter I have used references to Biblical imagery and reinterpreted it, extended it by speaking about things which have been omitted (Hawthorne, 1998a: 161).

This poem is hypertextually linked to others in the series, which at times touch on similar themes. For example, the theme of the closed community is one which reappears throughout the sequence. There are references to schools for girls, to colleges, to convents, to asylums, to gyms and to prisons. Take the story of Jake (from “In the Prisons”):

As I move from one poem to the next, I discover yet another rich seam of material, one I hadn’t anticipated. And my map of the connections between the poems has become so complex that I have ceased to map the poems on paper, but carry it instead in my head. When I did attempt to map the poems, using StoryVision® the complexity of constructing a cross-hatched set of hypertextual links became clear. The hypertextual links, moreover, traced my poetic intention and these meanings can be made transparent through linking to either a site or another explanatory or associative text, which further elucidates and expands the meaning. For all the discussion of the death of the author, there is something to be said for having access to the poet’s intention.

Conclusions

The concept of hypertext has given me a way to express a lesbian poetics, using both poetic and academic conventions, two worlds I happen to straddle. Hypertext, along with other electronic interventions and inventions, will open up a huge array of possibilities for poets to explore into the next millennium.

This is an extract from “Unstopped Mouths, and Infinite Appetites: Developing a Hypertext of Lesbian Culture” by Susan Hawthorne. The complete article will be published in CyberFeminism: Connectivity, Critique and Creativity, edited by Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein. Spinifex Press. Available in Australia and New Zealand in August 1999, and in North America and Britain in Fall 1999.