The Tokyo-based CŌEM is a multi-talented collective of poets, writers, and coders who explore the ever-evolving and curious intersection between poetry and technology. In creating immersive experiences and rethinking the potential of words, the group work to advance their writerly craft with feats of digital engineering, operating on the idea that poetry is not only a literary form or a vehicle for expression but a way of engaging with the world as it moves and changes. I spoke with two leaders of CŌEM, the award-winning poet Nagae Yūki and co-founder Jordan A. Y. Smith, our conversation touching on the singular life of the poem, how poetry can be enacted in physical and digital landscapes, and what transpires when minds of discreet intelligences converge.
Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): CŌEM brings together digital language and poetic language to create projects that aim to immerse readers further into the world of the poem. For you two as poets, what about virtuality entices you? What is particularly seductive or engaging about a poem existing outside of the page?
Nagae Yūki (NY): This addresses a fundamental question of how to determine the essence of poetry. The poetry on the page in the form of écriture can easily be understood as poetry itself—but spoken poetry, with the tongue and the throat and gestures, is a more primeval form than written poetry, as seen with the Iliad and the Odyssey. In fact, I feel that this physicality is key. Over the last ten years, as social media have reached the peak of their prosperity, the digital has largely been criticized as a medium that strips away human physicality; however, today, the latest technology (including the metaverse, which is a sensory technology) allows people to experience leaps in time and space that are possible only in virtual space.
Returning to the first question, what is poetry? Perhaps a metaphysical gaze that overlooks the branching, irreversible movements of time in simultaneity, a miracle of the tongue that freely draws in different places. Isn’t it the poet who makes such connections visible, translating them into something that can be sensed by others? If so, technology as a poetic medium can be considered to have this same power, allowing many people to approach the written word intuitively. Don’t get me wrong—I truly believe in writing, but at the same time, when poets manipulate digital devices and let their bodies and thoughts pass through the metaphysical touch of technology, I am convinced that new poetic expressions that have never existed before will be born—and re-introduced to the page someday. It is my intuition that within these exchanges lies hidden the actual potential for revolutionary changes in the expression of poetry.
Jordan A. Y. Smith (JAYS): Poetry on the page is a great nexus of experiences, but there’s nothing about the medium of paper except its tactility and scent that merits it being the primary locus of poetic form, and the digital “forms” that mimic paper actually sacrifice what’s good about it, remaining faithful to conventions like line shape and length, print-based traditions, and the simulation of book construction that actually deprive the digital of anything that could potentially justify that very sacrifice. There’s a place for poetry in printed forms such as books—I mean, I also edit Tokyo Poetry Journal—so this is not suggesting a replacement of “pages.”
What can be found “in” the poem through the digital is in many ways more akin to the actual poetic experience, which can be synaesthetic, hyperlinked, virtual, disembodied and re-embodied in new ways, spiritually haunting, uncanny, delusional, multilayered, and so on. I’m generally in favor of doing things with poetry—reading it out loud, writing it in my own handwriting, playfully removing parts to highlight, decontextualize, and emphasize them as units.
This sense of play is embodied in Oulipo writers as well, and when I designed and taught a course in digital literature (at UCLA back in 2014), we spent a fair amount of time looking at antecedents of digital literature. Now we have increasingly more versatile tools, so this is just as natural a change as writers switching from quill and ink to ballpoint or mechanical pencil, and from printing press to print-on-demand or e-books.
XYS: Digitality is distinct from textuality in a number of ways—the internet has a tendency to fragment and re-amalgamate what the book is arguably attempting to keep cohesive. Do you think the CŌEM projects aim to create different experiences of reading? To subvert reading? To democratise it?
NY: Textuality and digitality are not contradictory for me. In fact, last month, I had a three-way discussion with two participating artists of the project, and one of them, Matsuura Hisaki, commented that “the digital evolves in such a way that it indirects and erases the body, but this is actually another physicality, a peculiar form that can only be grasped by advanced technology.” He felt this directly after participating in the project.
I do not know how CŌEM as a whole will develop in the future, but from my point of view, if one feel that there is a contradiction between poetry and technology, the textual and the digital, the reason is that one sees technology as just a convenient tool. This is something I am always conscious of, but I do not treat technology as a mere tool or as a toy for enjoyment. Like Jean Cocteau and Jonas Mekas, there were many poets in the past who found “poetry” in technology such as photography and video. You all know that Jonas Mekas in particular continued to greedily incorporate various cutting-edge technologies until his later years, even creating works for Apple. This is proof that he regarded technology as a poetic medium, that he instinctively realized how technological development would accelerate poetic depth.
As you know, now everyone has a smartphone, and the latest technology is in the palm of your hand. Paper has long been the democratically elected champion of poetry, but in an age when people spend most of their time digitally, that form of poetry is also being democratically rejected in many countries. I believe the poetic form and other expressions should be open to new developments, but my hope is that, after embracing such activities and ideas, people will eventually converge in reading on paper.
XYS: The project GeoPossession merges poetry into the psychogeography of Tokyo, with poets reading their work at a certain location and creating a 3D recording that then lives on in that space. What was the process of choosing these poems, these locations, these contributors?
NY: The importance in this project is that the essence of it is not “art” but “literature.” In many regional art projects, there are patterns of creating new poems and novels suitable to the region. GeoPossession, however, connects previously written works written by writers and poets who are naturally inspired by the land back to the land itself; the nature of each artist and the essence of their creative act is highlighted by what kind of landscape they are inspired by. In order to respect that, I left it up to each artist to choose which work of theirs to exhibit, and which landscape to exhibit it in.
The participants in GeoPossession are not only poets—poets are certainly the most numerous, but novelists, playwrights, and singers have also taken part. I was careful about the selection because within each genre of poetry, novel, and drama, I wanted to choose artists with different voices and styles. In this, I feel that the works and locations are naturally scattered all over Tokyo, creating a well-balanced “Tokyo map.”
JAYS: As for my poem, I wrote partly about Shinjuku’s Golden-gai, which is a tiny area of maybe a hundred square meters crammed with two-story drinking establishments built mostly post-WWII. Now, each of the over two-hundred shanties is built around a theme, a vibe, a musical genre, a drink, or whatever you fancy. I also reference Godzilla, who lurks a few blocks away in Kabukicho over the Toho movie theater. As a sober person who goes to Golden-gai and sees the fun without the sake-goggles, the culture of this place always amazes me; its ability to survive yakuza fire attacks, coordinated to facilitate a corporate buyout of the super valuable land, also fixes it as symbol of the urban heroes behind the stubborn resistance. The rest of my poem is about finding a way to survive—no exaggeration—in the high-pressure Tokyo world, and the small tricks of resistance I’ve explored with varying and questionable success in my own life as a privileged immigrant. Japan is one country where privilege-without-real-power can actually eat you alive. There are wielders of enormous power who build a base out from this kind of privilege, and it’s easy to feel as though you’ve become an all-the-more-essential building block of projects so grand you can barely see the forces moving them. That was my position at the time of writing, anyway, and I felt like I needed to explore a kind of liminal or ambiguous relation to these forces––high-ranking government officials (heads of state, ministers, royalty/imperial family), university administration, tycoons, and culture-makers.
XYS: What does this addition of poetry into the vast archive of Tokyo contribute to the city’s urbanity, its identity?
NY: GeoPossession is not about making new, palatable works that fit in the space; the artist’s free, strong eyes are gazing towards the land, and the image is then filtered through the artist’s body and verbalized. Planting it in the actual city is the act of overlaying the texture of one reality on top of another. Depending on the work, it may appear as a magnificent If that looms large over the city, or it may abstract and distort the scenery in front of you with poetic effect. Each of the works introduces a strong alien feeling unique to literature, breaking down the stereotype of the city through virtual reality. The contributors I convened are all prominent members in the world of Japanese novels, poetry, plays, and songs, and the city they express is completely different from the orthodox Tokyo. They bring out often-overlooked niche places, small voices, and the warmth of the seikatsusha—the living person. This adds a layer of grief to superficial representations of the city, introducing a profundity to Tokyo’s urbanity and identity.
XYS: How do you see CŌEM working within the larger trajectory of Japanese-language literature?
JAYS: We have a surprising number of traditionally recognized writers joining us–many of them are the gatekeepers of literary recognition, many are award winners, and many have never written anything except words on paper—with the ultimate destination being book form. Some of them have no idea what we’re doing, seeming to join out of pure curiosity. And many of them have now actually experienced their own literature, their own voices, in new forms and contexts. I think time will tell how transformative that will be.
Honestly, it may be more of an incursion of the literary into the popular space of technology. Technology is expensive to produce, so insofar as innovation occurs within a capitalist investment structure, it generally has to aim for experiences that offer maximal return for the investing parties. We are essentially trying to seduce software engineers and technical experts out of those regimes to come play with us, so we don’t have to ensure that 80% of the population aged 6-60 pays good money for our artistic product. I’ll say it: we want to mess around with big-ass toys and discover what we discover. Is that so wrong???
XYS: How do you see language and writing as an artform changing alongside technology and its increasing authority over our lives?
JAYS: Language and writing are forms of agency. Technology for many of us is a form of agency, but since we don’t speak its language, we can’t use it as well, and its potential for bringing agency is reduced. We know the results but not how it’s made—like dogs who know where to go for the bowl of food but would have a rough time if someone asked them to come up with their own recipe or mix up a batch of chow. CŌEM may not yet give the dogs of poetry the full power of code, but it does invite us on factory tours and asks for input on the recipes.
XYS: Can a computer write poetry?
NY: Of course it can. For example, one of the ideals that the surrealists aimed for in automatism may be possible with today’s computers. The big point is whether or not we feel it is good poetry.
JAYS: How can a poet write poetry? I don’t really know. But! I would say that when people think of digital literature, they often associate this with AI-generated poetry. Often humans who are invested in writing as a craft or profession, or just bibliophiles and lit-nerds in general, find this idea threatening. Personally, I don’t have a problem with computer-generated poetry—or maybe we should start calling them digital authors? I don’t have much proof that so-called human literature wasn’t conceived by simulacra, cyborgs, or other fantastic phenomena, so I’m not worried if a computer joins the fray and spits out something interesting or even life-changing (though I haven’t seen it happen). Since a computer is just the machine, though, we should probably remember that it’s maybe more like code writing poetry. Humans write the code, and the code writes the poetry, so it’s kind of like more complex Oulipo stuff, or an infinitely complex butterfly effect. And even if one makes the argument that some code is written by AI, then it’s still humans [who] write code that writes code that writes poetry.
In semiotic terms, there has been way too much emphasis in such lines of questioning on authorial agency or authorship and subjectivity. Readers, or “interpretants” in Charles Sanders Peirce’s schema, are way more important. That’s why I have led at least two double lives as a literary scholar and translator; at least half the fun in literature is helping bring it to life on the interpretive end.
I guess CŌEM is making sure poetry has lots of people to tango with and plenty of moves to heat up the dance floor.
XYS: What do you think is the role that the humanities play in development and technological innovation? When putting together poets with engineers, what do you hope will transpire?
NY: The hope is that they will greatly inspire each other. We poets can receive a different metaphysics from technology, and it can also upgrade our linguistic levels. Also, for engineers, technology is not only a tool for making people’s lives more convenient or a toy to be enjoyed, but it can also suggest the essential possibility of expanding human vision and our five senses. In doing so, I believe that the humanities can play a role in suggesting new directions for such development.
JAYS: What I hope will transpire: friendship, novelty, discovery, fun.
Our thesis was that (excuse what is probably a rather fair generalization here) poets generally have no clue what technology is doing under the covers. Most of us—myself, anyway—have no idea what code is doing, how it works, what it can or cannot do. Our most sustained contact with technology takes the form of using consumer technology or consuming science fiction. But being a poet myself, how could I see my own ignorance as anything but a total asset? We banked on that. Our weird conceptions of tech could perhaps push code in new directions, engage coders in dialogues with people they might justifiably find completely ignorant but who they were not able to simply dismiss because their own boring lives in the tech world left them just desperate enough to commit to trying some super creative projects with poets to save their souls or break out of the rusted structures governing their equally creative minds.
But software engineers are also in that position of ambiguous privilege—they have a skill set highly valued by more powerful entities—and their gift of time to literature always comes with a markedly high opportunity cost. Poetic imagination can be bound by pages, the presumption of poetry readers (leading to feedback loops), and limits on who will end up getting to know it exists. Digital imagination maybe suffers from lack of the human body or other haptics, average consumer as audience, and the necessity to make stuff that the market demands. In this scenario, poetic imagination is wild and free, and digital imagination is large and has learned to reach more people. Each can unlock the other’s parallel limits.
So in that sense, we are the extension of the front lines of the humanities as found in universities. I’m still trying to turn the world into a perpetual undergraduate course in the humanities, or a grad seminar in comparative literature, or at least preserve a shoal of that vibe somewhere in the adult world. Maybe the best way to do that is to tell our software engineer friends that they can join us at the literary retreat that is CŌEM, and they are allowed to bring their toys.
XYS: As translators, do you see any affinity between moving between languages and moving between physical and digital realms?
NY: I’m not a language translator, but translation is not just between languages. As I mentioned earlier, the poet is also a kind of translator. They look at representations that people pass through, take out the deep image, and “translate” it into words. A person attempting to express something is, so to speak, a translator. Until now, this has often been a round trip between reality and words, but for me and the members of CŌEM, we put the digital realm of virtuality in between.
JAYS: Yes! Todd Silverstein and I were the initial founders of CŌEM, and it was first Todd’s suggestion. He’s also proficient in other languages, but his main mode of translation (at least in this project) is working between the coders and poets. He’s a poet and a former HarperCollins poetry editor and has worked with code and software engineers for decades, so he was doing a lot of syncing and establishing dialogue between us all. I was doing that on the English-Japanese front, bringing in more collaborators from the Japanese poetry world.
Translating between the physical realm and the digital realm is a super interesting concept. We can certainly take the adages of translation and apply them to what happens in experimental tech projects like ours. I think the difference is that while a translator ideally has a good (not to say “perfect”) grasp of both languages and their worlds, most of the stuff we’re working with in the domain of code is barely understood. This means that technical artists involved in mediating between, say, the speaking of a poem by a poet on the street corner in Tokyo’s Ginza district, and the movement of that sound through an ambisonic mic into new formats of audio file through the largely binaural audio technology structure of today’s world—it’s a largely unknown process. It’s kind of like saying: translate this poem into a language that no one really knows, but we’re pretty sure they use nouns and verbs.
So the physical-digital translative imagination is tied to higher degrees of technological unknowns and is therefore somewhat more freestyle and jazzy, actually.
XYS: Tell us about some of your ongoing projects.
NY: One of the projects I proposed was to rewrite the external differences that make us different—and that are sometimes discriminated against us—and paint them with new representations. However, this is still difficult to realize at the present due to problems such as archiving. There is also a project being discussed which involves having people experience and think about the contradictory “correctness” that sometimes makes us antagonists to one other using super-directional microphones.
JAYS: We have mostly prototypes in the works, and they are all the result of us trying for a massive project for which we need probably $3,000,000—and yes we accept donations.
This massive project we are tentatively calling Poets’ Pulpit, and [it] involves a group of people entering a large space together (auditorium or gallery perhaps). The group speaks poetry into microphones, and the audio is picked up by an intelligent mixing system that both remixes the spoken audio and projects visualizations of the pastiche on the surrounding walls. The intelligent mixing system is not necessarily an AI and would instead function like an audio mixer whose various functions—volume, pitch, tone, reverb, special effects—would be tied to certain humans walking around the space while their motions are tracked. Person 1 might bear the function “silence”, and when they approach a poet speaking into one of the mics, their mic falls silent; Person 2 might bear the “reverb” function, so as they move toward poets speaking, their voices would start to echo in the audio mix.
But—surprise, surprise—doing this is harder than it sounds. So we have a number of spin-off projects that began as experiments to create this intelligent mixing system and the associated experience. GeoPossession is one of those spin-offs.
Other spin-offs include a poetry sculpture app, where your reading of a poem physically transforms the words into a sculpture, moulded by the way you articulate each word. The sculptures would be 3D printable or would be accessible as augmented reality sculptures, which you could “see” through your phone. Our video projects, such as Misumi Mizuki’s “featuring cross-mixed vocals from Shinto priest Miyake [Yoshinobu] and Poetry Slam Japan champion Miki Yuuri, as well as AI art visuals or my bilingual haiku (hikurazy) video NFTs with Jason Scuderi, are all experiments in mixing various voices, languages, and images to find new poetic experiences through layers of encounter.
Nagae Yūki (永方佑樹) received the 2012 Poetry and Thought Newcomer’s Award, and her 2019 poetry collection, Absentee Cities (Fuzai toshi) was awarded the Rekitei Prize in Japan. As a performance-poet, her work is at the frontier of a new cross-disciplinary way of approaching poetic practice, deconstructing lived and social environments and reconstructing them using technology. She is a lecturer at Nagoya University of the Arts and is currently participating in the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa, funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State.
Jordan A. Y. Smith writes, translates, produces, researches, and teaches in literature, digital arts and humanities. His translingual volume Syzygy (Awai Books, 2020) combines poetic responses to visual works by artists from Japan and North America. Translator of Yoshimasu Gozo, Mizuta Noriko, Fuzuki Yumi, Kanie Naha, and many of Japan’s cutting edge poets. Editor-in-Chief of Tokyo Poetry Journal. Earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA, then worked as a professor of comparative literature and translation until spring 2022, when he left academic life to focus on Narō, serving as Vice President of Content and Storytelling in the creation of video masterclasses with many of Japan’s luminaries from various fields. Occasional productions include a BBC Radio series on Japanese poetry and culture, curating the Mad Dog Jones Afterl-ife exhibition for DIESEL Art Gallery, and Cōem’s 3D audio hologram experience, GeoPossession with Kalkul.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet and editor. shellyshan.com
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