Notes Towards a Glitch Poetics

Jones, Nathan (2017) Notes Towards a Glitch Poetics. Thresholds, 1 (1): 11.

Abstract

To read a text for its glitch poetics is to be awake to the moments of breakdown, wrongness, incongruity, and instability in the text — perhaps to use these moments to glimpse the workings of the language-machine within. But then glitch is singularly a term of new media cultures, connoting the messy and unpredictable results when executable code becomes visible as a surface effect. To read literary errors as glitches, we should not only read for glimpses at the language-machine, but also for the entanglements of language with the technics and ideologies of code and media-effects. Keston Sutherland’s book The Odes to TL61P, with its aggressive wrongness, encryptions, command-line rhetoric, and overt — perhaps pathological — insistence on the poet’s own language as ideologically indebted, lends it to this kind of reading. This paper is published in the inaugral issue of the digital humanities journal Thresholds, and includes an innovative html setting that amplifies the "glitch" concept within the text.