On Poems (System and Environment)

Abstract: In this essay, I propose a different approach to how we might conceptualize poetry, one that understands the poem not simply in terms of human-centered agency (that is, the complex of author-persona-reader) but as an emergent informatic-system. I focus on how the material and immaterial media of language, prosodic rules, and generic constraints all possess their own kinds of agency, comprising a set of limitations for what words the poet may select in composing the poem. Taking a poem by the Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei, I build upon a number of theoretical framings to argue that these strictures function as the constitute the field of what is possible in terms of poetic composition, that the compositional loop between an individual poet and poem is a cybernetic system and the set of constraints that delimit what is compositionally possible is the cybernetic environment.