This mission began to form after I read an article by N. Katherine Hayles in the 2007 issue of MLA’s journal Profession. The article, titled “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” basically convinced me that I needed to learn what this “new media” was all about or I would get left behind in an academic wasteland, outpaced by my peers who knew how to effectively use technology in their research and teaching. In her article, Hayles draws from a 2005 study that shows increased use of media (not just more time spent with media, but the increased variety of media used at once) signals major changes in brain development and learning styles amongst young people. The study dubs 8 to 18-year-olds “Generation M.” (of course, M = Media.) Hyper attention, resulting from consuming many types of media at once, means that kids can focus on playing video games but struggle to concentrate on reading novels. These concepts all sound rudimentary to me now, but two years ago they were true revelations. Here is the passage from Hayles’ article that really gave me a jolt:

The trend toward hyper attention will almost certainly accelerate as the years pass and the age demographic begins to encompass more people of Generation M. As students move deeper into the mode of hyper attention, educators face a choice: change the students to fit the educational environment or change that environment to fit the students. […] Digital media offer important resources in facing the challenge, both in the ways they allow classroom space to be reconfigured and the opportunities they offer for building bridges between deep and hyper attention. (195)

I was staring down a digital divide, and it was obvious that with my beginner level technical skills and non-existent foundation in media theory, I was on the wrong side of the canyon. So, as I sat in my office looking at classes that were still open, I opted for a class in media studies instead of literature without hesitation. (At UTD, media studies classes are not part of the regular curriculum for humanities grad students.) Would I be able to build a bridge across the divide?

The M.A. portfolio (the degree at UTD requires a portfolio of two papers instead of a traditional thesis) I am defending tomorrow really crystallizes my effort to “build bridges.” In my teaching, I have tried to get better at building bridges between student learning styles represented in Hayles’ distinction between hyper and deep attention. However, in my research—and in my M.A. portfolio, especially—I have tried to build bridges between analog and digital biases, techno-dystopia/utopia binaries, and literature and media studies. This last divide marks the original bridge I crossed two years ago as I selected a class in emerging media to see where it would take me. What I learned, though, is that this divide is really not a divide at all. Media studies—which is essentially a critical lens to look at the creation, circulation, and preservation of knowledge—is for me so implicated in literature that I can never again look at a text without seeing its medium. In opening my eyes and mind to a media-specific approach to literature, I have also realized that to study media is to study the political structures and ideologies that can easily go unnoticed in literary analysis (at least, in close-reading).

Both papers in my M.A. portfolio have given me a platform to practice media-specific readings of texts, though I still have a lot of work to do in sharpening my analysis. As I move on to begin (“every beginning is a beginning over” as Blanchot reminds me) a Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee next semester, I hope to blend and extend this interdisciplinary work in the program’s newly approved Digital Media degree plan. I am sure that I will miss the energetic faculty, brilliant students, and strong community feeling that flourishes in UTD’s Emerging Media/Arts and Technology departments. However, UWM has the advantage of integrating media studies “officially” into the English degree. In my view, that integration is not simply a bonus—it should be the standard. For without a clear understanding of how a text’s medium works to support the language and shape reading experiences, and without training in digital literacy and technology, how can literary scholars remain relevant? How can they build the bridges that Hayles and other academics are calling for? Media studies at UTD has opened my eyes to countless dilemmas and questions that students of literature need to be asking as our culture embraces all things digital.

Below are the abstracts for my two portfolio papers. If anyone is interested, I can provide the full-text.

[cc licensed photo by Flickr user casch52]

A common project to end the poetry workshop is a printed chapbook or portfolio. While such projects have the benefit of encouraging students to think carefully about the material constraints and possibilities of paper, there are many reasons why poetry instructors should ask students to engage literacies beyond printed discourse. One reason is that students have likely been producing work in print for the entire semester, if not for most of their academic careers. Whether the genre is a poem, essay, book review, or written exam, they have experience thinking about design, layout, and content creation in ink-and-paper terms. A change of medium can lead students to re-conceptualize their poetry and discover new ways of making meaning from words. However, new media are not enough. A purposeful combination of media in a program like Sophie can have astounding benefits for the creative process at any stage.

In the field of composition studies, Cynthia Selfe (2002, 2006) has argued convincingly for an approach to writing that does not privilege print and integrates alphabetic elements as only one component of the text. As literate practices are changing in the twenty-first century, Selfe argues that multimodal assignments can be refreshing, meaningful after the class is over, and relevant to the digital texts that students encounter on a daily basis. In “Thinking about Multimodality” (PDF) (2004), Selfe and co-author Pamela Takayoshi observe that control over the page is important, but that “authors could expand that notion of control beyond the page, that they could think in increasingly broad ways about texts” (2). These propositions can migrate from composition studies to creative writing pedagogy. With Sophie, students create an interactive, digital poetry artifact they can include in e-portfolios or personal web sites. A chapbook, on the other hand, is bound in a literal and figurative sense.

The Sophie book project could consist of four or five short poems, two or three one-page poems, or a single long poem. Instructors should spend a class period in a computer lab to help students learn the software and create a one-page practice book. Sophie is not difficult to learn. Instructors can experiment with the program on their own time and create a sample Sophie book in a matter of four or five hours. Sophie books are not necessarily produced for web development. However, with Sophie 2.0, which has just been released, Java script will enable Sophie Books to be published online in a networked environment that extends beyond the classroom walls, furthering the relevance and lasting impact of a Sophie book project in poetry.

Demo Books and Tutorials:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/sophie_demo_movies_now_availab.html

http://sophieproject.cntv.usc.edu/demobooks

http://sophie2.org/trac/wiki/ITERATION_12/Release/UserDocumentation/DemoBooks

http://sophiecommons.blip.tv/

[cc licensed photo by Flickr user Horia Varlan]

Finally I have arrived in the digital age and can liberate my list from the yellow post-it note! Here is what I have so far:

• 38 Special, “Teacher Teacher”

• Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall”
• Van Halen, “Hot for Teacher”
• School of Rock (Jack Black), “Teacher’s Pet”

• Loudon Wainwright III, “Final Exam”
• Alice Cooper, “School’s Out”
• Brownsville Station, “Smokin’ in the Boys Room”

• Beastie Boys, “Fight for Your Right”
• Twisted Sister, “Be Chrool To Your Scuel”

What other rock songs do I need to add?

[cc licensed photo by flickr user House of Sims]

In Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (1999), Carrie Noland interrogates the identity of poetry as it collides with the alterity of technology. She studies the interplay between technology and lyric poetry and how technology challenges a lyric aesthetic dedicated to the expression of a private and interior self. In this case, Noland uses media studies to question a traditional definition that sets lyric poetry in opposition to technology, popular culture, and the “commodification of the human voice” (5). The genre of lyric poetry is associated with a single speaker or voice, and especially in the Romantic period the lyric was elevated to pure and unmediated expression. Noland references poetic and artistic approaches that have clouded that pure aura with uncomfortable liaisons of self and machine. In what is more like a collection of essays than a deliberately chaptered book, Noland explores poets who treat technology as an analogy (Char, Rimbaud) and poets who apply technology as a material condition (Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson).

Noland takes Guillaume Apollinaire as her starting point and agrees with his provocation that external forces (namely commodification and technology) would ultimately not threaten lyric poetry but actually would “play an instrumental role in the composition of the lyric text and […] in the construction of the autonomous (lyric) subject” (5). Apollinaire does not just seek a new poetic language, but more radically a new conception of how subjectivity is constituted through social interactions, discourse, and mechanical interventions. In her chapter on Adorno, titled “Confessing Philosophy,” Noland analyzes his atypically confessional philosophical work Negative Dialectics. One important conclusion that Noland makes in this chapter is that the concept of self-exposure and confession is a troubled one. In using a first-person pronoun to “confess philosophy,” Adorno highlights the fact the the “I” of lyric poetry has never represented the autonomous, transcendent, individual self. In fact, confession is “a highly public gesture, defining […] consciousness as a rhetorically and historically overdetermined form” (63). To understand how the self is determined by external conditions, Noland writes, Adorno focuses on “the technologies responsible for the production of what is commonly taken to be the self” (64), i.e. the lyric confession and the personal memoir. Like Apollinaire, Adorno worries about the myth of the individual, autonomous subject since it is too easy to forget that it has a source external to itself and that it is mediated. Noland concludes that Negative Dialectics is “the testament of the human subject as cyborg, a creature who must write through a distorting apparatus in order to achieve, paradoxically, an authentic voice” (88).

The tension between poetry and the distorting potential of technology is clear in the chapters following “Confessing Philosophy.” In her chapter on Blaise Cendrars, she finds that poetic language and popular commercial discourse make a tenuous opposition, since each category constitutes the other. We can only identify poetic language insofar as it is distinct from the mediated language of popular culture. In the chapter on René Char, Noland analyzes the paradoxical relation that Char has with technology in his poetry. On one hand, Char affirms Heidegger’s view that poetry (poiesis) is a privileged receptor that can channel a pure essence, whereas technology (enframing) only reduces and vanquishes nature. On the other hand, Char was a member of the Surrealist movement and at least partly endorsed “theories of the technological and its potential relationship to poetry that were decidedly not Heideggerian” (143). Also, Char was willing to host a technological Other in his poetry, since he integrated elements of encrypted radio code transmitted during World War II. As Noland points out, the presence of the technological language (code) in his poetry is complicated and reveals Char’s admission that poetry cannot remain totally removed from technological mediation. According to Noland, Char’s Feuillets d’Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos) demonstrates the question of “poetry’s relation to cryptography, and, therefore, of the poet’s relation to the radio-controlled, ideological actor in history” (159). In other words, by integrating radio code into his poetry, Char admitted that the language of poetry—like the language of communication technology—has an origin outside of itself.

In her chapter on contemporary performance artist Laurie Anderson, the relationship between the individual self and communication/reproduction technologies is at issue in a more explicit way than in her previous chapters. (Noland begins the chapter with a mention of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.”) Noland’s primary premise is that Anderson, similar to Apollinaire, “problematizes the distinction between what is intrinsic (internal to the self) and what is extrinsic (technology, institutions, politics, the media, etc.)” (189). In Anderson’s work, the self as an individual mind and body is penetrated by technologized messages and what we commonly consider nonhuman, self-destructive systems. Although it is a little unclear how Anderson fits into Noland’s expressed focus on lyric poetry, the analysis makes an important point that poetry should “strive to confess mediation [...] while simultaneously challenging mediation’s limits” (211).

In following this last point, the final impression I have is that subjective expression in poetry has traditionally assumed a concept of the individual, autonomous, and transcendent self, and that this concept functions in lyric poetry only as it is placed in opposition to technology, popular culture, or some other external entity. Thus, only by excluding technological mediation as “not poetry,” the identity of “poetry” emerges. To interrogate this binary means that more than poetry is at stake, since we must also “place ‘natural’ images of selfhood at stake [and] recognize them as objectifications and yet continue probing their traumatic content” (Noland 216). At the point where media studies and poetry analysis begin to elucidate each other and blend, a chaotic and radical line of inquiry emerges.

If “writing machines, in particular, get some of their meaning from the way they are used, including the writing they produce” (6), as Gitelman suggests, I wonder to what extent the reverse is true, for poetry in particular? Obviously poetry makes meaning from language, and in many ways we could say that poetry’s subject is language itself, but to what extent does poetry get some of its meaning from the writing methods and machines used to create it? This really is a central question for me. From one view, poetry is an artifact in the traditional (dictionary) sense of the word—“any object made by human beings,” or “a handmade object characteristic of an earlier time or cultural stage.” The poet works in and against language, using language as a way to craft meaning. But from another, less anthropocentric view, neither language nor inscription technologies are neutral and passive; the poem is a hand-made artifact but it is also a machine-made artifact. It is a technofact, distinct from artifact, yet one and the same. The poet is a user of language and a user of writing technology, but he or she is also used by the technology to author certain texts and articulate certain identities. Moreover, the poet may be unaware that this reversal is taking place. McLuhan is an appropriate reference here, since he writes that the effects of technology on humans are profound and inescapable, happening below “the level of opinions and concepts,” happening “steadily and without resistance” (“The Medium Is the Message” 114). For Gitelman, the effects happen through discourse:

Artifacts become knowable in part because they are enmeshed within the back and forth and round about telling of what they are, and because telling devolves upon discernible rhetorical conventions, like genres and specialized vocabularies, that are themselves largely the result of unconscious consensus. (7)

As she demonstrates repeatedly in her book, inscription technologies have intended and unintended consequences.

In poetry, specifically poetry that is frequently anthologized, a narrative about the poet’s writing practices and/or methodology accompanies the work and mediates our reading of it. This narrative is sometimes printed with the poem or sometimes circulated as a rumor. For a poet like Emily Dickinson, the narrative of her methods—i.e. hand-copying poems on scraps of paper, binding them into curious volumes, pinning additional lines to the end of poems, and other analog remixes—is well-known and practically permeates the experience of reading Dickinson. In her excellent article, “My Digital Dickinson,” Lori Emerson observes that Dickinson’s exploration of writing technology is key to understanding her poetry. Emerson notices “instances of Dickinson’s desire to draw attention to the mediating effects of pen and paper, and therefore to denaturalize the media” (61-2). Dickinson was not only writing with media, however. She was also being written by the media, written into the literary imagination and American history. Emerson correctly points out that digital poetry is not just an artifact, “an instance of a foreign, textual object of fascination” (65). Digital poetry must also be read within the network of its material context, within “a shared ongoing poetic exploration […] of language as an elusive and yet multi-dimensional dwelling space” (65). This is what Emerson means by saying that we can read pre-digital poetry with a critical lens germane to our present digital moment; we can “[read] the digital into and out of a poet such as Dickinson” to “enrich our understanding of her work” (57). Emerson’s approach does not treat Dickinson’s poems as stagnant artifacts of pure human creation, but rather as technofacts created with a writing technology at a specific historical moment.

William Carlos Williams, successful physician and figurehead of the Modernist poetry movement in America, also is known for experimentation with a writing technology: the typewriter. As Gitelman observes, “the typewriter reportedly became a sort of object-muse, a fetish, in the creative processes of William Carlos Williams” (218). The word “reportedly” is code for “as the story goes…” yet, in the case of Williams, there is truth to the story. The writing technology of the typewriter to some extent determined his composing method and thus the composition of the poems themselves. As Peter Halter puts it, the “Cubist” poems of Williams, like many poems from Spring and All, “are presented not only via language but also visually in the organization of words on the page” (194). It seems safe to conclude that the technology of the typewriter—which allowed the poet to see the typescript on the page and consider blank space as a unit of text—was instrumental in this highly visual creative process.

Williams has left a trail of materiality behind him. The University of Buffalo houses the poet’s “favorite fold-up typewriter” in addition to typed and handwritten drafts. As the library’s web site explains, “often poems originally written on Williams’ prescription pad precede the typed versions,” and the Williams Collection of Buffalo has these artifacts available for viewing and “for literary research.” Treated like objective artifacts, however, it is easy to forget that the poet’s typewriter and manuscript drafts have authorial significance. Each time the typewriter and manuscripts are viewed, Williams is recreated and his poetry rewrites itself in a new technological moment. These preserved writing machines are not dead, but they are alive and they alter our reading of Williams’ poetry. In a sense, his writing technologies authored Williams in the same moment he used them to author his texts. As both artifact and technofact, his poems bear the human and machine touch as all poetry does. If these materials in the university’s collection are viewed only as residual traces of Williams’ creative process—just as we view dinosaur bones in a museum as evidence of prehistoric life—I believe an opportunity to find “the double-sided boundary” that Gitelman mentions is lost. Williams, like Dickinson, could not master his writing machines, no more than we can master his poems’ language and arrive at a transparent understanding of their meaning.

Gitelman’s last chapter attempts to bridge (or rather re-frame) the history of older, non-digital technologies with the digital textuality of the World Wide Web and hypertext. It is quite obvious that she views technological development as an evolutionary process in which digital textuality is just another chapter in the history of inscription technology: “I want to question and elaborate the parameters of novelty that recent accounts of hypertext seem to posit as the foundations of a new democratic future” (222). Gitelman here and throughout her whole book reminds us of the “gleeful claims” surrounding the invention of shorthand, the phonograph, and other inscription technologies from 1877-1914. The novelty and democratizing power of digital hypertext, she claims, has been overstated, especially by authors like George Landow. For Gitelman, the claim that digitality is the biggest revolution since the printing press is reductive and skips over a complex and interdependent history of pre-WWW writing machines, intellectual property laws, and shared experiences of textuality that “are as variable as they are fluid” (225). Gitelman cautions readers to be wary of perspectives that view technological development as a process of improvement. She writes:

All new media, in failure or success, in rejection or in erratic, faddish appropriation, inspire conflicted cultural moments of self-consciousness about the making of meaning. (224)

Her perspective, though at times very difficult to discern in her historical accounts throughout the book, is a valuable one for readers of digital poetry. As both artifact and technofact, new media poems cannot be read exclusively as works in language, authored by a human presence—they must also be read as works in machine, authored by the materials that represent them in our time.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gentlepurespace/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In the chapter “Hypertext/Hyperpoeisis/Hyperpoetics,” Glazier points out that within the critical discourse surrounding digital literature and writing, poetry has been overshadowed by prose. Although theorists and hypertext poets “often seem to evoke postmodern theory, postmodern poetry is surprisingly overlooked” (93). The problem with this, according to Glazier, is that assumptions and claims about new media prose would probably be refigured/revised if scholars were to consider concerns specific to poetry, concerns founded in poetic composing practices: interrogations into materiality, form, nonlinearity, semiotics, and sense of self. Glazier claims that what is currently considered innovative practice in hypertext prose has long been at stake in poetry, even when poetry was limited to print media. For the past one hundred years, “rather than focusing on the information of the text, poetic practice has explored the conditions that determine that information, the procedures, processes, and crossed paths of meaning-making, meaning-making as constituting the ‘meaning’” (32, italics mine). Thus, poetry has been working towards a critical approach to mediation for some time, and now that it has moved into digital media, poetry should have a more important place in the conversation.

In one sense, it is as though hypertext is poetry’s “soul mate”—the ideal match for poetry, the medium poetry has been waiting for all these years while it made do in oral history, script, and then print. Glazier writes, “digital poetries are not print poetry merely repositioned in the new medium. Instead, e-poetries [make] possible the continuation of lines of inquiry that could not be fulfilled in [print media]” (26). Here, it seems a dimension is unlocked as poetry moves into a new writing technology. In another sense, however, Glazier acknowledges that poetic traditions are not carried over from medium to medium without undergoing serious transformation by the medium itself: “the Web […] has become a part of a transformed social fabric: writing will never be the same again” (52).

This is the key distinction/question I come away with: to what extent does innovative poetic practice alter and advance digital media (or create new media in some cases), and to what extent does digital media alter poetic practice and what it even means to do poetic work? This is a bit like the distinction between technology determining society vs. society determining its technology—who or what is in control? As Glazier asks, “What should be questioned? What […] should be accepted or rejected?” (18). I don’t think he or anyone else has the answers, though it is crucial to keep asking these questions as new poetic forms emerge.

Blog Project Overview

• The project as a whole constitutes 10% of the final course grade.
• Project is meant to be adapted and developed to meet individual instructors’ needs. The blog can work for in-class or at-home writing assignments.
• Choices provides prompts for blog posts in Chapters 2 and 3; there are also blog prompts included in each assignment description. Guidelines for the project are on pg.31 in Choices.
• Instructors decide additional blog prompts, such as free writing exercises (select your own subject) at least one per week after week 2.
• A suggested length for blog entries is 100-250 words. (Choices has a 10,000 character limit, which is about 1,600 words.)

Differences & Similarities between Choices Blogging & “Real World” Blogging

• Difference: Customization
• Difference: Evaluation
• Difference: Exposure
• Similarity: Space to play
• Similarity: Public audience
• Similarity: Multimodal composing opportunities
• Similarity: Critical thinking

Tips for Teaching Blogging

• In Using Blogs to Enhance Literacy, Diane Penrod offers some basic rules that good bloggers follow (40). Here are three that writing students can really use:

1. Pay attention to tone in your blog. Adapt it to the subject and audience, and write to keep the reader’s interest level high.
2. It is important to blog original content, even though you are writing for the web. Cite or link to all outside sources, including images and videos.
3. Use good sense when deciding to post personal content. Think of blog entries as something you would be willing to say in class or have someone read aloud in class.

• Students can experiment with the many different rhetorical situations that blogs present.
• Although individual entries are not graded, the blog is graded writing as a whole. Maintain grammatical standards and discourage students from writing in “txt msg” speak.
• To make the blog assignment more dynamic, try asking students to make a set number of comments on classmates’ blog posts over the course of the semester.

Examples of Different Types of Blogs

• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-blog/
• http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/
• http://feministmentalhealthuk.wordpress.com/
• http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/
• Others?

Miscellaneous Resources

• A tutorial on working with HTML
• A multi-use prompt (courtesy of Annie Mendenhall)

“The response blog gives you an opportunity to explore blogging as a personal, political, or opinion-based public platform. In this blog post, you may respond to a class discussion OR any text (blog, article, video, image) you come across in your own time that is relevant to the course theme or reading. You should describe what you are responding to & then offer your thoughts & opinions. Your response can be a rhetorical analysis that explains what the text is trying to accomplish, a thoughtful response to an issue or idea that came up in class, or an opinion piece responding to a text. Feel free to be creative in your responses & to incorporate images, videos, or hyperlinks throughout your post. Keep in mind the rhetorical principles we have been discussing. What do you want your audience to understand? What are you trying to accomplish in your post? Which rhetorical techniques best suit your needs in this situation?”

• Annotated bibliography blog post:

In lieu of the formal annotated bibliography, try asking students to post three or four sources they have gathered for the Academic Essay assignment. For each source, they can describe what they like/don’t like and how they plan to use the source in their papers—just as they would in a traditional annotated bibliography. They should do this before class. In class, ask students to review the bibliographies of two or three other classmates and then conduct online research to contribute an additional source the student could possibly use. Ideally, students who are writing on similar topics would review each other’s bibliography posts. Diigo Educator (a specially designed social bookmarking tool) may facilitate a collaborative research assignment more than blogging software.

• Additional resources

1. Advice about teaching blogging for the first time: http://cac.ophony.org/2009/06/12/lessons-from-a-first-time-course-blogger/
2. Blog project at Ohio State (with sample prompts & links to blogging resources): http://dmp.osu.edu/blog/index.html
3. Annie Mendenhall’s class blog: http://wi09mendenhall110.blogspot.com/
4. Blog search engines: www.blogdigger.com, www.technorati.com, & www.feedster.com
5. List of blogs in Cultural Studies, Theory, Literature, & Rhetoric: http://www.academicblogs.net/wiki/index.php/Culture%2C_Theory%2C_Literature

When I picture a delirium waltz, I see people dressed in gowns and tuxedos, tumbling and gliding around a grand ballroom. In fact, that is the central event in Strand’s poem. Guests with names like Muffie and Glenn come and go, in and out of the ballroom, dancing and dancing. The dancing happens in pantoums, but prose stanzas are spliced in between each pantoum, as though to narrate the events. The speaker’s memory in pantoum form is very clear-cut, but in prose form it is… well… delirious: “And the rush of water was suddenly loud as if a flood were loosed upon the ballroom floor. I seemed to be dancing alone into the absence of all that I knew and was bound by, […] the smear, the blurred erasure of differences, the end of self, the end of whatever surrounds the self. All that I saw was a vast celebration of transparence, a clear dream of nothing. And I kept on going.” Or, are the events themselves delirious, prior to the narrative account? Herein I find the cross-genre problem of narrating a moment as the moment happens, and this problem is really exposed in Strand’s poem—the problem of bearing witness to incomprehensible, indescribable events.

Like the poem, a delirium waltz is the central event of my life, tumbling, chaotic, set to music and choreographed in the most ambient, unchoreographed way possible. In Strand’s poem, one senses an astounding confluence of time and bizarre weather. He writes, “We moved in the drift of innumerable notes, abstractions and histories and as we passed over the ground it formed for us the shape of the earth. We moved toward the future, or was it the past?” It’s all very disorienting. It’s delirious.

The dictionary provides some great synonyms for “delirium” – frenzy, fury, hysteria, craze, folly… What words could better describe my life? For every loose end I tie, I sense that nine others have come undone. From school to work to family to friends, I always come in under the bar I have set for myself. Yet, what does it mean to set a frenzied state of hysteria… to music? In 1867, the famous composer Johann Strauss II tried to capture that very paradox in “Delirium Waltz” (you can listen to it here, with a few interruptions). It is a beautiful piece that flirts with order and chaos, just as the waltzing folk do in Strand’s poem, “Holding each other and turning and turning.” The etymology of “delirium” offers one last tidbit of meaning. The word comes from the Indo-European root phrase “de + lira” meaning “out of the furrow.” For me, the furrow represents the narrow thinking and false rhetoric that we all encounter in day-to-day life. Personally, I’d rather be out of the furrow, in a state of disorderly delirium, than stuck in the plowman’s linear rut.