To Archive or Not to Archive: The Resistant Potential of Digital Poetry

IntroductionThe topic of ephemerality in digital literature and poetry is one that has been at the forefront of critical inquiry in the field of contemporary digital poetics for the past several years, often in relation to achievability. Its writers seem to exhibit a kind of anxiety that arises from the fact that their work will inevitably be lost, unplayable, or unreadable, and it is indeed likely that their work will become so. Each software update, each development in hardware, can provide myriad challenges for a given born-digital poem, and the writers of these poems have been struggling with what they perceive as the "problem" of their poem's rapid and inevitable evanescence. One only need visit the Electronic Literature Organization's online anthologies, the Electronic Literature Collection, Volumes 1 and 2, to find a host of links to works that no longer function as they were intended to, if they function at all. Deena Larsen, foundational hypertext author of Marble Springs, laments on her website in reference to a series of 13 "kanji-jus" poems, or "short poems based on the Japanese kanji or ideogram for the word itself ":Note that the javascript in all of these has gone on to bigger and better things. If anyone would like to help me upgrade these, I would be eternally grateful. . . . Further, we mourn the loss of Cauldron and Net. (Larsen)Cauldron & Net is an online "journal of arts and new media" that published a number of prominent writers of digital literature and poetry, including Larsen, from 1999 until 2002. The website is still active, but many of the works are, as one would expect of works of digital literature composed more than a decade ago, now broken. Larsen's quote is representative of the anxiety many digital poets are currently articulating: a fear that these works are fading away before their very eyes.A decade ago, Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, writing on behalf of the Electronic Literature Organization, published "Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature," a sort of howto manual intended to instruct the writer of digital literature and poetry in the ways of writing works that last. Joseph Tabbi, in the introduction, says that this "document is a plea for writers to work proactively in archiving their own creations, and to bear these issues in mind even in the act of composition," and the authors write that although the preservation of digital literature is "the work of a community," "the practices of authors and publishers will determine whether preserving particular works is relatively easy or nearly impossible" (Montford and Fruin). They recommend a litany of principles that the writer can employ in order to ensure the longevity of her/his work, including preferring open systems to closed ones, providing copious comments in the code, choosing plain-text formats over binary formats, keeping multiple copies on various, "durable" media, and so on. It is necessary, they seem to argue, that the poet or writer think consciously about the longevity of her/his poem before, during and after its composition. And this would all seem to make perfect sense. After all, we should certainly make every effort to ensure this poetry exists for generations to come.Or should we? Is there not, perhaps, a value in embracing the fact that these poems are short-lived? Is there not a value in the fact that the very lability of these poems allows the poet an opportunity to assume a somewhat different position within a complex web of power relations than the more traditional, print-oriented poet?The intention of this essay is to explore the resistant potential inherent in digital literature and poetry, a potential that exists, at least in part, because of the very fact that digital media is ephemeral. First, I will discuss archival strategies, not from within the discussion of digital media archives, but from within the related field of contemporary experimental art. …