Cultural Software explained ideology as a result of the cultural evolution of bits of cultural knowhow, or memes. It was the first book to apply theories of cultural evolution to the problem of ideology and justice.

Click here to see what this means.

A few words from Louise Glück’s Foreword to the book for those unfamiliar with Richard Siken’s work:

We live in a period of great polarities: in art, in public policy, in morality. In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos. The great task has been to infuse clarity with the passionate ferment of the inchoate, the chaotic.

Siken takes to heart this exhortation. Crush is the best example I can presently give of profound wildness that is also completely intelligible. By Higginson’s report, Emily Dickinson famously remarked, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

She should, in that remark, have shamed forever the facile, the decorative, the easily consoling, the tame. She names, after all, responses that suggest violent transformation, the overturning of complacency by peril.

In practice, this has meant that poets quote Dickinson and proceed to write poems from which will and caution and hunger to accommodate present taste have drained all authenticity and unnerving originality. Richard Siken, with the best poets of his impressive generation, has chosen to take Dickinson at her word. I had her reaction.

Louise Glück, the current editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has said that Jay Hopler’s book is “filled with tardy recognitions and insights. Always we sense, beneath the surface of even the most raucous poems, impending crisis: the terrifying onset of that life long held at a distance.”

We want more people to experience this—people who’ve never sat in a poetry workshop or thought to purchase the latest issue of Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, or the newest Yale Younger Poets book.

One of Hopler’s most haunting lines, from the poem That Light One Finds in Baby Pictures, reads: “Being born is a shame— / But it’s not so bad, as journeys go. It’s not the worst one / We will ever have to make . . .”

Who hasn’t felt these things at some point? Who can’t identify with these sentiments?

I for one, would like to know.

Maybe it’s the short form or the easily chunk-able and digestible bits that made poetry seem a natural fit for this platform. I’m curious to see how far this carries and how far the discussion it generates will continue. At heart, it’s nothing new—just another means of publication, a different kind of cover for the same kind of content; but I think this project does have the potential to help rekindle something special—a truly broad discussion of poetry, which has been been missing from the national discourse for quite some time.

By placing Jonathan Zittrain’s book on the CommentPress platform, we really hope to practice what he preaches. One of the main themes of his new book is that the Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity and that users are losing control of the web. We have to save ourselves. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia, Zittrain shows how we can develop new technologies, social structures, and strategies that will allow us to work continue working creatively and collaboratively.

Yale University Press has experimented with mounting books on a wiki platform before with some publicity and so far with mixed success. (See yalepresswiki.org.) Even from the beginning, we weren’t sure that a wiki platform would be best for mounting long-form writing, but it was definitely worth a shot. It was really the spirit of collaboration and sharing that gripped us and our authors; but writing and editing wikis can be trying—even for those who’ve made the Internet their main subject of discourse.

As soon as we saw CommentPress and McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H3ORY project, we felt that the folks at the Institute were on to something special.

I’ll speak to Jay Hopler’s project in the next post.