Peter Ganick is an extremophile of American letters. Extremophiles, as any ten-year-old addicted to the science shows on the Discovery Channel can tell you, are those amazing creatures that thrive in extreme conditions, such as in the lightless & chilly depths of the ocean or in fire-orange lips of lava at the edge of a live volcano, even conceivably on asteroids or other planets sans atmosphere. These include (but aren’t just limited to) anaerobes, thermophiles, psychrophiles, acidophiles, alkalophiles, halophiles, barophiles, and xerophiles. Fun folk one & all.

In poetry, an extremophile would be someone whose interest in the dynamics of his or her own work are intense, detailed & radically distinct, but which develop with only the most passing concern or correlation with whatever else might be going on in the world of poetry. Extremophiles have been around for some time: Bern Porter, Bob Brown & Ian Hamilton Finlay all qualify as examples of extremophile literature at its finest. Alan Sondheim is another contemporary example, but it is characteristic of extremophile writing that although Sondheim & Ganick are relatively like-minded souls practicing at the same point in time who live within only a few hours of one another, no one would suggest that you might make a group phenomenon out of this ensemble of impulses.* The closest you could come in recent U.S. poetic history to an extremophile grouping would be the collaborative projects of Stanley Berne & Arlene Zekowski, who also demonstrate the principle that extremophile writing need not be interesting just for being extreme.

Ganick hasn’t always been perceived as an extremophile in part because there are some aspects of his poetry that, if you were draw it up as giant circle in a Venn diagram, would slightly overlap some other things going on in post-avant poetics, for example in the most purely prosodic pieces of Clark Coolidge’s writing. And by virtue of having been one of the major publishers & promoters of post-avant poetics, Ganick has been in the thick of things now for a few decades. But his best work, which is to say the poems in which he seems to be most fully himself, are longer works in relatively constant forms where the language builds only to be itself. Read aloud, books such as No Soap Radio, Agoraphobia, Rectangular Morning Poem or <a’ sattv> lead a reader toward trance-like states that are not meaning-invested, but rather ultimately meaning-liberated. These states are zones unique to Ganick’s poetry. & I suspect that you or I could not conceivably come close to duplicating them if we tried.

tend.field is Ganick’s most recent project, a PC CD of a single 223-page paragraph that exists both in PDF format and as a self-scrolling text, that appears to run literally forever. There is also a series of related abstracted line drawings, although I could not explain to you how they’re related to the text if my life depended on it.** But it’s the self-scrolling text to which I really want to call your attention. Subtitled in parentheses a philosophy, the text itself is pure Ganick – no capital letters, just streams of sentences such as:

which sly in recanting olé yesterday’s impasse the memorized cloister, ailing with which one seeks a decent paradigm for annuity. rendered universal, saving which adrenaline blister, on as much to repent with glaringly thought of hidden discomfort in otherness’ pileation, so major as nodule perhaps riddance to evidential gleams. of which in constriction the abolished shoulder of roadway calling out in an advent of persuasion, trial size formalization so regaled those predicated on hopefulness’ factuality restructured. some sleeping window nest, gravity of expanse the time of for which name naïvely preoccupies the margins of a destiny modeled after waiting’s insurgency not breathing - less. when as constricted from address, to pull into a gossamer flange more the parade solar aspects in huddle remotely isolationist as caveat, not the advantage the blessing-with that mandalas implicate formally. on as one could seek, permission granted that being on a folder to be wrenched infotainer’s materializations aside the curious name-calling’s prudence. some so gained as to merit wideness of pertinence, well into scrambler’s official derangement, more fleshy that wilted on haphazard notification elsewhere sandwich. lanyard on the motionlessness, one creates out of a camera to beaten down shut as orange to skimmer flood the feeling in leggings more mundane as permitted. schismatic retaliation of sic with-in a space in documentation maternally the fullness of bluntness talking at hula horrors, the emptiness of wishful gradients. some other specimen of tangibility in other packages merely lionized. scholiast. venerable mistral, with garble and chain-song, reurged in the camped-over, where wit as synergy tempts an icy startling of vestigial prosody, the celebrated more than which with an announcement of negotiation, somewhere out inside the temporary. while affording in selected retentions -ive the merging ogre to blemish with not haggling out of the shoebox named for a full salute here to befriend of pranams why thresholds flail. some rendered which has not startled invasively premonition therefore unsold or sold, that beginning from endgame in parlance therefore to be else in fact. whose elementally curious not wished failure, template on-site the having which affords one’s explanation of culpable secretion, manicure where aspects remove tiles longing for beatitude. not recognizable from one’s clangorous monotone, that being as hidden rend on prior tear to the millefleur grail-proof in derivation of parlance’s emulsified feverishness, something addicted to scramble, with whose affording one classes others’ notions therefore something else to be headless in reminder.

This represents less than one half of one percent of this paragraph. In book format, or even in a PDF file on a screen – on a PDA for example – this is rough going, even though phrase by phrase it’s always of some interest. But the use of the scrolling text –Macromedia Projector is the underlying program – transforms a very difficult slog through language into something else altogether. Line by line the language rises from the bottom of the screen only to exit at the top. Roughly twenty lines are visible at any given moment, but they’re moving very quickly – a line stays on the screen for its entire journey for no more than 7 seconds on my Pentium 4 1.8GHz Windows XP system. This means that it’s impossible even for a speed reader to do more than pick out phrases as they flash past.

This is where I think that subtitle comes into play. Ganick is in fact arguing here for a new way of reading, one that can be understood as glimpsing (or perhaps “registering”) data as it flashes past. In practice, this means that no longer how many times you run the program, tend.field will never yield the same poem twice. Not in the sense of a random language generator working with a set vocabulary – the computer-written poems of David Benedetti like Ideas Imagine Passion would be an example – but rather in the sense that you will never notice the same things as you proceed through this forest of language.

Reading around in a text has, of course, existed as a process for centuries, mostly unspoken about, undescribed as a process, treated rather as a form of not reading or of inferior reading if it shows its head in college lit class. But it occurs constantly in “real life”: as one walks down any commercial street in America, for example, Canada included, one is inundated with signage & figures out how best to absorb (or not) the onslaught of commercial speech in public display. Ganick’s innovation is to identify just how far beyond pure Burma Shave poetics we have actually advanced & to develop a text – and the means for presenting it – that turns this “alienation from nature” in on itself until, in fact, it truly becomes a new nature. Which is why my trope of a “forest of language” in the paragraph above was not accidental.

If there is a process that is anything like the experience of reading tend.field – note the pastoral terms welded together (but also kept separate) by punctuation here – it is exactly a walk in the country. But an exceptionally frenetic one – you realize very rapidly that you will never be able to take in more than a fraction of what is scrolling by & you then have to decide just how copasetic you are with this as a reader. It’s a new country alright, one driven & occupied by language – bureaucratic, commercial & manipulative “where wit as synergy tempts an icy startling of vestigial prosody.” Exactly!

I’m on record as a skeptic on the subject of new media – I’ve expressed a concern that the applications and software platforms on which they’re mounted will prove increasingly short-lived – and nothing here really alters my overall assessment of that. But even if tend.field proves as temporary as the Macintosh & Windows operating systems on which it is intended to operate, it makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of what reading & writing might be right now.

* Theoretically, Robert Grenier’s relationship to langpo, which has been profound, complicates the issue of placing him fully into the extremophile category, although everything from the “Chinese box” Sentences to the more recent scrawl works suggests that Grenier is just such a critter.

** One drawing is vaguely visible as the background to the scrolling text