A Cyborg Syntax
First things first... If Rosenburg wanted us to walk away from the poem without any kind of interpretation then I would like to let him know that he can rest easy because I have no particular clue as to what I read in his "Diagram Series 6" poems. That being said I still found a lot to like in his poetry but it was more in the form of pondering the potential of this new type of syntax. Each poem made me feel like I was backwards engineering a circuit or something of the sort because not only did I not fully understand what I was doing but I had the feeling that the person who made it did. It was definitely an experience to observe this non-linear syntax in action. Exploring the space and having it react to one's movement makes for a dynamic new form of hypertext.
While reading this I couldn't help but feel excited, despite my depiction of confusion above. I was excited because I recalled my linguistic courses and the discussions of how our spoken language is the way it is because we can only produce linear strings of phones and this leads to things like a more linear syntax. I also remembered my reading of Walter J Ong's Orality and Literacy in another class with Professor Flores. The part of the text that floated around in my mind was the section in which Ong discusses how Philosophy and advanced study are possible with the arrival of the written word because spoken language is liberated from the heavy mnemonic burden it carried. This new syntax in which clusters are related to other clusters and which can dived into with a simple mouse click didn't feel like strictly human syntax; it seems to be much more than that. The structure that Rosenburg tinkers with and its resulting syntax feels more cyborg than human. This is what ultimately excites me because it speaks volumes about our interaction with the electronic medium and reaffirms my hopes in the future of the Digital Humanities.