Tan Lin’s cumbersomely titled book Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking [Lin 2010c] features the term metadata twice on its cover, as well as all of its cataloguing data including its call number (Figure 1). Of particular interest is the book’s Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data, which offers fourteen possible subject headings. Lin’s headings force us to ask questions of categorization related to nationality, genre and language before we have encountered a single image or blurb. As he describes the cover in an interview,

it has metadata layers for bibliographic control. The LCSH is an old-fashioned thesaurus, and 7CV references dictionaries and other classification/reading systems. Subject headings are conflict prone near ethnicity/identity issues, and I tried to highlight that with China-Poetry as a disappearing first term.  [Lin 2010a]

The overall effect of the cover is that the clichés of the poetry book and of the poetic persona are subverted in advance of our encountering any of Lin’s poetry, much of which consists of appropriated texts and images.

Lin describes his work as an “ambient poetics,” about which he writes “[Today] a work architecture [or film] or [poem] or [novel] should have as fluid and standardized an ID [OBJECT ID™ SYSTEM] as possible and function like a waiting area, time slot, universal market/currency or metadata standard”  [Lin 2010c, 131]. Lin is clearly mocking the rhetoric of genre hybridity, but he is also pointing out that in an era of media convergence, poetry, while it may evade a specific use value, is still implicated with homogenizing systems of distribution and classification. Lin’s ambient poetics acknowledges its place with a hypermediated society, and yet attempts to resist being instrumentalized in the interests of any single cause or subject matter. For Lin, “A book should be the weakest information pattern that is visible to the eye. Only in that way can it outlive its data”  [Lin 2010c, 130]. A book is, of course, in many ways one of the strongest information patterns with which we are familiar — compared to electronic documents, the book is a relatively stable artifact. By emphasizing the metadata protocols of the book as physical object, Lin subverts the unit of the poetry book, and by extension places poetry within a far wider discursive field. That field also extends beyond American Written English, as well as beyond categories such as Asian American and Chinese American. Lin has even made a Google translation of Seven Controlled Vocabularies available on lulu.com. No pretense is made of it being an authoritative cross-cultural document. Lin’s output over the past several years has been prodigious: there are a number of companion volumes to Seven Controlled Vocabularies: an entire Appendix volume, a critical reader, a book of blurbs, a book of mini-essays, and even a handmade book. Lin has made collaboration a key feature of his work — in the “EDIT: Processing Network Publishing” event at Penn in which Lin participated last year, for instance, different media technologies were employed to produce work on site. One product (or byproduct perhaps) of the event was the volume (available as a pdf and as a Lulu print-on-demand book) Selected Essays About a Bibliographyedited by Danny Snelson. The book features mini-essays by nearly fifty contributors; among the contributions are two essays titled “Metadata.” One essay, credited to Kareem Estefan, simply reprints the definition provided by the National Information Standards Organization. The other essay, by Dan Visel, explores paratexts, such as book covers, as forms of metadata. According to Visel, “A book is not a text. It’s more than a text. It’s a text and a collection of information around that text, some of which we consciously recognize and some of which we don’t”  [Snelson 2010]. This description captures well the radically open-ended nature of Lin’s project.

Lin’s 2007 book Heath: plagiarism/outsource, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Untilted[sic] Heath Ledger Project, a history of the search engine, disco OS is a particularly rich text in terms of exploring issues of intellectual property within a global marketplace for ideas. From Dada to Situationism to conceptual writing, appropriation practices have long presented an overt critique of intellectual property.[8] Appropriation reconfigures source material and yet typically a residue (or metadata layer) of the source remains.[9] Though many of Lin’s practices have a long lineage, they are also very much enmeshed in the present. His appropriations tend not to be nostalgic or historical, and they tend to be extraordinarily self-reflexive with regard to remediation. As a whole, they go far to enact Marcus Boon’s recent advocacy of copying as an ethical practice. For Boon,

In a sign of the times, Boon’s book is being given away as a free pdf on the Harvard University Press website. Like much of Lin’s work, Boon enacts, as well as theorizes, a critique of an intellectual property system replete with contradictions.[10]

Craig Dworkin’s The Perverse Library purports to list the contents of Dworkin’s library, as well as to list books he wishes were in his library [Dworkin 2010]. The book comprises a bibliography of 2,247 works, as well as a remarkable forty-page introduction entitled “Pinacographic Space.” Pinacography, or the compiling of lists, derives from the Pinakes, or tables of learning, compiled by Callimachus at the library of Alexandria. According to Alex Wright, in his Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, “this elementary bibliographic constituted the first systematic abstraction of metadata”  [Wright 2007, 73]. Dworkin offers an exhaustive description of his library, but at the same time his entire project recognizes the difficulties of classifying and describing a physical library. The book includes two bibliographies, “A Perverse Library” and “The Perverse Library” — the difference between the definite and indefinite article presumably denoting books the author would like to own as opposed to those the author actually does own. Dworkin’s fundamental classificatory choice is to group his books by publisher. He acknowledges that he has not provided a complete bibliography of his library — many titles, particularly those of mainstream publishers, are excluded. The effect of this is to present the reader with an extraordinary cornucopia of recent avant-garde writing.

There is something of a voyeuristic show-and-tell feel to a personal pinacography — perhaps that is part of what Dworkin means by the perversity of the project. On the one hand, many of the likely readers of this book will look for books they own or have written. On the other hand, this book has induced me to buy a number of books I otherwise would not have, and in this sense the book could be said to have a strikingly direct effect on its readers. Dworkin hardly mentions electronic publication in his introduction, but it is clearly a specter haunting the book. Dworkin is no technophobe, and has made much of his library available online at his Eclipse website. He has even extensively theorized his own practices as an online archivist.[11] In some sense, The Perverse Library shows that no amount of metadata can stand in for the sensory data of physical books. The book could almost be taken as a refutation of Goldsmith’s “If it isn’t on the internet, it doesn’t exist” — except that ironically the maxim almost holds true in that almost all of these books are online, in the sense that it is possible to find instantaneous metadata, including prices and library access information, about nearly all of these titles. [Goldsmith 2005]

Dworkin both celebrates and laments the physical space taken up by the library. He insists his project is an architectural one, a documentation not simply of the library’s textual contents, but also an account of its materiality. In his introduction, Dworkin engages in an extended excursus on the olfactory aspects of his library — a form of sense data seldom recorded bibliographically. The catalog presents us with a paradox — it makes information accessible, but it also deforms it through reducing it to fixed categories. Dworkin’s book could be the most compelling single volume account of small-press Anglo-American poetry publishing over the past few decades, and yet it does not contain a single image. Despite its seeming copiousness, it is a radically reduced representation of these objects and those persons and institutions that produced them. The title suggests a sexualized relation of the bibliophile to his books, but etymologically the word “perverse” — in the sense of through verse — could also be considered entirely appropriate to a poetry library.

M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! [Philip 2008] takes on a more serious topic than either The Perverse Libraryor Seven Controlled Vocabularies. Zong! retells — or refuses to retell — the story of the Zong, a slave ship from which 150 slaves were thrown overboard in 1781 so that its owners could collect insurance money. A lawyer by training, Philip derives much of the nearly 200-page book from the two page text of the Gregson v. Gilbert decision. Derive may be too strong a verb, however, since Zong! is more of a dérive than a derivation, which its author describes as a kind of “recombinant antinarrative”  [Philip 2008, 204]. Philip describes locking herself “into this particular discursive landscape in the belief that…the story that can only be told by not telling, is locked in this text”  [Philip 2008, 191]. In effect, Philip rewrites the Zong! narrative by reordering the categories upon which the case was based. “The law,” she writes, “uses language as a tool for ordering… I want poetry to disassemble the ordered, to create disorder and mayhem so as to release the story”  [Philip 2008, 199].

Zong! is a fantastically complex multi-generic work that I can only begin to describe in this essay — what I want to note are the book’s formal features and how they relate to questions of metadata and classification. The first Zong! (Figure 2) is one of 26 in the first chapter, suggesting an alphabetic microcosm of fragmentation and erasure.

At the bottom of the page, significantly, are names of the victims chosen by Philip; none of the slaves’ actual names were ever recorded. As if to undermine any notion of a possible point of origin for the story, the first three letters of the poem are www, suggesting world wide web, and yet these three w’s remain in a kind of proto-semantic state, not syntactically subordinated, referring to no one or no thing directly. The words that do rise off the page are monosyllabic, often are fillers or homonymic, signs perhaps of dysfluency or of being heard by a non-English speaker or even perhaps of being heard from below deck or from below the sea: “our/go/goo/oh/one/won/dey/ah/ay/day s.”

Philip describes the composition of Zong! as the product of a number of serendipitous events, among which she lists her “laser printer for no apparent reason print[ing] the first two or three pages [of one section] superimposed on each other — crumped, so to speak — so that the page becomes a dense landscape of text”  [Philip 2008, 206]. Philip claims that the laser printer did this to the “beginning of each movement of the second part of the book…the same thing happens”  [Philip 2008, 206]. So far as I can tell, however, only in the Ebora chapter (Figure 3) does the malfunctioning laser printer produce a palimpsestic overwritten text.

Many of Zong!’s sections demonstrate an extraordinary care and precision in terms of typography and layout. The book uses multiple fonts, for instance, including a cursive script. It would seem that Philip exaggerates the effects of her printer’s presumed malfunction. Philip’s printer introduces what Benzon calls “the standardization of error” into the text of Zong!. The malfunctioning printer resists the protocols of a clean, direct presentation of text. Writing of Andy Warhol’s Aa: A Novel, Benzon suggests that “At both the microscopic and the macroscopic levels, the systematization of textual production that inhered in the typewriter and elsewhere in the office influenced writing and reversed its effects”  [Benzon 2010, 96]. It is perhaps more difficult to introduce serendipitous errors into computer texts than typescripts, and it would seem even more difficult to encounter such errors in works which are extensively copyedited for publication. According to Benzon, “Each typed document, each piece in the massive archive of postwar corporate discourse, is a unique record of an individual sequence of body-machine interfaces and technological inscriptions” [Benzon 2010, 96]. Philip’s printer performs a kind of violence upon the page, crumping it — but it also leaves a trace of the author’s engagement with technologies of textual production. It is worth noting that The Perverse Library also thematizes the role of error in its introduction, and that Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head, while it does not explicitly thematize error, seems to go to great lengths to eliminate errors.

Zong! ends with a glossary and imagined ship’s manifest. As opposed to the constrained English vocabulary of the court decision, Philip offers a cosmopolitan list of words from other languages likely to have been used onboard. She also provides a manifest which lists eleven African “Groups and Languages,” a list of animals, a list of body parts, crew members, and food and drink. The least likely categories on the manifest are “nature” and “women who wait.” These lists undermine the well-known opposition suggested by Manovich between database and narrative, in that the lists tell a story of horrific absurdity and mistaken classification [Manovich 2001]. Zong! also could be said to resist the general current of recent scholarship on lists — found in books such as Umberto Eco’s Infinity of Lists [Eco 2009] or Robert Belknap’s The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing [Belknap 2004] — which tends to celebrate the plenitude of objects recorded in lists, and which tends to skirt difficult questions of property and identity.

Zong! and The Perverse Library both prominently feature what might be called negative listing — that is to say that their lists are as much about loss and misclassification as they are about possession and appropriation. Zong! re-enacts wrongful classification at the same time that it reconstructs the languages, names, and possessions of those whose history has otherwise been erased. The Perverse Library repeatedly invokes the burning (or purported burning) of the Library of Alexandria.[12] The list becomes a metadata substitute for unobtainable objects and for information that cannot be processed. Italo Calvino remarks of Georges Perec — perhaps the most famous compiler of avant-garde literary lists — that for him “Terminological exactitude was his way of possessing things. Perec collected and gave a name to whatever comprises the uniqueness of every event, person, or thing”  [Calvino 1988, 122–123]. The reverse process may also be possible, however. Clark Coolidge writes in his aggregative prose poem Mine: “it’s this insane listing that keeps you from ever possessing anything”  [Coolidge 1982, 29]. Lists can mark absences also, as for instance in Maya Lin’s 1981 Vietnam Memorial, which arranges the names of the dead not alphabetically but chronologically by date of death. According to Belknap, “In the inventory, words representing names or things are collected by a conceptual principle”  [Belknap 2004, 3]. The formal organization of lists and inventories suggests order and coherency, but that organization can also display the injustices of classifications based on flawed conceptual principles.

The readings of Lin, Dworkin, Philip and Morris that I have suggested here could be extended to encompass a broader range of recent writing; I would mention in particular the writing of Robert Fitterman, Monica de la Torre, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Kim Rosenfield, Caroline Bergvall, Nicholas Thurston, Matthew Timmons, Derek Beaulieu and Ara Shirinyan — although this list (or meta-list) is far from complete. Recent avant-garde writing from the US, UK, and Canada has a near obsession with classification. The Listmania found in this writing challenges a passive acquiescence to the cataloguing procedures we experience every day. Perhaps avant-garde poetry has transferred itself from the prison house of language of the 70s and 80s to the prison house of classification in the Internet era. In saying this, I recognize that I am awkwardly assigning agency to a number of overlapping historical categories. The writers under discussion in this paper are careful not to assume simplistic correlations between metadata schemes and ideology (or politics). Though these works suggest that we are captives of classification, they do not necessarily claim that we are deterministically imprisoned by our classifications. To adapt the prison house metaphor, perhaps the door of the Bastille has been open for a while. Contrary to enduring myth, only seven prisoners were freed in the storming of the Bastille. This makes it no less important as an event, or rather no less important as a shifting series of events, images, descriptions and (re)categorizations.

In the words of Perec, “Taxonomy can make your head spin”  [Perec 1997].

An early version of this paper was presented as part of the “The Poetics of Metadata” panel at the 2011 Society for Textual Studies Conference. I would like to thank my co-panelists Paul Benzon and Mark Sample. Andrea Andersson offered helpful commentary on a draft of this essay.