AustLit

'Keyboard performance is a form of visual poetry tracing the invisibilia of a text as it is typed. Specifically, the texts are others’ poems and, to date, mine have all been written by women. Surfacing the poem’s marks through keyboard input returns an abstract gaze of both the poem and the keys. Just as Winkler’s (2021) spelled-forms use process to visually represent words, clues for keyboard performances are in their design. A keyboard interface is the framework to atomise poems into individual keystrokes, and choices are made regarding title, colour scheme and keystroke style. Where letters repeat, layered keystrokes suggest density, which is reminiscent of Winkler imagining repetition in spelled-forms as three-dimensional (p. 39). In contemplating how Emerson (2014) relates the procedural capabilities of digital media to labour, keyboard performance transforms a labour-oriented task like word-processing into a literary subject experimenting with form. The inclination to perform poems written by women challenges the presumption that feminised work is necessarily obedient, subservient or invisible. These visual poems contribute to the field of poetry by expanding notions of simulacra and translation-as-concept. Additionally, they draw attention to how “elusive keystrokes can be captured and reused” (University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 1).' (Publication abstract)