At the Symposium on Manitoba Writing held in Winnipeg last week, I signed up for a 3-hour “Reading digital literature” workshop, which wasn’t strictly Manitoban but a bonus opportunity because of the presence of Manuel Portela of Portugal, a scholar of the field. (He did a paper at the conference on “typographic notation” in the poetry of Dennis Cooley.) Having signed up, I almost regretted it, because the abstract was full of words like modularity, permutational, kenetic, audiotextuality, materiality, hyperlinks, nodes, and more. But once in the room, I found Mr. Portela not nearly as imposing as his words and his presentation accessible and informative. Continue reading →