Introduction to Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats

Astrid Ensslin introduces Unnatural Habitats as “a poetic hypertext pastiche” in which Kathy Mac “explores American idealism,” and describes the work’s original publication bundled with Kathryn Cramer’s In Small and Large Pieces in The Eastgate Quarterly Review, holding up the original folio to show it to the camera. 

Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Part 1

Ensslin hands the Traversal over to Kathy Mac, who explains “I am talking to you from New Brunswick, Canada which is the traditional territory of the Wolastoqiyik people, the Peskotomuhkati, Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq” and the background of Unnatural Habitats. She was employed at a Canadian publishing house, “moonlighting as a poet,” and working for “a fellow named Bob Atkinson… a serious tech geek” who “got me thinking about hypertext.” Mac says a few of the threads of poems existed on their own, and others were written specifically to be a hypertext. Navigating to a table of contents featuring text arranged in a circle with four levels, Mac explains what each level means: the top six describe physical “unnatural habitats,” the four in the tier below describe mental ones, the two under that weave the physical and mental together, and then the last line is occupied by a “directions” button. 

Mac chooses to read the “Apollo 13: Interface” poem thread, which is opposite “Apollo 13: Reentry” on the top tier of the table of contents.  Mac shares the story of the Apollo 13 mission, in which an exploded oxygen tank led to the astronauts getting stuck in the atmosphere which led to the astronauts and the “pragmatic” training of astronauts, who attempt not to show emotion and demonstrate “an apparently perfect faith” in the “radio voices” from command giving them directions. Mac describes how the language of the poems, with the patterning of frictive sounds and vowels, is designed to imitate the motions of the men and their spacecraft. The placement of the lines on the page — mounting, descending, narrowing, and contracting --  also mirrors the motions of the craft and their thoughts. Similarly, the arrangement of the lexia in the map mode imitates the spiral path downward of the spacecraft.

Moving onto the section of lexias about the "Unnatural Habitat" of early aviation and the life of Alberto Santos Dumont, Mac explains how “many of the poems deal with binaries” like “down/up” or “individual identity and groups.” Mac tells about Dumont’s career as an airplane designer around the same time as the Wright brothers, and how the lexias of the poem follow a path going up and then down in a “teeter-totter motion" like an early aircraft. 

Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Part 2

Clicking the link to “submarine patrol 1915,” Mac tells about how the word “fathom” comes from a word for “graves,” linking it to the danger experienced by submariners in that “unnatural habitat.” She describes the history of early submarining, and how during World War I in the Sea of Marmara, where salt and fresh water mixed, military submarines could only go down as far as the level of the denser salt water which began “fifteen graves” below the freshwater. 

Turning to a section about miners, she reads a line about how “when we go down we turn the world/ into the opposite/ of sculpture” and explains how she used that first line break to tease another meaning before adding on the next clause at the next line. The poem brings up the dangers of mining, and “the egg of grief” that lodges in the throat of those loved ones left behind on the surface.

Mac continues to “Kuwait: a Testimonial,” an “elemental poem” about fire and two journalists who were burnt in an oil fire in Kuwait during the first Gulf War. Combining her own poetry using (in the voice of the dead journalists' he collective “we”), news and press items describing the incident, and quotes from the Bible about fire, Mac examines not only unnatural habitats, but the people who are drawn into them. 

Moving down to the next layer of “conceptually unnatural habitats” rather than “elementally” unnatural habitats Mac visits a poem about the AIDS Quilt that memorialized victims of that epidemic. Her poem is ekphrastic, describing the experience of seeing a quilt which incorporated Army clothing in a way that showed “this quilt emblematized somebody who had to un-pick and restitch his private life and public life… had to fit a different pattern” in each of the two areas of living. The windows on the screen pop up in different positions, in imitation (Mac explains) of quilt-squares.

Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Part 3

The next poem, within a section called "Signifier, sign, sold" tells the story of a dolphin named Sammy in “a pool somewhere on the prairies” who paints. The entire situation to Mac indicates an unnatural habitat: Sammy wasn’t born to live on the plains, but he also can’t return to the wild because he has never been there. Instead, the dolphin stays and paints, in a palace where “the least of his marks/ means five hundred dollars.” Mac wryly remarks that she made Unnatural Habitats at a time when she was having difficulty making money as an artist.

When the story of Sammy the painting dolphin ends, Mac moves onto “Living vicariously: a basement oblivion” which describes the unnatural habitat of living indoors and watching a screen, and is "about bread and circuses... how if we are distracted enough we won't notice how unnatural the world is." Mac wrote the work “before the internet was a thing” so the screen indicated is more of a television than a computer screen. Since then, the influence and immersiveness of this particular habitat, where a person watches videos and plays games all day, has only increased.

Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Part 4

Returning to the table of contents screen, Mac reads a section called “Odds and ends” that begins with a lexia about Andy Warhol, exhorting the reader to “Forget/ your promised quarter/ hour of fame” that features couplets or tercets from lexia to lexia, each in a different location onscreen. Mac explains that these sections came from a non-hypertext poem she'd previously written about Warhol. Those poems then “swing into the next poem” through a series of links, returning us to the Apollo 13 re-entry poem that Mac read first.

Dene Grigar brings up the “double-clicking” necessary to navigate the work on old hardware with old software, and Mac comments that “Storyspace is squirrelly... this is off-brand use, I was pushing it to be something it wasn’t.” Because of how the software worked, Mac was unable to end the last two poems the way she wished to, but “that was fine” in the end. 

Mac discusses the map interface for each poem, which is a bunch of boxes connected by arrows showing links. Mac decided to “make patterns out of these.” Looking at the map of the Kuwait poem, Mac and Grigar comment on the star shape formed by the lines between lexias on the mapmode, which evokes both the American flag and the fiery heat of stars. 

Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Q & A Part 1

Ensslin shares a question from Richard Snyder about the influence of concrete poetry on Unnatural Habitats. Mac answers that “I like concrete poetry that’s three dimensional,” and sees herself, because of her work in textiles, “hooking into a very traditional way of looking at it as opposed to a very abstract and contemporary way.” She shares that she has done academic work on textile metaphors in English texts, and that she sees links as analogous to strings. Highlighting this relationship between electronic literature and textile arts, Ensslin and Mac discuss the debate over categorizing the genre, concluding it “must be put in the unboxable box.”

Ensslin then asks how Mac might define the notion of “the natural” at the time of the work’s composition and also now. Mac answers that “natural is a vexed term,” but also “basically what you’re used to,” a thing that is as “constructed” as the “unnatural.”

Andrew Klein from the chat asks whether Mac planned the project before learning about Storyspace, or if Storyspace inspired her to write the poems. Mac explains that she had written some of the poems before she discovered Storyspace and “started playing around in there,” but that the work came together with the software.

Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Q & A Part 2

Andrew from the chat asks if the work could ever exist as a non-hypertext work, to which Mac answers “no” because the visual and dynamic elements of the hypertext are an important part of the whole. Ensslin brings up how often people didn't understand or appreciate new media work at the time of its original publication. Discussing the complexity of new media to unfamiliar readers, Mac says “I want people to trust me as the writer, I don’t want to leave them feeling like they’re stuck on the edge of a cliff hanging onto a bush that’s gonna give at any time. I want them to feel like they’re standing on that cliff looking over the vista.” 

Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Q & A Part 3

Sharing a question from Sarah Xerar Murphy — “does sound reconstruct physicality in a digital world?” — Mac takes a moment to contemplate, saying “words aren’t visual,” and sharing that Sarah is her sometimes-roommate currently recording an audiobook of a novel. Bringing up Saussure, Mac describes how signs have “imposed meanings” and are apprehended visually, aurally, haptically, and culturally. Because of these several meanings, Mac concludes that “sound doesn’t reconstruct physicality, sound helps us interpret physicality.”

Mac goes on to describe how “reading (a hypertext) out loud” or putting it into “regular text” or “French” are all forms of “translation,” and none of these translations are any better than the “original.”

Grigar then asks some lore questions about what kind of MacIntosh Mac used to make the work (an SE, she answers) and how she discovered Storyspace (“I honestly don’t remember, I’d love to say something brilliant about that but I really don’t remember.”) 

Traversal of Kathy Mac's Unnatural Habitats, Q & A Part 4