christoph /project /300

Narrative Biography (300 Words)

Christoph Girard is fascinated by the shared and marginalized identities of poets who are disconnected from life in ways he is not. Like the poet Clark Coolidge, who is interested in geological rock patterns, absorbing the population is how he connects with nature. He is interested in the chaos of communication as a journalist, artist and poet; and chooses to spend his free time as a recluse immersed in the bizarre psychodynamics of social interaction. How identity works itself into technical poetics is hard to articulate yet he believes there is a parallel between the components of a marginalized identity and the poetics of fragmentation.

He is interested in how the evolution of language can transform public texts into poetic artifice. The transition from original source material to the realm of disembodiment presents how process can be subverted into literature as linguistically challenging as poetry while it undermines the original grammar and syntax that commodifies different environments and mood sets into the illusion of a uniform experience. A common thread in the process is to show how textual manipulation can transform semantics to occupy a space between the tangible and fantastic.

In order to expand the semiotics of form, he approaches electronic literature with media like video to show the sustainability of the poetic medium by going from a linear-based interface into accessible applications. A sustainable form for uncommercial and experimental literature that inflects poetry through photography, video and hypertext can only be accessed through web-based applications. Most contemporary poets consider themselves lucky if they can find a small press that will publish their work for free but the dire reality is that the distribution of small presses can only reach a limited audience at best. The antiquated medium of dead tree editions are often inaccessible as almost all bookstores offer only a limited selection of poetry.