the poetics of digital gardens
the web was meant to be wild. somewhere along the way, we forgot this. we have forgotten that the internet is embedded in slow-moving geology and nature. the current focus of technological develepoment (especially regarding the internet) has been on speed of (a perceived unlimited) growth, and we have lost focus on the quality of the soil from which our technologies are born. we are in the era of ai-driven algorithms and slop. feeds and funnels have quickly replaced our once rich digital fields and forests of knowledge, art, and poetry.
digital gardens can offer us something else:
a place to grow, not just to post.
although the web hosts images and videos sublimely, we should think of it as a primarily typographic space. in doing so, we can be reminded by robert bringhurst that:
typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. its heartwood is calligraphy—the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand—and its roots reach into living soil.
— the elements of typographic style, p. 6.
a digital garden echoes this spirit. each note is hand-shaped. links are laid down like roots. the garden is not architecture. it is an ecology. the logic is not linear; it's relational.
bringhurst in another essay claims that:
being is the dance of form.
— everywhere being is dancing, p. 147
this is where digital gardens feel most poetic. they don’t impose a final structure. they emerge. they cross-reference, evolve, loop back, and revise. they hold thought-in-motion.
unlike a singular blog, a digital garden doesn’t timestamp ideas into oblivion. it composts them. let's them sprout elsewhere and reemerge. each link forms a part of a rhizomatic or mycelial knowledge structure. sprouts appear, sprigs or cuttings might be take. a garden takes tending, but nature must also take its course.
the designer always has to leave room for the gods.
— robert bringhurst, everywhere being is dancing.
this is not just aesthetic. it’s metaphysical. gardens are never complete: they’re tended and lived with. gardens are stories we depend on for our livelihood and wellbeing. they feed and nurture us so long as we feed and nurture them. yet as every gardener knows, the season is a god that must be understood well and respected. in some cases, we must just leave it up to the seasons and their temperaments for our gardens to flourish.
below the ground, matted roots give strength.
an ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns—but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver.
— robert bringhurst, the elements of typographic style
the digital garden as a primarily typographic garden, is about laying roots. it is weaving in public. tying thoughts and ideas together rhizomatically. not as a performance, not as a product, and certainly not as some form of capitalist attention farming:
just weaving. just roots. poetry from the fertile soil of one's mind and thoughts.
digital gardens matter because:
- they are alive
- they honour form
- they grow relationally
- they create and leave space
a digital garden is what happens when we remember the internet is embedded in geology and nature. when we remember that text is a seed. that links are rhizomes and mycelium. that websites, too, can be an ecosystems.
we need to tend the space between words and worlds, leaving room for nature and the gods, and let form dance and become poetry.
the web can be wild and poetic again. but it takes intention and the patience of a gardener. plant your thoughts and ideas. make poetry. we got this!