Valerie Witte is represented in the archive by an excerpt from a game of correspondence, published in the thirty-eighth installment. The surviving text moves through telephone, radio, television, dreams, invented devices, circuits, levers, implanted memories, brain scans, recorders, projections, playback, interference, translation, and disembodied voices. Bodies and communication technologies continually exchange properties, creating a poem where sensation and transmission occupy the same field.
a game of correspondence
The title frames communication as a game. Correspondence can involve letters, messages, parallels, matching systems, or relations between distant points. “Game” adds rules, turns, uncertainty, play, strategy, and the possibility that messages may arrive altered.
This structure places Witte naturally within experimental poetry, where communication itself can become a compositional problem. The poem treats language as something sent through channels whose noise and delay shape what can be understood.
Bodies and devices
One of the poem’s central transformations imagines technology as the human body: circuits, levers, mechanisms, and continued animation become ways of describing embodiment. Elsewhere multiple bodies coincide, sensory overload appears, and physical pain enters through eyes, throat, smoke, touch, and motion.
Readers exploring poetry of the body can follow how Witte makes anatomy and machinery mutually legible. A body can behave like a device, while devices acquire emotional and sensory consequences.
Memory and scan
The poem imagines brain contents scanned and memories implanted. These images bring medical and technological vocabularies into questions of identity. Memory becomes something readable, insertable, and potentially unreliable.
This gives the work a strong relation to modern poetry concerned with mediated selfhood. Personal history enters systems of recording and diagnosis, making memory feel both intimate and technically exposed.
Recording and playback
Later sections move through recorders, basements, projections, television, nicknames, playback, and interference. Recorded material gains meanings that were absent during the original event. Sound and image change as they move through another medium.
That difference between event and playback gives the poem a temporal structure. Communication survives through repetition, yet every repetition can introduce distortion, added voices, or unexpected associations.
Simulation and real time
The poem describes a room as part of a scenario simulating real-time communication. This phrase captures the larger pressure of the work: mediated contact tries to create immediacy, while screens, devices, delays, and bodies continually complicate the encounter.
Readers interested in poetic forms can approach the poem as a serial field of interruptions. Parenthetical speech, fragments, repeated dividers, lists, and abrupt transitions create the sense of several channels operating at once.
Interference and translation
Interference appears through television, colors, reflected light, multiple bodies, cyber shorthand, and the explicit need for a translator. Meaning is carried across systems whose codes never align perfectly.
Translation therefore becomes broader than movement between languages. Gesture, image, voice, abbreviation, memory, and technology all require interpretation. Witte’s poem makes correspondence into a continuous act of decoding.
Reading Valerie Witte
a game of correspondence is a poem of transmission under pressure. Bodies become circuits; messages pass through telephone, radio, television, dreams, and invented devices; memories are scanned; recordings change during playback; voices detach from physical presence.
Within contemporary poetry, Valerie Witte’s archived contribution offers a dense example of technological language transformed into lyric structure. The poem rewards attention to interference, mediation, bodily sensation, and the unstable distance between sending a message and being understood.