Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900
- The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Space of Public Memory
- Chapter 2 Poetry and Propaganda
- Chapter 3 Depression-Era Poetics and the Politics of How to Read
- Chapter 4 The Politics and Poetics of Revolution
- Chapter 5 Wallace Stevens, Stanley Burnshaw, and the Defense of Poetry in an Age of Economic Determinism
- Chapter 6 The Line of Wit
- Chapter 7 US Poets on War and Peace
- Chapter 8 Institutions of American Poetry
- Chapter 9 African American Political Poetries
- Chapter 10 Our Terribly Excluded Blue
- Chapter 11 Poetry and the Prison Industrial Complex
- Chapter 12 “Oh Say Can You See”
- Chapter 13 The Political Resonances of Hip Hop and Spoken Word
- Chapter 14 Language as Politics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Poetry
- Chapter 15 Renovating the Open Field
- Chapter 16 Transcultural Agency
- Chapter 17 Ecopoetry Now
- Chapter 18 The Politics and History of Digital Poetics
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
- References
Chapter 18 - The Politics and History of Digital Poetics
Copyright, Authorship, Anti-Lyric
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2023
- The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900
- The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Space of Public Memory
- Chapter 2 Poetry and Propaganda
- Chapter 3 Depression-Era Poetics and the Politics of How to Read
- Chapter 4 The Politics and Poetics of Revolution
- Chapter 5 Wallace Stevens, Stanley Burnshaw, and the Defense of Poetry in an Age of Economic Determinism
- Chapter 6 The Line of Wit
- Chapter 7 US Poets on War and Peace
- Chapter 8 Institutions of American Poetry
- Chapter 9 African American Political Poetries
- Chapter 10 Our Terribly Excluded Blue
- Chapter 11 Poetry and the Prison Industrial Complex
- Chapter 12 “Oh Say Can You See”
- Chapter 13 The Political Resonances of Hip Hop and Spoken Word
- Chapter 14 Language as Politics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Poetry
- Chapter 15 Renovating the Open Field
- Chapter 16 Transcultural Agency
- Chapter 17 Ecopoetry Now
- Chapter 18 The Politics and History of Digital Poetics
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
- References
Summary
Digital poetry emerged in tandem with advances in the computer sciences in the mid-twentieth century, although we can trace its experimental impulses to earlier literary traditions. As Dani Spinosa argues, “digital poetry has its roots in a history of print-based avant-garde” (x). The recombinant and nonlinear conditions of electronic literature, broadly conceived, have led some scholars to attend to modernist works by writers and media visionaries such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Bob Brown in a search for the origins of the procedural play in contemporary innovative writing. “Early digital poems,” as Christopher Funkhouser notes, “can be conceptually interpreted as searching for their essence or as striving to make their essence apparent, as did modernist endeavors” (3). Media theorists, such as Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, and Lev Manovich understood the innovations of early media as cornerstones in the development of the digital revolution. The modernist transition to new communication and media technologies, such as cinema, radio, and the gramophone, fostered faster transmissions of information that in turn influenced novel approaches to structuring narrative time, visual language, and reading practices. Bob Brown’s 1930 proposal for a mechanized reading machine offers an intriguing example of this collision between media and literature. Invoking the “talkies” or sound films, Brown’s reading device proposed to deliver “readies” or a ticker-tape stream of prose or poetry to a viewer, thereby efficiently transmitting a visual spectacle of information. For Brown, the machine would “revitalize” an “interest in the Optical Art of Writing” and thus merge the act of reading with the technological innovations that were already modernizing society (27). With this background in mind, it remains a useful exercise to apprehend the radical experimentation of contemporary electronic literature alongside the visual, technological, and formal innovations of earlier avant-garde movements, including Futurism and Dadaism, as well as later literary groups, such as Oulipo, Fluxus, and language writing.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023