National Poetry Month: Digital Poetry

Our recent book New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, edited by Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss, is an indepth look at how poetry is being transformed by digital technology, computers, and the internet. The world of digital poetry challenges readers to interact with the words on the page or in the digital realm, and allows the shifting and manipulation of the written word to be a form of expression in and of itself. New Media Poetics contains a poignant collection of essays by writers and poets on this burgeoning new media form. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

“The reciprocal and complementary aims of this book are to extend the work of understanding the computer as an expressive medium by adding new media poetry to the study of hypertext narrative, interactive fiction, computer games, intermedia art, and other digital art forms, to showcase a series of visually arresting, aurally charged, and dynamic examples of this kind of writing, and to consider some of the ways in which these examples reconfigure the familiar filed of poetry by bringing back into view vital but marginalized lineages of print and sound poetics, procedural writing, gestural abstraction and conceptual art, and activist and/or utopian communities formed by emergent poetics.”

 

You can check out several of the poetry projects that are analyzed and discussed in this text, online, such as Stephanie Strickland’s Vniverse, John Cayley’s riverIsland and overboard, and Jim Andrew’s Arteroids 3.1, as well as archives and databases of digital poetry, such as Ubu Web.

Comments

[Robert Peake]

I suppose I have always felt whatever newness mixed media bring to poetry must compensate for the profound simplicity and elegance of ink on paper which is necessarily lost in a digital form. At its essence, poetry is about the fundamental building blocks of thought presented in their most direct form: words.