Not yet reviewed

How have our ideas about reading and writing poetry been transformed by digital media? In "'Borrowed Country: Digital Media, Remediation, and North American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century," I discuss five American poets who have variously discussed and made use of particular forms of digital media in their work: John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Kevin Young, Steve Roggenbuck, and Patricia Lockwood. I am interested in these poets because they circulate work via traditional sites and networks of publication-individual volumes and poetry journals in print-while maintaining investments in the ways digital modes of writing and publishing have both changed these conventional sites of transmission and created additional venues in which to circulate poetry: e-books, web sites, social media networks.The poets surveyed here all write about cultural objects as they change over time: they demonstrate how works are overshadowed or otherwise obscured by historical imperatives that desire broad strokes and tidy narratives, fragmented or erased by poor care or inattention over the passage of time, reprinted and resituated across various print and digital editions. Their writings document what is ignored, lost, and transformed in the various acts of remediation they survey and participate in, as they make their own decisions to remediate particular texts and figures, transporting older figures to contemporary contexts or highlighting the distance between an earlier historical period and our own. And they are variously interested in forms of digital media: composing work on word processors, scanning and fragmenting digital images, mimicking digital sampling patterns, and circulating texts and videos on social media networks. The work of Ashbery, Carson, Young, Roggenbuck, and Lockwood reminds us in various ways that constant remediation is a condition of our hypermediated lives.

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter serve millions of people who populate digital space with autobiographical avatars and simulacra. Digital selves are curated, edited, and maintained in a perpetual process of digitizing life experience in order to produce an imagined life. The emergence of social media poetics—and, specifically, what I term digital realism—demonstrates the use of the confessional mode in social media. Digital realism gives name to a process of literary production that obscures the lines between life and writing. In this essay, I explore how digital realism operates in the work of multimedia artist Steve Roggenbuck (b. 1987), which draws out and capitalizes on the contradictions of self-fashioning through affective modes of sincerity and failure, in order to explore the limits of popular accessibility that social media platforms and poetics purport to offer.

How has the Internet transformed Chinese poetry today? How has the democratization of publishing poetry online challenged the traditional gatekeepers, and how has this affected the quality of modern poetry? Heather Inwood explores these questions and reveals how such tectonic shifts have reinforced the status of poetry as a social form of culture, one that possesses great symbolic importance for China no matter who is doing the writing or critiquing.