digital poems

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.

This paper explores collaborative processes in electronic literature. Specifically, it examines writer authority as it applies to text, code, and other media. By drawing from cinematic auteur theory, Mitchell’s Picture Theory (1994), Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Cayley’s Grammalepsy (2018), and Flores’s (2019) generational approach to digital literature, this paper highlights unique issues that arise in the creative collaborative production of digital literary works, and the influence these processes have on how these works are ‘read’. The creative processes employed in Montfort, Rettberg, and Carpenter’s respective Taroko Gorge, Tokyo Garage, and Gorge (2009), Jhave’s ReRites (2017–2018), and Luers, Smith, and Dean’s novelling (2016)), as well as reflections on the author’s own collaborative creative experiences (Paige and Powe (2017) with Lowry and Lane, Little Emperor Syndrome (2018) with Arnold, and V[R]erses (2019–) with Breeze) are explored in detail. From these analyses, this paper concludes that in digital literary practices code should be regarded as a meta-authority that denotes authority to specific components of the work. A better understanding of these complexities as they apply to attribution is emphasised in the future development of digital literary creative practice and education.

This 20-minute presentation highlights research conducted as a Fellow in the MIT Open Documentary Lab developing a methodology and software for parsing linguistic and semantic information from vast quantities of audio and video files for playback and synchronization across networked computers. The presentation will focus on the expressive potential of this methodology to create new forms of multi-modal digital poems. The goal of this research is to extend recent advances in computational text analysis of written materials to the realm of audio and video media for use in a variety of different language centered media production contexts. This methodology and software provides the ability to parse vast quantities of audio and video files for topics, parts of speech, phonetic content, sentiment, passive/active voice and language patterns and then playback the video or audio content of the search for consideration in an aesthetic context. Queries that are intriguing can be saved and sequenced for playback as a poetic remix of linguistic patterns on one or multiple monitors. For instance, an e-lit poet can create a database of hundreds of audio recordings of poems from the Poetry Foundation and parse the recordings for moments of alliteration; the search can then be played back as a generative remix of alliterations across decades of poems and poets. This new composition could then be sequenced across multiple computers in a gallery setting and spatialized with speakers playing in different locations in a room; imagine the alliteration example above but coming from a dozen locations in a gallery, sometimes the samples playing in a sequence around the room, sometimes all at once with the same phrase other times with pairs of speakers triggering simultaneously. The poetic possibilities that can be explored between the choice of material for the database, the choice of linguistic and semantic parsing and choice of spatial configurations (how many playback devices, where are they located) can foster intriguing new forms of e-literature. To make the concepts concrete I will illustrate the research with video documentation from a recent digital poem I created with the work that uses Youtube typography tutorials as its source material for a sixteen-computer composition. This humorous work demonstrates the multimodal aspect of the research. For example, when parsing for parts of speech like a superlative adjective in the Youtube tutorial database, the visual content of the word the author is constructing in their Adobe Illustrator interface is visually displayed; creating an aural and visual combination that has both sonic and graphic impact. The presentation will provide an overview of the process for making this form of digital poem as well as demonstrate creative applications of the research.