Writing the Virtual: Eleven Dimensions of E-Poetry

Eleven characteristics of networked digital poetry, a category that encompasses an enormous variety of work, are discussed and illustrated with examples. Issues raised include the recalibration of the writing/reading relationship, the nature of attachment at the site of interaction, an architectonic quality of instrument-building that characterizes many pieces, differing treatments of time and “place”, the use of recombinant flux, a performative character displayed by many works, the omnipresence of both translation and looping, as well as pervasive references to ruin and hybrid states of mixed reality.

(Source: article abstract)

Pull Quotes

E-poetry runs directly into the unrepeatable, through algorithmic reach and through live feeds from dispersed networks. This situation is interesting, valuable, and riveting — as well as exhausting, confusing, and opaque

The virtuality of e-poetry in all its forms, its constantly shifting eventfulness, can provide us with the mindset and perception-set needed to listen to the earth, to process huge datasets that are sublimely overwhelming, in that we cannot take them in and understand them rationally, but nonetheless might “hear” and be affected in our bodies through indirect and “least” speech, if present to us with high enough resolution in a poietically resonant interface.