Not Born Digital: Poetics, Print Literacy, New Media

About the Book

Not Born Digital addresses from multiple perspectives – ethical, historical, psychological, conceptual, aesthetic – the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics, the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the human voice, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.

The premise of Not Born Digital is that the innovative contemporary poets studied in this book engage obscure and discarded, but nonetheless historically resonant materials to unsettle what Charles Bernstein, a leading innovative contemporary U.S. poet and critic of “official verse culture,” refers to as “frame lock” and “tone jam.” While other scholars have begun to analyze poetry that appears in new media contexts, Not Born Digital concerns the ambivalent ways page poets (rather than electronica based poets) have grappled with “screen memory” (that is, electronic and new media sources) through the re-purposing of “found” materials.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Not Born Digital: Poetics, Print Literacy, New Media

Chapter One
Medium as Messenger: Hannah Weiner Anchors the Social Poetics of 1986 in Weeks

Chapter Two
A Blizzard of Snowflakes: Kenneth Goldsmith as Conceptualist at the Cusp of a Digital Age in Soliloquy

Chapter Three
(In)decisive Moments: On Kenneth Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters

Chapter Four
"The wound track shows deeper hemorrhage": Kenneth Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown” as The Eighth American Disaster

Chapter Five
Gaps in the Machine: Andrei Codrescu’s Unarchival Poetics

Chapter Six
“Needing to Summon the Others”: Archival Research as Séance in Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars

Chapter Seven
Bad Company, Meet Sonic Youth: On Noah Eli Gordon’s Inbox: Social Media, Post Language Conceptual Poetics, and the Ethics of Online Appropriation

Chapter Eight
A Tonalism, Synaesthesia, Translation, and Post-Ableism in The Route

Chapter Nine
What Makes Poetry Happen: The Erotics of Literary Activism in an Age of Internet Virus

Bibliography

Index

About the Author :
Daniel Morris is Professor of English at Purdue University, USA. He is author of The Writings of William Carlos Williams: Publicity for the Self (1995), Remarkable Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors on Modern Art (2002), The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction (2006), After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photographers (2011), and Lyric Encounters (Bloomsbury, 2013). He has also published two volumes of poetry, Bryce Passage (2004) and If Not for the Courage (2010).

Review :
This is one of the best studies to date of what happens to poetry and the poetic in our ‘new media age.’ Himself a poet, Daniel Morris understands as have few critics that the real effect of the digital on younger poets is to create an entirely new sense of materiality, of poetry as the archive of experience rather than a finished product. For the poets in question from Hannah Weiner to Juliana Spahr, it’s not a matter of writing ‘digital poetry’ but of making use of the new constraints the digital puts upon us. The chapters on Kenneth Goldsmith’s controversial writings are especially strong—and also eminently reasonable and good-humored. As long as ‘old’ media persist, writers will worry, contest, play with, theorize, and explore their relationship to ‘new’ media. From this position, Daniel Morris reads across generations from Weiner and Howe, through Codrescu and Goldsmith, to 'experiments in digital citizenship' by Noah Eli Gordon, Durgin and Hofer, Spahr and Buuck, offering a careful and sometimes controversial poetics of convergence culture as these poets negotiate issues of personal and historical trauma, archiving, memory, witness, authorship, and some sort of human future.