Not Born Digital Poetics, Print Literacy, New Media

by Morris, Daniel

• ISBN13: 9781501316708
• ISBN10: 1501316702
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-07-14
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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). He is coeditor of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.

Table of Contents

1. This is Just to Say This is the End of Art: Williams and the Aesthetic Attitude
2. Medium as Messenger as Medium as Messenger: Hannah Weiner Anchor's the Social Poetics of 1986 in Weeks
3. Bibliodeath: What is an Archive in a Digital Era?
4. Gaps in the Machine: On Andrei Codrescu's Unarchival Poetics
5. “Tech support says 'Dead Don Walking': Tradition, the Internet, and the Individual Talent in the Poetry of Daniel Y. Harris
6. (In)decisive Moments: On Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American Deaths and Disasters
7. On Soliloquy: Kenneth Goldsmith as Conceptualist at the cusp of a Digital Age
8. Bad Company, Meet Sonic Youth: On Noah Eli Gordon's Inbox
9. “Cum on Feel the Noize”: The Erotics of Literary Activism in an Age of Internet Viruses in An Army of Lovers
10. Ai Wei Wei's Dirty Conceptualism

Bibliography
Index