Post-Internet Poetry Lecture

This week, we are going to take a different approach to Internet-based poetry. Instead of looking at poetry that is written for or on the Internet, we are going to look at writers that take language from the Internet and use it to create poetry on the analogue page.

 What is the analogue page? In this case, analogue simply means the physical page--in other words, poetry that is written for a physical book of poems. While the poems you are going to read for this week were published individually in online journals (which is how you are reading them here), keep in mind that the goal of these poets was to eventually publish a collection of poems in a physical, traditional book.  This is a very different approach to the Internet, when you think about it. The audience is different, for one--usually poetry that is published on the physical page is only read by other poets. 

Additionally, while writers who make work on Twitter or Facebook inhabit the spirit of those mediums to experiment with personas or poetic voices they might not normally write in, they are limited by the constraints of the medium in certain regards. In other words, they can't make a poem that is not a tweet, or not a Facebook post, as those are the spaces they are writing in/on. And while they might critique those spaces and their politics to some degree, they are still utilizing them to get their poems to an audience. They also run the risk of their work being de-contextualized if it goes viral, and therefore each tweet has to be its own contained universe, in a way. This limits the scope of their projects.  Poets who make work about, or using materials from, the Internet, off of the Internet itself and on the analogue page, have a different set of potentials and concerns in their work, and a very different audience. They might remix materials from the Internet, such as Sophia LeFraga's Literallydead or I RL/YOU RL; or they they might comment about the Internet, such as Alex Dimitrov's and Ben Fama's poems.   

Poems after the Internet attempt to understand our relationship to the Internet itself, and how it affects our life experiences and relationships to other people, as well as our views of ourselves. Because the Internet is such a significant element of contemporary life for many people, it is, like all things, worth exploring in a critical way. For example, Sophia Le Fraga's Literallydead is comprised of Facebook posts she gathered from the profiles of the dead; her book explores how the grieving process has been altered since social media is now incorporated into our everyday lives. When the online ghosts of our dead friends and family linger on Facebook, how do we deal? Can commenting on their Facebook profiles help us to let go and move on?   

Sometimes this category of poetry and poets can be accused of being narcissistic. While poets have long spoken in the "I" voice (let's not forget Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"), the specific narcissism of poetry after the Internet should also be read through the lens of the platform itself. We build social media profiles in order to craft brands around the image of ourselves we want the world to see. The desire to be seen and liked comes up frequently in this type of poetry as a natural extension of the way we perform for likes on social media. 

The subsequent depression and disaffection this life-approach sometimes causes is also a present vibe in some of these poems. Their affect (tone) may or may not rub you the wrong way. It's worth discussing this, but also worth exploring how the tone of some of these poems might intentionally mimic the affect of social media voices more generally, in order to critically comment on how many of us sound when we are speaking online, whether we are aware of it or not.