Chapter 1 The Digital Situation of Poetry

The Digital Situation of PoetryPoetry in the twenty-first century finds itself in a media-technological situation that is both new and not new.On the one hand, it is not new because technology and media have always been part of poetry's environment.On the other, the situation is new because digital technology and media have configured novel frameworks and situations for the production, distribution and reading of poetry.Poetry books might contain programming languages.Using computer code, Mez Breeze, for example, has created a new language, "mezangelle."Algorithms write poetic texts, as in the case of the poet Johannes Heldén and Håkan Jonson's Evolution (2014) or Karen ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato's The Library of Nonhuman Books (2019), an autonomous art installation where artificial intelligence is programmed to create new books from old publications.Jason Edward Lewis produces visual and tactile poetry as apps to be read on a single mobile medium, preferably with a touch screen, in his series of poems called P.o.E.M.M.: "Speak," "Know," "Migration," "Bastard," "Choice," "White" and "Death" (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013).Poetry travels between media with highly different technological and institutional affordances, i.e. between books, computers, theater scenes, performances and installation rooms.These new technological conditions of poetry have had a direct effect on poets' and readers' everyday lives as well as on literary institutions.In Canada and the USA, the career of Rupi Kaur has been a powerful illustration of such changes.Her success demonstrates the ways in which social media intervenes with the field of poetry.The story is well known: Kaur established herself as a popular poet on Instagram, with an overwhelming number of readers.Following this online success, she made her debut with the collection of poems Milk and Honey (2015), topping the New York Times bestseller list.This instant success would have been unlikely without Instagram and other influential social media.Similarly, social media has played an important role for new voices such as R.M. Drake, Atticus, Nayyirah Waheed, Lang Leav, Yrsa Daley-Ward and, though on a smaller scale in terms of followers and financial success, Sabina Store-Ashkari, Alexander Fallo and Trygve Skaug in Norway.Furthermore, in the digital era, sound poetry and poetry readings have expanded their fields of distribution and sites for performance, becoming at once more visible and audible.This phenomenon, in turn, has had an impact on poetry's appearance in physical rooms, on stages and in public and semi-public places.These shifts have not only been limited to poetry slams but have blossomed into widespread practices through which young and emerging poets have developed their own styles, as in the cases of Maren Kames, Amanda Gorman and Olivia

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