KPCC aired a program on their “Cyberfrequencies” segment today about the relationship between poetry and new media–particularly, Twitter. Having read a previous post on this site about the inherent disconnect I sense between the always-on babble-stream of new media, and the deliberate relationship to language I crave in poetry, producer Jackson Musker asked me to weigh in. You can listen to an audio archive of the show on the KPCC website (6 minutes, 48 seconds.) You can also listen to audio of Tao Lin, Katie Peterson, and me reading poems on the Cyberfrequencies website.
In the radio show, I essentially came out as a naysayer about the idea that technology presents a golden age of opportunity for poetry itself. That is, while I have found tremendous value in being able to connect with fellow poets and poetry aficionados through the web, I see poetry itself as an antidote, in so many ways, to what this technology does to our attention span, our relationship to language, and our understanding of ourselves. Still, my views on technology and poetry, having spent most of my adult life immersed in both, are far more subtle than can be expressed in a few short audio clips.
It is a topic, in fact, that I would love to see given the treatment of, say, the half-hour BBC 4 radio program “The Atheist and The Bishop.” Fortunately, however, this brief segment does bring up some interesting points on all sides–and, thanks to new media, this dialog can now continue–in blog posts, comments, and tweets. So, what did you think of the show?
2 Comments
I appreciate how you suggest that poetry gives us a meditative respite from the dumbed-down hyperreality most of us self-submit to. But don’t you think that these web 2.0 microblogging sites present, at least, a golden age for found poetry? Aren’t more and more people realizing the beauty & significance of language by posting their own pseudopoetic cyberincantations?
I tried my best to turn microblogging into micropoetry in my collection, “TWEET, TWEET: a mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the american open road odyssey.”
In it, I used twitter posts as documentary micropoetry for a road trip across the western US.
http://markfullmer.com/books#tweet
Thoughts welcome.
–Mark Fullmer
Thanks, Mark. I enjoyed this, and agree with John Rabe that it’s a high-production-value clip.
Regarding found poetry, I suppose this is typically a case where the original author does not intend poetry–it is only through a poetically-minded reader that the words take on life in the new context of a poem. Therein lies the rub–that the proliferation of new media, with its progressively more pervasive entrance into our everyday lives (chiefly through mobile devices), and its either pecuniary (marketing) or political (spin) intent, is an assault on the poetic mindset.
Hearing my own words back through the radio show, my knee-jerk response was, “Really? Must I really be such a naysayer on this issue?” Then, just now, I finished reading Czeslaw Milosz’s 1974 essay “Reality,” toward the end of which he says:
“If we recognize that it is our lot to live in a decadent era, we are faced with the problem of choosing our tactics. Since man is not an animal and is in touch with the entire past of his specie, and since the past, to the extent that forgotten civilizations are being rediscovered, is becoming ever more accessible, we cannot but be depressed by the thought that instead of trying to equal the greatest human achievements, we yield to inferior philosophies only because they are contemporary. It is very difficult to find appropriate tactics for resistance, and our development, if it to be worthy of that name, must be founded, I believe, on advancing from unconscious tactics to conscious tactics. Unfortunately, the individual, because he absorbs the same things as everyone around him, is weak and is continually considering whether it is not he who is mistaken.”
I suppose this is part of why I have been so interested in dialog–because I waver on this point, or see its counterpoint clearly, or see subtle intersections and grounds where the two meet. But, in the end, Milosz concludes:
“A pessimistic appraisal of the powerlessness of contemporary forces, and of the literature and art that unconsciously submits to these forces, is not synonymous with a lack of faith in individual achievements or with doubts about an eventual victory of the human race over ‘reality.’ After all, consciousness, in the clutches of the epoch, is always incomplete, and as it grows older we shall at best be able to describe clearly what it is that we do not want. And that is how it ought to be, for our zealousness has its source in our nay-saying to what the age obligingly places before us.”
It is for this reason that, as much as I would like to, I can not champion technology as the “savior” of contemporary poetry, the magic substance that will revive it to mainstream popularity. It will take, I’m afraid, much more than that.