Not Born Digital

Reviews / Votes

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. * Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University, USA, and author of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century * 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. * Alan Golding, Professor of English, University of Louisville, USA *