e-poetry

E-poetry is poetry that arises from an engagement with the possibilities offered by digital media.

Leonardo describes e-poetry and digital poetry as synonymous. He describes e-poetry as follows in his entry on Digital Poetry for the Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media:

Digital poetry is a poetic practice made possible by digital media and technologies. A genre of electronic literature, it is also known as electronic poetry or e-poetry. The technologies that shape digital media are diverse, rapidly evolving, and can be used to such different effects that the term has expanded to encompass a large number of practices.

Digital poetry isn’t simply poetry written on a computer and published in print or on the Web. The most common use of the computer in the creation of poetry is as a word processor, which “remediates” the typewriter in its capabilities. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin coined the term of *remediation to explain the process of representing an old medium in a new one (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 45). Using a word processor to write a poem doesn’t necessarily make the result a digital poem because this kind of software is designed primarily to produce printed copies. As an inscription technology it still leaves a mark on a poem, partly in the composition process, and partly in how a poem looks, because it provides a diverse palette of formatting elements and language tools. N. Katherine Hayles distinguishes electronic literature from contemporary works designed with computers for a print publication paradigm, “More than being marked by digitality, electronic literature is actively formed by it” (Hayles 2008, 43).

(Source: Leonardo Flores, "What is E-Poetry", from I Love E-Poetry, http://iloveepoetry.org/?p=11968 )