Borrowed country: digital media, remediation, and North American poetry in the twenty-first century.
How have our ideas about reading and writing poetry been transformed by digital media? In "'Borrowed Country: Digital Media, Remediation, and North American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century," I discuss five American poets who have variously discussed and made use of particular forms of digital media in their work: John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Kevin Young, Steve Roggenbuck, and Patricia Lockwood. I am interested in these poets because they circulate work via traditional sites and networks of publication-individual volumes and poetry journals in print-while maintaining investments in the ways digital modes of writing and publishing have both changed these conventional sites of transmission and created additional venues in which to circulate poetry: e-books, web sites, social media networks.
The poets surveyed here all write about cultural objects as they change over time: they demonstrate how works are overshadowed or otherwise obscured by historical imperatives that desire broad strokes and tidy narratives, fragmented or erased by poor care or inattention over the passage of time, reprinted and resituated across various print and digital editions. Their writings document what is ignored, lost, and transformed in the various acts of remediation they survey and participate in, as they make their own decisions to remediate particular texts and figures, transporting older figures to contemporary contexts or highlighting the distance between an earlier historical period and our own. And they are variously interested in forms of digital media: composing work on word processors, scanning and fragmenting digital images, mimicking digital sampling patterns, and circulating texts and videos on social media networks. The work of Ashbery, Carson, Young, Roggenbuck, and Lockwood reminds us in various ways that constant remediation is a condition of our hypermediated lives.
