New Media Poetry: Theory and Strategies

Going beyond the mere employment of new communication technologies in the production of poetic texts, new media poetry integrates characteristics of the new media in the theoretical basis of its poetics. This paper outlines this basis and shows how it affects poetic and verbal conventions, particularly with respect to the constitution of texts and the roles of author and reader, and with regard to its implications for our views on language. The author thus contends that the innovative force of new media poetry lies not in the communicative channels used (e.g., computers, video, holography) per se, but in the exploration of their ramifications for syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of verbal/poetic communication in general. This view is further developed through a discussion of some writing strategies of new media poetry.

(Source: Visible Language)