Poetic Transformations in(to) the Digital

In our contribution we will discuss some projects in the field of digital poetics which transform or recreate poetic pre-texts that were not conceived for the electronic space. Our interest is to focus on the question of the site of digital poetics, i.e., on its discursive or systemic affiliation. These projects of transformation imply a justification: We derive digital poetics not primarily from theories or discourses of information and communication technology or the digital media culture, but from theories and histories of poetry and “language art” itself. While doing so, we do not ignore that electronic or computer poetry is turning problems of the actual media and technological culture, as well as its theoretical description, into poetological and artistic categories and categorization. The perspective on art itself means, quoting from Loss Glazier (2004), “Siting the ‘poetry’ in e-poetry, which means to read digital poetics against its poetological and historical background.” The examples that will be discussed refer to the tradition and evolution of language art by means of intertextuality. We will be looking at an art which puts on stage, above all, language itself, in a self-referential way. Ever since, poetry has been art with language in all its dimensions. The conceptual concentration on special linguistic aspects has lead to specific forms of language art throughout the history of poetics: the poetization of the graphemic aspect in visual poetry, the phonetic aspect in sound poetry, or the poetization of the grammatical aspect in combinatory and algorithmic poetry.

(Source: Authors' abstract)