Screening a Digital Visual Poetics

Postmodernist poets' continued use of the self-consciously "material" print media of high modernism, in tactical response to life in a postmodern, technologically mass-mediated society (even while they embrace new electronic media as well), is a literally "literary" form of resistance to both the dematerializing, utilitarian ends of technology--what artist Simon Penny terms the "engineering world view" 8 --and the pure theoretic mode that, in its estrangement from or resistance to art practice, reverts to apocalyptic (or, less often, utopian) prophecy.