Poetry Unbound, by Mike Chasar (introduction)

books and off the page. Refuting the claim that poetry has become a marginal art form, he shows how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet and social media,

Chasar

In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar reveals the new horizons that poetry has found beyond

Chasar follows poetry’s travels into newer formats that include radio, film, and television.

“Poetry is more than a creature of voice, hand, and press, as Chasar shows with verve, wit, insight, and sparkling detail. The public life of poetry in the twentieth-century United States is also a secret history of multimedia. Each medium remakes poetry. And poetry, in turn, remakes the media in which we live, move, and breathe. I love this book!”

—JOHN DURHAM PETERS, AUTHOR OF THE MARVELOUS CLOUDS: TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF ELEMENTAL MEDIA “By disclosing what are at once poetry’s most inscrutable and its most public aspects, Chasar reorients our understanding of poetry’s relation to the media, throwing gasoline on the fire of a question we have dodged for too long: what is a poem? The old answers to that query won’t hold up in the wake of Chasar’s attention to the vulgar afterlives of bookish things.”

—DANIEL TIFFANY, AUTHOR OF MY SILVER PLANET: A SECRET HISTORY OF POETRY AND KITSCH

MIKE CHASAR is associate professor of English at Willamette University. He is the author of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (Columbia, 2012) and the coeditor of Poetry After Cultural Studies (2011).

cup.columbia.edu Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: Nam June Paik and Otto Piene, Untitled (1968). © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Printed in the U.S.A.

COLU M BI A

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK

Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram

Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram

“With Poetry Unbound, Chasar secures his place as our foremost investigator of poetry as a popular practice—ordinary, ubiquitous, and, indeed, fundamental to American cultural life. Poetry is dead; long live poetry, untethered from the constraints of the printed page and in the wilds of new media.”

—RITA RALEY, AUTHOR OF TACTICAL MEDIA

POETRY UNBOUND

“This is a persuasive, thoroughly researched, memorable, and often delightful book.

Chasar has excelled in his ambitious coverage of primary sources. Moreover, this is a book that addresses questions that come up frequently in the poetry world about where and why and how ‘poetry matters,’ and about its place in the wider culture.”

—STEPHANIE BURT, AUTHOR OF DON’T READ POETRY: A BOOK ABOUT HOW TO READ POEMS

Poetry Unbound

Mike Chasar

INTRODUCTION Poetry Unbound

1

In 1890—more than two and a half years before the official opening of the Chicago World’s Fair, and over two decades before the first issue of Poetry magazine would go to press—twenty-nine-year-old Chicago Tribune freelance correspondent Harriet Monroe started working on a poem that she hoped would be featured during the Fair’s dedication ceremonies. “The Dedication would be incomplete without a poem,” she would later explain, “and I wanted to write it.”1 Writing the poem was one thing. Getting it on the program was another. But in the intervening months, and via what Ann Massa describes as a “farcically intense series of behind-the-scenes machinations” that involved Fair planners and wealthy, Chicago-based backers, Monroe not only managed to wrangle from the sixteen-man Committee of Ceremonies an official “invitation” to submit a poem for an event slot that was not yet on the docket for ceremonies that were not yet scheduled, but even secured a $1,000 commission for the work—the equivalent of more than $25,000 today.2 On November 3, 1891, Monroe read all four hundred lines of her poem before the committee. The response, according to Massa, was “excellent,” but most of “The Columbian Ode” never got the airing its author desired.3 Ultimately, the committee approved and accepted only two sections totaling twenty-eight lines for the staged Dedication Day ceremonies, which took

2 INTRODUCTION

place on October 21, 1892. The acclaimed New York actress and poetry reader Sarah Cowell Le Moyne recited one part. The new Chicago Symphony Orchestra director, Theodore Thomas, led the other—a choir of five thousand people singing Monroe’s words to music composed by Boston’s George Chadwick, and “accompanied,” Monroe would write, by “a great orchestra and military bands.”4 (Brooklyn’s Evening World would call it the “largest chorus assembled in the history of modern times.”5) According to newspaper reports repeated by Monroe, more than one hundred thousand people attended the performances, and the poem’s excerpts were printed as song lyrics on the published sheet music for Chadwick’s score.6 But the entire poem, published as a pamphlet in an edition of five thousand and priced at a quarter apiece, would not fare as well. In a scenario to which many poets and publishers might relate today, “So few [copies] sold,” writes Liesl Olson, “that Monroe burned stacks for winter fuel.”7 Monroe would stick with and reprint the poem as late as 1925, but perhaps its most significant instantiation occurred prior to the Fair’s opening.8 As court records later put it, the New York World newspaper “surreptitiously obtained from the rooms of the committee the manuscript [of the poem], or a copy thereof” and edited and published it without permission and “with many errors” on September 25, 1892.9 Indeed, Massa writes, “The World had not done fairly by the Ode: leaving out some lines, truncating others, and running some together; reversing the order of stanzas, printing past tense for present and vice versa.”10 It was not uncommon for nineteenth-century newspapers to lift and reprint poems without permission and even without byline. But instead of acquiescing to what Lisa Gitelman might call those media “protocols,” Monroe sued the World and, in a case that helped to establish precedent for modern copyright law and eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court (which refused to hear it), she won damages in the amount of $5,000—the equivalent of nearly $150,000 today.11 When founding Poetry years later, Monroe went out of her way to seek start-up money from Chicago patrons as a way of cultivating a diverse set of stakeholders in the magazine’s success. It is unclear how much, if any, of that lawsuit settlement directly subsidized the magazine, but it certainly stabilized Monroe’s own financial situation and perhaps afforded her the time to edit Poetry without salary as she did for its first two years.

3 INTRODUCTION

From committee room to court room; from newspaper to sheet music; from the page to the stage; from a single voice to “the largest chorus assembled in the history of modern times”; from excerpt to full text; via telegraph from Chicago to New York; from manuscript to pamphlet to kindling for the sad “little stove” of Monroe’s “bedroom-study”: when Monroe later wrote that “poetry travels more easily than any other art,” she knew it from experience and knew, as well, that its easy mobility—from place to place and from medium to medium—was no certain pleasure.12 Like many poets before and since, Monroe enjoyed and harnessed this mobility in printbased venues and platforms such as Poetry or slim book volumes, and also in audio recordings like the aluminum plate records she cut while reading at Columbia University in 1932.13 In less professional contexts, she literally traveled with poetry, as she did with the “poetic idyll” she penned and helped perform in honor of John Muir on a 1908 Sierra Club trip to Peru—a poem “enacted at the campfire one never-to-be-forgotten night” when Muir “was induced, very much against his wishes, to take part in the out-of-door drama.”14 All that said, and even though she believed that “poetry is a vocal art” and that “the radio [would] bring back its audience,” Monroe did not enjoy the verse traveling through the ether via the nationally broadcast poetry radio shows of the 1920s and 1930s, characterizing those programs’ participants as “numerous impossibles . . . reading their maudlin verses to invisible audiences of millions.”15 Certainly, Monroe knew that poetry was being projected via magic lantern and that poems were being adapted for film treatment. It is likely that she had read poetry on the back sides and, rarely, even the fronts of stereoview cards. And she knew that poetry had been recorded and played back for public and private listening since the late 1870s via various instantiations of what her 1914 poem “Night in State Street” would call the “wheezy phonograph.”16 So far as I can tell, we do not know specifically how she felt about poems traveling in these ways. What an odd mix of emotions it would have been, however, had she encountered an 1893 B. W. Kilburn & Company stereoview card that featured the poem that, just over six months after Dedication Day, was featured near the beginning of the Fair’s Opening Day ceremonies on May 1, 1893. Indeed, popular Chicago recitationist Jessie Couthoui’s performance of William Augustus Croffut’s “The Prophecy” was memorialized in a way that Monroe’s had not been: in a

4 INTRODUCTION

three-dimensional stereoscopic experience capturing what The Hub called “the vast multitude” massed in front of the Administration building during the poem’s performance. Fair exhibits in buildings surrounding that performance boasted a wide array of typewriters, printing presses, linotype machines, telephones, an early fax machine (the telautograph), and other new or updated communication technologies, including, in the nearby Electricity Building, an Edison wax cylinder phonograph exhibition that would net more than $33,000 over the next six months. Elsewhere on the fairgrounds, the American Graphophone Company had set up one hundred nickel-in-the-slot machines. Yet despite those available technologies, the capacities for mechanical reproduction they represented, and the multimedia future that the Fair seemed to be both anticipating and celebrating, B. W. Kilburn’s stereoview card version of “The Prophecy” contains not a single word of the poem itself.17 2

In Poetry Unbound, I take Monroe’s observation that “poetry travels more easily than any other art” as the first of four points of departure. One of poetry’s chief, most distinctive, and most important features, this easy mobility is also one of the most overlooked and understudied characteristics of poetry as a literary form. As the story of “The Columbian Ode” only begins to suggest, poetry over the course of history has been composed in, for, and in relation to an extraordinarily wide range of media, media platforms, and media conditions, and it has a rich and almost equally long history of being remediated and transmediated—of being converted from one medium to another, or transmitted, oftentimes by design, in multiple media forms.

No other literary art form has this character or inherits this history to the same extent. Like poetry, novels are adapted to film or audiobook, but, unlike poetry, novels have not been composed for and printed on business cards or funeral brochures, nor have they been used to respond to users’ behavior on Craigslist; whole or in excerpt, poetry frequently makes its way into novels, but rarely the other way around.18 Short stories travel more easily than novels, perhaps, but short stories have not been digitally composed on the spot as poems were for PayPal users in celebration of Valentine’s

5 INTRODUCTION

Day in 2014; nor were short stories stuffed, as poems were, into speciallydesigned propaganda bombs and shot across enemy lines during World War II—or, more recently, printed on bookmarks and dropped by the hundreds of thousands via helicopter or airplane.19 And while dramatic scripts, like poems, find print, stage, acoustic, film, and television presentation, they have not appeared in or on greeting cards, postcards, calling cards, billboards, breath mint tins, trivets, table runners, stained glass windows, handkerchiefs, pillows, cross-stitchings and wall hangings, subway and bus placards, autograph albums, playing cards, posters, calendars, stickers, event tickets, cocktail glasses, ring holders, souvenir plates, candy bar wrappers and candy boxes, packaging for pet products, cereal boxes, milk bottles, thermometers, and any number of other “incidental” ways in which people have encountered and continue to encounter poems.20 Although poetry is not mainly, naturally, or inevitably a print phenomenon, most scholarship on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry nevertheless tends to treat it as such, giving special privilege to codex forms such as the anthology, the “slender volume,” and the poetry- or literature-based “little” magazine following the model of Poetry (itself described by Bartholomew Brinkman as “a slender volume”).21 Many sectors of what Charles Bernstein has called “official verse culture” likewise take single-volume and little magazine publication to be the primary or most important measure of a poet’s professional legitimacy and career status. Most job postings for poetry-writing faculty positions at colleges and universities establish minimum qualifications in terms of number of books published, for instance, and few programs encourage or train students to compose for slam, spoken word, song lyric, or other non-print-mediated formats.22 Thus, too—from Rupi Kaur’s New York Times best seller milk and honey to the far more obscure PDF-format literary journal Brine, which boasts that the “quality” of poetry in its new issue “is so high that we decided to launch the issue in print as well”—a significant mark of e-book, e-journal, or e-author success is eventual codex publication.23 According to a 2006 study and report commissioned by the Poetry Foundation, “Ninety-nine percent of all adult readers, including those adults who said that they have never read or listened to poetry, indicate that they have been incidentally exposed to poetry in at least one unexpected place” (i.e, not in a book), and “[e]ighty-one percent of the respondents who

6 INTRODUCTION

reported any incidental exposure to poetry said that they read or listened to the poem when they came across it.”24 Nevertheless, codex formats— especially if they do not sell well, but sometimes even if they do—are often taken to be the chief barometer of poetry’s popularity or cultural health more generally. Even though the World thought poetry’s public large enough to merit putting its stolen version of Monroe’s “Ode” on page one, for example, her pamphlet’s failure to sell signaled clearly to her that “the public for poetry had oozed away.”25 For some people today, book sales by so-called Instapoets like Kaur, Tyler Knott Gregson, and Lang Leav signal that interest in poetry is rising; for others, those sales figures signal that the public’s taste is as bad as it has always been, or worse than ever before, making even more precarious the cultural fate of “real” poetry. When William Charvat claimed in 1968 that “no American poet has ever made a living from his [sic] work except, in a few cases, late in life,” it was a not-so-subtle dig at the nation’s failure to support a literary culture. However, Charvat was only able to make that claim by ignoring the long multimedia careers of poets such as Edgar Guest and Anne Campbell in the first half of the twentieth century: both earned hundreds of thousands of dollars by parlaying their Detroit newspaper success into radio, advertising, book, spoken word, and even film and television activities.26 Similarly, when Janice Radway and Perry Frank took up the subject of poetry’s popularity in 1988, they, too, assumed the print “single volume” to be the genre’s best unit measure and thus concluded that poetry “has never approached the novel in sales.”27 As book sales go, such perspectives would have us believe, so goes poetry. I can’t help but wonder what Radway and Frank would have made of my June 2019 Instagram search for #poetry, which netted nearly thirty-two million results, while a similar search for #novel produced three million and #shortstory a paltry five hundred thousand.

In focusing on the transmission and mediation of poetry by historically new, nonprint media technologies, Poetry Unbound offers not just a counterweight or correction to the codex-based default settings of current poetry studies and related spheres of activity, but also argues for a comparatively expansive, even alternative history to poetry in the long twentieth century.

In doing so, I follow the spirit if not the practice of literary historians such as Jed Rasula, who in his 2017 essay “A Potential Intelligence: The Case of the Disappearing Poets” lobbies for reading the large body of work by hundreds of poets who were regularly anthologized and published via

7 INTRODUCTION

commercial presses in the first half of the twentieth century but who were “unceremoniously dropped” from the historical record in the reductive process of academic canon formation and reformation that followed.28 Via “total immersion” in the work of people “who invested so much of their creative imagination in books we might actually read”—that is, by reading as much of this lost verse as possible—and by concurrently studying “the variety of formats” that “the book as object” took, Rasula argues, “the spectrum of poetry is itself extended, like discovering a new bandwidth on a radio.”29 While his fidelity to the codex as a centering media platform helps to maintain the restrictive print orientation of poetry studies that I have described, Rasula nevertheless—in looking without canonical agenda beyond a select body of core texts while concurrently attending to the variations of poetry’s codex manifestations—seeks, as this book does, to learn more about “the spectrum of poetry” and its capacities.30 The history and subject of media are crucial to expanding and understanding the “spectrum of poetry.” This is especially the case in an age of rapidly multiplying media and media platforms, such as our own, as well as the period that produced what we call modernism and “modern” literature, which also saw the emergence of film and radio and the conversion of the magic lantern into a poetry-reading machine. As media studies scholar Lisa Gitelman has written, “Just as it makes no sense to appreciate an artwork without attending to its medium (painted in watercolors or oils? sculpted in granite or Styrofoam?), it makes no sense to think about ‘content’ without attending to the medium that both communicates that content and represents or helps to set the limits of what that content can consist of.”31 If, in other words, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis has put it, we should not “simply regard the poetic text as an odd delivery system for ideas and themes” but instead “engage . . . its conventional and textual mechanisms, its surfaces and layers,” then we must also regard the many media of poetry’s transmission themselves as more than a set of odd delivery systems and engage and attend to their respective sets of conventions, mechanisms, surfaces, and layers, insofar as these elements relate to, represent, limit, and otherwise affect the poetic text.32 In thus advocating for a “total immersion” in the media of poetry’s transmission, my second point of departure assumes that poetry studies stands only to gain in the process of extending Rasula’s catholicity beyond the bound volume. Looking beyond the limits that the codex sets up for what

8 INTRODUCTION

poetic content can consist of, and toward the relationships with different aesthetic, social, economic, historical, and technological forces that other media bring into varying relation with poetic materials, can benefit poetry studies in a variety of ways. Expanding its archives, it can offer a more complete understanding of poetry’s possible effects (Rasula’s “spectrum”) as well as a more complete picture of the shifting idea of poetry in the cultural imagination. It can make poetry studies more relevant to changing literary and media environments that, along with poetry itself, have not waited for poetry scholarship to catch up. And perhaps, as I will explain shortly, it can contribute in a singular way to the field of media studies.

Indeed, how different a picture of poetry’s place in modern life—how it moves, who reads it and how, even what financial company it keeps—might emerge if we took as one of our baseline measures not solely “the book as object,” but also film? After two hours’ running time, for example, Ridley Scott’s 1997 G.I. Jane culminates with a scene in which protagonist Jordan O’Neil reads “Self-Pity” from a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Selected Poems.

Shown in 1,945 theaters, debuting at number one at the box office, and raking in more than $11 million on its opening weekend alone, G.I. Jane may have given Lawrence’s poem a larger audience in a single weekend than in the entirety of its codex history.

In moving beyond the figurative language of Rasula’s exuberance (extending the spectrum of poetry is “like discovering a new bandwidth on a radio”) and instead discovering and studying actual poetry on the actual radio and in other nonprint media, this book is indebted to and likewise extends a body of scholarship that, over the past two decades or so, has emerged to challenge the print focus of poetry studies by more fully considering poetry’s instantiations as what Monroe called “a vocal art.”33 Despite the vibrancy of that work, scholars have nevertheless been reluctant to study poetry in relation to mass media forms that were new or being made new during and after Monroe’s lifetime (1860–1936)—media like the magic lantern, radio, silent and sound film, television, and digital platforms that have offered not only more ways than ever for poetry to reach audiences but also more ways to reveal, magnify, expand, cultivate, or study the spectrum of poetry’s possible effects. No doubt such reluctance even on the part of innovative scholars stems from poetry critics’ enduring mistrust of the culture industries and mass media, as well as a suspicion, long complicated or dismissed by other fields of literary and cultural studies, of what

9 INTRODUCTION

poet and former National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia has called “the incurious mass audience of the popular media.”34 Precisely because mainstream poetry criticism and official verse culture remain tethered to codex-based hermeneutics and values and indifferent or averse to poetry as it functions in the larger culture, this book’s third point of departure is that, if we in fact want to learn more about poetry’s capacities in an age of nonprint media, we need to do so by looking “outside the zoo,” as it were, where poetry flourishes in the wilds of mass and popular culture and where its unique mobility and literary properties are not only regularly recognized or put on display but analyzed and theorized as well.35 Consider, for instance, the various ways in which the CBS police procedural drama Criminal Minds imagines and approaches the subject of poetry’s media mobility. On October 12, 2005, over thirteen million viewers of Season 1, Episode 4 (“Plain Sight”) followed the attempts of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit to capture a serial rapist/killer who leaves excerpts from the seventeenth-century ballad “Death and the Lady” at his crime scenes. Over the course of the episode, special agent and unit chief Jason Gideon and his team work in various ways to understand the verses and their possible significance. They consider the poem’s length and form, its “aggressive language,” its symbols and themes, its historical context and relationship to similar dialogue poems, and the nature of the killer’s editing practice (he quotes only passages in which Death is speaking), and they consider it from the point of view of class and gender. Along the way, the audience encounters the poem in at least six different media versions: read aloud from a crime scene photograph; recited from memory (inexplicably the team’s resident genius, Spencer Reid, has parts of it memorized); read aloud at a crime scene, where it has been handwritten (possibly in lipstick) on a mirror; printed out via laser printer and assembled stanza by stanza in sequence on an office bulletin board; and—in what I personally find to be the most thrilling instantiation—on a photo that detaches from a bulletin board collage and floats in the air around Gideon as the show tries to represent his mental “profiling” processes at work. Via photograph, handwriting, lipstick and mirror, several oral versions, toner and paper, and the special effects of television, “Death and the Lady” takes a more diverse set of media forms in the span of forty minutes than many non-poems ever do. As the FBI team of literary critics demonstrates via their analysis, because poetry travels so easily, it must be studied in multiple media forms

10 INTRODUCTION

if readers want to best understand the range of ways it can signify. Indeed, they are not content to study it in situ but—via the laser printer, photograph, and various oral recitations—remediate it themselves to more thoroughly understand it.

Four years later, in its Season 3 finale (the 2009 “An Evening with Mr. Yang”), the USA Network show Psych picked up where “Plain Sight” left off. A comedy version of procedural or detective dramas like Criminal Minds, Psych is well aware of its genre’s conventions, including the incorporation and mobilization of poetry. In this episode, in order to stop the riddle-writing Yin Yang serial killer from killing again, fake police psychic Shawn Spencer has to solve a series of poem-clues delivered in a variety of unorthodox ways to the amusement of the episode’s initial five million viewers: via telegram (subsequently remediated by projector for police to read during a briefing); spelled out in Alpha-Bits cereal and hamster pellets pasted to paper; printed on a restaurant credit-card receipt; stenciled on poster board in purple and yellow capital letters; delivered by fax; on a piece of paper wadded up in a woman’s mouth; and, as if deliberately alluding to Criminal Minds, written in lipstick on a hotel room mirror.36 Compared to “Plain Sight,” “An Evening with Mr. Yang” ignores the types of conventional analysis used in classrooms and literary criticism.

Shawn quips that Yang’s “rhyming skills are rudimentary at best” and—in a comment that, however facetious, parodies Marshall McLuhan’s famous claim that “the medium is the message”—contends that Yang’s use of AlphaBits as a writing system communicates symbolically that “breakfast for lunch is way underrated.” At the same time, the episode not only continues to showcase poetry’s mobility but also, as we see perhaps most clearly in the unconventional and even absurd example of the hamster pellets, displays how that mobility makes poetry—rather than the novel, short story, or dramatic script—an occasion to experiment with, broker, or serve as the means for discovering new or unexpected media forms. In this respect, “An Evening with Mr. Yang” is not off the mark, as poetry in fact has a long history of being a testing ground in the development, emergence, and cultural mainstreaming of new media and media technologies, though not always, as sections of this book will show, in mutually beneficial ways.

Indeed, if poetry was present in the original moments or decades of movable type, sound recording, radio, film, television, and related instances of technical innovation, then why not also at the dawn of the age of

11 INTRODUCTION

hamster-pellet writing—a medium that, like many media before it, may appear to be clumsy, unnecessary, impractical, or even farcical, but perhaps only because it remains as-yet unexplored?37 Despite their corporate origins, popularity, and industrial scale of production and distribution, Criminal Minds and Psych may be more alert to the power of poetry—or to certain of its powers—than are many literary critics or media studies scholars, and they display and investigate poetry and poetry reading as a multi- and transmedial literary endeavor in insightful, historically grounded, and theoretically sound ways: poetry travels more easily than any other art; we must immerse ourselves in poetry’s various media instantiations in order to understand its range of possible meanings and effects; as much as media may affect how we understand poetry, poetry, in turn, can also play unexpected but important and formative roles in the history of media development. As the following chapters will illustrate time and again, new or emergent media often gain by strategic association with or disassociation from poetry simply as an idea, first by granting it special powers or a position of prestige and thus shaping poetry as an idea in the larger culture. But they gain from interfacing with poetry in other ways, as well, which leads to this book’s final point of departure: if we turn our attention more deliberately to the many media of poetry’s transmission, we stand to learn at least two more things about poetry’s effects on media history and media innovation. First, we learn how individual poems serve as a type of charged, sometimes ceremonial landscape on which media conduct relationships with each other and therein work to differentiate or define themselves. And, second, as much as poems are shaped by the media of their transmission, that relationship is not a one-way road: poems, in turn, shape the media that transmit them.

In the scene from G.I. Jane referenced above—a scene I will examine at length in chapter 4—Jordan O’Neil opens a codex copy of Lawrence’s Selected Poems and reads “Self-Pity” to herself. But this is not simply a scene of silent, codex-based poetry reading. Rather, it is a filmic representation of silent, codex-based poetry reading, and it is a filmic remediation of the printed poem. Because the content (i.e., the poem) of the book and film remain constant, the scene becomes one about the possibilities and limitations of film, relations between film and print, and what film can “do” that the book cannot. As N. Katherine Hayles and other media scholars have long observed, new media “emerge by partially replicating and partially

12 INTRODUCTION

innovating upon what came before.”38 As we shall see later, this scene’s camerawork both harnesses and innovates on certain aspects of silent, codex-based reading for a variety of reasons that stem in part from a long and tendentious relationship history between film, sound, and print that silent film used poetry to help negotiate. Insofar as G.I. Jane revisits and continues to process this history, it undoubtedly remains tied to the book (i.e., “what came before”) for part of its identity as a medium. Media studies often proceeds from similar logics: that either the “medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan famously articulated it (e.g., “The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print”) or, in Regis Debray’s formulation, “Transport by is transformation of.” Indeed, Debray explains, “That which is transported [in this case the book] is remodeled, refigured, and metabolized by its transit. The receiver finds a different letter [or book] from the one its sender placed in the mailbox.”39 As I have suggested, this is also the case with the transportation of Lawrence’s poem. Audiences find a different “Self-Pity” in G.I. Jane’s filmic representation of the silently read codex than they would if they were holding the Selected Poems itself, and the ease with which poetry can travel as “constant” content between media forms offers plenty of test or exemplary cases for the Comparative Media Studies approach to writing, teaching, and scholarship that Hayles proposes in How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis.40 As with the various instantiations of Monroe’s “Columbian Ode,” it is far easier to find and compare manuscript, magazine, codex, audio, filmic, and digital versions of “Self-Pity” than multiple versions of, say, David Copperfield or Citizen Kane. (For an example close to home, my students and I regularly study the print, audio, slam, televised, digital text, and YouTube video versions of Saul Williams’s “Coded Language” and Patricia Smith’s “Skinhead.”) The Criminal Minds analysts know and do this, and G.I. Jane relies for some of its narrative and emotional content on the relative ease or clarity with which poetry facilitates the comparative process. Early in the film, Command Master Chief John Urgayle recites “Self-Pity” from memory while inspecting his recruits. The similarities and differences between the spoken, codex, and filmic versions of the text that emerge as a result—the same words in three different media forms—are not only central to showcasing the specific capacities of film, but also to illustrating how Urgayle’s character changes over the course of the movie.

13 INTRODUCTION

In Poetry Unbound, though, I propose that a reconfiguration of Debray’s formula is also true: that “transport of [poetry] is transformation by [poetry].” As the following chapters will show, the transport of poetry helped shape and transform media as well as relations between media forms.

By projecting poetry, the magic lantern temporarily forestalled its cultural obsolescence, in part by refashioning itself as a poetry-reading machine and offering an alternative to, if not improvement upon print. Poetry helped silent film boost its status as an art form in a variety of ways, sometimes by simple affiliation with poetry’s cultural prestige and sometimes by providing familiar storylines or subject matter that freed film to explore, pioneer, or showcase its capabilities as a medium without having to create its worlds from scratch. Later, poetry helped sound film secure its credibility as an established medium in relation to emergent digital media. And by mobilizing the links between poetry, queerness, and communism in the public imagination, television transported poetry during and after the Red and Lavender Scares to help establish and maintain a sociopolitical relevance and credibility in relation to the containment-era logics of the Cold War. While carrying poetry helped media differentiate themselves from each other within the larger media landscape, it also helped transform those media on internal or aesthetic levels. If, as Jahan Ramazani suggests, “poetry expands its range and possibilities, at the same time that it flaunts its distinctiveness” by incorporating “extrapoetic” or “nonpoetic genres,” then media, I argue, expand their range and possibilities by incorporating poetry.41 The magic lantern imitated and exploited the effects of poetic line breaks and stanza breaks to showcase its distinctive powers as a text-delivery system. Incorporating poetry helped film define itself in relation to sound and print while offering one answer to what Mikhail Iampolski calls “cinema’s deeply rooted need for a symbolic origin or source.” 42 Poetry also became an intertextual foil in the development of certain cinematic techniques, including subtitles and parallel editing. And television incorporated poetry—often clichéd, and often in plots centering on plagiarism—to offer an aesthetic precedent or analogy by which to style itself and its frequently borrowed or cribbed scenarios as a popular art for the masses. It is not uncommon for scholars to posit, or at least assume, that nonpoetic forms attempt to “elevate” themselves by association with poetry and poetry’s perceived cultural prestige; I am not alone in suggesting as much here in regard to silent film’s pretensions to artistic legitimacy.43 As I have just

14 INTRODUCTION

indicated, however, the transportation of poetry is far more complicated than just that.

3

In The Textual Condition, Jerome J. McGann argues that “the object of the poetical text is to thicken the medium as much as possible—literally, to put the resources of the medium on full display.”44 McGann’s scholarship is well known for attending to the relationship between print and digital media.

As with that of many literary scholars interested in the future of literature and literary studies, however, that work tends to leapfrog from the book to the computer without much considering the media that are both prelude to and part of our current landscape. I would thus like to extend the spirit of McGann’s argument, just as I extended Rasula’s, and suggest that the convergence of poetry and nonprint media technologies, including, but not limited to magic lantern projection, film, radio, and television, also makes for uniquely “thickened” moments of mediation that offer poetry and media scholars rich opportunities to learn more about the respective “resources” of what I hope will become their increasingly overlapping objects of study.

One goal for this book, therefore, is to illuminate as many points on the horizon as possible, so that other scholars and writers may find in them invitations, motivations, or springboards to do further work. In service of that end, I do not establish a specific, narrow preference for the poetical or technological object of my analysis; nor do I cleave to any one methodological approach, although I do follow Gitelman and others in assuming that “looking into the novelty years, transitional states, and identity crises of different media stands to tell us much, both about the course of media history and about the broad conditions by which media and communication are and have been shaped.” 45 From close to distant reading; from formal and comparative analysis to archival research; from reception studies to theories of remediation, adaptation, and intertextuality; from canonical poetry

by William Butler Yeats, Frank O’Hara, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson to religious hymns and the kitschy Thanksgiving Day verse that fourth-grader Kathy Anderson writes on Father Knows Best; from renowned filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith, Orson Welles, and Steven Spielberg to sitcoms like Charles in Charge and The Facts of Life: all find quarters here. Setting out a variety of welcome mats makes particular intellectual sense when studying

15 INTRODUCTION

media because, as Paul Young explains in The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals, relationships between media forms “tak[e] place on too many fronts and in too many different registers—economic, technological, formal, discursive— for a single theory to encompass them all.” We need to understand, as he puts it, “not only what kinds of information a medium carries and how it is carried” but also “how industry and consumers think about the medium, and in turn, how those ideas about its nature affect both production and reception.” 46 As such, a study like this one necessitates a broad approach in order to account for what William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson call “the dialectical interplay of producers, viewers, texts, intertexts, and contexts.” 47 Given this imperative and the large historical umbrella that I am about to unfold, chapters 1 and 2 approach a central, interrelated pair of questions from different methodological perspectives. How, on one hand, can poetry affect the medium that transmits it? And how, on the other hand, can a medium affect the poetry it transmits? Following and extending Friedrich Kittler’s speculations about the long, religiously inflected side of the magic lantern’s history, chapter 1 takes for its analysis the transitional point when, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the device was commonly used for the first time to project text, making it not only a popularly available alternative to print-based reading but also the ancestor of today’s screen-reading interfaces. Instead of seeking to liberate or wholly differentiate the technology from older media forms, lantern projection of religious poems and hymns frequently brought under its auspices the bibliographic, media, and generic features of poetry, print, photography, handwriting, drawing, and various forms of vocal mediation in order to synthesize their values in legitimizing and promoting the lantern as a reading machine. Indeed, after two hundred years of projecting “moving” images of skeletons, ghosts, and devils in phantasmagoria-related “horror” shows, projecting religious poems and hymns in this manner not only helped to school audiences in the dynamics of reading via screen by way of familiar reference points or touchstones, but also worked to rebrand the lantern as a device with new uses and cultural orientations.

As Kittler argues, the lantern had been heavily used by Catholics as a Counter-Reformation tool to reanimate some of the effects of older religious icons—chiefly a “fear and horror” of hell that would inspire audiences to convert—and thus at least attempt to answer the Reformation’s “letterpress

16 INTRODUCTION

monopoly.” 48 During that process, he contends, the fire, light, and heat of the lantern’s burning oil illumination source came to symbolize the fires of hell, thus bringing the mechanisms of its technology and its most famous content into a mutually reinforcing conceptual alignment that, despite its diverse other uses, adhered to the device through the nineteenth century.

By projecting hymns and poems that repeatedly made the language of light and fire metaphorically central to heavenly rather than hellish powers, the lantern retroactively glossed and redefined its heat and light and thus shifted the cultural connotations of its technology. Not only did this stage a visible connection between projection and divinity—connecting light and Light as analogous to word and Word—but the accompanying projection of printbased images and a fidelity to many print protocols then also associated the lantern with the mediumistic powers of the Protestant tradition, synergizing if not reconciling the two main epistemological branches of Christian worship (image and word) and making for a powerful medial resource that subsequent warm or lit technologies would inherit.

Just as poetry can help transform a medium’s cultural status or function, so media transform the ways that poems mean and the range of effects they have. We know—or at least feel—this to be the case, at least in the abstract.

Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Eiffel Tower” or human and animal word portraits are vastly different experiences when encountered on the page than when read aloud. Bob Dylan’s lyrics have different effects when mediated via voice and performance or recording technologies than when read silently in album liner notes or encountered via the moving words of a karaoke screen.

The 1889 or 1890 wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reading four lines of his poem “America” makes for a markedly different poetic encounter than the one that the Wieden+Kennedy advertising firm cultivated by incorporating that same recording in its 2009 “Go Forth” television spot for Levi’s jeans.49 And the poem exchanged between lovers signifies differently when it is photocopied, sent via fax, text, or Facebook message, posted on Instagram, or written out by hand in looping cursive letters with bubbly hearts replacing the tittle in every lowercase i or j.

What the exact effects of these media differences are can be more difficult to ascertain, to say nothing of how to gauge or measure them. Employing the media archaeological methods favored by scholars such as Gitelman, chapter 2 thus looks to the production and reception history of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s long World War Two propaganda poem The Murder of

17 INTRODUCTION

Lidice to pursue and offer more detailed if not empirical evidence of how different media can—and have been orchestrated to—affect how audiences respond to poems. Whereas chapter 1 considers the text of individual poems in their print and projected instantiations and in relation to the cumulative power of the Christian discourse of fire and light, chapter 2 does not venture to read Millay’s poem about the Nazi destruction of a Czechoslovakian town much at all. Saving that endeavor for chapter 6, I instead read for the history of the transmediated poem’s various effects beginning in June of 1942, when the Writers’ War Board approached Millay about creating a poem for “a coast-to-coast radio program” that would contribute to the board’s goal of cultivating public support for U.S. military intervention in the war’s European theater.

An antifascist activist who had been writing for some time in support of intervention, Millay responded with a now largely forgotten 750-line poem that, during a single week in 1942, became the center of a remarkably well-coordinated transmedial event having more in common with presentday marketing campaigns than with what we normally assume is possible with poetry. A short version first appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature, followed by a longer, illustrated version in Life magazine. Then NBC Radio made a national broadcast of a live stage performance featuring Hollywood actors, musicians, and Czech folk dancers while simultaneously doing Spanish- and Portuguese-language versions, all of which would be shortwaved across the globe. Finally, Murder appeared in paperback via Millay’s publisher. By comparing two types of audience response—fan letters written to Millay, and a small archive of paperbacks that have newspaper articles sandwiched between the pages—I reveal how the highly mediated radio and Life versions cultivated and inspired in audiences an immediacy and urgency that the comparatively unmediated codex did not; indeed, while Life and NBC moved audiences to write immediately after reading or listening, Millay’s codex audiences took much longer, even years, to respond via their interleaved “marginalia.” One might assume that the former set of respondents—Gioia’s “incurious mass audience of the popular media” caught up in the thrill of the moment and reacting impulsively— would do so with less care or critical thinking than the presumably more reflective “book-smart” readers would, but that is not especially the case.

Both are participatory, both are emotionally charged, and both appear to be more self-aware or reflective regarding the poetry and the media of its

18 INTRODUCTION

transmission than we might expect from targets of wartime propaganda.

What varies, instead, is the immediacy effect that the more highly mediated versions were designed, I argue, to provoke.

As we see in chapter 1, the relationship between the magic lantern and poetry was more or less mutually beneficial. Poetry helped the lantern through a moment of cultural transition and thus to renew or at least temporarily resecure its place in the shifting media landscape. The lantern, in turn, gave audiences different ways to experience and engage with otherwise familiar poems, making those poems new and possibly even “modern” and therefore revitalized in their own right. As my focus on film in chapters 3 and 4 illustrates, the relationship between poetry and emergent or new media is not always so symbiotic. Off-screen, trade and fan publications from the silent and early sound periods went out of their way to affiliate film with poetry, casting film in general as a poetic project if not an extension of, or even heir to poetry’s legacy as an art form, portraying writers, directors, and cinematographers as poets, and depicting Hollywood as a large poetry-reading community. While this discursive affiliation helped to broker film’s credibility as an emergent art form, the relationship played out much differently on-screen. Many silent-era films portrayed poets as out of date in the modern world. Others told thinly veiled allegories dramatizing poetry’s death. And some of the many films dramatizing poems— notably, Edwin S. Porter’s 1905 adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” and D. W. Griffith’s versions of Charles Kingsley’s “The Three Fishers” (1910) and Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (1911)—staged this poeticide at a formal level via intertitle quotation of the original text that either treated the source material as unnecessary or inferior to the pictorial, or else dismantled the original to the point where it became unrecognizable as poetry.

Film pursued such a course out of more than an artistic rivalry, however. It also did so because poetry linked strongly to a wide range of print and sound platforms—older media whose capacities silent film either lacked (sound) or upon which it depended (print for intertitles) and thus was not yet in a technological position to replicate, innovate on, or replace. By oneupping or disparaging poetry, by muting poetry’s sonic, formal, or rhythmic qualities, or by simply eliminating the need for the intertitle’s poetic text, film could imaginatively and in some cases actually resolve its relationship insecurities regarding sound and print. The Porter and Griffith

19 INTRODUCTION

films do so in especially compelling and creative ways. After the advent of sound, film would reconfigure its relationship to poetry, regularly incorporating it into stories in far less antagonistic ways. That said, compared to silent films, sound-era films rarely display the text of a poem for audiences to read on-screen. Even today, poetry in sound film remains for the most part a steadfastly vocal, not textual, phenomenon; movies are far more likely to have characters recite from memory or read aloud from print sources, or else they convert silent reading into sound via voiceover, all of which suggests that film’s relationship to poetry’s print instantiations is still unresolved. To illuminate the nature of this ongoing anxiety, I examine some of the few movies from the sound era that have ventured to show the text of poems on-screen—movies that, in revisiting or recalling the site of silent film’s on-screen reading, attempt to process the otherwise repressed subject of film’s relationship to print.

In her essay “I Remember, I Remember,” poet Mary Ruefle recalls a poetry reading during which John Ashbery compared reading his book to watching television. “He said that it was a lot like watching tv—you could open the book anywhere and begin reading, and flip around the book as much as you wanted to,” Ruefle writes. “I remember hating him for saying this. I remember the word sacrilege came to mind.”50 Indeed, the “boob tube” or “idiot box,” with its history of game shows, talk shows, sitcoms, soap operas, reality shows, televangelism, cartoons, news programs, and advertisements might seem for many people the most unlikely new media form to forge a sustained relationship with poetry, HBO’s Def Poetry and the inclusion of poetry in acclaimed shows such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad notwithstanding. As I show in chapter 5, however, television and poetry nevertheless have a long and complex relationship history stretching back to the former’s emergence during the Cold War. From I Love Lucy and Have Gun—Will Travel to The Addams Family, Star Trek, Days of Our Lives, The Tonight Show, Twin Peaks, and The Simpsons, I have found well over a hundred different shows that at one point or another and in any number of ways incorporated poetry; undoubtedly, hundreds if not thousands more have done so as well.

As the aforementioned episodes of Criminal Minds and Psych suggest, television has repeatedly connected poetry with killers or other criminals, which is an association it inherits from film. Rather than focus on the implications and permutations of that shared tradition, chapter 5 examines a

20 INTRODUCTION

tradition nearly unique to television: the association of poetry and plagiarism via storylines in which characters are caught plagiarizing poems or fake being poets. From Leave It to Beaver to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, this recycled motif structures episodes of at least ten different shows and informs the treatment of poetry in so many others that, in the world of television, poetry now frequently functions as a type of clue, tell, sign, signal, or shorthand that, somewhere close by, some sort of plagiarism or equivalent act of fraudulence, fakery, or imposture is going on or just about to happen. It is no coincidence that Walter White, the chemistry teacher leading a double life as a meth kingpin on Breaking Bad, owns a copy of Leaves of Grass, or that Dick Whitman, who switched dog tags and assumed the identity of Don Draper during the Korean War, reads Frank O’Hara’s poetry on Mad Men. As I show, television forged, rehearsed, and cemented this association during the Cold War, when narratives policing and exposing poetry plagiarists troped or paralleled the social policing and outing of communism and nonnormative sexuality that was central to the era’s national security containment strategies and most visible in the Red and Lavender Scares of the 1950s. As a 1980 episode of The Facts of Life indicates, such poetry-based plotlines were flexible enough to incorporate and police perceived threats to American racial hierarchies as well.

While at least nominally demonstrating television’s cultural importance as an ideologically weaponizable and Cold War–ready new medium, fidelity to this motif was not uniform or complete but, at times, provided a sort of cover under which TV writers could more subtly interrogate or subvert the very hegemonic containment-era Americanism to which those shows appeared to adhere. Even though the Cold War has ended, this association of poetry with fraudulence persists in a variety of ways, but that is not the only or most durable legacy of television’s relationship with poetry. Indeed, even as television was singling out poetry as an especially charged site of social concern, it also found in poetry—rather than in sculpture, the novel, or another fine art form—a particularly instructive aesthetic model and kinship. Forced to meet pressing and seemingly endless content demands, television writers faced the prospect that unless they relied on formulas or clichés or stole from other shows, they might run out of material. In one respect, the plagiarism plot motif provided those writers with an opportunity to process this anxiety. At the same time, the poems most frequently

21 INTRODUCTION

positioned at the center of those narratives—popular, kitschy verses anchored for their poetics not in the tradition of individual authorship, but in recycled content, clichés, and collectively owned poetic formulae such as “Roses are red / violets are blue”— offered a model for how television could itself copy, crib, or put on repeat with slight variations something like the plagiarized poem plotline without in fact committing plagiarism. In other words, by aligning itself with a long, anti-individualist, antibourgeois tradition of poetry circulation, use, and authorship, television (and its seemingly endless string of formulaic game shows, sitcoms, and soap operas) was able to stake a claim in the media landscape to being America’s truly popular medium.

If poetry affects the media of its transmission and media affect the poetry being transmitted, then chapter 6, in connecting Millay’s The Murder of Lidice to the present day Instapoetry that Rupi Kaur and others are circulating via social media platforms, speculates about how the prospect of publication or transmission via new, nonprint media forms affects authors’ relationships to their writing and the poems that they produce. As I explain in chapter 2, the success of Millay’s poem was no fluke, modeled as it was on the transmedial successes of Alice Duer Miller’s The White Cliffs of Dover and Stephen Vincent Benét’s They Burned the Books. Despite its popular reception, Murder was largely pilloried by critics and friends in the poetry world, and Millay eventually went so far as to disown it, renouncing a project that might have otherwise helped to blaze a path for poets to work in multiple and popular media forms. Scholars have speculated that Millay distanced herself from Murder because she worried about how its critical reception would affect her literary reputation. Indeed, after the war, instead of continuing to experiment with the possibilities of the multimedia future that her poem would have seemed to bring more clearly into reach, she returned to the codex as the favored mode of poetry’s transmission.

Millay had written for mass media outlets before, however, and she had written extensively for the stage and recited regularly on the radio. She thus knew, to some extent, how working in multimedia contexts would involve various participants, editors, directors, and other stakeholders and magnify what was for some poets an already frustrating aspect of the little magazine world, where activist editors pressured writers into cutting and rearranging poems as a condition of publication. And the construction

22 INTRODUCTION

of Murder itself seems designed to hedge against, if not accommodate this inevitability. Shrewdly composed of parts that could be cut or rearranged without significantly disrupting the central narrative, it has an accordionlike quality tailor-made for the variable demands of transmedial distribution, allowing editors to create a seven-section, 292-line version for the three pages allotted by the Saturday Review of Literature and for NBC radio producers to fit a much longer (but still cut) version into their program’s half-hour time slot.

The poem does not just register those media concerns on a formal level, however. What is perhaps most surprising about Murder’s remarkable history is how Millay takes the story of a Nazi atrocity as an occasion to thematize the predicament of the poet working under modern media conditions. The narrative’s main character—a young, pure, creative, female poet figure named Byeta—ultimately commits suicide rather than endure abduction and exploitation by a Nazi soldier whom the poem stylizes as a male “editor” or “cultural businessman” figure. In effect, with Murder, as its very title implies, Millay not only constructs a poem that anticipates the conditions of the multimedia world for which it was produced but then, in that very poem, dramatizes how those conditions so threaten the poet’s sovereignty that they lead to her death. Viewing the poem from this perspective, it is reasonable to argue that Millay did not return to the codex after the war because she feared for how Murder was affecting her literary reputation, or because she was unable to handle critics who deemed the poem a failure without recognizing its sly critique. Rather, she did so because, as the character of Byeta suggests, she was finished dealing with media conditions that took the future of her work out of her own hands.

In our present day, we are at a charged point not too dissimilar from the one in which Millay was composing Murder—a period when poetry has or appears to have more media forms and platforms at its disposal than ever before and yet no clear set of ways, at least within the world of official verse culture, to motivate or harness them aside from a haunting feeling that something is about to happen. Poets, publishers, and audiences are processing and experimenting with—or finding reasons to avoid processing and experimenting with—the pressures and possibilities of this moment, perhaps nowhere more so than in regard to the phenomenon of Instapoetry, whose authors are leveraging social media platforms to create large readership bases and fan followings outside the purview of official verse culture

23 INTRODUCTION

and then converting that popularity into electronic and print book sales.

Of these poets, none has a profile equal to that of Rupi Kaur in terms of popularity, admiration, scorn, and symbolic or real diagnostic value regarding poetry’s cultural health. After first being digitally self-published, the print version of Kaur’s debut collection, milk and honey, sat on the New York Times Best Seller list for a year and a half and has now sold over 2.5 million copies. For those who measure poetry by the book, the effects are indisputable. In Canada, for example, poetry book sales increased 79 percent in 2016 and then jumped 154 percent in 2017, “thanks in no small part,” writes BookNet Canada, to the success of Kaur’s first two collections.51 A 2017 National Endowment for the Arts survey reports that poetry reading is also on the rise in the United States. While Amy Stolls, the NEA’s understated director of literature, does not mention Kaur by name, she comes close. “I suspect,” Stolls comments, “social media has had an influence.”52 For some, Kaur is “the voice of her generation”—“the poet every woman needs to read” who is “reinvent[ing] poetry for the social-media generation.”53 For others, in what has been called the “inevitable backlash,” she is “disingenuous,” “pitiful, vapid, exploitative,” and even a plagiarist who, as one of Kaur’s most contemptuous reviewers puts it, “seems utterly uninterested in reading books.”54 As I explain in the second half of chapter 6, Kaur does not make me feel either of these extremes. Instead, she, the nature of her work, and the range of responses to both make me feel more than a little bit as if we are back in 1942 again. As with Millay and Murder, Kaur writes about colonization and gender-based violence. Both authors feature female main characters confronting a history of gender-based silencing. Both rely on similar tropes connecting creativity, media, and the female body. The works of both are designed for transmedial rather than simply codex distribution, and both have experienced remarkable popular success doing so.

What Harriet Monroe called the “invisible audiences of millions” have praised and panned them in strikingly similar ways. In fact, Kaur not only reaches back to the 1940s in identifying the roots of her poetic ancestry. She then also eerily stylizes herself as Millay’s Byeta come back from the dead to take control of her creative and reproductive powers via social media forms that allow for a personal administration of her work that Millay could only have imagined given the particular media conditions of her time.

That we can find such parallels between the 1940s and now is both alarming and informative. Without knowing, much less immersing ourselves in

24 INTRODUCTION

the history of poetry in new, nonprint media like those in the chapters that follow, we risk misunderstanding or losing—or never finding in the first place—the spectrum of possibility for the art as well as its power. We risk missing how poetry helped to shape the media landscape that we have inherited. We risk missing how that media landscape has in turn shaped poetry, both as an expressive form and as an idea in the larger culture. But we do more than risk losing out on these pasts and the present into which they feed. We also risk losing sight, once again, of the futures that await.

That poetry travels so easily is one of its chief features and abiding strengths.

If we cannot keep up with it, that is not poetry’s fault—it is ours. But we stand only to gain by trying to follow it beyond the book, by tracking where it goes, and how, and by learning even more about what it helps to make happen.

books and off the page. Refuting the claim that poetry has become a marginal art form, he shows how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet and social media,

Chasar

In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar reveals the new horizons that poetry has found beyond

Chasar follows poetry’s travels into newer formats that include radio, film, and television.

“Poetry is more than a creature of voice, hand, and press, as Chasar shows with verve, wit, insight, and sparkling detail. The public life of poetry in the twentieth-century United States is also a secret history of multimedia. Each medium remakes poetry. And poetry, in turn, remakes the media in which we live, move, and breathe. I love this book!”

—JOHN DURHAM PETERS, AUTHOR OF THE MARVELOUS CLOUDS: TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF ELEMENTAL MEDIA “By disclosing what are at once poetry’s most inscrutable and its most public aspects, Chasar reorients our understanding of poetry’s relation to the media, throwing gasoline on the fire of a question we have dodged for too long: what is a poem? The old answers to that query won’t hold up in the wake of Chasar’s attention to the vulgar afterlives of bookish things.”

—DANIEL TIFFANY, AUTHOR OF MY SILVER PLANET: A SECRET HISTORY OF POETRY AND KITSCH

MIKE CHASAR is associate professor of English at Willamette University. He is the author of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (Columbia, 2012) and the coeditor of Poetry After Cultural Studies (2011).

cup.columbia.edu Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: Nam June Paik and Otto Piene, Untitled (1968). © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Printed in the U.S.A.

COLU M BI A

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK

Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram

Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram

“With Poetry Unbound, Chasar secures his place as our foremost investigator of poetry as a popular practice—ordinary, ubiquitous, and, indeed, fundamental to American cultural life. Poetry is dead; long live poetry, untethered from the constraints of the printed page and in the wilds of new media.”

—RITA RALEY, AUTHOR OF TACTICAL MEDIA

POETRY UNBOUND

“This is a persuasive, thoroughly researched, memorable, and often delightful book.

Chasar has excelled in his ambitious coverage of primary sources. Moreover, this is a book that addresses questions that come up frequently in the poetry world about where and why and how ‘poetry matters,’ and about its place in the wider culture.”

—STEPHANIE BURT, AUTHOR OF DON’T READ POETRY: A BOOK ABOUT HOW TO READ POEMS

Poetry Unbound

Mike Chasar