208 contemporary poetry
alliance of networked information with brutishness. American
poet Juliana Spahr, for example, admits in an interview from 2003 :
‘Now I can’t imagine how one wrote poetry before the Internet.
When I write poetry I spend a lot of time with search engines like
Google and Nexis’.^2
My conclusion offers a reading of the impact of multimedia and
web technologies upon poetic language and form. The infl ection
of web technologies – as we will see in the case of Claudia Rankine
- can result in creating mock-epic poems that juxtapose a litany of
facts with personal meditation. For some poets the overwhelming
perception of a vast information resource is perceived as a threat.
To others, such as John Cayley, the possibilities of technology
are celebrated as a site for visual and textual experimentation,
otherwise known as ‘electronic writing’. These sites do not share
the identity of magazines, presses or poetry organisations, but are
conceived primarily as websites. Other poets consider the Internet
as a tool of poetic composition, and chance operations such as
‘Flarf’ poetry. Most obviously, the Internet enables a mass audi-
ence and speedy dissemination. On one level this dissemination can
be of poetic material itself to a broader audience – such as in the
response to 100 Poets Against the War.^3 From a further perspective,
new technologies enable the awareness of breaking news material
instantly, which proves vital to the work of Labour activist and
poet Mark Nowak. It will become evident that poetry is always
grappling and responding to the ‘new’– be it new artistic, scientifi c
or technological developments. But we might also need to consider
whether new technologies can overall be viewed as a panacea to
political activism, or as supplement to more traditional forms of
response and protest.
WHAT IS ELECTRONIC WRITING?
The proliferation of media technologies over the past decades and
the possibilities that they offer in the construction of literary texts
have invariably impacted on the composition of poetry in a digital
age. The critic of contemporary poetry is well accustomed to
accessing materials through digital archives, or entering into con-