conclusion 223personal testimonies and accounts of legal action. The arrange-
ment of these materials, combined with lyric interludes, creates
in Rukeyser’s work a poetry that can ‘extend the document’.^39 In
a similar way, Nowak’s organisation of web-based materials into
a poetic form creates a composition that highlights the cruelty
of social inequities in a way that a governmental report cannot.
Tim Dayton comments that Rukeyser ‘challenges any poetics that
removes poetry from the ugliness and confl ict of the real world
of labor and politics’.^40 Dayton’s comment is clearly applicable to
the contemporary industrial landscape explored by Coal Mountain
Elementary.
TEXTURED INFORMATION: JOSHUA CLOVER AND
CLAUDIA RANKINE
Hazel Smith’s ‘Visibility and the Generation of the Text’ asks us
to consider how we quantify ideas of poetic form at a time when
twenty-fi rst-century formats challenge our vocabulary for ideas
of time, space and reception. Smith suggests that ‘reader inter-
activity, real-time imaging, morphing and text generation can
all produce textual variability... new media has the capacity to
change how we think about textual variability in general both on
and off the page’.^41 Already we have seen how new media and
information technology offer ways for sourcing material, perform-
ing poetry, organising material as well as enabling political poetry.
Finally, we can offer a refl ection on how interaction with global
information networks may impact on poetic form and poetic lan-
guage, as well as the representation of subjectivity in the contem-
porary poetry volume. Joshua Clover and Claudia Rankine’s poetry
offers insights into how poetic language responds to the pressures
of a perceived giddying arena of information. In a poetic manifesto
Clover draws attention to the premise of ‘superinformation’:
Data is a phenomenon of life organized by survival; super-
information hangs out near where the waves of data crash
against the seawall of the sublime, mixing metaphors in the
infi nite. Superinformation is a manifesto; the manifesto is