Not Born Digital : Poetics, Print Literacy, New Media

Not Born Digital addresses from multiple perspectives – ethical, historical, psychological, conceptual, aesthetic – the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics, the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the human voice, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.

The premise of Not Born Digital is that the innovative contemporary poets studied in this book engage obscure and discarded, but nonetheless historically resonant materials to unsettle what Charles Bernstein, a leading innovative contemporary U.S. poet and critic of “official verse culture,” refers to as “frame lock” and “tone jam.” While other scholars have begun to analyze poetry that appears in new media contexts, Not Born Digital concerns the ambivalent ways page poets (rather than electronica based poets) have grappled with “screen memory” (that is, electronic and new media sources) through the re-purposing of “found” materials.

"This is one of the best studies to date of what happens to poetry and the poetic in our ‘new media age.’ Himself a poet, Daniel Morris understands as have few critics that the real effect of the digital on younger poets is to create an entirely new sense of materiality, of poetry as the archive of experience rather than a finished product. For the poets in question from Hannah Wiener to Juliana Spahr, it’s not a matter of writing ‘digital poetry’ but of making use of the new constraints the digital puts upon us. The chapters on Kenneth Goldsmith’s controversial writings are especially strong—and also eminently reasonable and good-humored." - Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University, USA, and author of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century

"As long as ‘old’ media persist, writers will worry, contest, play with, theorize, explore, and explore their relationship to ‘new’ media. From this position, Daniel Morris reads across generations from Wiener and Howe, through Codrescu and Goldsmith, to 'experiments in digital citizenship' by Noah Eli Gordon, Durgin and Hofer, Spahr and Buuck, offering a careful and sometimes controversial poetics of convergence culture as these poets negotiate issues of personal and historical trauma, archiving, memory, witness, authorship, and some sort of human future." - Alan Golding, Professor of English, University of Louisville, USA

“This study will be especially useful to scholars of new media and contemporary poetry.” - American Literature