Internet Poetry is Revitalizing

“I don’t think that people, like, think that people still like poetry”

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Me neither.

Probably you don’t read poetry often.

But do you browse Facebook / Twitter / Tumblr often?

If you do, you may be digesting poetry without even realizing!

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Enter “internet poetry.”

Video: Everything Here Now – Internet Poetry (I tried to embed this; it wouldn’t work T_T )

I came across this short documentary covering the “internet poetry” phenomenon while browsing Tumblr. It’s really pretty good. It has images of poems, interviews with ostensibly knowledgeable people, discussion regarding academia, distribution, minimalism, new media / forms, etc.

If you want to just go ahead and watch the video, that’ll probably be better than reading my post, at this point, if you’re at all interested.

But, if you’re still here, ya, I think internet poetry’s great:

It’s recontextualizing rather mundane things, like tweets, Facebook statuses, and memes, and making them into art. Ask yourself if you want your social media newsfeeds filled with ‘news’ regarding what your friend ate for lunch or ART.

Internet poetry is sorta doing what that light bulb ‘art piece’ in the art museum is doing: via the same way placing a light bulb in an art museum makes an artistic statement, internet poetry uses social media / new media / etc. to make poetic statements.

E.g., this image, from Internet Poetry, the Tumblr:

Normally, you wouldn’t consider poetic a search engine’s telling you that there are no results. But here, the context of a “poetry” blog, as well as the humorous choice of search words, makes the piece poetic.

Poetry like this, which makes the mundane aesthetic, isn’t exactly new. The internet is what’s new. The method of distribution, it turns out, matters a whole lot. It’s changing the game.

If your tweet can be a poem, and it can get published on Internet Poetry (I’ve gotten stuff published there; it’s easy; I encourage people to submit!), then the gatekeeping on poetry publication is being broken. What does that mean, for the gatekeeping on poetry publication to be broken? I don’t know, because it’s just started and it’s still happening, but it seems exciting.

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“It’s encouraging people to write, because they don’t think like, ‘Oh I’ll write this but no one will ever see it, and if I send this in to literary magazines–like traditional ones, print ones–I won’t hear back for months and months, and no one’s ever going to see my work.”

I resonated with that sentiment from the video a lot^, because I’ve submitted to UofM’s literary magazines for years, and I’ve only ever heard back from Oddslot Xylem to say that I didn’t get chosen.

On the other hand, with the internet, I’ve been published by Internet Poetry a lot, and I’ve been able to self-publish to an online audience I earnestly believe to be significantly larger than Xylem’s.

Something seems cool, about that.

I feel like I kinda wrote about all this a couple weeks ago, in a post about vlogging (as poetry).