Born Digital: Writing Poetry in the Age of New Media Maria Engberg, Uppsala University
This presentation is based on my doctoral dissertation which I recently defended at Uppsala University. It presents a number of Anglophone digital poems and investigates their visual, kinetic, and textual practices. Out of several contemporary subgenres I have chosen to focus on poetic practices that raise questions about spatiality, temporality, kineticism, and word-and-image construction. My chief interest lies in the question of how poetic form emerges and is orchestrated in digital media and what forms of engagement these constructions present the reader with. For instance, a common feature of digital poems is the underscoring of a multisensory experience of poetry through visual, auditive, tactile, kinetic, and textual artifice. Reading then becomes a process of viewing, listening, reading, and physically interacting with a multimedial literary work. Not surprisingly, digital poetic works often challenge our way of thinking about literature and literary scholarship. In my presentation I show some of the works I have studied and discuss ways of addressing material and hermeneutic questions for literary scholarship.Maria Engberg is Lecturer in English at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona. She teaches modern, postmodern, and postcolonial literature, digital media and culture, visual studies, and literary theory.