Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content
Poetry in the Age of Consumer-Generated Content Craig Dworkin “Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.” —Kurt Cobain1 In the last years of the twentieth century, a soi-disant “conceptual writ- ing” seemed newly relevant because of the way it read against the contem- poraneous emergence of database-driven cultures of surveillance, finance, and communication. Although it was not necessarily published online and did not exploit the advantages of computational analysis or pursue the af- fordances of digital tools, such work could be considered new media poetry because it exhibited the structural logic of the database. Adhering to Lev Manovich’sdefinition of “the new media avant-garde,” this first-phase conceptualism privileged methods of accessing, organizing, and visualiz- ing large quantities of previously accumulated data, rather than creating original material or pioneering novel styles.2 To be sure, the reign of the database is still in the ascendant, but the underlying technical structure of the internet—not to mention its cultural semantics—has changed. Ac- cordingly, one way to map the development of conceptual writing over the Thanks to Virginia Jackson, Ilan Manouach, Simon Morris, Marjorie Perloff, Katie Price, and Jonathan Stalling, who gave me the opportunity to test some of these arguments in pub- lic, and to Amanda Hurtado, Paul Stephens, and Danny Snelson, who continue to encourage and challenge and inform and inspire me. This essay is for Al Filreis, who reminded me to care. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nevermind (DGCD-24425, 1991). 2. Quoted in Lev Manovich, “New Media from Borges to HTML,” The New Media Reader, ed.
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