Genealogies of Poetic Technology Downloaded from by Guest on 25 February 2020 Peter Middleton*

Looking Behind the Screen: Genealogies of Poetic Technology Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 Peter Middleton*

The digital technology on which poets, literary historians, and The Poem Electric: theorists now rely develops so fast that it can be easy for people of Technology and the American Lyric, Seth every generation to feel left behind by the latest computer demand Perlow. University of for increased dexterity of hand, brain, and social imagination, even Minnesota Press, 2018. to feel the pinch of lingering anachronism. Jacques Derrida recalls that he formerly used a fountain pen and manual typewriter, until he became unexpectedly attached to what he calls his “word process- Technomodern Poetics: or,” using a description that already feels somewhat old-fashioned. The American Literary Avant-Garde at the Start I can’t do without it any more now, this little Mac, especially of the Information Age, Todd F. Tietchen. when I’m working at home... . As you know, the computer University of Iowa Press, maintains the hallucination of an interlocutor (anonymous or 2018. otherwise)... . Like a hidden god who’s half asleep, clever at hiding himself even when right opposite you.... I know how to make it work (more or less) but I don’t know how it works. So I The Bloomsbury don’t know, I know less than ever “who it is” who goes there.... Handbook of Electronic With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it works, Literature, Joseph Tabbi, editor. Bloomsbury, how “it responds.” Whereas with computers, even if people 2017. know how to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intui- tively and without thinking—at any rate, I don’t know—how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. (20–23)

Todd Tietchen quotes the final part of Derrida’s revealing anecdote about his belated relation with a computer to make the point that John Ashbery was similarly anxious about “the new layers of technical depth and entanglement intrinsic to computing culture but absent from previous expressive forms such as the codex, sculpture,

*Peter Middleton is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Southampton, UK. His most recent book is Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (2015), and his essay “Unknowns” appeared in Chicago Review Summer 2018.

American Literary History, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 169–189 doi:10.1093/alh/ajz052 Advance Access publication December 26, 2019 VC The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] 170 Looking Behind the Screen

painting, or film” (133). These new depths and complexities are challenging: the loss of the advantages of textual fixity in the endless plasticity of visual text that can be rendered differently by the software every time it is viewed on a screen; the vast seethe of hypertextual information that now beckons around every corner of an online text; the anonymized phantasmagoria of online subjectivities; and Literary texts, once capacious remediations among image, sound, and sign. Literary Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 conﬁned to a very texts, once confined to a very limited range of printed forms, appear limited range of to have escaped into the wilds of unbounded media. The question is printed forms, appear to have then how much knowledge of the engineering, information theory, escaped into the design, material structures, history, linguistics, and sociality do we wilds of unbounded need to inform our digitally managed critical studies of poetic texts, media.... Digital and how can we do so without succumbing to reductive narratives technology is . . . such as those that ascribe scientific inevitability, or demonic agency, rapidly changing the entire infrastructure to the machinery? Although Derrida displays some interest in the of poetic practice. machine he is using, his account underlines what Seth Perlow describes as “technology’s tendency to evade critical attention” (17). To talk wittily of gods and demons is to avoid talking about software code and networked servers. The challenge today is to figure out how to redirect sufficient critical attention commensurate to the significance of the technology for our research. The books under review, and others I shall mention, attempt this task. Derrida doesn’t say anything that others haven’t also said. That even the most insightful modern philosopher of textuality can strug- gle to understand what a computer is and does, reminds us that ev- eryone has been disoriented by the new technology and its shimmer of compositional novelty. Disorientation, as he makes plain, is accompanied by welcome. To the new ease of writing and communication that he mentions, we should add other massive improvements: the liberating effects of digital technology for dis- ability, the internationalism, and the enhancement of cultural memory. Derrida says that such change is unprecedented. Did users of earlier phases of electrical communications technology really feel they knew how and why the machinery responded to users as it facilitated their interactions with others? If we look back at an earlier phase of extremely rapid development of technologies that extended the senses and human communication, a period that unfolded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find many parallels with our own time. Then, too, the technology generated a great deal of uncertainty, anxiety, and sheer puzzlement, especially about the apparent vitalism and spirituality active in wired and wireless devices. As Perlow observes, Emily Dickinson “often figures powerful emotion as electrical” (33). The late nineteenth century lived through a period of dizzyingly rapid adoption of diverse, socially American Literary History 171

transformative technologies based on new sources of energy, including the telegraph, telephone, wireless, railways, automobiles, and X- rays, thereby creating widespread existential upheaval not dissimilar to Derrida’s account. For those living through that revolution, it was not only disturbing to recognize how personal and social relations were changing as the new modes of communication invited new forms of connection, but it was also often difficult to be sure where Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 the boundaries of science lay, and where the demons lay hidden. People did not yet know whether ether or electricity, telepathy or te- legraphy would prove the more durable discovery. Claims that experts could talk to the spirits of the dead through Ouija boards, human mediums, or even via ciphers hidden in Shakespeare’s plays seemed plausible: messages could already be sent invisibly through wires or even the atmosphere. Electricity itself was mysterious enough: invisible, dangerous, magically potent. Telepathy and spirit communication seemed worth investigating scientifically. In his book The Invention of Telepathy (2002), Roger Luckhurst describes a world busy experimenting with metaphysics that created an “enigmatic interspace . . . mixing up tuning forks, ethereal waves, spark-gap detectors, synaptic gaps, hypnotic rapports, or phantasms of the living. In the late Victorian period, this interstitial space is at once overdetermined and undeterminable—that is, in a suspensive state between competing theorizations” (113). How then can we navigate our own similar spaces? Derrida’s winning admission of ignorance about the workings of the computer, and his self-exposure of the fantasies its word pro- cessor evokes, reminds us that there are many questions all of us who work with poetry still need to ask about how information technology works, about the metaphorical gods and demons of our digital pantheon. What is behind the screen; What are its internal rules or codes or mathematics? Although older generations may have different perspectives to those born into the digital world, all of us share a central question: How is the connectivity of these proliferat- ing digital devices that have reshaped our critical engagements with literary texts altering our sense of modernism and its aftermath? Today, literary critics like Perlow and Tietchen have begun boldly to explore our own interstitial spaces with theories whose epistemological investments make large demands on existing collateral knowledge. Over the past four decades, we have lived through an extremely rapid reconfiguration of the media through which we con- duct our social relations of communication, memory, obligation, fi- nance, exchange, politics, and aesthetics, a time during which the epistemological boundaries have been far from clear. Maybe machines do think, and maybe human brains are soft-tissue computers? Maybe coordinated instantaneous interaction is possible 172 Looking Behind the Screen

across distances, just as simultaneous quantum effects can be nonlo- cal, or entangled? This intriguing concept of entanglement has been widely adopted in cultural theory, perhaps partly because the high- speed responsiveness of the Internet itself appears analogous to quantum nonlocality. Will entanglement prove to be the telepathy of our time, or will it become as established as James Clerk Maxwell’s invisible electromagnetic fields? Compared to what now seems the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 austere stasis of the poetry book, poetry online often appears to be just part of a crowd of other screen activity, just a part of the picture that shades off into innumerable others. Epistemic indeterminacy casts a penumbra of speculation around digital technology hinting at new fields of inquiry, as well as the renewal of existing ones. In addition to some grasp of the physics or materiality of digital technology, answering such questions will also require a respon- sive poetics of digital terminology. In his rejoinders to the interviewer, Derrida tries out various consoling meanings of digital constellated around the hand and fingers, a verbal play that actually reminds us that this digitality is not primarily centered on the hand, despite the operative need for fingers and thumbs. Strictly speaking, the digital computer is neither digital nor a computer. Digitality refers to the use of billions of binary, on-off switches through which flows the machine-coded electricity that underwrites our apps and programs, enabling sequences of basic logical operations that result in decisions as to how to activate the hardware. Johanna Drucker, one of our best-informed commentators on the effects of the new technologies on the material rendering of literary texts, incisively summarizes the point: “The computer,” she avers, “is a symbolic manipulation device, not a calculation machine” (123). Computer and digital are not the only ambiguous terms. Of all the current dis- cursive handles for managing the digital revolution, the concept of information is probably the slipperiest of all. For the computer engineer, information is electronic signals; for the user, information is the data, constituents of knowledge to be processed and transmitted across the network. These two concepts of information are very much not the same thing. The term information allows for a confla- tion that may be handy for the purposes of the information technology industry but can be potentially misleading for poetry researchers, especially because it exaggerates the significance of the knowledge inherent in digital signals. Despite digital technology’s onrushing novelty, speculation about its future prospects may not be the best way to approach our questions. Paul Stephens argues in The Poetics of Information Overload (2015) that “[t]he very magnitude of the changes taking place in terms of communication and data storage make elaborate prognostications impossible” (32). Perhaps the only rigorous American Literary History 173

approach is genealogy? The researcher into poetry and technology is faced with a formidable task if, as Jussi Parikka recommends in A Geology of Media (2015), they do try to look behind the screen at its material history. Doing so reveals a ramifying ecology: “As a material assemblage, information technology also has its duration that is not restricted to its human-centered use value: media cultural objects and information technology have an intimate connection with the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 soil, the air, and nature as a concrete, temporal reality” (155). Researchers who want to know more about this material genealogy of the computer can now find assistance in a number of books aimed at the nonspecialist: Robin Boast’s The Machine in the Ghost: Digitality and its Consequences (2017); Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014); Tung- Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud (2015); Ronald R. Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (2015); Paul J. Nahin’s The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age (2012); and Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (2017). Each of these provides indispensable starting points for investigation. Cultural theory of the contemporary digital sphere already has a vast literature that is probably better known to poetry scholars than the history. In addition to key texts by Benjamin Bratton, Drucker, Lori Emerson, N. Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, Bruno Latour, Adalaide Morris, John Durham Peters, and Bernard Stiegler, for those who share Derrida’s sense that they don’t know how the demon operates, there are now valuable analyses of the operating code and its contexts: Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (2014); Federica Frabetti, Software Theory: A Cultural and Philosophical Study (2014); Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (2016); and Dennis Tenen, Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (2017). Increasingly, literary critics themselves write about poetry from a standpoint that assumes an understanding of the affordances of current technology. In The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (2017), for example, Nathan Brown assumes his readers will be at least minimally conversant with digitality and the media geology that Parikka espouses. In this study of Charles Olson, Ronald Johnson, Christian Bo¨k, Caroline Bergvall, and Shanxing Wang, Brown argues for a materialist poetics that takes the complex chemistry and physics of materials seri- ously, fully integrating techne and poiesis in the concept of textual “fabrication.” One consequence is that “our cognitive apprehension of indeterminacy via ambiguities of ‘meaning’ participates in and is 174 Looking Behind the Screen

premised upon the indeterminacy of ‘the materials’” (247). Digital strata can be glimpsed within the semantics. As a result of this technological change, features of our once seemingly solid literary institutions may be dematerializing. Cultural theorists of the digital are increasingly relocating away from literature departments to the visual arts departments where new media studies in all their electronic creativity have long been wel- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 comed, while new modes of textual composition also find recogni- tion in this field of research and teaching. We are all working within a new commercial environment too. Publishers can appear old- fashioned compared to the corporately controlled information technology that is now one of the most successful industry sectors on the planet, and as yet barely regulated by the kinds of legal and govern- mental controls that oversee older industries. Defying copyright constraints, almost all the poems in the major teaching anthologies are now available individually online, and more legitimately, so too is a rapidly growing body of modern and contemporary poetry published on numerous websites. Migration of copyrighted poems into the wilds of the Internet is part of a wider poetry revolution. Digital technology is not just having an impact on theorists and critics, it is also rapidly changing the entire infrastructure of poetic practice, its composition, circulation, publishing, social networks, even its very constitutive principles. Poets talk to each other across continents in new digital equivalents of the television writers’ room. Software and relatively inexpensive file storage have made possible large archives of audio and increasingly video recordings of poetry performance, inviting poetry scholars to study the once-neglected field of performance history. Even the fixity of poetic texts themselves is wavering. Digital publication is now so flexible that the malleability of files brings a new challenge to poets. Hitherto they have relied on the page fixities established by the printer’s spatial control, the nonlinear relations curated by prosody, rhyme, line breaks, spacings, fonts, and other techniques for creating a subsurface textual rhizomatics of meaning. Digital files are so plastic that poets must increasingly allow for some loss of control of the presentation: some have moved into performance so completely that they treat text publication as an after- thought; others have relaxed their editorial demands for exact print size, fonts, spacing, gutters, and margins. Some poets are “exploring how electronics alter a poem’s objecthood,” as Perlow observes in the course of a discussion of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s (YHCHI) digital text “Dakota,” which reads his work, and that of William Poundstone and Tan Lin, in dialogue with Michael Fried’s famous essay, “Art and Objecthood” (231). Perlow is following up a suggestion of Jessica Pressman’s in her extended analysis of American Literary History 175

“Dakota” where she also draws briefly on Fried, arguing that not only does “Dakota” suspend its objecthood, it remediates cinematic practice “via Pound’s technique of superposition” (100). Pressman and Perlow concur that YHCHI demonstrates that digital technology can be a medium for radically altered reading, value, and semantics. In more mundane terms, digital machinery not only offers in- stant control of the audiovisual delivery of the poem, but it also Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 facilitates new modes of distribution and reception that critics and authors can then reflexively incorporate in their own practices. Layout, printing, publishing, and circulation of poems were until very recently always a big challenge for publishers. The rise of small-press poetry was made possible in part by the obsolescence of office printing equipment with which editors could cheaply print magazines and chapbooks. Many editors employed purloined Xerox machines, pensioned Gestetners, and ink-stained cast-off mimeo machines, while a few even moved the iron bulks of discarded letter- presses into their concrete-floored basements. These older technologies have now mostly been supplanted by computers and their printer counterparts. Many poets prepublish poems on their own sites. Some may never appear between covers: these poems will have no ink-and-paper appearances listed in their curriculum vitae. Poetry is also becoming more and more multimedial now that it is so easy to build into the poems additional consumer-friendly, visual, and aural features. Not only can poets publish work constructed from a circuitry of different media elements, but they can also incorporate distribution and feedback into their publications, and more. All sorts of strange mutations of poetry have come and sometimes gone as the software and hardware evolves from HyperCard to Flash and its successors. Early adopter poets who once worked in relative obscurity using multimedia before the digital era are now far more visible. Information technology is also changing the way literary scholars work. One of the less-advertised virtues of the New Criticism was that it provided a plausible conceptual rationale for avoiding the troublesome work of tracking down sources at a time when they were hard to trace. The pushback of historicist criticism meant that the next wave of literary criticism of modern poetry in the decades after midcentury would be based on the discovery and analysis of new intertexts found through painstaking searches in specialist li- braries and collections to develop new historicizing contexts for canonical texts. It took years of work for researchers to compile thorough glossaries for the numerous obscure allusions and citations in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1925) and Olson’s Maximus Poems (1953). Today, the combination of nearly omniscient search engines with digital archives of magazines, journals, books, and primary texts 176 Looking Behind the Screen

means that such guides though occasionally still handy have been largely superseded. Until the advent of digital searches, critics working on the postwar avant-garde poets were aware that they sometimes relied heavily on unacknowledged use of found materials unfindable by readers, usually excerpts and phrases taken from het- erogeneous sources often far removed from the literary world. Apart from serendipitous encounters with those sources, critics were not Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 able to track most of them. Perhaps this hiddenness of sources protected the poets. Today we can see exactly how much material has been taken by poets such as Susan Howe or J. H. Prynne from news media, academic journals, and books, as well as the more obvious literary canon. One consequence of this is that poets are now tending either to make a virtue of their borrowings as the conceptual poets have done or to back away from thickening the poetic surface with torn fragments of topical ambient discourse. Digital technology that almost all literary scholars of poetry now use has reached an impressive degree of maturity since the days when accessing the Internet required slow modems, most archive file formats were not directly searchable, and when digital archives themselves tended to be compiled on CDs rather than on servers. As Joseph Tabbi notes in the essential new collection of essays by writers, critics, and theorists, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (2017), “scholarship, and even authorship, are currently relocating themselves in databases, collaborative networks, and global systems of production,” a transformation that urgently requires researchers to find better ways to “locate ourselves and extend our own social, intellectual, and creative activities within networks of our own making” (399, 417). This digital efficiency also renders persisting constraints less obvious, making it difficult to notice potential research materials that still remain inaccessible, or are presented from limited perspectives by the digital window. Hidden selectivity is only a part of the issue. How does the commercial own- ership of the machinery of computing affect what researchers can do? To what extent is digital technology trimming away the complexities of language with its software algorithms? Poems themselves have always used arrangements of language that overlay the linear singularities of writing with elaborate implicit recursions made possible with the structures of prosody, phonetic patterns, image lines, etymologies, and more. Do we even have the appropriate software we need for transmitting, analyzing, or rerendering such multidimensional patterns? Over the next decade, poetry researchers are likely to be pressing hard on these issues. Already some researchers in the digital humanities have been turning new powerful digital tools onto the older texts, creating big data analyses. Tietchen and Perlow express some concern about the susceptibility of such American Literary History 177

research to the marginalization of dissenting social and political views. Tietchen cites Alan Liu’s belief that digital humanities will need to talk more to researchers in both new media studies and science and literature studies, to address the concern that such research must not let social and political issues be marginalized. They also urge researchers to look back at the recent history of modern poetry with new eyes, as that history begins to reveal previously little- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 noticed contours strikingly consonant with our rapidly developing social media landscape. Perlow, for instance, extrapolates current usages of online anonymity to the social scene of Frank O’Hara’s New York to argue that “[a]nonymity shapes O’Hara’s reflections on a range of social equipment—what we now call ‘social media’— that interrupt and block the very exchanges they apparently sustain” (135–36). We do already have a small but growing series of studies that are doing just this. Some deliberately focus on the prehistory of the digital from the standpoint beyond the analog/digital divide. In Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (2018), Lytle Shaw offers what he modestly calls just “one of many possible histories of the analog precursors to our generalized digital surveillance culture” (20), primarily tape recordings of site-specific poetry performances. It is not only the new availability of sound archives and tools for sonic analysis that underwrites this project; it is also the new aware- ness of the complex tensions between public institutions of communication and homemade blogs and videos that enables Shaw to develop his expanded definition of the narrowcast. For instance, he uses film and audio recordings to make a persuasive case that Larry Eigner creates “an alternative radio station,” a poetics of a “slow, durational present, stripped of drama, conclusions, and temporal projections” (82). Stephens also works with methodological retrospec- tion by reenvisioning predigital poetry with concepts and insights derived from our current situation. He shows that Gertrude Stein’s remark, in one of her last writings, that “[e]verybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense,” a senti- ment not unlike Pound’s starting point for the ABC of Reading (1934)—“We live in an age of science and of abundance [of books]” (1)—resonates differently for us now that we live in the midst of an information technology culture, inviting close critical analysis of her preoccupations with information, attention, and repetition (qtd. in Stephens 37).1 In a later chapter discussing Rachel Zolf, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Rob Fitterman, Stephens argues in a corrective to digital theories of distant reading that one of the key innovations of computing, the creation of searchable databases, could be made the basis of a new critical approach to modern poetry, if we “thematize in some manner the relation of a writer to a data set” (154). His 178 Looking Behind the Screen

proposal is to look closely at poetic strategies for curating the abundance of information. Shaw’s book aligns with a key essay by the poet John Cayley, known for his use of software programs to add temporal flow to his texts, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature.Cayley argues that one key consequence of digitality is the convergence of visual and aural modalities in what he proposes to call a new culture Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 of “aurature.” The auralities of poetry that Shaw uncovers in the archive are rapidly expanding across our new media. Cayley persua- sively argues that writers should be making themselves aware of the rapid replacement of the codex by new technological devices. E- books offer scope for authors to develop textual forms constructed around newly possible modes of reading, such as might be created using the shared annotations feature of the Kindle, if writers seize the moment. They cannot wait for the purveyors of the technology to give them what they need, nor expect that readerly technology will spring to life directly from aesthetic innovation; innovation will have to be “hacked from vectors of commercially implicated flows of network attention” (77). Tabbi’s authors present thoughtful research essays on many dimensions of the phenomenon, sharing for the most part the belief expressed by David Heckman and James O’Sullivan that a “poetic wrangling” with digital technology can create new spaces for art and social transformation (110). Alvaro Seic¸a provides useful instances of the early history of personal computers to create kinetic poems, notably by Silvestre Pestana using Sinclair ZX81 and ZX Spectrum machines. There are also interesting essays on combinatorics, and on what Nathan Jones designates “glitch poetics.” In a valuable essay on Erica Scourti and Bergvall, Jones argues that the concept of glitch, already circulating in the world of new media art, can be a critical tool for “cutting across the visual surface-textual depth dichotomy at work in digital realms” (250). In scientific discourse, a glitch is a spurious signal, originally associated with computer problems experienced by astronauts. A glitch is indeterminacy made apprehensible. The term hedges with bravado an anxiety about the significance of an unexplained failure of an electronic system: maybe this error indication is nothing, maybe it is a symptom of impending catastrophic failure. Glitches are momentary, correctable errors inherent in a digital process; in Jones’s words, they are not just “coping-traces of systems working at their limits,” they are projections of the aesthetics of the system itself (250). One of the originators of the concept, Rosa Menkman, argues that “glitch culture” demands an understanding of “the rela- tionship between technical and metaphorical or cultural dimensions” of the art practice.2 This demand is surely also true of digital poetics in general. American Literary History 179

The Bloomsbury Guide to Electronic Literature,althoughit contains several fine essays about narrative fiction, from the author of Patchwork Girl (1995), Shelley Jackson, for instance, centers largely on poetry and poetics. Its international scope, its excellent bibliographies, and the balance between originality and survey make it a valuable research tool for anyone interested in the transformations wrought by digital technology on the field of US poetry and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 poetics. In the remainder of this essay-review, I shall concentrate on the two bold recent studies of technology and poetry by Perlow and Tietchen. Both embark on what Tietchen astutely calls an “intermedia philology” (141). If we are to understand the extraordi- narily rapid transformation of our writing and reading technologies, we will need a philology to complement media archeology, just as aesthetics will be needed to complement informatics. Perlow asks how the affordances of the new technology have shaped critical de- bate. What can we now see more clearly in the poetics of Stein or O’Hara with the insights gained from the social transformations brought about by the Internet, and by using new software tools and digital archives? Tietchen argues that the current economy of data aggregration and surveillance was anticipated by 1960s poets, artists, and engineers in New York and the Bay Area. By studying the cultures that emerged through poetry, music, and utopian engineering, we will underscore our own historical moment. Both Perlow and Tietchen are concerned that the utopian longings of that era have unwittingly allowed some of the excesses of today. In Tietchen’s words: “the systematic gathering of information subject to instantaneous analysis now suffuses the networked structures of Web 2.0 in ways that Ashbery’s existential concerns foreshadowed” (131). Both are also concerned that scholars are too readily dazzled by the digital renditions of material texts. Perlow uses our current knowledge of digital and social media to examine with altered vision the social structures of modern poetry, starting with Dickinson, and then shifting to avant-garde poets of the decades since 1950. He wants to correct a bias in recent literary scholarship toward “the promises of digital scholarly forms that may displace the academic monograph” by asking methodological questions of poetry studies today (175). How are digital tools altering criticism? Perlow has a surprising answer. Instead of becoming critical engineers who emulate the strict reasoning of the sciences on which the new technology depends, many poetry researchers have been discovering that digital technology can facilitate other forms of knowledge, cognition, and affect, not limited to scientific logics. In Dickinson’s case, Perlow suggests that “[e]lectronic imaging equipment has shaped reading habits that prove far less orderly and 180 Looking Behind the Screen

rational than the epithet ‘information technology’ suggests” (42). While digital imaging can encourage affective reading, other digital technologies have offered bonus imaginaries: nuclear research with computers has extended the realms of chance; social devices for creating intimacy across distances (such as the telephone) have increased anonymity; while the archiving functions that digital technology performs so well have had unforeseen effects on our per- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 ception of recordings of poetry readings. Helping the technology have these impacts is what Perlow designates “lyric exemption.” He mentions several modern US poets as instances: “Cummings, Stevens, and Williams share a commitment to the rhetoric of exemption from rationalism as a language of poetic value, a belief that poetry’s privilege lies in its distinctness from rational knowledge” (6). Poets and critics are predisposed to exempt poetry from ordinary logic, what Perlow calls (slightly misleadingly) “rationalism,” and hence from the expectations of truth and accuracy on which knowledge rests. Lyric exemption in the digital world is helped by latent potentials in the technology: “Today, we more commonly understand computers as mechanisms for gathering, manipulating, and presenting positively given information, but this view elides their inventors’ interest in the others of rationalism and the frequency with which these devices inspire less knowledge-oriented responses such as frustration, uncertainty, disorientation, confusion, and play” (91). Exceptions to these generalizations about poetry’s avoidance of rationality and its embrace of affect are easy to think of, and the concepts themselves will require more philosophical rigor, but the broad claim is persuasive. We shouldn’t assume that digital technology will automatically turn critical methodology into a form of logic-based software. Perlow is an adroit, incisive close reader of poems by both canonical and contemporary poets, including Stein, Jackson Mac Low, O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, YCHI, and others. His writing is always lively and insightful, his many speculative ideas always interesting. He draws on his experience as editor of Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) for an excellent discussion of its indeterminacy, and shows how when Mac Low employs the RAND book of random numbers, the resulting chance-based composition becomes a powerful allegorical critique of nuclear science. Looking back at the New York School from our digital world reveals that O’Hara’s poems ask prescient questions about the social technology that sus- tains his coterie. Looking again at how Baraka works with the para- doxes of recording technology helps us see the significant politics of his performance improvisations, and to realize that there remains a pressing need for archived poetry recordings to include oral para- texts as transparently as possible, because indicators of American Literary History 181

improvisation can otherwise easily be lost. For Baraka, improvisation can be an allegory of black precarity, as it “constructs the past as a lost object,” recalling the cultural erasures of African American history (205). This fine discussion of improvisation will be of interest to scholars of poetry performance. Throughout the book, Perlow is attentive to exactly how readers and scholars encounter poems now that digital technology is our medium of inquiry. The technol- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 ogy is not neutral. Perlow’s chapter on O’Hara is the most successful. Perlow starts with an observation of Keston Sutherland’s, that O’Hara’s poems are “full of anonymity” (135), but whereas Sutherland uses this counterintuitive idea as the theme of a minute analysis of the po- sitioning of the reader, Perlow opens it out to a dialogue with our contemporary insights into the practices of anonymity facilitated by the social media revolution in our communications.3 The new anonymity, or virtual personification, characteristic of online exchanges challenges existing models of language and the public sphere, making it possible to perform opinions without being answerable for their implications, and in doing so exposes the mental screens on which our sense of others is projected. This wildfire success of online pseudonymity also reveals how deeply embedded is the mental capacity to find persons in poems and people in fictional characters. Even Twitter’s former limit of 140 characters was enough to create a character in whom we could believe. We have a strong cognitive willingness to maintain a confidently solid sense of others despite having only intermittent, fractal encounters with them, accompanied by limited inferences we can ascribe to their utterances. O’Hara of course is a precomputer poet. Perlow argues that “anonymity shapes O’Hara’s reflections on a range of social equipment—what we now call ‘social media’” (135–36), notably the telephone. O’Hara’s reflections on the social entailments sustained by the telephone network enable him to dramatize “an interplay between lived social experience and critical insight about sociality” (137). His poetry makes tangible what is mostly invisible, that much of our everyday social world is made possible by technological means. To make his argument, Perlow treats the telephone as a placeholder for the expanding telecommunications of the time, like the tape recorder, television, and transistor radio. Counter to the orthodoxy that O’Hara does not model lyric address directly on the phone call, his poems repeatedly make evident how telephone talk gives us a measure against which to measure what is different about lyric address. How, for instance, does telephone address differ from the poetic rhetoric of apostrophe? Perlow offers a virtuoso reading of the poem “To Jane, Some Air,” in which O’Hara plays with the pronouns capable of being assigned as agents 182 Looking Behind the Screen

of telephone talk, only to conclude with the neutral “it talks,” as if talk were rain, not a sign of directed human consciousness. Perlow also subtly reads the dialogue of “Metaphysical Poem” as a poetic scrutiny of “social abstractions of self” (149). Again and again, O’Hara’s poems introduce social distances even when writing to or about his closest friends and thus also extend our understanding of the delayed temporality of poems that include us readers from a later Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 historical moment: “When his call to a friend arrives before us as readers, the occasion of this call generalizes itself as an occasion to ask how such an indefinite call to the anonymous future can ever be occasioned” (162). I wonder if it might help to think of O’Hara’s contrasts between lyric and telephone in terms of remediation. This concept has been gaining ground as a means of identifying the complex gains and losses involved in shifting from one medium to an- other, whether that shift crosses the tiny distance of a change of typeface, or the greater distances of a telephone. Central to Perlow’s sustaining argument is the claim that many modernist poets locate poetry outside formal knowledge and its methods. “Lyric exemption,” a phrase previously used by Stephanie Burt in more limited context, is Perlow’s key tool. I think there are problems with this argument as Perlow sketches it. He is certainly right that lyric poetry is widely celebrated, even by poets skeptical of dominant expressivist categorizations of lyric, for its capacity to op- erate outside what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars helpfully names the “the logical space of reasons” (76), and for its rich displays of affect.4 But neither the term rational nor Perlow’s definition of affect quite capture the complexity of what poetry is exempted from and what can still be ascribed to it. The term rational is too widely used as a polar opposite to irrational to be of much use. What we need to know is more about poetry’s relation to the constituents and their dy- namics within that logical space; we need to know more about poetry’s relation to concepts, propositions, assertions, truthfulness, and logics. Otherwise the idea of lyric exemption will be too dulled by the taint of irrationality to be helpful. Poetry can be rational yet avoid propositions; it can use concepts and assertions and yet embrace irrationality. Affect is an equally elusive concept today. Perlow uses it in a primarily emotivist sense, to describe utterances that commit the speaker to a judgment based solely on individual feeling. My feeling is uncontestably mine. Philosophers have largely abandoned this picture, often associated with the moral theory of Charles Stevenson, as unsustainable.5 Theweaknessofthisideais evident when Perlow reductively argues that Howe’s description of Dickinson’s handwriting as “spiritual improvisations” is nothing more than “affective play” (46). Affect theory may have been ade- quate for some areas of literary study, but for the work of American Literary History 183

understanding digital technology, our models of emotion and affect need to take account of the much broader body of work in psychol- ogy and philosophy on the nature of affect. Issues such as the possible rationality of emotion, links between affect and conceptual thinking, the social and historical determinants of the emotions, and the complicated terminological issues that result in the partial over- lapping between the concepts of emotion, feeling, sensation, affect, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 passions, and other terms will be crucial to the development of the study of intersections of digital technology and poetry. Perlow’s methodology works least well with Dickinson. His starting point is promising, the effect of widespread availability of visual images of the Dickinson holographs, especially when aug- mented by potentially tendentious hypertextual apparatus online. Many scholars with archival commitments have raised concerns that as useful as digitization has been and will continue to be, it needs to be employed with caution, because it can for a whole variety of reasons leave significant material traces outside the frame. Perlow also provides a useful brief overview of the debates about the significance of a visual text, particularly the role of the dash. Arguments about the significance of Dickinson’s holographs rapidly open out into major debates about editing, materiality, signification, and image-rich texts. What Perlow says too little about, however, is that the new scholarship on Dickinson has been powerfully shaped by changing feminist political perspectives. I think it is misleading to claim that, encouraged by the framing effects of electronic imaging, a “possessive rhetoric” took hold, driven by what he calls “the politics of affect” (41). Howe’s strategic use of my in My Emily Dickinson (1985) responds both to what she felt was unwarranted exclusion from access to Dickinson’s manuscripts and also to 1970s feminist arguments that presented Dickinson as a largely passive victim of patriarchy. Howe is explicit that Dickinson is writing as a woman poet who brings a powerful sense of literary history as well as great cognitive intensity to the composition of a poem such as “My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun.” The polemical use of my to describe a critic’s relation to Dickinson was a rhetorical move related to feminist political debates, not the emotivist tactic that Perlow di- agnoses. Cristanne Miller’s judicious conclusion in the introduction to her recent reader’s volume of the texts surely comes close to the median scholarly consensus today:

Dickinson’s poems are separable from their handwritten arti- facts, and . . . it is both useful and reasonable to reproduce them in print in the form she typically indicated she imagined them... . As with any poet’s manuscripts, a print transcription cannot re- tain the aura of a handwritten artifact, the idiosyncrasies of the 184 Looking Behind the Screen

poet’s handwriting, or the perhaps playful use of the page. It does give us, however, everything essential to what I believe Dickinson conceived as the poem—even if not everything re- markable about particular presentations of a poem. (7)

Although affective responses do occur in critical writing on Dickinson, we need to be cautious about assuming, as Perlow does, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 that “the point of affect’s difference from rational knowledge is that such emotional bonds elude evidentiary verification” (66). As many philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, have argued, affects can produce verifiable evidence of their existence and impact. The Poem Electric (2018) does what good criticism does: it helps us think differently about familiar texts, recognize influences we have not noticed before, and leaves us with many insights that can be developed further. If there are a few areas in which the book is less convincing, this is mainly a side effect of its boldness, its willingness to venture into our own interstitial spaces created by the new digital science and technology. Where Perlow largely concen- trates on poetry, canonical and contemporary, Tietchen finds techno- modernism in poetry and in its affiliates: the music of the Grateful Dead, Bay Area surrealism, Warhol’s Factory, as well as works by Beat Generation writers, artists, and visionary engineers. Like other researchers into the problematics of digital media and their impact on poetic theory, he wants to reexamine moments in modernist literary history that foreshadow and critique our own moment. Tietchen takes his title from a comment by Mark McGurl, who argues that there has been a “kinship between high literary techne and media technology” which justifies the description of American fiction exemplified by John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966) as “technomodernist” rather than “postmodernist” (42). In a generalizing style, he invites us to look again at the cultural moments and networks that helped make possible the work of poets ranging from Olson and Jack Kerouac, to Philip Lamantia, O’Hara, and Ashbery, through the lens provided by the current “ascendancy of social computing” (17). Tietchen argues that we should notice that the traffic between the visionary engineers and the experimental poets was two-way, sometimes mediated by unexpected crossovers such as the contribution of the Californian surrealists to the creation of multimedia music events. Revisiting this history can also help us understand how some of the more damaging features of our current media world, especially ubiquitous surveillance and the growing power of “algocracy” (a term Tietchen favors), or the management of public behavior by algorithms, all have roots in that earlier time. Tietchen can be fairly polemical about this. He is acutely aware that corporate Internet platforms “enable a teeming social aesthetic capable of materializing American Literary History 185

a live, dynamic exchange of information and data that comes to assume one of the primary forms of our social relations” (123). This argument leads to some surprising, counterintuitive claims, such as the suggestion that O’Hara’s work makes a “contribution to emergent surveillance aesthetics” (13). Tietchen’s point is less startling than it sounds: the preoccupation with writing poems that project to their readership an ongoing record of the author’s everyday activity Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 resembles the “self-elaboration” (102) evident in the microblogging in our current digital social media. Tietchen then argues that “[t]he literary longings of O’Hara and others, then, might be contextualized as part of a protracted push to democratize the information economy by expanding its narrative breadth through the tools made available by the print era” (113). As this quotation indicates, this argument may too readily elide many developments in the intervening decades by relying on the ascription of futural desires. Earlier versions of current social technologies can be seen as imperfect versions of what is to come. Tietchen imagines Ashbery, the poet of an earlier time than our own, wishing for a better mechanism than the technology of his time can make available:

Parmigianino’s painting expresses a similar desire or longing to break free of its representational dimensions, and in that way it inspired (or served as one of the muses for) Ashbery’s longing for the more dynamic interface that the poem dramatizes or approximates within the limitations of paper-based expression... . But we might say that the expressive forms struggling at their communicative limits in Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” have now come to exist within the very same interface on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. (123)

The valuable insight here is that we now have the critical tools, thanks to the insights resulting from life with digital technology, to analyze emergent communicative practices in earlier poetry which previously we could not discern. Just as Perlow relies on a newly named methodological concept of “lyric exemption,” Tietchen deploys a bespoke concept of his own—“critical analogues,” as a means of finding prescient foresha- dowings of digitality. A critical analogue is “a literary or critical ges- ture that simultaneously critiques and extends the assumptions embodied within the technical modality or technological ensemble it mimics” (9). Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” is described as a critical analogue of the state of electronic communication at midcentury, and Kerouac’s famous use of a paper roll for his typed draft of On The Road (1957) is invoked as a critical emulation of the teleprinter. In Kerouac’s case, Tietchen proposes a somewhat dubious analogy 186 Looking Behind the Screen

between the concept of noise in Claude Shannon’s information theory and the verbal excesses of Kerouac’s onrushing spontaneous prose, and therefore it is the subsequent discussion of Kerouac’s science- fictional short story “cityCityCITY” (probably written in response to a Time magazine article on the new ENIAC computer) that gives a more persuasive image of Kerouac’s creative response to emergent technology. In the following, inventive chapter “Dharmic Atomism,” Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 Tietchen combines recent research on extended cognition with his Californian cultural history to make the interesting claim that interest amongst the Beat Generation in new forms of collective consciousness was troped through analogies with the interconnectivity of atoms, an analogy that helped make Beat writings influential on engineers aspir- ing toward “the electronic coalescence of distributed cognition or par- ticipatory intersubjectivity, modeled in part on the supernormal subjective states at the core of Eastern mystical striving” (60). Tietchen is alert to the commercial deceptions that sometimes resulted. “Hippie communitarianism” (76) was readily co-opted by commercial innovators who created the computing giants of today. The argument about critical analogues works best in the accounts of Ashbery and O’Hara. Tietchen notices a “restless voluminosity of the self” in Ashbery’s poems, notably “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” where Tietchen finds Ashbery wishing for greater interactivity with the human world beyond the poem, and resisting it (130). One key image of this tension is the mirror’s convexity imaged in the painting as a “globe” where Ashbery fantasizes Parmigianino to be trapped, and in doing so appears to allude to the images floating inside the globe of the convex cathode ray tube (CRT) of a ubiquitous television set. This CRT monitor was soon to be used by builders of personal computers, which encourages Tietchen to stretch chronology and claim that Ashbery’s poem is written “on the cusp” (120) of the arrival of these new machines. Tietchen is then able to make an astute generalization about “Self-Portrait” and Ashbery’s other poems of the period: “Ashbery created critical analogues foregrounding the evolving features of the information society that he deftly undercut. These technomodernist aesthetic experiments—mirroring a media environment built around interfacing, multiple information streams, and collaborative creation— simultaneously and intentionally resist the canalizing modes of analysis that have since become intrinsic to algocracy” (132).6 Thisisamodeof analysis that is suggestive rather than precise. We can see that there are affinities between the modes of “self-dramatization” (114) explored by 1960s poets and the social media participants of today, but there are also many intervening historical steps between them. Tietchen’s most powerful claim is implicit in his concept of the critical analogue. After discussing “The Day Lady Died,” Tietchen comments that O’Hara’s response to the media event of American Literary History 187

Billie Holiday’s death is a reminder of the capacity of poetry to re- flect on its conditions of possibility: “literary history represents a comprehensive record of human cognition and its operations, illumi- nating the evolution of our subjective and aesthetic concerns as they have emerged not only within the print technologies of the Gutenberg era but in response to multiple histories of media development and technological change across the arc of modernity”(106). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 We might, for example, read Lunch Poems (1964) as a foreshadow- ing of the technological changes under way at the time, “information relics” that can still yield much insight (108). Here I think we have the stirrings of a mode of criticism that could combine the insights of book history, science and literature studies, aesthetics, new media, and poetics to create a new history of modern poetry as taking place within the material technologies and their social expressions. Stephens asks rhetorically, “Isn’t the avant-garde always technological?” (xv). In her astute study of the philosophical implications of software, Frabetti reminds us that digital technology encapsulates uncertainty: “software is always both conceptualized according to a metaphysical framework and capable of escaping it... the unexpected is always implicit in technology” (xxvii) Writing about poetry and digital technology is likely to remain a challenge, whether prospectively or historically. In the face of this volatility, Tietchen and Perlow take speculative risks that have to be taken. Perlow concludes his book with a suggestion that digital media are “not merely audio-visual but also gesturohaptic” (236). Tietchen ventures into object-oriented ontology in his conclusions, borrowing its authority to argue that even though the algorithms that drive so much of our computer Internet traffic are “partialities” however successfully they might “integrate us into a Web-based specta- cle” or “pseudoreality,” this reality is not in the end virtual but also an object in the world (142). These striking claims, that digital technology is embodied and actual, remind us that we are all a long way from a settled view of what has happened and that we must continue to ask difficult questions about our own entanglements, how they arose, and, as the metaphor of entanglement should remind us, whether our concepts, our metaphors and analogies, are sufficient.

Notes

1. From Gertrude Stein, Reflection on the Atomic Bomb (1946).

2. Menkman is sometimes credited as the originator of the glitch aesthetic and has certainly been one of its most articulate advocates.

3. Sutherland adds: “Not only are these people anonymous, but what matters most about them is their anonymity” (122). 188 Looking Behind the Screen

4. Sellars explains his pragmatist concept of knowledge: “The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or state as that of knowing, we are not giving an em- pirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (76).

5. See, for instance, Stevenson’s Facts and Values: Studies in Ethical Analysis (1963). See also the sympathetic account of his ideas in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which argues that Stevenson’s ideas anticipate the current metaethical Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 emotivism of Simon Blackburn and others (“Charles Leslie Stevenson,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 13 May 2015, web).

6. Tietchen cites Jentery Sayers’s definition of algocracy: “the programmatic treat- ment of the physical world in digital form” (7). This paraphrase may represent a speculative expansion of the concept of governance by algorithm, which may offer a logical procedure for diagramming and often managing a real-world phenomenon, but is not accurately describable as engaged in “reconstruction” as we usually understand it. Sayers attributes the idea to A. Aneesh; see Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (2006), especially p. 5.

Works Cited

Aneesh, A. Virtual Migration: The Frabetti, Federica. Software Theory: A Programming of Globalization. Duke Cultural and Philosophical Study. UP, 2006. Rowan & Littleﬁeld, 2014.

Boast, Robin. The Machine in the Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Ghost: Digitality and Its Consequences. Toward a Media History of Documents. Reaktion Books, 2017. Duke UP, 2014.

Brown, Nathan. The Limits of Heckman, Davin and James Fabrication: Materials Science, O’Sullivan. “‘Your Visit Will Leave Materialist Poetics. Fordham UP, 2017. a Permanent Mark’: Poetics in the Post-Digital Economy.” Tabbi, pp. Cayley, John. “The Advent of Aurature 95–112. and the End of (Electronic) Literature.” Tabbi, pp. 73–91. Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. North Atlantic Books, 1985. Chandra, Vikram. Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty. Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Graywolf P, 2014. Cloud. The MIT P, 2015.

Derrida, Jacques. Paper Machine. Jackson, Shelley. “I Hold It Toward Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford You: A Show of Hands.” Tabbi, pp. UP, 2005. 13–38.

Drucker, Johanna. What Is? Nine Jones, Nathan. “Glitch Poetics: The Epistemological Essays. Cuneiform P, Posthumanities of Error.” Tabbi, pp. 2013. 237–52. American Literary History 189

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Seic¸a, Alvaro. “The Freedom Changes: A Literary History of Word Adventure of Portuguese Processing. Harvard UP, 2016. Experimentalism and Kinetic Poetry.” Tabbi, pp. 165–79. Kline, Ronald R. The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the Information Age. Johns Hopkins UP, Philosophy of Mind. Harvard UP, 1997. 2015. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/32/1/169/5687270 by guest on 25 February 2020 Shaw, Lytle. Narrowcast: Poetry and Luckhurst, Roger. The Invention of Audio Research. Stanford UP, 2018. Telepathy: 1870–1901. Oxford UP, 2002. Soni, Jimmy and Rob Goodman. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Invented the Information Age. Simon & Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Schuster, 2017. Creative Writing. Harvard UP, 2009. Stephens, Paul. The Poetics of Menkman, Rosa. The Glitch Information Overload: From Gertrude Moment(um). E-book, Network Stein to Conceptual Writing.Uof Notebook Series, Institute of Network Minnesota P, 2015. Cultures. Colophon, 2011. Sutherland, Keston. “Close Miller, Cristanne. Introduction. Emily Writing.” Frank O’Hara Now: New Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Essays on the New York Poet, edited Them, edited by Miller. Belknap P of by Robert Hampson and Will Harvard U, 2016, pp. 1–22. Montgomery. Liverpool UP, 2010, pp. 120–30. Nahin, Paul J. The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Tabbi, Joseph, editor. The Bloomsbury Claude Shannon Created the Handbook of Electronic Literature. Information Age. Princeton UP, 2012. Bloomsbury, 2017.

Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media.U Tabbi, Joseph. “Relocating of Minnesota P, 2015. the Literary: In Networks, Knowledge Bases, Global Systems, Perlow, Seth. The Poem Electric: Material, and Mental Environments.” Technology and the American Lyric.U Tabbi, pp. 399–419. of Minnesota P, 2018. Tenen, Dennis. Plain Text: The Poetics Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. of Computation. Stanford UP, 2017. Routledge & Sons, 1934. Tietchen, Todd F. Technomodern Pressman, Jessica. Digital Modernism: Poetics: The American Literary Avant- Making It New in New Media. Oxford Garde at the Start of the Information UP, 2014. Age. U of Iowa P, 2018.