post-internet poetry

Published in Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives 5 (2013), Harry Burke’s ‘in respect to the real’ alludes to Allen Ginsberg’s ‘In Back of the Real’, in which Ginsberg’s speaker contemplates an “ugly” yellow flower in a “railyard in San Jose.” After wondering “how can we now say/‘i wandered desolate’”, as Ginsberg’s speaker did, Burke’s poem ends:

i sent bella a message (she is the flower of the world) of a rose which i decided to colour yellow not the yellow of ducklings or bellies or our great eastern future but my own r 255 g 255 b 0 yellow

RGB values represent how colours are displayed on screen by mixing red, green and blue. The intensity of each constituent primary colour is specified by a number between 0 and 255, and so here the speaker’s “own” colour is the maximum of red and green: the brightest, simplest yellow. Whereas the dirtiness, the worldliness, of Ginsberg’s “flower of industry” allows our reading to convert it into symbol, Burke’s speaker attempts to refuse complications of his message. The interruption of the RGB numbers in the final lines, with “yellow” withheld until the end, marks the distance that this perfect, digital colour puts between conventional poetic maneuvers and Burke’s rose, using computer language to say what other words can't. It has exchanged its old limits for new ones. Expressed in RGB, the yellow can’t be any brighter

Ginsberg’s poem, itself playing amongst Wordsworth’s daffodils, feels like a Romantic consciousness doing a warm-up exercise, or attempting it with the dirtied materials in view. Burke’s, on the other hand, asks whether it’s necessary to be lonely, or rather to aestheticise the experience of loneliness and solitary contemplation in an age of connectivity. Instead of the fiction of soliloquy, the event of Burke’s poem is the act of communication with which it ends: the message “of a rose” sent to “bella”. With reference to the previous poem, ‘in respect to the real’ shows how our relationships with others, and how our cultivation of our selves, are dependent on the methods we have to exercise them. It demonstrates how lyric subjectivity is a product of its socioeconomic context, and how it negotiates for space with the technologies that enable it.

When it generally appears in anthologies or in surveys of contemporary writing, the influence of the internet on poetry is shown to have produced writing that fetishizes the web’s strangeness and novelty, poetry alive with excitement at the new possibilities offered by networked computing at the start of the new millennium. The two strands typically presented are flarf and conceptualism, with writers such as Drew Gardner, Sharon Mesmer and K. Silem Mohammad in the former camp and Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place in the latter. These writers produce work that is collected and collaged from online sources, as statements about the internet’s vast, exhilarating, unreadable excess of the boring and the profane. Flarfists create kitschy, outrageous, burlesque poems from the results of Google searches. Nada Gordon’s ‘Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas’, for instance, begins:

Oddly enough, there is a “Unicorn Pleasure Ring” in existence. Research reveals that Hitler lifted the infamous swastika from a unicorn emerging from a colorful rainbow.

Conceptualists, somewhat similarly, elevate the technical mechanisms of the digital circulation of words—typing, copying, printing—into conceptual elements of composition, exploring the nature of language as material. Noah Eli Gordon’s Inbox (2006), for instance, is a book-length poem created from the body of every email in his inbox, in one unbroken paragraph. For both flarf and conceptualism, cyberspace provides fodder for a detached, curatorial poet to process and collage, as if in thrall to this new reading experience. And encouraged by the formerly nerdy nature of the internet and the outsider status consciously sought by these poets, this writing is generally compartmentalised into specialised and unthreatening peripheral categories, such as ‘cyberpoetry’ or ‘digital poetics’. The internet’s presence is reduced to an extension of 20th century avant-garde practice, as a set of compositional strategies, in a cursory acknowledgement of the information age as a matter for the squabbling children of Language poetics.

Poetry’s dot-com bubble, these conceptualist provocateurs and flarf hooligans, was a response to the conditions at the new millennium, a techno-utopian vision of the thrilling brave new world online. But the economic and technological structures of the internet have undergone significant change since Y2K. Much of this comes under the developments behind ‘web 2.0’, whereby technologies such as Ajax (introduced in 2004) allow a website to become more like a dynamic application than a static document, encouraging user participation and interaction, updating effectively in real time. These developments encouraged the increasingly social web that we recognise today: Facebook was launched in 2004, Youtube in 2005, Twitter and Tumblr in 2006, and so on. Facebook is now the second most visited website (after Google) with over a billion users. Social media are now more popular than porn. What’s more, the first iPhone appeared in 2007, moving smartphones beyond the business market and into the hands of more than a quarter of the world’s population by the present day. By 2010, internet use in the developed world had more than trebled in a decade, and the internet had changed from being something one dialled from a computer in a study to something always-on and in the pocket. As the cloud replaces the superhighway, the internet has become something that passes over us rather than something we surf over, something intervening throughout our work and social lives, something that attempts to know us better than we know ourselves. And so as the boundary between off and online disappears and as the internet flattens into reality, the novelty, fear and excitement fade. The distinction between the author and the internet disintegrates, as the internet becomes no longer the source of waste material for a detached poet to process, but a collaborator in the active, endless work of self-creation and expression. It is no longer a separate place to go for information, but the medium in which we are ourselves.

In visual art, the term ‘post-internet,’ albeit with some modishness, has been used to describe the work arising from this context, as contemporary artists acknowledge the ubiquity of the internet in all aspects of artistic creation and circulation. Marisa Olson, credited with coining the term, describes it neatly in terms of the artist’s everyday life: after going on the internet, she makes art. More specifically, Gene McHugh defines ‘post-internet’ in relation to the shift described above:

The Internet, of course, was not over. That’s wasn’t the point. Rather, let’s say this: what we mean when we say “Internet” changed and “post Internet” served as shorthand for this change.

So, what changed? What about what we mean when we say “Internet” changed so drastically that we can speak of “post Internet” with a straight face?

On some general level, the rise of social networking and the professionalization of web design reduced the technical nature of network computing, shifting the Internet from a specialized world for nerds and the technologically-minded, to a mainstream world for nerds, the technologically-minded and grandmas and sports fans and business people and painters and everyone else. Here comes everybody.

Furthermore, any hope for the Internet to make things easier, to reduce the anxiety of my existence, was simply over—it failed—and it was just another thing to deal with. What we mean when we say “Internet” became not a thing in the world to escape into, but rather the world one sought escape from…sigh…It became the place where business was conducted, and bills were paid.  It became the place where people tracked you down.

In the last few years I’ve been exploring how this context and outlook is also reflected in contemporary poets, especially those who, if born around or since the late 80s, have likely not known a world without the internet: writers such as Gabby Bess, Steve Roggenbuck, Melissa Broder, Tao Lin, Patricia Lockwood, Mira Gonzalez, Harry Burke, Sophie Collins, Crispin Best, and Sam Riviere, amongst others. These writers produce innovative, exciting work that is profoundly influenced by living on or with the internet in the 2010s, as the conditions of a poem, or for a poem, have changed.

An example to start would be Crispin Best’s ‘if you don’t forward this poem to 10 people i will crawl out of your toilet while you sleep and i’m gonna be pretty ticked off’, published in the 2014 anthology I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best, edited by Harry Burke. Best’s poem starts with the speaker and another “playing the intel jingle” on a piano, joyfully quoting a marketer’s tune. The second half of the poem then runs:

we stop i pet your head and say “we stopped” and “that’s ok” and “girl you put the baller in ballerina”

i feel like do leaf insects know other leaf insects aren’t just leaves and it’s late

A nervous love poem, the speaker appears to keep talking to defer an overwhelming question. The present tense space sets up frames for its own statements, as the poem exists in an uncertain position between the action it relates and the jokes it is able to generate from them. The speaker delivers his lines whilst winking at the audience, always sort of putting on a voice, even if it's his own. As this moves from direct to something like indirect speech, the rhetorical question about “leaf insects,” discarded as quickly as it is introduced, is given as something the speaker ‘feels like’, as if its relation to the drama of the poem is in its emotional meaning, as if the line is a self-contained poem in itself.

In part the hyperactiveness of this poetry derives from the internet’s attention economy, but it also reflects the changed relationships between speaker, voice and poem in post-internet poetry. With the web 2.0 technologies described above, the internet presents a flattening of the distance between consumption and production, between composition and publication, forming a closed loop with the potential for almost immediate feedback. Poets accustomed to working within a textual vernacular produce poems that are acutely aware of their medium, that seem to work within a continuous, immediate, on-going present, a sort of self-enclosed, self-directed free indirect discourse, where the speaker anticipates, repeats and frames their utterances. These poems are continually looking for space for more text within or without their current frame. They are always self-consciously ‘quoting.’ Instead of stable voices, whose emotion recollected in tranquility has been processed and ordered to emphasise epiphanic resolution, insight and memory, these poets present speakers actively in process and acutely aware of their own textual self-construction.

In this tendency Crispin Best perhaps sits most closely to the poets grouped in and around the label ‘alt lit,’ primarily young, American writers for whom writing is an extension of, or even indistinguishable from, their social media presence. (Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez have a book of “Selected Tweets” forthcoming this year.) Steve Roggenbuck, perhaps better known for his Youtube videos, is a central figure; he recently co-edited an anthology of alt lit-related writers, The Yolo Pages. He has 17,000 followers on Twitter. Roggenbuck’s 2013 ebook of “poems and selfies”, IF U DONT LOVE THE MOON YOUR AN ASSHOLE, includes lines like the following:

im pissed off “band of horses” is not actual horses. what will it take to get some god damned actual horse’s into the studio because i am willing to do what it takes. i want to have a gigantic bird mask on my face everywhere i go. WHAT WOULD U SAY if u knew it was your last comunication with anyone, for ever? my favorite moment from the office is when michael scott quits and tells david wallace You have no idea how high i can fly. The World Series of Christianity. a person at this party recognized me from the internet, they seemed upset that i exist IRL. im not totaly sure how to “double dog dare” but im hangin out with 2 dogs right now im thinkin of goin for it

A previous set of poems, DOWNLOAD HELVETICA FOR FREE.COM, was entirely created from his own instant messaging logs, as if sourcing flarf from himself. In the above he is producing it directly, with an irrepressible chattiness that feels potentially endless, veering from near sarcastic to earnest. But unlike flarf, there's no distinction between internet and poet, between source and curator: rather than going off to the internet for material, the writing comes from the internet in the first instance. And whilst flarf’s compositional process, this distinction, allows the poet to disown and exploit its kitschy silliness to amuse or offend, Roggenbuck instead uses indeterminate irony to achieve something similar, with droll exaggeration allowing him to not (quite) take responsibility for his words.

Just as the serial work of social media trains us to interpret messages in reference to their sender, the central drama of post-internet poetry is that of disclosure, confession and self-creation. A crucial development of the internet since 2000, concurrent to the rise of social media, is a decline in anonymity, one of the reason for excitement and nervousness with the early internet. (A popular cartoon in The New Yorker from 1993 had the caption “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”) Marketing companies (and post-9/11 governments) have a keen interest in our lives as data, in our activities, circumstances and consumer preferences. Facebook incentivises disclosure so that we may be better sold. But any relief and reassurance in being known, of having our identities reaching out across networks, brings the new anxiety of maintaining an authentic, original, irreducible self in the face of machines that anticipate our self-creation. One strategy of eluding this is with the mischievous, playful irony as utilised by Best and Roggenbuck above, an interpretative shield to protect the poem from a single reading back down to the author. But another is in more impersonal methods of expression, eschewing or at least complicating direct speech from a lyric ‘I’.

A useful, and final, example here are Sophie Collins' unsettling centos in I Love Roses When They're Past Their Best, from which the anthology gets its title. ‘kissing’ runs:

I remember the neck curls (limp and damp as tendrils) symbols, and secret names before I knew there were men or improvised concoctions with tequila

ridiculous and lovely, I weigh you now against the good you’ve done

It was composed by searching the title word in the Poetry Archive website and taking one line from each of the results. But unlike flarf or conceptualism, it doesn’t foreground the compositional process by re-contextualising non-poetic language. By taking words from other poems, ‘kissing’ is not all that different from a traditional cento, or from Collins’ own writing. In an interview, she mentions how producing them felt like “the process of simply writing a poem,” and goes on to liken the centos to stories that we come to confuse with our memories, that we incorporate into our own personal narratives. As the work of the speaker scales between what the lines say and how they are collected, depending on how we think of the poem, it isn’t ever  entirely clear who’s speaking. We remember that our words are always somebody else’s. By making the number of results the determinant of length, the centos are statements of the limits of the Poetry Archive's inclusions, but also of the print canon beyond it, as the internet comes between the poem and its tradition. Further, the internet becomes an element of our reading, as, when we go about the business of interpretation, we begin to incorporate the functioning of the Poetry Archive’s search algorithm in our idea of the author as delimiter of meaning. The technology and its operation here determine the boundaries of how we read, as rather than being a subject or main element in a process, the internet is an ubiquitous filter, medium, container, intercessor.