#post-text future

Boredom of words. Ingenuity, originality, emancipation — sure — but the methods of concrete poetry and digital text suggest that traditional formation of words are relics in a constantly reorganizing world. Static becomes dynamic. Concrete combines thought and image, restoring creative agency to the poet from standard forms of lyric and verse. By reducing language to the word, concrete poetry liberates communication. Word combined with image translates to a symbol as powerful as logical grammar. Novelty aids in this process of symbolic freedom, proposing imaginative reconceptions of commonalities and modifying the world to fit individual feeling (as suggested by Marinetti). Even the move away from the literary “I” is not universal enough; with a global, online society as audience, the “I” is bloated with potential perspective, opinion, and alienation. In place of a detailed, personal experience of free verse is instead an eye-catcher poetry. As fast, as transient, as flashy as everything else. Easily translatable, easily commercialized, too.

Today’s poetry is interactively simultaneous: reader must click, scroll, touch, drag, press, hold, follow, watch, and play. Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES presents a cinematic poetry, that is sound poetry and visual poetry and performance poetry and concrete poetry encased in a video. “The Jew’s Daughter” rewards patience with completion for the reader who experiences the entire page before hovering to the blue word. In these ways, poetry becomes environment. Beyond words and pages, each element within the poet’s defined space enters the poetic sphere because technology makes each element customizable. Digital poets necessarily expand the limits of the poem in order to contend with the Youtube videos, Facebook posts, emoji-ed text messages, CGI-ed medias, and generally accessibility of entertainment that threatens traditional — comparatively “boring” — text.

Ricky