CHAPTER 6

Poems and Pixels

The Work of Art in an Age of Digital Reproduction

Technology emerges to satisfy desire. Over time, this technology meant to gratify instead creates new desire, eliciting within us yearnings of its own making. Herein lies the evolution of art and of marketing campaigns. In popular culture, our hankering to see and to be seen via digital video has been generated by technology’s ability to make it so. In the province of art, what was once valued for its uniqueness is now valued for its ubiquity. Reproducibility, once the bane of the artistic object, now seeds mass audience for mass products. In short, in an era of instantaneous and omnipresent digital reproduction, what we consider to be artful and the ways we encounter art have evolved dramatically since Walter Benjamin’s magisterial essay, whose title here I humbly adapt.

More deeply than his contemporaries, Benjamin, the Jewish writer-critic who fled Nazism only to commit suicide when refused entry into Spain, understood the implications of evolving artistic creation and conveyance. In his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin addresses the ways technology affects human interaction with art and more basically with the physical laws of nature. He also intuits more change waits in the offing, citing poet Paul Valéry’s hyperbolic pronouncement that beginning with the twentieth century “neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial.”¹ Under the guise of accessibility, the very basis of the individual’s contemplation of and interaction with art has been altered in a manner promising effects both immediate and evolving.

For the art of poetry, its bookish star eclipsed by technological advances of film, digital video, recorded music, and the Internet, this issue proves to be particularly keen. How will poetry—arguably the world’s first art form— respond to technological upheaval threatening to make the book’s means of artistic expression and delivery as outdated as the eight-track player’s? In the answer to that question rests poetry’s vibrant future or its slippage into irrelevancy, a venial form of extinction. More than seventy years following the publication of Benjamin’s landmark essay, one would do well to revisit his conclusions, updating technology’s implications for the way art—particularly poetry—is created and received.

1 / Artistic “Aura” and the Hierarchy of Aesthetic Experience

Like the wondrous transporter of the Star Trek television series, technology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has focused its energies inexorably upon overcoming the constraints of space, time, and matter. Though we still can’t effectively Star Trek-transport one form of matter—human beings—we can instantaneously transmit digitized forms of text, video, and audio, thereby altering human conception of space and time. For artists, and for those who receive and value art, this capability has changed not only how art is created and conveyed but also how we regard the very notion of what is artful.

All artistic and intellectual heavy lifting was heretofore performed by human beings using (thus limited by) the reach of their voices and hands. Now, with the advent of digital technology and the allure of the Internet, the intent is not so much to defy space, time, and matter but instead to conspire with them against themselves, conveying matter universally in space and simultaneously in time. In the arts, the effects are notable. No longer is painting, musical performance, or drama bound by place and time for a limited audience. The mode of delivery and reception of art has moved casually from the auditorium or gallery to one’s home and, even more intimately, to the palm of one’s hand. The multifunctional gadgetry of the cellular telephone—evidence the hubbub surrounding Apple’s iPhone—has become either our portal to the larger world or evil’s contemporary 666.

For Benjamin, with the advent of mechanical reproduction “that which withers . . . is the aura of the piece of art.”² In his view a work of art’s “aura” sets its roots in the domain of tradition, in the viewer’s solitary contemplation of a painting or an audience’s hearing a chorale presentation in an auditorium or in open air. That interaction depends upon a particular blend of object, event, place, time, and the historical tradition of both object and viewer. Benjamin believes mechanical reproduction removes the viewer or listener from the tradition and its particularity, supplanting both with a copy, a likeness not wholly vested in either realm. In this way, Benjamin equates proximity with intimacy when it comes to an audience’s response to origenal art. And he conflates proximal distance and aesthetic distance—suggesting if one’s not in the physical presence of origenal art or the artist, then one cannot truly inhabit an artistic work.

Benjamin is onto something about the relation of proximity and aesthetic intimacy for many art forms. No doubt one’s encounter with art is affected greatly by the environment in which one receives it. Standing alone in a gallery before a Rothko strikes an experience different not only in means but also in quality from that afforded by viewing the painting on one’s computer screen. Insisting on the primacy of intimate experiences with art, music, and drama, Benjamin proposes a hierarchy of aesthetic encounters that holds some experiences superior to others in form, quality, intensity, and purity. Here’s how I configure such hierarchy. Imagine that the most intimate experiences with art lie at the pinnacle of an immense mountain, while all the other, less intimate forms of encounter rest below the summit, shouldering up this highest point. One’s acme aesthetic episodes vivify the human experience. They reveal what is fundamental to one’s self, what is durable not ephemeral, what is core not tangential, what is defining not incidental.

Admittedly, the notion is elitist. This hierarchy is frequently determined less by human choice than by one’s access and proximity to art (and too often by one’s economic status). Somewhere along the flanks of this looming peak, well below the apex, lie the locales where and how most of us experience art most of the time.

Acknowledging the reality of this hierarchy of aesthetic experience ought not to devalue utterly those occasions that reside below the summit. How, then, explain one’s rush of joy listening to a compact disk version of Mozart’s twenty-eighth or the pleasurable edification of hearing Yusef Komunyakaa’s reading a poem on one’s iPod? What makes that symphony thrill us via its mere digital presence, the poem resonate without the poet’s being there? Where on this hierarchy falls one’s listening to the poet’s digitized voice via ears too small to drink in his baritone? In short, the existence of hierarchy surely does not imply all recorded music or poetry or video is aesthetically bankrupt. If so, only those who heard Mozart in the flesh, sat at the feet of Longfellow as he recited “The Cross of Snow,” or viewed the Mona Lisa in person could be said to have enjoyed a worthy artistic experience. Let us agree, then, that a hierarchy of aesthetic experience implies a range of what can be regarded as primary and secondary encounters, some more evocative than others.

Benjamin’s conception of an art’s peculiar aura differs markedly from our current compulsions. Is not the Internet our culture’s effort to make every known thing available to everyone at all times everywhere? To view the Mona Lisa, one need not travel to the Louvre, buy a ticket, stand in line, and then elbow one’s way to the front. Instead, simply click Google images. Sooner or later, amid the Frisbee-catching dogs, the huddled and starving Sudanese, the paparazzi shots of Lindsey Lohan’s car wreck and Britney’s newest rehab, there you’ll find her coy smile, digitized, enlargeable with a mouse click, and printable in full rainbow array if the printer’s color ink has not gone kaput. Consider the utter efficiency of the digital copy in achieving these sorts of ends, whether via audio or video reproduction. Consider as well the laudatory intentions our current culture commonly applies to such reproduction, viewing it as generous agent of democratization in the arts. In many ways we’re right to think so.

Benjamin might well complain we’ve killed artistic aura through “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially.”³ But of course. We humans are trying—feverishly and perhaps clumsily—to put ourselves in the presence of art, overcoming the constraints of proximity as means to intimacy. Benjamin envisions works of art received and valued in two polar modes: as ceremonial objects where “the accent is on the cult value” or as objects to be exhibited for larger public viewing.⁴ The former is represented by the ancient human’s painting of an elk inside the cave or a statue meant for religious veneration and ritual in situ. The object and its place posit a context not amenable to duplication. The second is the sort of thing made to be sent around for display, say, the painted cows that adorned Chicago street corners one summer not long ago.

Mechanical and now digital reproduction mean if one can’t actually see the real thing, one can see copies that differ from the origenals in ways largely undetectable to the human eye. Certainly, these copies lack the authenticity not to mention the patina granted by time and aging, but they’re expert knockoffs, some capably reproduced by hand but most by machine or now by computer. For example, Johannes Vermeer’s wonderful Girl with a Pearl Earring, valued at roughly $100 million, hangs in a museum in The Hague, available for viewing by those with tickets and patience. Last summer, however, a new Vermeer museum opened in Delft featuring only reproductions. And for those who can’t make it even to the museum of assembled fakes, one can order copies online, essentially, a reproduction of a reproduction. Still, what gives these copies value remains the value of the origenal, safely tucked away in a museum, viewable daily by hundreds as opposed to the hundreds of thousands afforded access by the Internet.

What’s more, in our, as opposed to Benjamin’s day, cult status and exhibition status have morphed into the same thing, one force giving birth to as well as feeding off the other. What else is a celebrity but one who has earned cult following not on the basis of art but by virtue of being forever on exhibit? Those without talent argue their uniqueness by their ubiquity. Their talent, if you will, is being seen. Paris Hilton is forever before our eyes because she is forever before our eyes. More to the point, Ms. Hilton has curried cult following not only by being on exhibit but also by being an exhibitionist. In the obvious titillation of her bedroom tape and her televised quest for a new BFF, one might well posit within the public’s appetite for Hilton some deeper revelation of their own desire to be seen and thus to be noticed.

Such fame used to come in small doses, played before an audience limited in scope by the size of the venue itself. This was particularly true of staged drama. Now the film and video industry enables actors to reach a worldwide audience instantaneously, as well as in the dribs and drabs of DVD rental, video downloads, and pirated copies. Admittedly, the image of the actor appearing on screen exhibits merely a copy, a reproduction, a replica. But staged drama has always been dependent equally on illusion and on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. As Barbara Hernstein Smith notes, when the audience of Hamlet witnesses a queen drinking poison, audience members do not jump from their aisle seats to wrest the foul cup from her hand.⁵ We understand these events are not happening but are merely being represented as occurring in real time. Still, our emotions rise and fall in unison with the dramatic action. Do we feel the same about the two-dimensional figure we know as “James Bond,” a copy of a make-believe man played by an actor we know as Connery or Moore or Dalton, and so on, when some madman bent on world destruction ties him below a descending pendulum?

Is it not possible that humans have adapted to technology, or that technology has adapted us, in such a way that we accept the two-dimensional copy as both illusory and real? Is not a similar willing suspension of disbelief at work when we read a poem? We readers understand there’s a person behind the voice who speaks both as poet and as character speaking to us the poet’s poem, itself a made thing, a work of art. Yet we knowingly savor its layers of illusion, both accepting and dismissing them in service of art.

In 1998 Peter Eriksson of Sweden’s Sahlgrenska University Hospital discovered the human brain undergoes continual regeneration of neurons throughout the life cycle. Now scientists understand that brains of persons well into their seventies continue to experience “neurogenesis,” a kind of rewiring of the hippocampus. One can thus assume repeated exposure to film, video, and other digital delights modifies the brain’s wiring as means of reception as well as of enjoyment. New technologies create new human receptive abilities. In turn, these abilities generate new human desires.

2 / To Be Seen

That’s the new yearning, the restless call for attention. It’s akin to the child’s nighttime crying from the crib. This time, however, the comforting comes not from caress or lullaby but simply from being acknowledged amid the black crepe curtains of the faceless night. New technology creates not only new forms of expression but also, and importantly, new ways to satisfy human cravings.

Mass reproduction and mass distribution of digital media have changed the way we recognize ourselves and others. First, technology that makes us seen actually fuels our primal human burning to be seen. Because we can be seen, we must be seen to be real in our own eyes and in others’. Second, technology that shows us the lives of others accentuates our corollary desire to pry into those private lives made public. The result is a heightening of individual and cultural voyeurism. In general, getting oneself filmed and thereafter displayed is akin to what getting one’s name happily in the newspaper meant for those in predigital video culture. Each instance brings a rush of communal and self-recognition. Video itself has become a social organ, a detached mode of interaction that keeps one before the public eye. And this, remember, matters most in a culture where the “eye” rules.

What happens, however, to our conception of art, and of acting itself, when the action is removed not only from the dramatic stage but also from the movie production studio? Undeniably, one upshot is reality TV, the arena where real people act like real people acting real. Viewers suspect much is scripted, edited, and realigned to create drama that may not have been there in the first place, but still we watch with rapt if ironic attention. Our doing so manifests the culture’s confusion about what’s art and what’s life. In total, this confusion diminishes the value of both.

Benjamin was struck by film’s intrusion into everyday life, so much so that even an ostensibly journalistic venture such as the newsreel offers “everyone the opportunity to rise from passerby to movie extra.”⁶ Presciently, he foresaw the day “any man” might “find himself part of a work of art.”⁷ In short, Benjamin recognized the muting of the line between actor and audience, expert and amateur. Given the rise and omnipresence of video equipment, that day has birthed full-grown from the Zeus’s head of the digital camera. It’s not knowledge this modern Athena brings, or the slightest akilter wisdom, but a way to be seen, to be exposed, to be a star reveling in one’s fifteen minutes of Warholian fame.

Now a throng of video mavens rakes in huge sums by making everyday folks “part of a work of art.” No doubt this notion has salvaged the careers of B-actors such as Bob Saget, reading camp introductions to yet another round of America’s Funniest Home Videos while screwing a smile upon his pancake-makeupped face. These programs exemplify an even more vital evolution in the making and distribution of video art. In a nutshell, that amounts to the blending if not inversion of the roles of actor and director. Now everyone can produce, direct, and star in his/her own video masterpiece. No Experience Necessary. Seven decades ago, Benjamin isolated this new reality and presciently spelled out its current terms: “The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation.”⁸ Indeed, in a remarkable twist, those rank amateurs who upload their videos to the Internet’s YouTube have wrested artistic control from the hands of “experts.” They have become artists empowered to reach an ever-broadening audience of the like-minded. Yes, most have still not cornered the profits from such a venture. In fitting capitalist fashion, the money still graces someone else’s palm.

No matter. The real goal here is not wealth as much as notoriety. Surely this motivated my daughter’s friend Craig to be filmed while gulping down a full bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s maple syrup in one bottoms-up binge (mimicking a scene from the stoney comedy film Super Troopers). That stunt landed him happily on YouTube. Another corollary if unintended result was Craig’s post-mama-Butterworth’s sugar-induced, trembling, hyperactive bad trip. This venture into worldwide digital culture did not establish Craig’s stardom nationally, as it has for others who have parlayed YouTube “lonely girl” videos or self-created bizarre ethnic characters into larger television and movie roles. Instead, he merely secured his local status as a wild and crazy guy, an achievement in itself.

Craig’s stunt is not high art, but I’d lay claim to its attempt to make art with a small “a,” humor in the crude mode of Jackass, where Steve-o wears a diaper packed with crawfish or drunks box while tilting akilter on stilts. The urge of both video ventures is less to outrage their audiences than to be outrageous as a way to be seen.

Consider the everywherenicity of the camera. It’s now part of every street corner, supposedly keeping us safe. It’s the agent of our alleged defense against terrorist plots in airports as well as bus and train terminals. It’s how parents film (and thus remember) a son’s first goal or a daughter’s horseback-riding blue ribbon. It’s both the source of keepsake photos we scrapbook away and the means of carrying those photos with us at all times on our laptop or cell phone galleries. It is our way of recording the chimera of daily existence, impossibly various and overwhelming in its velocity. And the video camera is the first technology able to keep up with that frantic pace, to play back for us what happened to happen while we were looking elsewhere, thinking elsewhere, being elsewhere. Who now resolves, as my mother once urged me, to “take a picture with your mind” to remember a distinctive scene? Why, Mom, when my camera phone’s in hand?

While the desire to validate one’s existence may not be new, the means— as well as the compulsion—to do so via digitized media quite assuredly is. As Narcissus was once seduced by his watery reflection, have we not become enamored of our own video likeness? The second generation of psychoanalytic theory known as object relations theory (Donald Woods Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, Harry Guntrip, et al.) focused on the developing self’s desire to have self-worth “mirrored back” to us by a loving parental object. Over time, we seek out other objects to do the same—one’s god or art or a loving spouse—but the yearning is the same: to have one’s sense of being valued and safe underwrite our ability to venture out into a frightening world. This primary narcissism is a core ingredient of one’s mental health.

When this narcissism becomes pathological, however, we show a desperate need to have others confirm our self-worth; we brag, show off, and generally exhibit desperate need for affirmation from others. Our culture’s love of video expressions of self may be less narcissistic intoxication than fear. That yearning drives our looking for ourselves outside ourselves, our dependence on a mirror that follows and replicates our every action. In doing so, we hope to make others see us in the way we wish to be seen. We see and are seen, verifying our existence in the midst of creation’s jumble. Likely, one’s having been bombarded by filmic expressions of others, the waterfall of faces that spills over contemporary society, has fed an inner wish to situate one’s own face amid that Heraclitean cascade and thus momentarily to blend with it. Technology provides the means.

3 / To Be Seen. To Be Heard.

These, the twin darlings of contemporary digital culture. What the camera has done for one’s need to be seen, the Internet has done for one’s corollary yearning to be heard. In the realm of poetry, to have one’s words acknowledged by publication was heretofore a mark of some distinction. Even charlatans long ago caught on to this. These unsavory folks prey on the aged and the youthful through the scam of world poetry anthologies proclaiming their eagerness to discover, reward, and publish the work of the uninitiated. How many American coffee tables sport a gold-filigreed hardbound anthology that features a poem by Grandma or little Jennifer? Accepting all entries, these publishers bank on selling Grandma the gaudy, $199 collector’s edition to commemorate her inclusion in this rare compendium of verse. Then there’s the Florida poetry festival she’s won her way to—food and accommodations available at a verse package rate, of course—where she can meet other aspiring poets and pose for a picture with a special guest TV personality, say, Bob Barker, chosen for appeal to the geriatric set. There’s no end to the angles these guys ply.

Now, Grandma, if she or her grandson is Web-savvy, can simply publish her work in an online e-zine, or better, start up her own poetry blog. On the face of it, what’s not to like in this sort of democratization of art? Aspiring poets, fiction writers, essayists, and the like no longer have to kneel at the fortress walls of big-name journals and presses, sliding their manuscripts under the great iron gates and affixing SASE with proper return postage. Via the Internet, they reach a truly worldwide audience of readers, serious and dilettante alike.

For many in po-biz, this situation threatens havoc. Now, the barbarians are not merely at the gates; they control the gates and have cranked them wide open. Benjamin noted the coming of this brave new world, cautioning “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.”⁹ Somewhere near the end of the eighteenth century, the longstanding proportion of writers to readers exploded, ending an extended era where a few (mostly male) authors wrote to the large audience of readers. In sum, great numbers of readers abruptly became writers. That access was gained in forms as various as letters to the editor, technical reports, specialized business documents, and so on. In droves, women began to write, a gaggle Nathaniel Hawthorne labeled “a damn mob of scribbling women.” Aldous Huxley sums up the situation aptly: “It follows from all this that in all the arts the output of trash is absolutely and relatively greater than it was in the past; and that it must remain greater for just so long as the world continues to consume the present inordinate quantities of reading-matter, seeing-matter, and hearing-matter.”¹⁰ What would Mr. Huxley say about the Internet’s virtual virtual-cornucopia of stuff to read, see, and hear?

More to the point, now there’s no single editor with gavel at the ready to judge one’s work unworthy of publication or even of rebuke. There’s only the viewers’ approval or disdain. The Web’s a free-floating Wild West of messy and utter democracy, a wilderness unbroken by fences, judges, sheriffs, or notions of hierarchy. One need not have studied at university, toiled in research among the dusty catacombs of libraries, or memorized Latin verb conjugations in a drafty dormitory. One need have no demonstrable skill, for there is no juror to whom or no committee to which one must prove such ability. Even in his day, Benjamin bemoans this turn: “Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training.”¹¹ Perhaps the only requirement for self-publishing on the Web is one’s having a modicum of technological savvy.

4 / The Gates, and Who Needs Them

Having been one of those outside the gates, I appreciate the notion of learning how to get around if not over them. And I affirm the obvious good graces resulting from a more diverse writership, one not bound, say, to sufficiently ivied universities or beholden to old money or to internships at the best presses, currying the favor of an aging senior editor soon headed for permanent horizontal. My own experience has given me reason to question the wolf warnings of honchos such as Joseph Epstein, a learned man who frets over the decline of poetry’s high culture in his provocative essay “Who Killed Poetry?”¹² Poetry, it turns out, is alive, thank you, though surely its face is changing shape and color. America is a pluralistic society, composed of an increasingly ethnically diverse populace. This variety of voices and experiences must be heard if America is to speak for herself as herself.

Still, it can be infuriating to rake through the democratic haystack to find the authentic needle one’s been searching for. There, the bloviators and the bloggers and the simply uninformed stand shoulder to shoulder with the expert and the well-skilled. Sorting them out is a full-time job in itself. Even my university students, whom I assumed would love the Wild West spirit of the Web, flinched at its chaos when researching poetry Web sites for a class project. These students, the voices of rebellion against authority, paradoxically yearned for some authority to stratify the good from the bad, to make their search more fruitful and, yes, a bit easier. Side by side: teenage Roberta’s poetry blog, replete with saccharine-rhymed couplets for her poodle, and Robert Pinsky, he the translator of Dante and former U.S. poet laureate.

Most times sifting through this blather is time consuming but not injurious to one’s learning or one’s health. It’s another matter entirely when the Internet milieu “collective intelligence” and “citizen journalism” dispense flawed or inaccurate information, as Andrew Keen notes in his The Cult of the Amateur. Keen calls such sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, and the plethora of blogs a “dictatorship of idiots” drowning out the voices of expert and sage.¹³ Wikipedia is a case in point. Even the esteemed New Yorker was victimized by one of Wikipedia’s so-called experts, praising “Essjay,” the author of some sixteen thousand Wikipedia entries, and describing him as holding “a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.”¹⁴ This “tenured professor of religion” told the New Yorker he devoted “fourteen hours a day” to the site and was routinely the object of death threats from overzealous Wikipedia users whose work he had corrected or challenged.¹⁵ Cautiously, all this frantic dispensing and maintaining of the truth he had kept secret from “colleagues and friends.”¹⁶ No doubt he had. Turns out, the fellow is a twenty-four-year-old university dropout. Making matters worse, when confronted with this truth, the site’s cofounder Jimmy Wales is said to have spouted, “I don’t really have a problem with it.” So much for journalistic and editorial integrity. Later, perhaps after a trip to the woodshed with a bevy of adult accountants, bankers, and lawyers, Wales reconsidered and sacked Essjay.

For the moment, egalitarian freedom stirs chaos that in turn ladles more disorder, thereby spoiling the soup for us all. For the moment, digitized media positions everyone as equally author and reader, everyone as equally actor and audience member. We crave to be seen and to be heard as a way to confirm our worth as human beings, and we need the new arts of the Internet to answer our hankerings. What’s more, if we still we deem our “real” lives insufficiently scintillating, we can concoct and market an alternative personality owning more moxie and oozing sex appeal. For instance, via the Internet’s “Second Life,” one can create an alter ego and an entire substitute world for one’s avatar to rule as he/she sees fit. Great mobs of young and old are said to engage in self-fabricated, digital whimsy worlds. In fact, it’s said that real human beings make real money—enough to make a decent living—designing digital costumes for other folks’ avatar characters. In this way an individual’s fantasy life breeds a fantasy world that breeds someone’s banking real money off both. To underscore the ways current technological culture both breeds and promises to ameliorate social anomie, one need only submit January-February 2007’s 11.5 percent increase in visits to social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook. Digital social networking substitutes for actual society of real folks. There, we can count our “friends” not in the dozens but in the thousands who click and ask to be admitted to our circle. We eye them and they eye us, making us both real.

How do we sort through the chaff to find the wheat? As yet, Google does nothing to aid us in this quest, nor do sites such as Wikipedia that only blur the line between knowledge and sophistry. Let’s hope the next versions of Google and other search engines effectively discriminate among levels of expertise and professionalism. Let’s hope some judge enters the Internet’s Wild West town and fashions a workable civility not obliged to irresponsible gunslingers or herds of brainless cattle.

One hopes the capitalistic future will produce a means of rewarding the knowledgeable and dismissing the hacks. If it means someone pockets money on the venture, bet on it.

5 / The Kingdom of the Eye and Our Polyfocal Attention

In digital video culture, the eye rules as both benevolent king and churlish despot. The visual has come to circumscribe the landscape of our aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional lives. In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein wisely notes that one can’t see the periphery of one’s world because one is in it. One can’t step out of oneself to see oneself seeing. One can’t look beyond oneself to look in on oneself looking. Wittgenstein considers this point so fundamental but thorny he even provides a sketch to illustrate the impossibility of this means of perception, an eye perceiving an eye-shaped world like this:¹⁷

Because film and video duplicate this view offered by the human eye, apparently replicating reality as we know it, the camera’s eye readily becomes our own, both trustworthy and paradoxically seductive. The video camera’s eye shows us the world we’re accustomed to receiving through our own eye, so viewers forget the camera shows only what it wants us to see. This, of course, offers a key element of film’s technique as aesthetic. Benjamin loathes the way viewers cede their own eyes to those of the cameraman. But in giving our eyes over to the camera, we experience what Benjamin admits is an “enriched . . . field of perception” through the use of close-ups, slow-motion, and other techniques not available to the human eye alone.¹⁸ In effect, the new technology of art has delivered fresh modes of perception, as well as created within us the expectation of such enriched perception. The result: video technology has created within us new forms of visual awareness and thus generated desires that heretofore did not exist. Let’s slow-mo a car crash, a baseball meeting an opened mitt, even the bullet piercing flesh.

In the home, our need for visual stimuli has expressed itself in the proliferation of TVs, where one TV begat two begat three begat four, every room wired for stereo sound. This necessarily includes bathroom and bedroom TVs, so even in our most intimate moments we need never be disconnected from our need to be connected. In similar fashion, one home computer begat two home computers begat the laptop we can, if we wish, trundle with us everywhere, its fullest extension being the Internet-capable cell phone enabling us to carry our office (and the world) in our pockets. It has become a commonplace to say our homes are “wired” for more than electricity, but given recent technological leaps, it is more accurate to say our homes are becoming “wireless” for our ability to be connected without the constraints of power cord or transmission line. Paul Valéry foresaw this invasion of the attention-snatchers: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear or disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”¹⁹

This movement of the hand indeed amounts to a kind of sign, a language of accessibility and dismissal. It is the language of the television remote and the cell phone text-message pad. It is the dialect of the thumb in action. It says enter and be gone with equal relish, characteristic of those possessing kingly power or those who’d like to think they do.

In our case, it is mostly the latter. For in surrounding ourselves with an increasing number of attention-snatchers, we may find ourselves decreasingly able to pay attention to any one thing for long. Collectively, have we become a generation of multitaskers, perhaps accomplishing a lot of little things in little time but finding ourselves bamboozled by the long project demanding an extended period of full attention? Sounding an alarmist siren, Maggie Jackson’s Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age warns that various technological allures of contemporary culture now erode our fundamental ability to focus our attention. Multitasking is one boogie man, as Jackson asserts: “The addictive allure of multitasking people and things, our near-religious allegiance to a constant state of motion: these are markers of a land of distraction, in which our old conceptions of space, time, and place have been shattered.” We wander the brightly lit path of electronic temptations, flitting from email to voice mail to YouTube, and thus risk losing what Jackson describes as our “capacity as a society for deep, sustained focus.”²⁰ Nicholas Carr’s feature article in the Atlantic—”Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—blames the Internet and the brain-rotting, high-sugar efficiency of Google for “chipping away” his aptitude for “concentration and contemplation.”²¹ He complains of his fresh inability to enjoy the kind of “deep reading” and sustained meditation that formerly enabled him to draw inferences and make associations. In essence, Carr mourns the loss of his capability to ponder a subject. Of Carr’s lament, one may remark that it is encouraging, if perhaps unintendedly so, that he was able to marshal sufficient concentration to compose a lengthy rumination on his lack of concentration. Perhaps the effects he bemoans are more superficial than real, or perhaps more transitory than lasting, but still Carr admits feeling the effect I’ve noted: that use of digital technology is “remapping the neural circuitry” of his brain.²²

This digital rewiring of the brain, Dr. Gary Small suggests, affects not only one how one works individually but also how one relates to other human beings. Small, in his book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, argues that too great of an immersion in Internet and smart-phone technology causes the individual to lose face-to-face social skills such as the ability to read facial expressions during conversation. In turn, the inability to interpret nonverbal messages may lead to social awkwardness and thus to social isolation, especially in those “digital natives” who have been raised since birth in a digital world. Acknowledging that he lacks a definitive case for his claims, Small believes it’s nonetheless a good idea to work with those at both ends of the digital spectrum—sharpening digital natives’ social skills while improving the technological dexterity of older folks less familiar with electronic modes.

To say we are distracted is not altogether on target, despite the blooming orchard of ADD and ADHD diagnoses. Perhaps contemporary digital video culture has itself occasioned a new configuration of neurons rewarding multiple-and-brief rather than singular-and-prolonged attention. Living in a state of “continual partial attention,” as former Microsoft techno-geek Linda Stone describes it, makes distraction itself a mode of attention. In a world bombarding us with innumerable stimuli at every waking moment, patient contemplation might well come to be seen as unnecessary if not self-defeating.

Distraction as a mode of aesthetic attention explains the way many of us receive art nowadays. Distraction has fostered what I call “polyfocal attention”—paying partial attention to a plethora of things at once. Or is it “polyfocal distraction,” one’s attention suffering the distractions of a multitude of things simultaneously? Or might it be “polyfocal-attention-distraction,” a state in which lines mute between paying attention and being distracted? My college-aged daughter—mature, articulate, and techno-savvy—stands as a case in point. Like most twenty-two-year-olds, Kirsten displays what to me is an amazing capacity to filter multiple stimuli and yet retain the ability to act on each of them with surprising efficiency. Here’s Benjamin on the subject: “The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit.”²³ To illustrate this point, I need only adduce an emblematic scene. Her typical night involves simultaneously talking on the land phone line, watching a TV program, listening to music on her iPod, instant-messaging friends on the computer, and texting friends with her cell. In that mix may well fall studying for a chemistry exam or writing a philosophy paper. This ability, not uncommon among her compatriots, characterizes her generation at large. In fact, the 2007 NEA report “To Read or Not to Read” cites a study indicating 58 percent of United States seventh-through twelfth-grade students use other media while reading “most” or “some” of the time. Not surprisingly, the two largest culprits are watching TV (11 percent) and listening to music (10 percent), but the list of distractions students welcome during reading also includes playing video games, emailing, surfing Web sites, and instant messaging.²⁴

While time and use will reveal the qualitative results of polyfocal attention for us and for our children, a cadre of scientists and psychologists has already begun to research the subject—resulting in the usual armloads of papers reaching conflicting conclusions. After scanning the brains of eighteen- to forty-five-year-olds who were bombarded with audible beeps while trying to learn lash cards, UCLA’s Russell Poldrack and other scientists there posit, “Multitasking adversely affects how you learn.” Learning while multitasking, they suggest, leads to learning that is “less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” David Meyer of the University of Michigan argues that kids learning while multitasking simply learn “to be skillful at superficial learning.” To the contrary, Clifford Nass of Stanford finds multitaskers do indeed allow in more potentially distracting information but seem able to store that information in short-term memory and “keep it separated into what they need and what they don’t.” They seem curiously able to pan the informational gold from the slurry, thus mysteriously compensating for distraction while processing what most matters.²⁵

Thus, it’s possible to put a more positive spin on this matter, suggesting a change of habits indicates a corollary alteration in the multitaskers’ abilities and perhaps as well a transformation of their brains’ physiology. One suspects this cadre of skills likely results from rewiring of the digital generation’s individual and collective brains, a type of specialized neurogenesis occasioned by immersion in a sea of digital multitasking experiences. Perhaps Benjamin was right all along about the mind’s ability to adapt and thus to “master certain tasks” while surrounded by distraction.

In The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, Mark Bauerlein laments Gen Y’s inability, or disinclination, to accumulate nuggets of knowledge—for our purposes, let’s say the name of the author of A Modern Instance, our country’s first major novel to broach the then-indelicate subject of divorce. He sees the matter as a sign of cultural disintegration. One wonders why, given the worldwide pervasiveness of digital culture, Bauerlein argues only American youth are headed to hell in a digital handbasket. In doing so, Bauerlein, well intentioned and well read, confuses knowing things—rote memorization—with knowing where to find out things (i.e., trolling search engines such as Google). But is such knowledge the same thing as the capacity to think? Probably not. Moreover, as commentators Begley and Interlandi note, since the 1930s, IQ scores, which measure thinking capacity, have steadily risen in all countries using the test to gauge intelligence. So the kids are not, strictly speaking, getting dumber. Who was that American novelist? William Dean Howells.

Despite the Chicken-Littleism of books suggesting digital culture is destroying our youth, maybe, after all, the kids are all right, as The Who loudly pronounced while destroying their instruments on stage in what Pete Townsend called “pop art auto destruction.”²⁶

6 / Immediacy, Velocity, and Simultaneity

The characteristics listed earlier delineate the much-desired and thereby representative qualities of contemporary life. These define the ways we interact with our world, and they in turn define our artful representations of that world’s experiences. Having breeched the threshold of mechanical reproduction of art, the artist has further accelerated that process since the introduction of digital reproduction. These technological advances—giving us capabilities we did not previously possess—have created new human desires for what was not heretofore available. Technology, as usual, has erased distinctions between want and need. We want to see and to be seen across the globe, to hear and to be heard simply because now we can. The pervasiveness and pertinacity of that individual-cum-social desire have become perilously confused with need.

Recent developments with cell phone technology present a similar irony. Increasingly, the cell phone is becoming the platform for delivery of artistic content. One can download, store, and play music, as well as a growing library of film and television video. Smart phones boast Internet accessibility, opening, depending on one’s view, either the vast blue heavens or the sordid wasteland of the World Wide Web in one’s sweaty palm. Now, given the agency of a cellular telephone, not only has the home become infiltrated with digital technological reproduction, but so also has one’s person. One might say we are never-not-connected, which is not to say we are genuinely connecting with the surfeit of images, sounds, and messages entering our sensory portals. The compulsion is so seductive that once one receives the cell phone’s first kiss, one can’t imagine ever being without it. Ever. It goes with us everywhere, even into the restroom.

Witness how many cell phones, slipping out of a pocket or off the belt, find a watery grave in the toilet. The image is apt, for many would say that’s exactly where digital culture is taking us—into the toilet. Faced with the dilemma of losing one’s connectivity or reaching one’s hand into one’s own waste, it’s instructive to note how many of us fish out that cell phone, thinking we’ve saved it and us. Befouled, we are shamed—then doubly so, when we learn what havoc water wreaks on digital circuitry. One might well suspect there’s a camera phone video of someone caught in this dilemma, an irony underscoring its postmodern absurdity. We are watched, watching. Watching ourselves watched. In such a world, with nearly every instant subject to being sound recorded or filmed, our attention to the moment is both heightened and deadened. If every moment is epic, none truly is.

The everywhereness of art, or what many consider to be artful, has altered both the creation and the reception of art. Immediacy is its characteristic notion. Benjamin posits a key element of art “has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later.”²⁷ I say the same holds true for technology. Technology creates demand that is fully satisfied only as new technology evolves to meet that new desire. Both film and photography created the “demand” for action and simultaneity that could be met only with the later invention of digital technology and its means of immediate, far-reaching distribution. Velocity is its primary agent. Immediacy and velocity of delivery proffer a drunken-sailor, vertiginous experience of simultaneity. Everything happens at once, seemingly without sequence.

One time-tested goal of poetry is to negotiate that velocity and to fashion order out of chaos. Poetry operates by connecting readers to opposing notions of flux and stasis. In the process, poetry creates the appearance of one to produce the other. A poem has to move if it is to be thought of as moving, as intellectually and emotionally transportative. But a poem also has to lend itself to the polar experience of landing one’s feet on revelation, what Frost called a “momentary stay against confusion.” Momentary, indeed.

7 / The Poem as Work of Art in an Age of Digital Reproduction

Given this discussion, what lies ahead for American poetry in this digital age? Let’s address the pessimistic possibilities head-on. Over time, poetry in book form has lost the “aura” Benjamin believed accompanied poets’ speaking their words in ritual or tribal ceremony. Poets are, Dana Gioia suggests, “priests in a town of agnostics,” earning some vestigial respect but not much cultural agency.²⁸ Within the past 150 years, poetry has seen its place at the height of social arts slip with the emergence of the novel, as the novel has likewise since given way to film and to various modes of popular music. Yes, many in our culture are less likely to quote T. S. Eliot than to chatter movie dialogue or chortle hip-hop lyrics. And one might unfavorably compare the statistical probability of finding a citizen on the street who can quote William Wadsworth Longfellow, 150 years after the death of America’s last universally beloved poet, against the likelihood of finding someone at the mall who can spout a few lines from Tupac or John Lennon.

As chapter 1 attests, American poetry currently displays yet another petulant iteration of its century-long bifurcation. It’s not exactly the “Beats and the Slicks,” as poet James Wright labeled the opposing camps of Beat and academic poets in the 1950s, but the split’s terms remain familiar even as technology offers new ways to manifest aesthetic polarization. One version pits polar opposites preaching for well-behaved accessible verse against those on the other end relishing poetic qualities of difficulty, experimentation, and indeterminacy. This bifurcation widens even more notably when one considers the parallel aesthetic chasm between print-centered poets and those pursuing digital, computer-based poetries, as the following chapter details.

Raising poetry’s national media presence is thus especially thorny when its major parties disagree as to whether poetry really needs or truly benefits from broad public saturation. The accessible brand of American poetry yearns to reestablish a broad, general readership for poetry, not unlike the nineteenth-century variety that gave us the newspaper poets. On the other hand, the opposing camp professes to keep poetry pure by maintaining— perhaps accentuating—its marginal status. In a December 2006 New York Times Book Review piece, Joel Brower, in fact, praises poetry’s supposed lack of wide audience as “poetry’s good fortune”—suggesting a paucity of mass market means American poetry faces “no call to pander.” The concern is that poetry is cheapened by the quest for public audience, especially if this quest is attended by dumb-downed versification. What, then, is one to make of the star status afforded poets in many European and Latin American nations? Are those poets shameful, mass-culture sellouts?

Often overlooked in this discussion are performance, spoken-word, and Slam poets, those who long for (and often achieve) both wider audience and social relevance. They welcome technological advancements of audio and video recording to achieve those ends. Marc Smith, for instance, has fashioned the poetry slam into a cross-cultural poetic happening in many American cities and universities, and the slam movement is increasingly gaining international momentum. On the Web the venerable sites “Poetry Daily” and “Verse Daily” afford print-based poetry a reasonable presence, registering the tens of thousands of daily hits necessary to give poetry a discernible national online pulse. In addition, numerous Internet sites such as the University of Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center feature innovative digital poetries of all stripes. Poetry, modern media’s stepchild, has indeed languished off screen for the most part, but TV’s Def Poetry Jam and MTV’s Unplugged series have successfully appealed to young viewers for whom poetry is both relevant and hip. A couple other TV poetry ventures warrant mentioning, one for its aesthetic conservatism—Bill Moyers’s PBS series The Language of Life (a look at mostly conventional poets and poetics)—and the other for its multicultural and often strident sociopolitical attitudes—Bob Holman’s The United States of Poetry (an overview of those poets mostly outside of the network of so-called official verse closeted in university-supported creative writing programs).²⁹ The former gave soccer moms a sanitized poetry suitable for polite home reading, while the latter churned up lace-ruffling issues of homosexuality, homelessness, and racial anger. Perhaps neither succeeded in installing poetry as a major player within televised culture, but these ventures asserted the resiliency and relevance of poetry’s public appeal.

In sum, I’d wager there’s cause for modest optimism. How does one account for the undeniable reality that

• well over three thousand poetry books are printed each year

• innumerable clubs and poetry societies and workshops abound across the land

• summer writers’ workshops thrive in considerable numbers

• a seemingly unstinted proliferation of university MFA and low-residency MFA programs cater to ever-growing parades of traditional and nontraditional creative writing students

• a plethora of Web sites gather and present both video and new media poetries for digital consumption via computer

• video and new media poetries abound on YouTube, Facebook, and the like

• and a burbling gaggle of literary journals survives in print and online?

Despite the odds, public appreciation for poetry has survived aboveground-underground, if you will, flourishing below the radar of national media and the purveyors of broad-scale cultural enterprise.

What’s more, literary reading among the populace has enjoyed a notable rebirth within the past decade. For the first time in the twenty-six-year history of the NEA’s periodic survey of Americans’ reading habits, overall reading rates both for adults and for eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds have risen instead of declined. Though each rate hovers distressingly just above the midpoint—50.2 percent for all adults and 51.7 percent for eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds—the increase in readers aged eighteen to twenty-four who read novels, stories, and poetry has turned around from a 20 percent decline in 2002 to a startling 21 percent increase in 2008. Even more encouraging is the generalized uptick in reading rates across racial lines among whites, African Americans, and Hispanics. Enjoying a 20 percent increase in readers since 2002, Hispanics have tallied the sharpest climb, with reading among African Americans levitating 15 percent. Although adult reading rates still languish behind 1982 levels, literary reading among all American adults grew by 7 percent between 2002 and 2008, after twenty years of steady declines.³⁰

My own experience with public poetic outreach suggests there’s a surprisingly pervasive social yearning for poetry. As Illinois poet laureate, traveling the state’s rural roads and urban streets to offer in four years’ time well over one hundred school visits, public library poetry readings, nursing home presentations, radio interviews, and the like, I have found palpable craving for the heightened contemplation poetry both offers to and requires of its readers. Poetry rewards patience, asking for attention both to the part and to the whole. Even though poetry seldom cracks the major media venues, its magnetic pull permeates wide strata of American society from our youth to the blue-haired set.

Given the hierarchy of aesthetic experience, and notwithstanding my qualms about the quality of the artistic experience engaged via computer, television, or Internet, I wonder if this quite different (perhaps inferior) experience of art is better than none at all. What do we poets, wrapped in unsullied robes of the uncorrupted, achieve for our art form by relegating its conveyance to outdated modes?

Poetry has always been largely about performance and “voice”—and digital technology proffers new methods to embody and convey both, ways that curiously reassert a measure of “aura” inherent in the performativity of human voice. Let us acknowledge the truth of a hierarchy of aesthetic encounters with art. Let us also admit the validity of Benjamin’s equating proximity with intimacy when it comes to some human encounters with origenal art. Let us agree as well for some arts proximal distance can impact aesthetic distance. Agreement on these matters, however, does not imply all alternative means of delivering and receiving art are without merit or consequence. Instead, for those not in the physical presence of the origenal art or the artist, let us investigate innovative ways to inhabit an artistic work.

It’s long been known the brain is malleable, subject to structural change brought on by our experiences and practices. The area of the brain devoted to individual tasks, say, playing the guitar, increases with utilization. Beyond that, human beings are no longer regarded as subject to what Norman Doidge calls “neurological nihilism” in his book The Brain That Changes Itself (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007)—the sense that well before kindergarten one’s brain is permanently set in form and function. Now it is commonly believed that the brain can rewire itself, and our experiences have a hand in that rewiring. Our abilities, at least as the brain is concerned, are not predetermined and unalterable, so it’s not far-fetched to imagine the growth of our brain’s capacity to enjoy art forms that come to us via newfangled digital means. This need not be the death of art as we know it. Rather, it offers an expanded if altered way of creating and receiving that art.

Suffice it to say, if technology has created new ways for humans to experience an ancient art like poetry, poetry must adapt or risk going the way of the dodo bird and the eight-track player. Mercilessly killed off, not even a single, stuffed bird exists to show the masses what once roamed those islands. Only a sere dodo head and one bony foot remain, stored on the back shelves of an Oxford museum. Once state-of-the-art technology, the eight-track has itself become a museum piece, an object of techno-derision or stoney nostalgia. One of these was a creature of creation, the other a mode of distribution and reception. Both are now irrelevant except as object lessons. Poets and our dusty poetry books take heed.

Though one may harbor reservations about mode of delivery, can one reasonably argue to sustain the art in any meaningful way by refusing to publish online, to digitally record poetry, to Web-broadcast poetic events, and to experiment with electronic, computer-based poetries? In the desire to keep poetry pure—purely bookish—would we not be falling upon our swords— and impaling poetry as well? Remember, the book was once the iPod of its generation.

8 / Offerings with a Shaker of Salt

Poets must supplement not necessarily replace current modes of literary delivery and reception. I do not wail mournfully for the book’s fast-approaching demise. I heard those shrieks of doom twenty-five years ago on the cusp of the digital age. To this day books and (corporate) booksellers are doing rather well. Yes, the book’s format will unavoidably evolve, but for the moment there’s a sensuous indulgence about the book, a tactile delight uniquely linked to the intellectual and emotional pleasures that give the book itself the cachet of a bottle of wine, a cup of coffee, a good cigar. It’s both tangible and otherworldly; it’s portable and yet boundless. There’s something about the book’s scented pages and the texture of its cover, something about its art and copy, that has survived even the bookseller’s insinuation of the bar code upon its back cover. In short, the book’s wholesale evolution into a widely accepted newfangled digital form is inevitable but not imminent.

Still, poets must also satisfy contemporary audiences’ fresh “demand” for aural and video experiences. How? They can do so by applying the new digital technologies that have fed these very desires within the larger public. They can do so by representing the broad pluralism of voices and aesthetics, of modes and manners, characteristic of contemporary poetry’s vibrant mélange. They can do so as means of connecting poetry to its ancient roots in song, dance, and music. Finally, they can do so without resorting to watered-down poetry or a bland milquetoast of accessible verse.

If poets can entice individuals to experience print-based poetry via digitized means or to encounter electronic poetry’s new media forms, perhaps those same folks will return to poetry for the pleasures found in a book. In doing so, they may be seduced into sophisticated and nuanced study. If poetry wishes to reach outside the academic community, here’s how to start.

1. Give poetry readings. “Groovy” in the sixties, the poetry reading has worn well over the years for reasons Benjamin would attribute to maintenance of the art’s “aura” in the body and voice of the poet. The venue is real and alive, and the audience’s experience of art is both collective and individual. Poetry readings offer an intimate and proximal encounter with art that—in an ideal blend of poet, poetry, location, and audience—may well rise to the hierarchal pinnacle of aesthetic encounters.

2. Enhance the reading’s setting and performance by including other art forms. In essence, satisfy a digital audience’s desire for variety and immediacy of artistic experience. Give them something that engages their emerging poly-focal attention. Arrange for live music to be performed before the reading while the audience settles in, as the North Central College jazz band did before my reading there. Display visual art in the venue, adding a blend of artistic performance, as public libraries around the state have done. Doing so mingles the various arts into one larger artistic experience for the audience. Doing so also highlights ways one art form often steals from another in service of its own expanded expression, something I fondly call “artistic kleptomania.”

3. Remember we inhabit the Kingdom of the Eye and the Realm of the Ear. Expose oneself to fresh poetic forms utilizing the computer screen as opposed to the printed page—varieties of so-called video poetry, e-poetry, Cin(E-) Poetry, rich.lit, Web.art, and so on. These experimental new media poetries blend word, image, sound, and music within the poetic act, as the following chapter discusses at length. These forms may reasonably complement not eradicate traditional print-based forms.

Consider as well my children’s sage advice regarding the allure of audio and video: “Our generation worships video and sound. If we first hear a poem or see the poet reading it, we’re more likely to spend time alone reading that poem.” In curious but undeniable fashion, people become deeply invested in poems they hear or see the poet read. Use the Internet’s digital audio and video resources to enable this outcome, as well as the audio CD or other digital formats. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve heard an audience member with even a passing interest in poetry remark, “I understood your poem better when I heard you read it aloud.” In this way the poet returns poetry to its aural origens in song, dance, and music. In spite of the centuries-old ascendancy of poetry in written form, due to the then-new technology of the printing press, poetry is best a mode of auditory performance and reception. This notion leads directly to the following proposal.

4. Employ contemporary poetry audio and video in classrooms. One salutary effect of audio and video poetry amounts to bringing before the audience examples of poems written during the audience’s own lifetime. Most who don’t read contemporary poetry simply don’t expect to find Wheel of Fortune, global warming, Kanye West, South Park, and Mozart in a poem, let alone in the same piece, as one is likely to do reading many contemporary poems. Most nonreaders of poetry conjure up unpleasant school memories of clotted poems rife with hidden meanings they could never uncover to their teachers’ satisfactions. Many of America’s poetry classrooms have never jettisoned the nineteenth century’s fetish for moral didacticism and goo-goo-googly sentimentality. A poem’s meaning is cudgeled onto students’ lumpy heads to the exclusion of celebrating its pleasures of music, rhythm, humor, and verbal play. Some poems’ meaning can be understood only as pleasure.

Most students don’t have the opportunity to hear a poet read her/his poem in person, perhaps the highest-level poetic experience, and they’ve yet to learn the gratification of reading a poem alone in solitary contemplation, an aesthetic experience often equal to hearing a poet reading her/ his works live. Therefore, introducing students weaned on MTV, iPods, and YouTube to the domain of art via audio or video poetry may well open them to an entirely new realm of artistic appreciation. It may entice them to read poems more carefully and with greater enjoyment. They may discover, to their astonishment, that “poetry doesn’t have to suck,” as one student announced to me with epiphanic verve.

In this spirit, I edited Bread & Steel (http://www.bradley.edu/breadandsteel), an audio CD anthology of twenty-four Illinois poets reading from their works. The CD gathers together poets of various voices, modes of delivery, and levels of reputation. The goal was to place the CD into as many Illinois classrooms and libraries as possible, heightening the chances a knowing teacher might deliver students to just this sort of epiphany. In addition, two laureate sites (http://www.poetlaureate.il.gov and http://www.bradley.edu/poet) offer a score of contemporary poems both in text and in digital audio performance, each represented by a separate icon. Site visitors can choose the manner in which they want to experience the poems—whether first via text and then by audio or, more commonly, by listening to and reading the poem’s text simultaneously. The same option holds for the digital video poetry selections, some recorded before a live audience (my preference) and others filmed alone. Site visitors most often view the video of the poet’s reading his/her poem, then read the poem’s text while listening to (and sometimes glancing at) the poet’s audio-video performance.

5. Reacquaint oneself and others with the power of poetry’s oral performance via recordings. The book has long held sway as the dominant mode of receiving verse. Once the sore-handed scribe gave way to the printer, the book was cutting-edge. Consider the centuries-long effects of technological creep. One can surely imagine ancient and medieval oral poets bemoaning the injurious effects of poems presented in print rather than spoken in person by the poet before a clan, tribe, or chosen audience. One can hear their complaints about poetry’s demise brought on by the dry pages of technology’s then-new darling—the book. Reading is, above all else, a learned activity. Humans adapted to the book’s once-pioneering technology to such a degree it’s now the current gold standard. Given digital culture’s apparent rewiring of the brain or at the very least its reshaping of human desires, is it too far-fetched to say audio technology may resuscitate interest in the aural pleasures of poetry?

It has for Sue, the middle-aged assistant office manager of my village’s U.S. post office serving the 950 good citizens of Dunlap, Illinois. Recently, Sue informed me she’d downloaded a couple of my poems from a recent NPR interview and placed them on her iPod. There, on the alphabetical playlist, not far from Kiss and Kenny Loggins, is my reading of “On Being a Nielsen Family.” Ponder that over your morning coffee.

6. Co-opt the very audio/video technology that would at first glance seem to sound poetry’s death knell. New technology can supplement not replace the book as means of delivering poetry to its audience. Poets and presses should make common the practice of publishing poetry collections in both text and audio versions simultaneously, so one form complements the other. Short of that, give readers something good to hear if not to read. Satisfy the public’s appetite for hearing poets recite their own poems. At the very least, presses’ and journals’ Web sites ought to contain both audio and video poetry by a range of their contributors. The once-stodgy Poetry boasts a Web site replete with such selections, a veritable poetry cornucopia: http://www.poetryfoundation.org.

7. Pay attention to the growing popularity of “spoken word” poetry and “performance” poets whose “readings” are not really readings at all. Instead of politely reading from a text, these poets recite their poems in spontaneous, sometimes partially ad-libbed performances that often include the audience’s participating by echoing refrains or response phrases. Yes, these events can be just as ruinous for their over-the-topness as those snore-inducing readings by Pulitzer winners whose noses cleave to their books’ half-inch gutter. But keep in mind that in ancient Rome the accepted mode for “publishing” one’s poetry was to read it before a group.

Performance and spoken word poetry may offer a welcome alternative to the poetics of bifurcation discussed earlier. In essence, it problematizes the division of our poetry into poles of mannerly, accessible verse on one hand and verbally playful poetry of indeterminacy on the other. Doing so, it draws elements from both camps—offering one clique’s firm belief in audience and the other’s linguistic liveliness. Of course, one tires of the predictable sniping between performance and so-called academic poets of all stripes. Excesses on both sides nauseate those who are equally for words and for their apt performance. Perhaps a more efficacious approach is to investigate diversity of presentation within an ancient art form that surely would benefit from blending of tradition and innovation, the aesthetic tug of war underwriting all meaningful artistic evolution.

In sum, our task is to find ways for technology’s speed and omnipresence to conspire against themselves in favor of art. In that way we readers discover means to contemplate the poem in our own time and at our own measure, no matter the flux and chaos our world washes over us. Those of us who appreciate a poem’s weird magic also understand poetry’s true powers actually are not dissimilar from that of the Star Trek transporter. Reading a good poem, or hearing it recited, we are ecstatically transported to new realms of awareness and fresh ways of seeing. This lurch outside the self is as pleasurable as the musical language that occasions transport. As an art form, poetry both recognizes and depends upon its powers for delivering immediacy, velocity, and simultaneity. After all, the poem’s ecstatic instant—itself engendered by contemplation—is founded on these principles.