The Poem Electric: Technology and the American Lyric

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Examining a broad array of electronics from radio to telephone to modern-day web browsers Seth Perlow considers how these technologies transform poems that aren't normally considered "digital." Posing a necessary challenge to the privilege of information in the digital humanities, Perlow develops new ways of reading poetry, alongside and against the electronic equipment that is now ubiquitous in our world.

Reviews

"What happens to the lyric imagination in our new computational environment Seth Perlow confronts a central paradox of postmodernity: a poem, on the one hand understood as a small (or large) machine made of words (William Carlos Williams), is, on the other, devoted to resisting the inherent rationalism of that machine. Indeed, the afterlife of the lyric, as Perlow argues in a series of fascinating case studies ranging from Emily Dickinson to Jackson Mac Low and Amiri Baraka, is one of lyric exemptionthe resistance to absorption into normative discourse channels. Frank OHaras poems, for example, may well claim to be like telephone calls, but their actual articulation is one of depersonalization and replacement rather than imitation. Casting a wide net, The Poem Electric is a highly original investigation of how electronics enable poets and their readers to animate and rework, rather than reject and surpass, familiar lyric norms."Marjorie Perloff, author of Radical Artifice and Unoriginal Genius

"Seth Perlow presents a magnificent challenge to the current fashion of big data and mathematized literary analysis. The Poem Electric shows how qualitative, lyric intensities embody dispositions that are of indispensable value to us, and which are in productive tension with the world of screens and memes that we inhabit. It represents a wonderful challenge to so many of our assumptions about the value of technology to the humanities and the place of the lyric in our technologized lifeworlds."Joel Nickels, author of World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance

"By examining the afterlives of the lyric through their relation to modern positivismor, more accurately, the equipment of rationalismSeth Perlow ventures into territory rarely visited by theorists and critics. He seeks to identify the rationalized objecthood of the lyric poem by pairing it with a series of electronic tools. He does so by repeatedly tracing a dialectical movement by which poetrys exemption from rationalism is exposed as a fallacy by its transactions with various devices and emblems of techno-rationalism: digital archives of audio and visual files, for example, or computer-generated lists of random numbers. Perlows critical anatomies can produce startling effects, as when his examination of the figure of the telephone in Frank OHaras poetry reveals not OHaras ebullient sociality (as we have been taught to believe), but a disturbing condition of anonymity and a-sociality. Remarkable for its close reflections and readings of unfamiliar texts, The Poem Electric helps to articulate a field of compelling interest."Daniel Tiffany, author of Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric

"Instead of emphasizing quantitative data and empirically oriented interpretive methods, Perlow prefers to hone in on, electronics messier, more complex influences upon how people read and write. Whereas the Digital Humanities tends to privilege a machines ability to render literary texts as informational fields, Perlows approachfocusing on how writers and readers interact with literary equipmentis one that expands critical lenses and realms of investigation thus far practiced in that academic discipline."Rain Taxi

Author Bio

Seth Perlow is assistant teaching professor of English at Georgetown University. He edited Gertrude Steins Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition, which earned a Seal of Approval from the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions.