“There are poets like John Ashbery for whom the internet seems to have been invented for who probably never sent an email” —William Lessard, from an email
When I started writing Data Mind, a collection of prose poems about digital life, it was not because I had anything to add to the debate about how the internet’s ruining humanity. Instead, I was just writing what I was always writing. I have always been thinking about and writing poetry that is obsessed with what it means to communicate; I obsess about the limits, the difficulties, and the joys of trying or not trying to connect. My original inspiration was not poetry about the internet, but instead older poetry that felt to me like a mirror of the digital world.
Here are four ways I see pre-internet age poetry predicting digital life.
1. Virtual Friendship
As a child, the first poem I remember speaking to me was Emily Dickinson’s “(260.)”:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
I remember sitting in the playground feeling that I was the “you” Dickinson was directly addressing. She and I had become what would later be called “virtual friends,” people one felt close to whom you would never meet. Over the years, I turned to poetry, and later social media, because I wasn’t sure who would really want to listen to me; it allowed me to write in an intimate way, but I wouldn’t have chose who I was speaking to. Like writing notes in a bottle, I enjoyed the feeling of flinging my words into the ocean. Similarly, when I post to social media I don’t require that any particular person responds to my address. The reader can decide if they want to accept the “you” role.
2. IRL?
Digital life has made us all confused about what is “real” and what is “just online.” This feeling of the blurring of the physical and the virtual that happens when one spends too much time in front of a screen can make one feel like one is living inside a John Ashbery poem.
In Ashbery’s poetry, the speakers are always questioning if their connection with the other is actually happening. Is togetherness a phenomenon that exists only in language? Is the experience of being in the world just a projection of the mind? How do you know which is which? This anxiety (or sometimes joy) repeats throughout his poetry. In “Fragment” (published in The Double Dream of Spring, 1970), he writes:
Thus your own world is an inside one
Ironically fashioned out of external phenomena.
And “What Is the Reader to Make of This?” (from A Wave, 1984) contains:
Give it a quarter turn
and watch the centuries begin to collapse
Through each other like floors in a burning building
Until we get to this afternoon
Those delicious few words spread around like jam.
In this image of the “burning building,” there’s no real smoke, no real consequence. Within a few lines, the speaker moves from an apocalyptic scene to a line about reveling in the sweetness of language. This phenomenological description of how it feels to not completely believe in images captures what it feels like to live one’s life online. Especially during the pandemic, we have all spent so much time glued to our screens that we started to forget what the immediacy of IRL feels like
3. Poetry as Meme
I am a meme fangirl. I love the way the spread of memes is both communal and individual. By riffing on the same material, we form a kind of collective repartee. One of my favorite recent examples of this is the “Cinderella’s Dead” TikTok trend. In 2022, EMELINE released a song about a woman who escapes an abusive relationship and remembers that she’s a “bad bitch.” In response, hundreds of women and queer people online created their own slide show-style videos using her music to document their own journeys escaping abusive relationships and creating an authentic self. What I find so moving is how different each video is. In some videos, the creator’s version of the “bad bitch” means exposing your body, wearing a red bikini on a motorcycle, while other women depict “the bad bitch” as being able to get a law degree in your hijab. Still others become “a bad bitch” by waving a rainbow flag or discovering their true gender.
This kind of communal/individual art making reminds me of what has been happening in poetry for centuries. Anyone who has taken high school English knows how Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”) is a response to Petrarch’s phony-sounding praise of his beloved. In the same spirit, I once made a packet of all of my favorite riffs on Rilke’s poem “Autumn Day,” from Ron Padgett’s surreal take “But now / His shadow is fast upon the sundials” to David Bromidge’s Californian “Man, where’d the time go?” to Bill Knott’s dystopian “Lord the summer was mostly waste.” A decade after making this packet, I realized what was pretty obvious. Of course, Rilke’s “Lord: it is time” is a riff on 3 Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” Poetry, like meme culture, is turtles all the way down.
4. “The Complete Derangement of the Senses”
Like everyone who has ever listened to Public Radio for more than fifteen minutes, I know all of the reasons social media is terrible: it changes our brain chemistry; the algorithm encourages polarization over empathy; it makes us vain, blah blah blah. But also, as dangerous as social media may be, I find its texture sublime.
As a writer whose sense of poetics is shaped by Modernism, Beat Poetry, and the New York School, I worship the goddess of juxtaposition. I enjoy the feeling of surprise when dissimilar elements are slammed together, so for me there’s nothing better than opening a social media platform and seeing the range of human experience: the Walmart ad for a hot pink polyester suit juxtaposed with someone showing off their new arm sling, next to the head of a Babylonian sphinx, next to a parody song about Alito’s upside-down American flag. This contrast between form and chaos reminds me of so much of the 20th Century poetry I love. Take “Heavy Water Blues,” one of my favorite Bob Kaufman poems, first published in 1967. The poem begins:
I am in love with a skindiver who sleeps underwater
My neighbors are drunken linguists & I speak butterfly
Consolidated Edison is threatening to cut off my brain
The postman keeps putting sex in my mailbox
Like an onslaught of status updates, each line of Kaufman’s poem creates a new, somewhat confusing reality. The personal (“I am in love”) is juxtaposed with the corporate (“Consolidated Edison”), the world of media (“the radio”), and, in a later line, advertising (“I dreamed I went to John Mitchell’s poetry party in my Maidenform bra,” referencing a famous surreal ad campaign”). The juxtapositions are so quick that the very nature of the self becomes transformed by the experience. Perhaps better than any poet writing about life today, Bob Kaufman captures what it feels like to live online.
Joanna Fuhrman is the author of six previous poetry collections, most recently To a New Era. Her poems have been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Slowdown podcast, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She is an assistant teaching professor in creative writing at Rutgers University and a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press.
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