Poetic Acts & New Media

Book excerpt: Poetic Acts & New Media advances the fields of literary and new media studies by clarifying boundaries between competing genres and media through the creation of a new artistic genre, "media poetry." This aesthetic mode of expression/becoming seeks to transform mass culture (our codes of communication) by self-consciously acknowledging how textual, audio, and/or visual signs are constructed according to their simulation and not their representation. This study draws heavily upon literary media theories that intersect with Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of 'Sense' as a simulated power of sensory transformations. Media poetry becomes a complex power of 'Sense' by blending conventional mass-media codes with poetic simulations that provide alternative forms of creating meaning. Poetic Acts & New Media specifically examines the works of several poets that exemplify this multi-sensory approach to printed-text poetry, especially: -Langston Hughes -Tony Medina -David Wojahn -John Kinsella -David Trinidad. It also analyzes several contemporary films that embody the multi-modal logic of media poetry: -David Lynch's Mullholland Drive -Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky -Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich. In addition, this study interprets two influential primetime TV shows as exemplars of media poetry: Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All media poetry, regardless of genre or medium, allows readers/viewers to envision "reality production" as a rewriteable and poetic enterprise that can productively remediate any transparent abstraction or common-sense realism.