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For the
last five decades, poets have had a
vibrant relationship with computers and
digital technology. This book is a
documentary study and analytic history of
digital poetry that highlights its major
practitioners and the ways that they have
used technology to foster a new aesthetic.
Focusing primarily on programs and
experiments produced before the emergence
of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, C.
T. Funkhouser analyzes numerous landmark
works of digital poetry to illustrate that
the foundations of today?s most advanced
works are rooted in the rudimentary
generative, visual, and interlinked
productions of the genre?s prehistoric
period.
Since
1959, computers have been used to produce
several types of poetic output, including
randomly generated writings, graphical
works (static, animated, and video
formats), and hypertext and hypermedia.
Funkhouser demonstrates how hardware,
programming, and software have been used
to compose a range of new digital poetic
forms. Several dozen historical examples,
drawn from all of the predominant
approaches to digital poetry, are
discussed, highlighting the
transformational and multi-faceted aspects
of poetic composition now available to
authors. This account includes many works,
in English and other languages, which have
never before been presented in an
English-language publication.
In
exploring pioneering works of digital
poetry, Funkhouser demonstrates how
technological constraints that would
seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry
have instead extended and enriched poetic
discourse. As a history of early digital
poetry and a record of an era that has
passed, this study aspires both to
influence poets working today and to
highlight what the future of digital
poetry may hold.
C. T.
Funkhouser is Associate Professor of
Humanities at the New Jersey Institute of
Technology and author of Technopoetry
Rising: Essays and Works (forthcoming) and
Selections 2.0, an eBook.
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