Beyond the Book: Poetry and New Media in Modern America

FAIN: FA-232243-16

Michael David Chasar
Willamette University (Salem, OR 97301-3922)

A book-length study of American poetry and new media.

Focusing on magic lanterns, radio, film, TV, and digital platforms, this book studies how "new" non-print media affected American poetry and how poetry in turn affected emergent media and media dynamics. Many people have felt that the twentieth century was an era of poetry's disappearance from public life, but I argue that, thanks to its absorption by non-print mass media, poetry changed forms and proliferated in tandem with those media, necessitating new critical models for poetry scholars to use in assessing poetry's social and cultural lives. As most twentieth-century poetry scholarship focuses on poetry as a feature of print culture, this project thus aims to: 1) expand the archives and media forms considered important to poetry studies; 2) assess the cultural impact of poetry outside of traditional frameworks like schools and high culture; and 3) develop new critical models for understanding poetry in non-print contexts and in relation to popular culture.