Poetry Unbound : Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram

It's become commonplace in contemporary culture for critics to proclaim the death of poetry. Poetry, they say, is no longer relevant to the modern world, mortally wounded by the emergence of new media technologies. In Poetry Unbound , Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, Chasar follows poetry's travels off the page into new media formats, including silent film, sound film, and television. Mass and nonprint media have not stolen poetry's audience, he contends, but have instead given people even more ways to experience poetry. Examining the use of canonical as well as religious and popular verse forms in a variety of genres, Chasar also traces how poetry has helped negotiate and legitimize the cultural status of emergent media. Ranging from Citizen Kane to Leave It to Beaver to best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur, this book reveals poetry's ability to find new audiences and meanings in media forms with which it has often been thought to be incompatible. Illuminating poetry's surprising multimedia history, Poetry Unbound offers a new paradigm for understanding poetry's still evolving place in American culture. "Throughout the twentieth-century and into the twenty-first poetry has seemingly taken an increasingly insignificant role in our culture as radio, film, television, and the internet have become dominant. Mike Chasar challenges this conventional wisdom by arguing that poetry isn't dying, dead, or marginalized, but rather that it has gone off the page where its cultural impact can be seen in the histories of the magic lantern, radio, film, and television. Audiences haven't vanished but the ways we experience and encounter poetry have changed. Mass and non-print media haven't stolen poetry's audiences but have opened up audiences to more types of poetry in more media formats. Moreover, new media has not only changed the way people experience poems but poetry helps and continues to broker and secure the place of emergent media in American culture. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through to the emergence of the internet and karaoke, Chasar examines the ways in which poetry was integrated with and employed by new media. He shows how the magic lantern went from a medium used primarily to frighten audiences to one that used poetry in schools and religious setting. He also considers how early cinema drew on poetry to legitimize itself as an art form and then how directors would turn to poetry in films to turn the act of solitary reading of poetry in a dramatic moment in which viewers experience the poem in a new context and how movies demonstrate their superior capabilities as a "poetry-reading machine." Chasar's book allows us to understand the history of poetry's reception and its place in American culture and media that moves beyond the book and takes on new lives and meanings via emergent technologies"-- Provided by publisher Table of Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Poetry Unbound 1. Letters of Fire 2. Receiving Millay 3. “Overlook the Poem, but Look the Picture Over” 4. Once More Into the Fray 5. I Need a Phony Poet Tonight 6. From Murder to milk and honey Afterword Notes Bibliography Index