Inviting the Language of New Media to Enter the #poem
Inviting the Language of New Media to Enter the #poem
Shannon Sankey
Throughout my time in undergraduate and graduate workshops, I observed a general reluctance, within myself and my peers, to allow the language of new media and technology to enter the landscape of a poem. For the purposes of this exercise, new media is defined as any means of digital communication, including social media, text messaging, email, and more.
I had begun to work through whiteness and gender and trauma in my poems—and wasn’t that the more daunting stuff to me, after all? Still, I circumnavigated every opportunity to lyrically interrogate the harassment I endured over Facebook Messenger, the rhetorical problem of un-threaded text messages, the unsolicited intimacy of Snapchat, the curation of my life for social currency, and the various ways my psychic landscape is being shaped and reshaped continuously by content and how content is delivered to me.
It occurred to me that, as a millennial poet, with the privilege of access to and command of technology, I had all the license I needed to corrupt and exalt these new and developing languages in my work. So, why should I be afraid to render the digital scaffolding of my daily life?
I asked students and peers who shared my experience the same question. They responded:
“I don’t like to include brands like Facebook in a poem.”
“I’m not used to seeing this language in poems.”
“It’s not sonically or aesthetically beautiful.”
“It doesn’t fit.”
“I don’t want to show my age.”
“I’m uncomfortable with my relationship to technology.”
“I write poems to escape Twitter.”
Fair. If there is a perceived lack of models, it may be that instructors are not comfortable enough with the material to introduce it into the classroom. Then there is the problem of aesthetic. Naming a social media platform or referencing one of its functions, for example, could be a burdensome import on a poem, particularly if it too sharply juxtaposes the poem’s intended tone or palette. The poet might choose to render a text message as a line of spoken dialogue to heighten the humanity or preserve the generality or, perhaps more often than not, avoid the distraction. There lies another problem: when we are exhausted with the noise of new media, the poem provides a quiet place, a safe harbor.
At least, that is our hope. But most of us make poems via blinking cursors in the dark, our faces cast in blue light. We take intermittent breaks to browse an array of open tabs. All the while, our smartphones glow with notifications. When the poem is done, we upload it to Submittable and blast the published link across our channels. We tag the digital magazine, friend the editors, rack up the shares, study the likes, and update our bios. Like so much of our lives, the business and consumption of poetry is, largely, online.
As a digital strategist by day and poet by night, I understand the tension between these two modes of communication. Some days I find new media and poetry irr