Abstract
This article proposes a new conceptual framework for understanding poetry in the age of the internet. By combining literary and technologic theories into one theory named ‘Internetica’, it typifies the structures and roles of internet poetry and poets. A grounded analysis of 200 poems revealed three types of web poems: poems about the internet, poems first published on the internet, and poems written through the internet. The analysis presents various distinctions among these three types of poems, including their subjects, length, and originality. An integrative analysis of these categories allows for a redefinition of the role of poets in the digital age as playing witnesses: ever-present internet users, who, thanks to their creativity, witness the medium while playing with it by using the tools that it offers them.
The internet and its platforms expand the creative expression of both professional and amateur writers. The internet influences all literature and especially poetry; therefore, in the digital age, the social status of poetry and poetics is evolving. Poetry is everywhere: in specialized websites and forums and on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But poetry also infiltrates previously uncharted waters, such as programming, coding, and Deep Learning. It seems that the internet allows for a significant increase in the number of texts that are considered poetry and the number of people who are considered poets. This is because poetry is self-defined since authors can frame various texts as poetry and because the internet continuously generates new textual structures, such as chats, and help guides. So far, despite its great social importance, poetry in the digital age has been understudied and, sometimes, misunderstood.
Previous research focused on describing single literary phenomena, such as digital poetry or web-related uncreative writing, without defining web poetry or finding links between occurrences. This article aims to aggregate and compare all manifestations of aesthetic texts related to the internet, thematically, publication-wise, or technologically; it aims to relate to them as variations of a single phenomenon. Thus, this article will offer the first comprehensive account of what I call ‘Internetica’: the sphere of intersections between the internet, social media and poetics.
This article examines digital poetry that was published in Israel as a case study. The Israeli poetry scene is extremely dynamic and innovative in general (with 700 poetry books published every year), and it is particularly innovative in its use of technology, echoing the perception that Israel is a start-up nation. Additionally, some of the prominent poets comprising the field of Internetica are based in Israel. Therefore, Israel provides a case study for the relationship between the internet and poetry that can reflect global phenomena.
The article will address three questions: (1) What are the features of Israeli internet poetics? (2) What do these features convey about writing in the digital age? (3) What do these features reveal about the internet’s influence on poetry and poets?
In the first part of this article, I discuss the existing literature on internet poetry, focusing on three main research strands: changes in poetry distribution, digital poetry, and online literary communities. Afterward, I present the findings of my grounded analysis of 200 poems: poems describing the rise of the internet, digital poetry, and poems published in a Facebook community page I ran for this research between the years 2012 and 2014. I then describe three general roles of the internet that emerged from this analysis: the internet as a means of testimony, a professional tool, and a playground. These three roles correspond with three roles that the internet plays in poetry: poems about the internet are usually testimonies; for poems first published on the internet, the internet is a tool; and poems which were written through the internet are usually an act of playfulness. An analysis of these roles produced an extensive typology that suggests an overarching understanding of the changing functionalities of poetry in the digital age.
Literature review
Early studies in the field of literature in the digital age expressed the hope that the internet would change poetry radically and that internet poetry would be significantly innovative (López, 2012). However, as time passes, research shows that the traditional form of poetry is still much more prevalent than the experimental digital form. Nowadays, it seems the internet has influenced poetry mainly in terms of quantity: above all, the internet increased the number of poets and poetry readers (Stein, 2010). Research on digital poetry has focused mainly on three realms: (1) changes in poetry distribution; (2) new writing techniques made possible via the medium (known as e-poetry, new media poetry, digital poetry, and computer poems), and (3) online literary communities.
Distribution
The first strand of existing research deals with poetry distribution (Bar-Ilan and Groisman, 2003; Bolter, 2001; Glazier 2002). It shows that new possibilities for poetry distribution arise due to the general curiosity about the web as well as the dramatic weakening of the former literary spaces described by Bolter, including poetry readings, university literature departments, and book and newspaper distribution (Bolter, 2001). Previous research presented the new possibilities provided by the internet to the 21st-century poet: the ability to shatter hierarchical systems, employ one’s generative powers, indulge in fluidity, interact, share, and use multiple platforms.
Poets now have an opportunity to shatter hierarchical barriers, which were reinforced by the former means of production, and publish their poems on the web without preconditions or costs (Hayles, 2006). For example, poems can be published on Facebook or book printing can be funded through public-benefit cooperation such as Kickstarter. In some cases, one’s popularity with readers, which was gained by bypassing hierarchical institutions in the first place, later promotes acceptance by literary institutions that gradually adopt popularity as a measure of quality. The generative text can be edited repeatedly and displayed in diverse contexts, without obligation or exclusivity that are conventional in print (Perloff, 2006). Furthermore, the fluidity of the internet allows the poet to change old standards whereby the publishing of the poem is the last stage of the creative process. Hence, the act of publishing on the web becomes a helpful editing process and does not obligate the poet to come to a final version of the poem (Hayles, 2006). The internet offers poets an intermediate situation between writing for themselves and publishing a book (Neiger and Abdullayev 2011). Hence, the online literary creator has a better entry point into the traditional literary world, since one may gain recognition from followers in the online community regardless of traditional publication, such as the literary magazines (Hockx, 2005). The internet encourages the poets to communicate with their readers via social networks, email, and chats, which makes contemporary poetry interactive and shared (Parish, 2008). The creative community on the web is an expression of the poets’ desire for a lively discussion with readers about their work. A study from 2003 that sampled a subset of websites found that poetry constitutes 70% of the literary texts on the web (Bar-Ilan and Groisman, 2003). This contributes to the fact that the majority of online literary discourse concerns poetry.
The integration of writing and publishing offered by the internet assists the process of self-discovery, emotional release, confidence building, and the honing of writing proficiency. The online community affects literary creation through dialogue, commentary, and the provision of feedback during the creative work (Neiger and Abdullayev, 2011). The broad range of poets and poetics on the internet encourages web poets to think as advertisers; what concerns them is matching specific poems to different audiences in diverse platforms and contexts in order to enlarge the relevance of their works by applying to multiple targeted communities. Moreover, through the unsorted crowd online the poet can display her poems to readers who are not the audience of poetry books or literary supplements. This technique reflects the current long-tailed distribution of poetry: it is no longer important that one publication appears in the best place in a newspaper; what is important is that many publications appear in various locations.
Digital poetry
The second strand of existing research deals with digital poetry. The internet instills new poetic writing techniques and upgrades old ones, including collaborative writing through chat rooms and using Ready-Made and writing programmed phrases (Goldsmith, 2011). Digital poetry is poetry that one can write or access thanks to the evolution of digital media, and it is often a form of conceptual writing. Relevant examples are ‘Google poetry’, which is based on Google Search and algorithmic poetry, involving code-running on large textual data such as traffic reports or the Bible.
In 1998, Cayley claimed that poets wishing to use the internet in their work cannot settle for exploring the internet’s surface. Instead, they must penetrate the internet’s interface and mechanism and understand the contemporary meaning of production (Cayley, 1998). Cayley’s argument is repeated by present digital poetry researchers who define internet poetry as an uncreative, experimental, and conceptual writing, which has a hardwired connection to the web apparatus. It enables the internet to be more than a publishing tool and become a lingual substance (Goldsmith, 2011; Perloff, 2010; Stein, 2010). Moreover, Flores describes internet poetry as independent poetry that does not echo the transference process from former media to the internet (Flores, 2014).
The dominance of technology in digital poetry is represented, for instance, in the conversion of the obsessive romantic narcissism in poetry to the obsessive ‘narci-system’, which is the mechanical lyricism (Glazier, 2002). The internet poetic speaker is not human but mechanical, while the actions of this speaker are imposed by the human poet (who, perhaps, chooses to write a haiku), forcing the machine to create what seems to be unnatural poetry. This reflects the role reversal between the medium and the message: the mediator is a human poet, while the message – the poem and its speaker, is the computerized protocol. The algorithmic protocol and repetitive code become personified by an aestheticized creative process.
Uncreative writing is regarded as the most dominant technique in digital poetry, emerging from the ease of copying and pasting texts on the computer, the tendency to imitate works of art in the internet age, and the massive general influence of Dada and its delayed effect on the literary sphere (Goldsmith, 2011). Dada transformed the industrial into the artistic and the used into the new. Uncreative writing is textual Dada, allowing the poet to transform existing and sometimes even public texts into fresh and personal work. Perloff describes uncreative writing as the highest inspiration of the poet in the 21st century. Uncreative work gains its authenticity from ‘life experience’, namely, the fact that it has already been used (Perloff, 2010). The ‘copy-paste’ practice and web distribution options merge into a powerful tool that has changed poetry-making similarly to the transformation of painting through the invention of the camera: shifting from technique (a proficient hand) to technology (hobby instrument). Uncreative poets are no longer writers; instead, they are makers and curators of existing texts. The readers, in turn, can navigate, program, copy, design, and republish the poem (Morris, 2006).
Unlike the permanent book publishing standards, the performance of a digital poem turns the poem in Hayles’s words ‘from object to event’ (Hayles, 2006: 181). The poet can choose every feature of the display, such as the font type, size, and color, the placement of the text in space, and text animation (2006: 181). While the appearance of the text in a book is fixed, the performance of the digital poem is surprising and infinite: each click on the ‘refresh’ button creates a new poem. This attribute transforms digital poetry into experimental poetry. Hence, digital poetry changes the poetic coordinates in three main aspects. First, the poet becomes a scientist of new media and explores its possibilities through poetry. Second, the poem becomes a web-narrative experiment, since most digital poetry has abandoned the prevalent narrative structure (with the poet as an individual storyteller) and has adopted the technological and mechanical narrative. For example, when writing a Google-poem with Google Autocomplete, the poets inform their audience about crowd wisdom through crowd skills. And, lastly, the digital poem deals with mechanisms, codes, and software: this is the background of the interface (Morris, 2006). If literary intertextuality renders poetry exclusive by inviting the proficient reader and rejecting the ignorant, digital poetry replicates this position by subverting artistic conventions for artistic creation (following Dada), while requiring technological skills, like programming.
Online literary communities
The third strand of existing research deals with online literary communities and their significance for internet poets (Bar-Ilan and Groisman, 2003; Hamidi and Baljko, 2012; Hockx, 2005). Online literary communities are networks of artists that get together and publish their poems on platforms, including social networks, mailing lists, and forums wherein readers can read, respond, and discuss writing experiences and meanings. These communities are extremely active and prolific in terms of publishing works and the extent of the discussions. Therefore, poems published in online literary communities create a vast and influential corpus. The online literary community is created by the social networks that allow users to meet in a virtual public space and discuss various personal and professional issues.
It seems that the dominance of the web community is unrelated to the poetic text itself and is tied to the new methods of production and distribution. Hockx (2005) mentions the contempt that some feel towards online literary communities’ poetry, which, he believes, arises from misguided assumptions that it is an unfiltered version of printed poetry. However, he believes that online community literature is an independent genre with its own textual and extra-textual characteristics. Some of the genre’s characteristics relate directly to the text, including political and biographical themes that provide a broader relevance and interest, much like political commentary or newspaper gossip columns. Other characteristics of this genre are less discernible, like the poet’s motivation for writing and the mechanisms of creative collaborations.
While in the era of print poetry was read by the few, in the web era poetry is the public’s domain. The interaction between users encourages a ‘Dialectical Poetry’ (De Mann, 1979) that is written due to the poet’s community-oriented goals. While writing in the traditional literary sphere required totality and ideologies, community poetry-writing on the web is a lifestyle choice of young internet users, who regard themselves as relevant to the internet’s writers’ community which mediate their everyday lives and thoughts to their community through aesthetic texts (Hockx, 2005). This poetry legitimizes loose expression with or without literary aspirations (Hamidi and Baljko, 2012). Social media play an essential role in the canonizing process: each work is graded openly by Likes and Shares that cause the item to reappear repeatedly. In this process the known is popular, and the popular will be good (Webster and Lin, 2002). This model influences contemporary poetry conventions. When a poem becomes popular on Facebook, it often seeps into literary magazines or other traditional literary institutions that reprint these poems and the poets are invited by literary institutions to participate in festivals and reading, thus promoting the poets’ acceptance.
Another aspect of the uncommitted poetic tendencies of online literary communities is found in evaluation. In the internet era, evaluation is based on emotional and intuitive explanations, unlike the traditional scholarly literary standard, which is based on the knowledgeable analysis of form and content (Hockx, 2005). This model results from the existence of multiple words-artists in a community that lacks critical proficiency and intent. Therefore, criticism is irrelevant to the community’s values and it is replaced by mutual responsibility. Lack of criticism and generous feedback contribute to the creative space that contains different themes, styles, and qualities held and affected together (Hamidi and Baljko, 2012).
Despite this plethora of work and the separate classification of each sub-phenomenon, an examination of Internetica’s core and an overarching understanding of the isolated phenomena is still lacking. Indeed, creative practices on the web often remain unremarked upon because of the quality of invention (Deuze, 2007).
In what follows, I will demonstrate that these three main research strands on changes in literary means of production, the rise of digital poetry, and the formation of online literary communities correspond with three dominant types of poems that are being written throughout the last decade.
Method
Sample
The purpose of this research is to formulate the concept of Internetica through grounded analysis of Hebrew-language poem (Starks and Trinidad, 2007). The lack of previous relevant research addressing all three types of digital poetry created a need to amass a large corpus of internet poems, which, indeed, I collected over a period of two years, to be as comprehensive as possible. I selected only poems that simultaneously matched each of the following criteria: (1) poems wherein the internet played a dominant role regarding their text, as a subject, a linguistic material, or a metaphor; (2) poems whose poet had a certain degree of centrality in the literary community, represented by their affiliation to publishing houses, literary awards, literary reviews, or a wide readership. I set these criteria to delimit the scope of materials to the most ‘Internetic’ poems while enabling the inclusion of the majority of poets in Israel. I selected poems for my corpus from different realms in several steps. First, I classified poems that included references to new applications, web links, and internet jargon that were published in poetry books, which are the traditional locus of poetry. Second, I chose to focus on Maayan Poetry Magazine (2005–15). Maayan is the most experimental magazine in the Israeli poetry scene. Surveying the magazine’s ten volumes added to my corpus innovative, digital, and collaborative writing that contributed to all three groups. Third, I surveyed each of the 45 poetry books that were published between the years 2002 and 2015 by established publishing houses (as opposed to self-publishing). I identified 29 relevant books that included 100 internet poems altogether, most of them relating to the internet as a subject.
In addition, to examine not only poems about the internet but also poems first published on the internet, I created a Facebook page called POEMA and ran it as an internet poetry research laboratory between the years 2012 and 2014. POEMA was a community page that posted previously unpublished original poems, sent to the page by their authors. Poems were published five days a week, one poem a day. Contrary to what is customary in literary editorial boards, in POEMA there was no sorting process. The page worked as a ‘reality contest’. Each published poem had 48 hours to gain Likes, comments, and Shares. The poem that became most popular over the week, garnering both positive or negative comments, was posted again on Saturday night with my short critique. POEMA had 2885 subscribers and, during the period of its activity, the page reached 5000 to 30,000 readers every week, depending on the poems that were published. Surprisingly, most POEMA poems did not use the internet as a subject, yet they did include themes of writing and publishing, as well as techniques that may be associated with digital poetry. Moreover, because the poems were first published on Facebook, I labeled them as Internetica. During 100 weeks of activity, 350 authors from various walks of life were published on POEMA: young and old, amateur and professional. For this article, I analyzed the 85 poems that won the POEMA weekly competition. An examination of the winning poems allows one to reach conclusions regarding the preferences of the readers in the online literary community.
Analysis
In my work, I followed the principles of grounded analysis. Hence, the research findings were produced by the inductive method: the investigation of accumulating details led to the creation of categories that could be distinguished and compared (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). The analytical process was divided into three steps, designed to produce axes of theme and form. First, the poems were classified according to the internet’s role in the poem, leading to the emergence of three clusters: poems that regard the internet as a means of testimony, a professional tool of the poet, or a playground. Second, the poems were divided by their aesthetic characteristics, including their type of humor, form, length, and internet jargon. These characteristics became part of the categories of the following analysis. The third stage intersected the previous ones to produce a more general classification into three types of poems: Poems about the internet, poems first published on the internet, and poems that were written through the internet. This categorization resonates with Markham’s (2004) definition of the internet as a tool, a place, and a way of living.
Findings
Each of the three main poem types (summarized in Table 1) symbolizes a type of poetry, a type of poet, and a stage within the spectrum of internet adaptation. Poems about the internet, arising from the early days of the medium, incorporate documentary qualities as they reflect the foreignness and discomfort of interacting with and through the internet, which is likely to disappear as users gradually adapt. The cultural temporality of the ‘poems about the internet’ group endows these poems with a special status: the subject of these poems is not only the internet as a medium or practice, but as a profound cultural change that has to be coped with. As opposed to the first group, poems first published on the internet, oftentimes on social media, use poetry as an experimental path to communicate with others and tell about the writers’ everyday lives, more than as an aesthetic form that is focused on style. These poems are characterized by clarity, communicativeness, and that they deal with current affairs. Poems which are first published on the internet function as the writers’ studio, which enables users to become short-term poets, or maybe help them discover whether they truly have a poetic calling. Poems that are created by internet tools, such as Autocomplete and code, use the internet to override emotional poetic formulas. The poets who advocate for this type of poem regard poetry as a limited mode of communication, used by those who wish to express their emotions. Instead, they suggest that the internet can enrich poetry by replacing the familiar formula with an imitation of the medium or an imitation of its users. In what follows, I will compare these three main types of Internetica according to the eight coordinates featured in Table 1: subject matter, medium of publication, community, dominant proficiency, length, originality, conceptualism, and humor.
An overview of the three main types of Internetica.
Subject matter
A thematic analysis of the corpus yielded three principal kinds of subject matter: the poem as a means of testimony, as a professional tool, and as play. All three kinds of subject matter are deeply linked to the internet’s general roles.
The poem as a means of testimony is a conventional technique that is derived from the status of the text as reflective evidence and from the understanding of poetry as eternal (Moxley et al., 2011). ‘Writing is a technology for collective memory for preserving and passing on human experience’ (Bolter, 1991: 33). The task of the poets is to curate the present by grasping a moment of dramatic cultural change, a moment that affects them directly, and they preserve it in the collective memory. This tendency is identified mainly in poems about the internet and also in poems written through the internet.
The corpus of analyzed poems displays four kinds of testimony. The first kind is a testimony about testimony: namely, writing about the documentary nature of the internet. ‘I searched myself in Google / and couldn’t find,’ says the speaker in Ayat Abou Shmeiss’s poem, ‘Google’ (Shmeiss, 2013: 6). The second kind of testimony bears witness to the way the internet has influenced every individual and, particularly, the poet. For example, the unspecific, diverse, and supportive community is dominant in the work of 21st-century poets like Alfred Cohen. In his poem ‘Hello Google’, the speaker says, ‘I asked Google / what is writing a poem? / Can you live without poems? / will Alfred Cohen ever write a poem?’ (Cohen, 2013: 13). The third kind of testimony attests to the changes in the social environment, with the novel addition of dating sites and social media. The fourth kind of testimony addresses the changes in culture and literature brought about by the medium itself. Such is uncreative writing, as seen in the poem ‘Terms of Use’ by Eran Hadas: ‘I make love on the net / When I expose my love, anyone online can see it / And I can see theirs / I am no longer ashamed / I share’ (Hadas, 2013: 9–11).
Numerous poems, mainly poems about the internet, reflect the significance of the internet as a professional tool for the poet. Poets use the medium in various ways to amplify their independence in their creative work, when writing, publishing, book printing, selling, and maintaining contact with their readers (Hockx, 2005). Poems that regard the internet as a professional tool are those that incorporate internet slang, and those that use the web as a tool for distribution, creativity, and the preservation and enlargement of the poetic community, which is achieved, for example, by intense presence in social networks. Almost regardless of the poets’ will, the medium transforms them into multi-taskers and sole manufacturers, as Tehila Hakimi writes in her poem ‘Poets’: ‘And then / all poets became friends / on social media: / all poets became enemies. / Later / all on one stage / Stomping their feet / Blinding spotlight in their eyes / Cannot read one word’ (Hakimi, 2014: 25). The tools allocated to the poets by the internet compel them to become responsible for their art and to relieve the power centers of their cultural duties. In this independent era, the poets’ role evolves when they become the editors and curators of the text.
The third and most important subject matter of digital poetry is play and playfulness, following Danet’s distinction of play as playing by the rules and playfulness as playing with the rules (Danet, 2001). Playfulness is also one of the most common attributes of the electronic text (Bolter, 2001: 165). Web 2.0, a sphere of user-generated content, encourages play and creativity due to the abundance of texts, such as jokes, memes, and linguistic games (Katz and Shifman, 2017). These creative phenomena frame the internet as a realm of playfulness, combining serious and original content, such as news, with creative and playful variations, such as mash-ups and jokes (Shifman, 2014). Play that takes place on the internet quickly becomes a permanent cultural act, for even if it occurred once, it is saved as a cultural creation that will occur again (Huizinga, 1955). Still, due to the medium’s innovative nature, the internet invites users to break the rules over and over again and invent new ones.
The web’s playful essence influences poetry and encourages poets to conduct artistic and poetic play while using the internet, for example, by engaging in collaborative writing while using chat interfaces. The playful nature of the internet is identified in various ways, such as extra-textual performances, linguistic amusement, collaborative writing, uncreative writing, and using ready-mades, programmed poems, or Google Autocomplete poems. Internet poems partake in the experimental environment of the internet. They reflect the medium as a large text-bank, which provides poets unending opportunities to play with texts and text forms by distorting existing texts and creating new ones. The artistic playfulness functions as a cultural practice (Siegert, 2008) and becomes a new requirement for contemporary poetry. Therefore, in the internet environment, the writing of a poem is no longer a private and emotional process: it is social playing.
The three subject matters (that match the roles of the internet in digital poetry) intersect differently with each type of poem. Poems about the internet, like Cohen’s poem cited above, include aspects relating to testimony and playing while disregarding the new possibilities introduced by the internet to the poet. This is due to the writer’s limited use of distribution options, digital creative tools, and online literary communities. Poems first published on the internet function as testimonies while regarding the internet as the poet’s professional tool, such as Mordechai Geldman’s poems ‘Daily Haiku in Facebook via iPhone’ (Geldman, 2013: 98). These findings match the nature of social media, which functions as a semi-public diary wherein users document their lives. However, the testimonial aspects presented by these poems often relate to the assistance that the medium provides the writers via the new options of writing, publishing, and distribution of their work. Poems that were written through the internet expressed all three subject matters: the internet as a means of testimony, a professional tool, and an act of playfulness. These poems bear witness to the values of the internet (for instance, the value of sharing), they indirectly refer to the internet as a professional tool while using machine syntax, and they combine playing with functioning as a playground, whether the playing is between the user and the machine or between two or more users.
The medium of publication
My corpus of poems shows that the medium of publication is a very telling matter. It demonstrates the poets’ relationship with traditional literature, signifies a wish (or lack thereof) to communicate with the established literary community, and reflects the poets’ attitude towards the internet. Additionally, the medium of publication can also reflect the poets’ changing perception of the internet: while at first, it was an unfamiliar and unwelcome instrument, it soon became a necessary tool that is worthy of poetry publication. For example, ‘Comment poem 162’ by Tomer Lichtash: ‘To publish poetry? Here? Now? / Better off bury the kids / in the yard’ (Lichtash, 2007: 162). The internet was the theme of all the poems that were published in print that were included in the corpus. These poems, written by professional poets and published since 2002 and increasingly after 2007, were either part of conceptual books or poem cycles or published as stand-alone poems in poetry books.
Contrastingly, most of the poems in the corpus that were first published on the web (hence, published without filtering) were written by amateur writers, who are not present in the traditional literary sphere, or by poets who integrate the printed and digital creation. Later, based on this integration, some promote a book by publishing single poems in the online literary community. By doing so, not only do they raise awareness for their book, but they also provide their poem with another editing process via the social network. Furthermore, the social network even boosts book publishing aspirations among amateur poets, because the online community provides encouragement and commitment.
Mostly, amateur poets have not yet gained the recognition of literary institutions. The internet is more identified with the amateur poet, yet print is not necessarily sign of professionalism. Amateur poets’ publications often depend entirely on their will, via paid or self-published books, Facebook pages, and self-promotion through digital platforms. The amateur phase is usually temporary for two reasons: first, the internet blurs the qualitative distinction, and almost every poet gets some recognition; second, the media adopts amateur poets frequently in efforts to discover talents. Still, some amateur poets stay away from the literary field, focusing on reaching their readers through social networks and online sales. This distinction is flexible and designed to distinguish the characteristics of the traditional poet, along with his values, aspirations, and community, from those of the contemporary internet poet.
Poems which were written through the internet and included in my corpus were mainly distributed in print, but naturally, due to the way they were written, they first appeared on the internet.
Community
The analysis of the corpus has highlighted the distinctions between the composers of each type of poem. Poems about the internet were written by poets who are known to the literary community and their internet poem is not their first publication. Poems which were first published on the internet were usually written by unknown, amateur poets, taking their first steps in poetry through the online literary community. True, these amateur poets desire the recognition of the literary community; however, they usually earn this recognition through their popularity on social networks. At the beginning of their literary path, this helps them skip the filtering and critical judgment of literary gatekeepers. Often, these poets publish a new poem on Facebook first, whereas poets of the literary community ‘save’ a new poem and first print it in a newspaper, a literary magazine, or a book. Later, they may post a photo of the published poem online.
Usually, poets who write poems through the internet are not central to the literary community. They are motivated by innovation, rebellion against literary tradition, and, above all, by their estrangement from emotions, which is the essence of traditional poetry. Such poets find their place in the margins of poetry and the online artist community.
Dominant proficiency
Each of the three types of poems demonstrates a different proficiency that is expected from the poet. Literary skills, such as using the internet as a metaphor, parodying earlier texts, and using linguistic games are the most prevalent among poems about the internet. Daniel Oz’s metaphors are an example of this: ‘our flesh, what’s in it? / a hidden network of links / fragile panels . . . the moan of an internal fan’ (Oz, 2013: 7).
In poems that were first published on the internet, mainly on social media, one can identify another proficiency: social skills. This type of poetry is interlaced with the medium of publication because it encourages interactivity and demands the readers’ participation by writing about a personal crisis, current issues in politics, society, or in the literary milieu. On social media, poets assign great importance to their readers, who contribute not only to the virality of their poems but also to their status in the literary field. Poets are attentive and thoughtful toward their readers; they match their publications to the mood of their network and try to lead their small community of followers by transcribing their feelings. However, they are also aware of the many other writers around them who are trying to do the exact same thing. This phenomenon was identified in other artistic fields, as well (Baym, 2018).
Poems which were written through the internet introduced a novelty: a flood of technologically savvy poets. Poems written through the internet are usually written by poets who are proficient in a whole set of technological techniques, spanning from Google Search to programming. These skills are obligatory for this kind of artist. The stereotypical absent-minded poet is seldom credited with any technological abilities, and the stereotypical solitary poet is seldom credited with social skills. But these proficiencies, which the internet now requires of poets, dramatically change the latter’s identity in the 21st century. Poets are no longer naive wanderers but rather professionals, who are aware of the means of production that they are capitalizing on.
Perloff (2005) defines the poets’ skills in the internet age as ‘moving information’, a double entendre that establishes that web poetics employ internet data, which is both in motion (as it is constantly re-edited and updated) and exciting (due to its colossal quantity). Perloff refers only to technological poets who write through the internet but this study of Internetica reveals two distinct subgroups: technological poets, who write by using data-in-motion, including refashioning large existing texts like the Bible or help guides; and social poets, who use data to ‘move’ and stir their readers’ emotions.
Length
The corpus shows that the rise of the internet resulted in a surge of short literary forms. This emergence is expressed both by the invention of new structures (chat poems, statuses) and the popularity of existing ones (haikus, word sonnets). Printed poems about the internet are becoming shorter and transforming into Nanopoetics, a literary genre defined by Meiri (2010). The term links the concept of nanotechnology that compresses information with poetry that compresses meaning into short texts: ‘Nano-poetics borrows two relevant qualities of nanotechnology for use in the interpretation of poetry: miniaturisation and duplication’ (Meiri, 2010). The length of Nano poems is 12-line poetical fragments and short stories.
Poems that were first published on the internet are even shorter than that: most of the winning poems in POEMA had no more than ten lines. When the poem is posted online, outside of the printed book, crammed between jokes, news clips, and birthday greetings, it must be short and well-targeted to be noticed. Otherwise, readers will scroll to the next thing. When the text is shorter lengthwise, it is often shorter content-wise, as well. The only lengthy web poems are the spoken-word creations, whose size stems from the narrative and performative character of the genre.
Unlike the short poems in books and social media, poems that were written through the internet are usually long cycles of fragments that were transformed into concept books, like Code by Eran Hadas and Lorem Ipsum by Tomer Lichtash. It is possible that when poets engage in programming and editing work rather than writing, they prefer to work with a significant volume of text. However, alongside the technical reasons for this, writing a poem that is long and un-narrative in the short-and-fast internet atmosphere is subversive. This act forces both the writer and the reader to concentrate on an explicitly ‘boring’ text, which loses the right to exist in a cultural sphere where ‘likes’ are sovereign.
Originality
All three types of poems in my corpus present the tension between the poets’ wish to innovate and their ability to be innovative. The web poets’ seeming unoriginality can be original by creating new forms of poetry, and may even function as a rebellion against conventional poetry that values originality. Poems about the internet that were published in print seem to be original, both because of the text that is new and not borrowed like ready-made poetry and because of the novelty of the subject matter, which, chronologically, preceded the other types of internet poetry.
In poems which were first published on the internet, textual originality is a non-issue since these writers regard poetry as a lifestyle-oriented technique rather than a form of art, reminiscent of photography, which is only sometimes artistic. This ‘photographic’ poetry treats everyday life events like famous monuments, which will be photographed again by the next visitor. Writing this sort of poem is a matter of placement, like placing a camera and searching for an individual point of view, instead of using specific artistic skills. Here, poetry is not an art form but a way of living, and, as such, it does not regard originality as an aesthetic goal.
In fact, online literary communities are searching for another form of originality: the speakers’ authenticity (Hockx, 2005). The authenticity of web poets is measured by their ability to design a reliable, fascinating, and poetic biography. Internet writing techniques such as posting multiple versions, displaying typos, employing various linguistic styles, and including user discussions contribute to the sense of authenticity.
In contrast, poems written through internet-related technologies create an originality that is external to the text by shifting the focal point away from the text into the concept. One example of original conceptual poetry is demonstrated in Code (Hadas, 2014), a book of haiku poems generated by programming the first part of the Bible through a designated algorithm. The internet poet employs a new concept to fearlessly repeat what was previously said.
Conceptualism
Conceptual poetry is based on a leading idea, formal or thematic that is prior to the text formation (Goldsmith, 2008). Unlike non-conceptual poetry that is a performance of the poet, conceptual poetry makes poetry performance of a specific idea. Conceptualism is a central aspect of Internetica. An analysis of the three types of poems demonstrates that poems that were written through the internet are conceptual poetry. This poetry has two central concepts. The first concept is ‘narci-system’, which is performed by programming, Autocomplete, and text recycling, which extracts from the automatic machine what seems to be an unnatural syntax. The second concept is the imitation of internet forms, such as help guides, chats, and other structures. Such poetry ridicules the boundaries of the device and reflects the blunt discourse among online users.
While machine poetry is distinctly conceptual, the other two poetic types are different. In the corpus, poems about the internet are only vaguely conceptual. This sort of conceptualism is not figurative but substantive, as it emerges when one commits to a theme, for example: ‘instead of the slow opening / searching inside the keyhole . . . double click / and you’re there’ by Zali Gurevitch (Gurevitch, 2008: 53). These poems describe the age of the internet as a new world, wherein the internet is a subject or an idea around which the poem is woven. Due to the traditional traits of this group, these poems are perceived as conventional and regarded as traditional poetry addressing a new subject.
Corpus poems first published on the internet are neither conceptual nor innovative. Quite the opposite: most of them are held captive by the traditional image of poetry as a text that expresses the speaker’s feelings regarding the holy trinity of poetry: God, love, and nature. These poems usually depict the speaker as an archaic figure that personifies the stereotypical pompous poet. For this reason, these poets are far-removed from the perception of poetry as avant-garde art.
Humor
Humor is very present in internet culture (Shifman, 2007) so an examination of its presence in Internetica is significant. Indeed, I found that all three types of Internetica incorporate humor, yet they tend to use it differently and for various purposes. The analysis revealed three humoristic notions: parody, identifiable by the references to specific texts while using quotations or accurate imitations; satire, conveying a critical message about the unmediated reality; and pastiche, the blank parody and unspecific imitation.
The corpus of poems about the internet used in this study often use parody techniques to imitate the iconic genres related to this medium, such as chats, comments, and automatic texts of help guides. In these poems, a slight irony arises when the poet links the semantics of the technological field and those of other fields, like comparing the milking cows at dawn and ‘milking’ one’s computer first thing in the morning: ‘At first light . . . I’m awakened on my bed of straw next to the computer / and milk it. / At the third star I fall asleep to the sound of its snore’s rustle’ (Haimovich, 2010: 52). In contrast, poems that were first published on the internet tend to convey satirical content, protesting political and social issues by offering a reflection of reality. In comparison to these two types, poems written by the internet can be depicted as pastiche; hence, this is an unspecific parody that stems from the imitation and citation of multiple former texts and shaping them as an automatic text. Overall, the varying types of humor in internet poetry reflect a shift of focus from the era of the intellectual poet, marked by literary education, vast reading, and hierarchical mechanisms, to an age when poetry is written by everyone about everything and published everywhere.
Conclusion
In his book Production of Presence, Gumbrecht (2004) describes two aspects of the literary experience. One is the ‘meaning effect’, which subordinates the text to its potential meanings. The other is the ‘presence effect’, in which the reading itself is an experience that transforms the recipients from readers to participants, who are free of the obligation to search for a specific meaning. For a long time, the ‘meaning effect’ was considered central and the ‘presence effect’ incidental. However, in the past twenty years, the power balance has shifted, and internet poetry is one of the leaders of this trend. Internet poets produce extended sequences and conceptual books of experimental poetry, thereby strengthening the ‘presence effect.’ The internet encourages the poets to forsake meaning and to be present in their creative sphere continuously, and to write and publish books at short intervals and in large quantities.
As my classification suggests, Internetica, at least as revealed in Hebrew-language poetry, is a broad field comprising multiple and diverse literary texts, all of which follow the internet or relate to its development. One wonders, therefore, what additional meanings could arise from this relationship. Is there a connecting thread between the three poetic types, transcending their association with the internet? The integrative analysis reveals a shared meaning, embodied in the poets’ role in the creation of a certain ‘presence effect’. I dub this the ‘playing witness’. Being creative and ever-present users of the medium, the poets witness the medium and play with it by using its language and technological tools. The poets are witnesses who are also active players, depicting the technological changes of this era for future generations: not as historians, but as creators. The Aristotelian distinction between the historian and the poet is that while the former describes life as it happened, the latter describes it as it could have happened (Aristotle, 1974: 11).
Internet poems fulfill the creative possibilities that the medium offers and break from fundamental literary questions relating to originality and quality that were asked until recently. For the internet poet, poetry is a way of life, a routine. As such, it is not presented only through complete and successful moments but is an exact illustration of the creation, including the process of trial and error, which aims not only for quality and acceptance but also for boundary-breaking, joy, and liberation.
The internet provides poets with various opportunities and challenges that compel researchers to catch up quickly and draw a relevant and clear map that will serve readers, and the poets themselves – professionals who are flooded by new poetic means. In the digital age, poets face growing competition that arises from the expansion of the literary community and the multiple texts which require their attention and judgment. I believe that this article offers such a map, which can continue to evolve as new technologies shift from invention to routine. Furthermore, I hope that this map can shed light on additional meeting points between art and technology.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.