Avant-Garde Poetry and Information Overload

Avant-garde poetry may have a small role to play in our understanding of global information flows—on the other hand, the avant-garde has always aspired to be predictive, to keep up with the present, to stay ahead of history. The avant-garde’s attempts to maintain critical distance from mainstream bourgeois values may be grandiose and hyperbolic, but the questions raised by avant-garde movements should not be dismissed as nihilistic or unrepresentative of larger social developments. To adapt a question posed by Lyn Hejinian—“Isn’t the avant-garde always pedagogical?”—I would ask: “Isn’t the avant-garde always technological?” Much of the work of the twentieth-century avant-garde was extremely self-conscious of the rapid changes in technologies of communication and data storage. From Dada photomontage to hypertext poetry, avant-garde methodology has been deeply concerned with remediation and transcoding—the movement from one technological medium or format to another. As Brian Reed has recently written, “poetry is a language-based art with a penchant for reflecting on its channels of communication.” For Reed, poetry “offers unparalleled opportunities for coming to grips with the new media ecology. Poets, as they experiment with transmediation, serially bring to light each medium’s textures, contours, and inner logic.” While poetry may seem the most non-technological of literary genres, over the past century poets have frequently been obsessed with the changing nature of information and its dissemination. The news that there is more news than we can process is not so new; while avant-garde poetry may not figure prominently in the global information glut, the global information glut figures prominently in avant-garde poetry.

Stephens, Paul. "Stars in My Pocket Like Bits of Data" Guernica, July 15, 2015, Accessed on July 20, 2015, https://www.guernicamag.com/features/stars-in-my-pocket-like-bits-of-data/