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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. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, he follows poetry¿s travels off the page into new media formats.
List 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
About the author
Mike Chasar is associate professor of English at Willamette University. He is the author of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (Columbia, 2012) and the coeditor of Poetry After Cultural Studies (2011).
Summary
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.
Additional text
While poetry studies has in recent years increasingly considered the ways in which print . . . mediates the transmission of poetry, Chasar extends and complicates this exploration through his emphasis on non-print media and in doing so necessarily enlarges what should count as poetry and what strategies we might use to study it.
