Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age by Kevin Stein

Author:Kevin Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

By his dead smile I knew we stood in hell.

While a digitized solder plays the Brahms on violin, scenes of trench and aerial warfare animate the computer screen. Intermittently, lines from several Owen poems emerge on screen, text formatted as centerpieces of the home front’s flickering wartime newsreels produced by Pathe-Gazette. The effect is to deliver to the reader poetic lines in the historically accurate cinematic manner that home-front citizens received news of the war. Later, as an animated aerial dogfight plays out, one plane spirals down, smoking its death spin to the ground it meets with a lash and bang. To close his Cin(E)-Poem, Aguilar adds a further element of intertextuality by inserting seven Page 125 →well-known lines from William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” splayed in ghostly white letters against a solemn black screen, beginning with “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” and closing with “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” All the while the Brahms plays achingly, both counterpoint to and confirmation of the black silence that swallows the poem.

One other Aguilar composition warrants attention as much for its author as for its execution. Aguilar took retired high school English instructor David Bengtson’s page-based poem “Blackbirds” and gave it digitized audio and visual life. Bengtson is hardly the kind of chap one would even loosely associate with Cin(E)-Poetry endeavors. He hails not from either fashionable coast or from an urban center offering the poet an eclectic soup pot of avant-garde artists from which to ladle his aesthetic broth. No, Bengtson’s roots finger down into the loamy soil of Long Prairie, Minnesota, where he seems a video-making isolato among wheat and sunflowers and the long horizon of the nation’s Northern plains. Even more notably, Bengtson came to video poetry equally from an esoteric longing for writerly expression and from his devotion to teaching high school creative writing workshops. A fellow used to open spaces and limitless horizons of north central Minnesota, Bengtson chafed at the confined space and literal materiality of the printed page. In the realm of image as word and word as image, Bengtson found a hospitable form as borderless and fenceless as the land he moved across. Notably, Bengtson became among the first American high school instructors to design and teach a video poetry course in which students combined the writing of poetry with the creation of video poems. For his students, an Apple computer’s iMovie program became both means and lens through which to reenvision what for them had been a purely print-based form.

Aguilar gives us Bengtson’s “Blackbirds” via the poet’s on-screen emergent text, animation, and Aguilar’s digital (colorized) stills photographed in Long Prairie.18 The Cin(E)-Poem initiates with an image of a prairie church, its bell clanging funereally against an explosively orange sky, a symbol of the shades of violence about to ensue. Aguilar affords the poem a kind of pre-text pretext before it appears, one that establishes the tone and sets up a

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