Post-Internet Poetry: In Search of a New Methodology

by Kate Meadows

The new always contains aspects of the old: Novation springs from the existent. Hand-me-downs are recombined, and during the process freshness (a strange entity that might seem wrong or counterintuitive at first) seeps in. Perhaps it’s nothing new to say that newness is composite. Rather than elide this truism, however, post-modernism rejects originality and stresses the inevitability of appropriation in creative work.¹

Poet Alice Fulton described this post-modernist spirit in her 1998 essay “Fractal Amplifications: Writing in 3 Dimensions” as a drive for her prospective “fractal poetry”—a style of writing that mimics the chaos of complex systems in nature through digression, interruption, and fragmentation. I think of that spirit now, in 2024, when considering the ways in which the lingo of the Internet has pillaged the English lexicon. The relative newness of how we describe online experience is indeed composite, borrowed from basic-enough words we already know. When discussing what takes place online, we may use words like follow, account, like, swipe, block, post, comment, filter, all of which exist now with complex connotations separate from their traditional “real-world” meanings. I have some reason to believe that these words, made a polysemous link between the concrete and the virtual, may make grounds for a rich encounter when absorbed back into the context of a post-Internet poem. 

After all, the artifice of art seems an apt way to criticize the virtual world we find our senses immersed in for half of our waking hours. Of course, artists and writers have remained free to use the facilities of the Internet as medium, tool, or platform since its inception, but otherwise we may take on what feels like evolutionary mimicry: adapting language, symbols, and sensory textures of what it feels like to be online from digital channels into a different form. 

Take, for example, Thomas Hirschorn’s Fake it — until you fake it, a 2024 installation at Gladstone in New York that used neither hardware nor software to gesture towards a virtual atmosphere. Instead, giant paper emojis and Instagram likes dangled from the ceiling into an “analog” environment of cardboard replicas of computers, screens, mice, and routers. Tokens of the virtual were made physically tangible, while their associated tokens of the physical world were made false. In the realm of literary fiction, there are novels that attempt to pull us into the feeling of using the Internet on the page, often on metafictional terms. In Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021), Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021), Jordan Castro’s The Novelist (2022), some actions in the “real time” of continuous scenes take place online. First-person narrators scroll, tap, click, swipe, and take in textual or visual information presented to them on a screen. Message exchanges replace traditional dialogue. Here, the lexicon of the Internet germinates in a narrative that was never meant to be mistaken for “real.” When digital actions are decontextualized on the page, our disbelief is more easily un-suspended, perhaps disrupted entirely. 

These models, by no means exhaustive, use the particularities of form to enact mimesis on the digital world just as easily as they might the natural world. Whether through cardboard or fiction, falsely replicating what we take to be false posits the true division between real experience and virtual experience as fallacy. Mitigating the distance of online and IRL can be playful, critical—and it grounds us in a hyper-present cultural moment. 

Now, are there certain formal qualities of a poem that are especially primed to make an Internet-esque impression? How can doing so be transgressive for the way poetry stands as a medium in our cultural consciousness? Many living poets experiment with digital technologies and online tools in creating their work. There’s Lillian Yvonne Bertram’s use of open-source coding to generate poems on topics of race and gender in her book Travesty Generator (2019). There’s Franny Choi’s persona poem “The Cyborg Wants to Make Sure She Heard You Right” from her collection Soft Science (2019), composed of tweets run through various languages in Google Translate. Jorie Graham dialogues with early AI chatbots in Fast (2019). Maya Salameh shapes some poems to resemble algorithms structured with coding commands. On and on, it’s important to notice how language becomes plastic in poetry, easy to mold into a form that resembles another (digital) form. 

Even without drawing directly from technology, there are perhaps other ways a poem can naturally mimic qualities of a more everyday online experience. I’ll make some loose associations between a text-based post on social media—say a Twitter post or an Instagram caption—and a poem. These are relatively short and contained forms, presented as a fragment isolated from any larger body (if they belong to a feed or a collection, we still process them as separate). Both a post and a poem can incorporate narrative, opinion, and mood in a somewhat disorganized way, breaking the structural constraints of prose’s regular flow. Most importantly, both have a speaker, sometimes an “I,” that can engage in declarations, imperatives, questions, allusions, and direct addresses. What is “uttered” can be accompanied by something visual or sensory (whether through an attached image or poetic imagery), but our experience of reading both a post and a poem demands our brief but sustained attention. Both so often demand us to engage as if we are “spoken” to. Like metafiction, there are certain inherent qualities in a poem primed to draw attention towards or away from voice and artifice, lending the poet a unique environment in which to play. 

Then, the real work begins in a poem’s ability to isolate words and phrases as ultra-potent units, to place emphasis on them by freeing them from the logical constraints of a prose sentence. Language in a poem conjures image, atmosphere, sound, mood, meaning in a highly condensed form—when brought to our brief but sustained attention, it can be plucked open by the reader to reveal multiple, sometimes conflicting interpretations. Words themselves may become volatile in the world of a poem. 

Bear with me as I return briefly to two titles I called on earlier: Fake it — until you fake it and Fake Accounts. The former is a clever pun on a colloquial catchphrase (fake it until you make it), and perhaps asks us to concentrate on making as an artistic action, subverting our expectations by replacing it with the rhyme fake. The latter asks us to look at a more fully-realized double meaning of fake account. Taken more formally or traditionally, a fake account is a tall tale, a fictitious report of events we’re not to take as fact. But set in the shared knowledge of our digital age, a fake account is also a social media profile that blatantly misrepresents the identity of the user—a finsta, a burner. Here, the meaning of the word account plays on our everyday grasp on English and the developing vocabulary of the Internet. In both cases, split meanings draw particular attention in the isolated form of a title. They oscillate under the reader’s eye like an ambiguous image or reversible figure.

This is exactly the illusory quality that I believe a poem has the power to exert with any Internet-related word or phrase borrowed from traditional English. For example, take thread and scroll. When I ask you to imagine them, you may think of objects that have existed in society for thousands of years; they carry concrete associations and contexts. Thread is a verb that could easily find itself in a more conventionally poetic metaphor as a fragile connector. Scroll asks us to envision a roll of parchment, an antique form of reading or writing, or perhaps an ornamental shape. It wouldn’t feel out of place in a poem either—yet I could use both words when describing the experience of using Twitter. A thread on social media can be scrolled. In fact, it can be read, just as a physical scroll could be read. This is one of many examples of how the Internet has stirred up fixed reference points of language, just as any poem might attempt with a streak of imaginative phrase-making. 

As the lexicon of the Internet proliferates, shifts, and invades the consciousness, the opportunities for wordplay with analogous words and phrases feel rather infinite. As the poet reveals and obscures contextual information, their poem stores potential for an ambiguous and multi-faceted experience of the reader. The precise point in history during which the reader encounters the poem—and the unique cultural references carried by them—all serve great influence on how language is processed. Telling your reader to go touch grass is strange and innocuous enough in a poem, but meaning something utterly specific to the terminally online reader. A poet does not have to obliquely write about the Internet in a poem, but may insert clues that complicate the meanings of these borrowed words, create entry points between the “real” and “virtual,” and in doing so hybridize the landscape of their poem. 

Especially once we consider what feels “out of place” among the stereotypical concerns of poetry—i.e. the base register of online jargon which lies clearly outside of the natural, the bodily, or the celestial worlds we associate with the poet—the power is placed in the post-Internet poet’s hands to take their readers by surprise. Perhaps the poet does this by mimicking a mimic, recontextualizing a recontextualized term, returning it to the land of traditional English as a new composite with yet another stamp in the borrower’s log. In the twenty-first century, we may write a poem “about” the Internet or “of” the Internet, but I believe the post-modern spirit could guide us towards that more indirect way of engaging with its trappings. Where, in a poem, form and language may exist mid-metamorphosis between past and present—real and virtual. 

Notes

  ¹ Fulton, Alice (1999). Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, p.64.

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