I.

AVANT WHAT?

One could argue that digital poetry—a medium that as yet has no stable name—is by its very nature avant-garde. In its hypermobility it represents a revolutionary step beyond the static print-based poem. The digital poem opens up the page by dramatizing poetry’s relationship to time and space. It is not as though time and space were absent from the print poem, of course, as line spacing and metrics as well as the basic temporality of reading itself testify. But the words and images of the digital poem are capable of visible animation. As such, the digital poem lays bare the naturalized conventions which print bred. In terms of a broad conception of the developments of poetry as a genre, then, digital poetry represents a new horizon which fuses the capabilities of print, photography, film, concrete poetry, music, choreography, and conceptual art.

But how helpful beyond this basic evolutionary persepective is such a concept of the avant-garde? I would argue that digital poetry must be viewed in terms of its own medium. As such, any notion of the avant-garde of digital poetry must take account of those works which challenge the normalization of the medium itself. And for web-based poetry, which is my focus here, that medium is the browser, its codes and languages and software packages (such as HTML and JavaScript and Flash), and the internet as a social practice. If this digital avant-garde is to respond to and perhaps influence the forces of history, it must begin with an internal critique of its own medium as it is shaped by the forces of Late Capitalism.