Subject definition and general semantics

 i.2.1.Unlike the more traditional approach of lyric poetics, which considered the poem a mere text, that is as an almost abstract verbal production capable of a wide range of possible materializations that do not fundamentally alter its original and authentic form, such as the oral reading of a written text or the reprinting of a poem in a different typographic format, most modern and contemporary poetic practices place a strong emphasis on the importance of mediality as well as materiality, not only at the level of the making of a poem, but also at all other levels and stages of its circulation (Publishing Poetry): reproduction in various formats (printing, oral recording, digital storage, for instance, but also learning by heart), distribution, reception (reading, silently or aloud, but also watching or listening), continuation and reappropriation (with all that these reuses involve in terms of collaborative writing and creative transformation).

 i.2.2.There are various reasons for this neglect of mediality and materiality in poetry. Like other forms of literature, poetry is a fundamentally allographic art, that is, according to the now canonical study by Nelson Goodman (1976) further developed by Gérard Genette (1997; 1994), a form of art where the notion of authenticity does not depend on the material form of its production. It naturally makes a difference whether one reads a Sylvia Plath poem in the Norton Anthology, a bibliophile reprint, or the personal diary where one copies one's favorite poems; whether one sees it written in stone or painted on a wall, or listens to it on the radio or on a historical vinyl record, but these differences do not really change the essential form and structure of the poem, whereas in painting for instance, a typical example of an autographic art, the difference between the original work of art and its copy (which can be a postcard, but also a fake, among many other types of reproduction) has dramatic consequences for its very status. In the latter case, only the original work is considered authentic, regardless of any properly aesthetic or other quality (or lack of quality). It is easy to imagine that the copy of a deteriorated original might be, aesthetically speaking, more satisfying than the original, but that does not suffice to grant it the same value in terms of authenticity. Autographic copies remain copies, whereas in the case of allographic art a reproduction, provided it is faithful to the original, is not considered less valuable, at least not in literary terms (financially speaking, there may well be a difference, as demonstrated by the existence of a special market for handwritten manuscripts or first editions, but in this case the work functions less as a text than as a visual and thus autographic object). In the 1980s and 1990s the digital turn in literature has reinforced this allographic approach to poetry, given the fact that digital culture has stressed the idea of immateriality. Culture seemed for a time to have shifted to a new realm of bits and bytes, one composed of ones and zeroes, and thus gave the impression of no longer being hampered by the migration from one format or one platform to another. Today, very rapidly, however, things have changed and both the field of poetry and the larger context of digital culture tend to foreground the twin notions of mediality and materiality (the publication of Lev Manovich's The Language of New Medium in 2001 has been an important catalyser of this new framing).

 i.2.3.“Medium” and “materiality” are highly complex and multilayered notions. At a very general level, it is possible to define medium in English (from Latin medium (the middle, midst, center; interval)) as communication channel and materiality as the sensory elements that are involved in the use of a certain channel. Lyric poetry can be read on the radio or painted on a wall, for instance, and in both cases the material features of the poem will depend on the signs that are transmitted via the channel in question: on the one hand sounds, to be heard as well as understood, on the other visual signs to be seen as well as to be read. We know that the better we understand and read, the more we may be tempted to pay attention to meaning at the relative expanse of mere sounds or mere images. But as soon as one wishes to have a more fine-tuned analysis of mediality and materiality in lyric, many terminological and conceptual problems jeopardize these elementary distinctions.

 i.2.4.Quite unsurprisingly, given the exceptional impact of the notion of “linguistic turn” (which continues to help label any change or transformation as a “turn”), the new approaches of mediality and materiality have been framed as “turns”, and literary studies nowadays frequently refer to their “material” and “medial” turn. There is, however, a major disciplinary difference between them, since the former has its roots in philosophy, while the latter relies much more on evolutions within the literary and poetic field itself.

 i.2.5.The material turn is strongly determined by the philosophical movement of “new materialism” (Sencindiver 2019) and its deconstruction of the subject-object divide. Thinking, here, is seen as “relational and matter bound thing” (Brillenburg-Wurth 2012: 83–85), that is as a process based on the systematic interaction and mutual reshaping of notions such as self and other, mind and body, culture and nature, etc. For the analysis of lyric poetry, this material turn translates into an increased awareness of the material features of the poem and a greater sensibility to the presence and agency of material aspects in the production as well as the reception of the text, which becomes an embodied and context-sensitive experience. Poetry today is rapidly becoming a literary art that puts the text at the centre of a wide range of cultural practices in new types of literary communication outside of the book (for an overview, see the mapping of this new field of practicing literature in the expanded field by the ExSitu group of Université Laval).

 i.2.6.The medial turn is more directly related to the field of literary studies than the philosophical movement of new materialism, but it is not a purely literary evolution either. There, the role and impact of communication and media studies (Lyric Poetry and Visual / Audio-Visual Media) should not be underestimated. In other words, the approach to mediality in lyric poetry cannot be understood without a reference to the debates on the notion of medium in these other fields. Medium is a term that may cover various realities and there is no consensus on how exactly to define it (for an almost exhaustive overview, see Jullier 2018). It is also a concept that is part of a terminological network that permanently casts new light as well as new darkness on its meaning, including the meaning of the specific types of materiality that may be involved. The most general definition of medium is that of the Oxford English Dictionary, which describes it as any “intermediate agency, instrument, or channel”. In general, the notion of medium oscillates between two definitions, a narrow and a broad one.

 i.2.7.The narrow definition of medium mainly refers to the channel that helps materialize and circulate the text of the poem. Multiple poetry channels are possible: the human body (including gestures and facial expressions, not necessarily only the human voice, since many oral performances, certainly in the specific case of the “public readings” in front of a living audience, also involve a strong visual dimension); the various ways of reproducing the voice with other means (audio recording being just one example among many others); any kind of print medium or related method of inscription (for one can also paint or engrave a text, reproduce it as a tattoo, project it on a wall, on water or in the air); and of course the manifold possibilities of using digital and other screens. One can even consider infralevel organic materiality, as theorized and practised by Edoard Kac in various forms of his ‘biopoetry’ such as transgenic poetry which the artist proposes to produce as follows: “[S]ynthesize DNA according to invented codes to write words and sentences using combinations of nucleotides. Incorporate these DNA words and sentences into the genome of living organisms, which then pass them on to their offspring, combining with words of other organisms. Through mutation, natural loss and exchange of DNA material new words and sentences will emerge" (BIOPOETRY). The material aspects involved in the definition of medium as channel (production, reproduction, storage, distribution, reception, and continuation) are then framed in sensory terms. Reading aloud, be it for oneself or for an audience, brings to the fore the human ear; silent reading does the same with the human eye, etc. It is important however to stress that this sensorial experience is never monosensorial, that is linked to just one human sense, and from this point of view it makes sense to consider that the poetic medium is a notion that has to be defined as a plural, not as a singular. One channel always involves more than one sense, and for this reason it is reasonable to believe that, in terms of sensorial experience, lyric poetry is never monomedial, but always multimodal. Silent reading involves the ear as well, and the sense of touch. When reading, even silently, we hear the internal sounding of the text (Puff 2015), we feel a certain rhythm; conversely, every optic experience also has a haptic dimension. And when listening to a poem, we may see the performer (or the machine that brings us their voice) just as we visualize in various way the meaning and the form of the words we hear: we see sentences, we make sense of a structure by linking it with an architectural form (e.g., there exists a long tradition of scholarship on the link between cognition and visualization, see Frank 1991, Klimek 2019, Mitchell 1981, Mougin 2017, Drucker 2012a, Drucker 2012b, Sorby 2012). In other words, all media, even defined in a very strict and narrow way as channels, are inevitably multimodal, to use a term coined in the field of linguistics and communication studies (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2021; various authors also use the term "mixed media" when referring to multimodality), and thus, more radically perhaps, intermedial (Baetens and Sánchez-Mesa 2015). Such intermediality is anything but homogeneous: it can remain formally implicit. This is what happens when a poem in print is read silently; an apparently monomedial item rapidly turns out to be a multisensory practice. This can also be formally explicit, as when the poem combines signs that address different senses, such as an illustrated text or a text on screen that also contains a sound track (Lyric Poetry and Visual / Audio-Visual Media) for more details, see Kohl 2011, Eckel (2011), and Ulrich (2011), the handbook by Rippl 2015 and the journal Intermédialités / Intermedialities, since 2003).

 i.2.8.Medium, in a much broader sense, is no longer understood just as a channel, but as a cultural form (Williams 2003), more precisely as a cultural practice that brings together different elements (a channel, of course, here often called host medium, but also a certain type of signs as well as a specific content), and one that does so in a way that obeys a certain social norm or convention. Contrary to what happens in the study of the narrow sense of medium as channel, which is the disciplinary object of "media studies", the enlarged sense of medium as culture is the central concern of “medium studies” (Baetens 2014). In this case, medium is seen as a set of rules that determines how a certain host medium, a certain type of signs, and a certain content, can or rather should be used, both at the level of production and at the level of reception. This set of rules is always the result of a social and cultural consensus, which means that it is inextricably linked to a certain time and place. In the case of lyric poetry (Lyric Poetry and Visual / Audio-Visual Media), which can be defined, not as a medium in the narrow sense of the word (since lyric poetry can be communicated via a wide range of channels), but as a medium in the broader sense (i.e., in the sense of medium as cultural practice), the historical and geographical variability of this consensus is clear, and questions such as “is this (still) poetry?” paradoxically reveal that the definition of what poetry as a medium actually is, and how we should judge it, is something that is frequently open to debate – at least in societies that value change and innovation (if not change for change’s sake). Christian Morgenstern’s “Fisches Nachtgesang”, the purely iconic, that is nonverbal and apparently nonsemantic poem of his collection Galgenlieder (Gallow Songs, 1905) is an example of such an attempt to push the boundaries of lyric poetry, but similar remarks apply to the aggressively “anti-poetic” style of the lyrical production (in prose, or a kind of prose) of Henri Michaux in the interwar period.

 i.2.9.The broadening of the concept of medium – from channel to cultural form – obviously has a strong impact on the approach of materiality in lyric poetry. Instead of limiting the study of materiality to the analysis of the material features of the poem itself, the emphasis on mediality in literary studies invites us to also consider the materiality of elements and aspects that go beyond the text itself, such as the material context in which a poem is presented: the material features of paper, typography, page design and cover illustration, as well as the binding of a book, for instance, but also the material features of the place where one is reading. A hipster bar is not a national library, and this difference matters for the way we read, etc. Questions of adaptation and intertextuality also begin to come under consideration here: the materiality of a lyric poem is related to the materiality of other, comparable poems (when listening to the oral performance or the audio recording of a poem, for instance, we inevitably compare it with implicit or explicit norms that rule this type of communication, and the forgetting or ignoring of these norms, which are highly context sensitive, can lead to serious misinterpretations); it might itself change from one version to another (it is a great illusion to think that one can “read” a poem “aloud” without actually producing a new version), and these material changes can become meaningful. What to think, for instance, of a facsimile reprint that modifies the size of a poem or uses a paper quality that is either much poorer or much richer than the original? And what about the illustrated reprint of a poem, or, in the case of an initially illustrated text, its non-illustrated copy? These differences – some modest, others highly intrusive – can make a significant difference for interpretation. Today, lyric poetry is becoming more and more fluid and hybrid: it moves from one channel to another, a process that frequently also modifies the text itself (fluidity), while it also likes to combine different channels and sign systems, for instance when the reading of a poem, live or captured on video, is accompanied by a visual counterpart, a background projection, or a videoclip (Bisenius-Penin, Audet and Gervais 2022, Novak 2011, Nachtergael 2020; for a special focus on poetry in the public space, see Benthien and Gestring 2023; for an overview of the institutional impact on the production of writing, more specifically on literary residencies in situ, see Bisenius-Penin 2023).

Mediality and materiality in contexts

 i.2.10.Poetry’s mediality and materiality vary widely, as shown by the very different positions of oral and print forms of literature at different moments in time, in different forms of literature, and in different linguistic areas. It is, however, important to underline that these differences can only be analyzed in context and in relationship to the role of other media, and also to stress that the shifts from one specific way of using a medium to another do not obey a linear or teleological scheme, not only because these transformations escape the sequential logic of the old versus the new – or, in the terminology of Raymond Williams’ cultural theory, the residual, the dominant and the emergent (cf. Williams 1965), many innovations in mediality reconnect the present with the past in often unforeseen ways) – but also because the temporal structures of the poetic system often involve the overlap of multiple layers and temporalities.

 i.2.11.Context is key, in time as well as in space, and so should be our awareness of the conflicting nature of the medial relationships within a given mediascape. The question of oral poetry is a good example of the extreme functional and aesthetic diversity of apparently similar phenomena. To start with, it is important to situate the role of orality in the wider mediascape of a given time and place: oral poetry (Oral and Written Lyric Poetry) does not mean the same thing in pre-print societies (Zumthor 1983) with scarce access to anything other than face-to-face information, and in print or post-print (digital) societies facing problems of information overload. It is not possible, for example, to ignore rhyme and rhythm (Rhythm, Metre, Line), whose culturally varying forms inevitably force us to ask questions regarding lyric poetry as a cultural form. These have a completely different role in the first type, where their mnemotechnic function is simply indispensable (as revealed by the absence of non-rhyming and non-prosodic poetry), and in the case of post-print literature, where the emphasis on sound in poetry is often a reaction against the hegemony of the book and the disembodiment (and, according to some, dematerialization) of the text, as well as against the author (hence the emphasis, in certain forms of avant-garde writing, on sound at the expense of other material features of a poem; see Perloff and Dworkin 2009). Similar observations also apply to medialities in themselves, regardless of their relationships, or the absence thereof, with other media. Futurism as well as Dada experimented with the continuation of literature by other means, that is, other media (performance and exhibitions, for example), and they did so in ways that were much more radical than announced and hoped for by Guillaume Apollinaire in his 1917 lecture on the Modern Mind, L’esprit nouveau et les poètes (Apollinaire 1996) . The digital turn in poetry is also a good point in case. It can be observed that in the first decades of the use of new media in poetry, which started in the fifties with the first text generators before moving to the subfield of visual poetry (for a good historical overview, see Rettberg 2019; Bajohr and Gilbert 2021; Visual Patterns), there was an attempt to discover the specific features of the medium and the new types of materiality that helped explore them, and hence the attempt to engage with properties that seemed to be absent in print literature, such as animation or ephemerality. Print characters are “mobile”, but once a text was printed, the letters became fixed and it was no longer possible to change them without producing a new print; on screen, however, letters could be programmed to “move” and to be changed on the spot. Yet more recent forms of digital poetry explore different directions, and no longer look for what distinguishes a text as read on a page and a text as read (or seen, or listened to) on a computer screen, but rather for techniques and mechanisms that disclose and further explore the underlying network mechanisms, such as the possibility to link a poem with social media and to allow for new forms of collaborative writing.

 i.2.12.Very generally speaking, the medial transformation of poetry is more that of an increasing diversification (for some examples, see McCabe 2005, Wall-Romana 2013, Orphal 2014, Benthien et al. 2019) than that of a more or less linear evolution from one medium to another. At first sight, this phenomenon seems easy to describe: poetry first moves from orality to print, then print is progressively complemented or challenged by other media (some of them oral, when it becomes possible to mechanically record and reproduce sound), and finally it moves into the realm of digital culture, which itself is becoming more and more multimodal. For medium theoreticians like Friedrich Kittler (1999), the computer becomes the supermedium that absorbs and further develops all other media. To a certain extent, this interpretation extends the tradition of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) of the nineteenth century, of which Mallarmé’s dream of the “book” (actually more a multimodal performance than a book in the conventional sense of the word; see Scherer 1978 for a “reconstruction” of Mallarmé’s notes on the topic) may have been the most prominent yet never realized illustration. Yet such a history of medial changes does not do justice to the synchronic and diachronic complexity of the relationships between poetry and mediality. To begin with, media themselves are never simple or homogeneous. Print, for instance, is not simply one medium. Even if there has been an undeniable shift from orality to print, this change occurred in various steps and various forms. One should at the very least distinguish between the initial period, from the late fifteenth till the early nineteenth century, when print continued to occupy a secondary position compared to the oral performance of poems, both in popular and in elite culture, and the later period of industrialized literature, starting around 1830, where it is literature and poetry in print that become hegemonic (Publishing Poetry). Second, medium changes never imply that previous medial forms vanish, or more or less rapidly fade out. In many cases they continue to be used, either as anachronisms (which are often vital, for instance in historical contexts attracted by nostalgia and vintage culture) or as forward-looking attempts to defy hegemonic cultural forms. Here as well, oral performance is a good example. During the nineteenth century, after the industrialization of the print industry and the subsequent split between two fields (the new mass media literature, called “industrial literature” by Sainte-Beuve, and the socially and culturally “distinguished” forms of art-for-art’s-sake, as described by Bourdieu 1996), there has always been a very thriving culture of social orality, with poets’ gatherings and public readings that were a vital part of the writing process itself, not a post factum exploitation of an already existing text (see Glinoer and Laisney 2013; Laisney 2018; Meyer-Kalkus 2020, Waquet 2023). And today, orality is once again everywhere. It is the basis of one of the most dynamic sectors of recent poetic life, namely slam poetry (Performance of Lyric). Yet this orality cannot be seen as the only medium of this kind of poetry: on the one hand, one should examine its opposition to print culture (see the idea of “delivering” poetry in print, with a French pun on “poésie délivrée”, meaning “liberated” as well as “freed from the chains of the book”, Hirschi et al. 2017); on the other hand it is no less imperative to stress that slam poetry has a dramatically powerful intermedial aspect, given its link with visuality, performance, music, and digital culture. A slammer is also a DJ, a VJ, a showman or woman, a social assistant, and a digital entrepreneur.

State of the art

 i.2.13.Modern media theory is generally linked with the name of Marshall McLuhan (1964 and 1967), whose ideas on medium and message are the starting point of most debates in the field (see for instance Ong 1985). The famous slogan “the medium is the message” should not be reduced to the narrow definition of the medium as channel, but rather designates the idea that any change of medium produces a new way of being in the world, as an individual as well as a society. Media as cultural forms represent our interface with the world, and changes of interface also mean changes of interaction with the world and thus of ourselves as human subjects. Later theoreticians have elaborated on McLuhan’s ideas, often in very creative ways. The most influential continuation of this kind of medium theory has been proposed by philosopher and film theoretician Stanley Cavell (1979), whose ideas on medium as automatism, that is of a socially accepted way of combining a host medium, a certain type of signs and a certain content, continue to be debated today. No less important has been the updating of McLuhan’s theory, which mainly focused on television, in the digital era. A key work in this regard is Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation (1999), which transfers McLuhan’s study of medium change and the historical development from old to new, and then to ever newer media, to the field of digital culture, with all digital media being defined not as totally new media, but as the new and culturally more powerful version an old, analogous medium (Baroni and Gunti 2020).

 i.2.14.The mediality and materiality of poetry have been strongly advanced by one of the many “turns” that characterize the field of literary and cultural studies since the famous “linguistic turn”, first in analytical philosophy (from Wittgenstein to Rorty), then in most other domains of humanities research. In the specific context of literature, this turn has translated into a raised awareness of the importance of the medium and thus the material properties of a text as well as the extreme diversity of its successive forms – not in order to establish the ideal and therefore somewhat dematerialized version, as in classic philology, but in order to examine the impact of mediality and materiality on the production, circulation, and reception of a poem. Key authors in this regard, even if they have not always concentrated on poetry, include, for instance, Roger Chartier (1994), Charles Bernstein (1998), Anne-Marie Christin (1999), Robert Darnton (1987), Jerome McGann (1993), Julian Murphet (2016), Marjorie Perloff (1998), or Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant (2001), who have all insisted on the double nature of the text, that is to say, both content (capable of moving from one medium to another and to be presented in changing material forms) and form (whose medial and material features, in the broad sense of medium as cultural form, are foundational of both the text as a cultural object and its meaning as a cultural construct). Important contributions have also been published in the Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies series (Northwestern UP) such as Haroldo de Campos’s selected writings Novas (de Campos 2007).

 i.2.15.A second strand of poetry research that has equally fostered mediality and materiality research can be situated in the field of digital humanities, including much practice-based research. Due to the strong porosity between traditional scholarship and creative writing in this field, there exists a thriving research tradition on the impact of digital culture on poetry. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the work by N. Katherine Hayles, who combines historical and critical thinking on e-literature (Hayles 2008) and close-reading of digital affordances in avant-garde e-writing (Hayles 2002). Of similar importance is the work by Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin, whose 2011 anthology Against Expression helped bridge the gap between predigital and digital avant-garde writing, and who both have made major contributions to the reflection on mediality and materiality. The latter with for instance a provocatively book entitled No Medium (Dworkin 2015), which highlights the foundational importance of mediality and materiality, the former with a series of critical texts on “uncreative writing”, an equally provocative term referring to the new forms of readymade writing with digital means (Goldsmith 2011 and 2020).

 i.2.16.A third vital strand focuses on poetry as a social medium, that is on the way in which contemporary poetry, on and off the page to quote a well-known title by Marjorie Perloff (1998), has migrated from the private sphere of the book to the public sphere of the poetry reading on the one hand, and to the internet, whose material form has become dramatically intermedial, on the other. A public reading is also an intermedial performance, while some poetry on screen is no longer just digitized (digital “borne”) poetry but native digital poetry (digital “born”) involving a wide range of sensory experiences and media cultures, ranging from word and image combinations in instagram poetry (instapoetry), a new form of illustrated poetry, to poetry clips, a new form of visual poetry, to take some examples that expand on traditional genres. Good overviews can be found in Scott Rettberg’s Electronic Literature (2019) and Magali Nachtergael’s Poetry in the Machine (2020). Logically, much scholarship and repositories are here published online, the most important sites being ELO ("Electronic Literature Organization", more and more multilingual), NT2 ("Nouvelles technologies, Nouvelles textualités", Montreal based and Francophone), ELMCIP (a knowledge base on e-writing), Antologia Lit(e)Lat (a repository for e-works in the majour languages, not only Spanish and Brazilian, spoken in Latin-America) as well as Cartografía de la literatura digital latinoamericana, Penn Sound (on sound-related issues; Pardo 2015, Pardo et al. 2010, Lang et al. 2019 for the French domain and Schenk 2000, Ammon 2018 and Vorrath 2020 for the Germanophone area), and electronic book review (a portal site on cyberculture in the broad sense of the word, much related to e-lit however). Mediality and materiality are the foundational layer of all these sites. Obviously, much important work continues to be published in print, with similar attention paid to the same issues (Kac 2007, Tabbi 2020).

Contemporary practices, methods and debates

 i.2.17.From a medial point of view, today’s poetic practices are as diverse as the scholarship in the field. At first sight, one may indeed have the impression that the poetry scene is heavily leaning towards either performance poetry (slam poetry, public reading, collaborative workshops, festivals such as Poetry International in Rotterdam and EXTRA! in Paris, etc.) or poetry on screen (sometimes very traditional, such as in the instapoet movement, sometimes highly experimental, as can be seen in the anthologies and repositories regularly published and updated by ELO, NT2, Lyrikline and ELMCIP, not to speak of the material, often predigital, gathered on Kenneth Goldsmith’s UBUweb, and in quite some cases a combination of both.

 i.2.18.The most exciting question however, taking into account that media always function in broader mediascapes, is at least twofold. First of all, the extreme diversity of the poetic field as it has been stretched by the exploration of old as well as new media, raises questions on the very definition of poetry itself. There no longer exists a strong divide, neither in the scholarly analyses of contemporary lyric, nor in the practice of many lyric poets themselves, between what poetry is and what it is not, and much of the most innovative writing as well scholarship focuses very explicitly on forms of production and aspects of mediality and materiality that traditional studies on poetry do not take into account – certainly not as relevant features of poetry, such as for instance the computer code used to write e-lit (Cayley 2018). The whole movement of writing as dispositif, that is the critical reflection on our current way of using language via the (audio-)visual montage of discursive fragments as they materially appear and circulate in modern society, is paradigmatic for this type of analysis, which rejects the notion of “poetry” as no longer relevant in the political perspective that is paramount in this context (Leibovici 2020).

 i.2.19.The second question, which goes beyond the avant-garde and experimental spirit of those poetic forms that question the very notion of poetry, has to do with the relationship between the new(er) screen media and the contemporary forms of reborn or reinvented orality and performance poetry, on the one hand, and the traditional medium of print on the other. Print is indeed anything but vanishing from the poetic field, not only because many digitally published poets still consider a subsequent reprint in book format as the natural (sic) continuation of their work, and certainly as the social and cultural legitimation of it (not to speak of the added commercial value: who can forget today that an instapoet such as Rupi Kaur has impressive print runs in a no less amazing number of languages?), but also because of the fact that print in the post-digital era is no longer what it was before. Print has gone through a process of “repurposing” (Bolter and Grusin 1999), it has adapted itself to the competition with the new medium that once seemed to replace it. A repurposed book is not only a book that copies or emulates what happens on screen, but also, and more importantly, a book that aims at discovering and exploring material and other aspects of its own medium (namely print) that digital culture is incapable of offering – certainly not with the same guarantee of sustainability – which is far from anecdotal in a historical moment where the problem of digital obsolescence is a daily reality. Creators of digital works and networks have started to develop sustainability strategies (Grigar and Mouhltrop 2017), but to date print remains the most robust medium of poetry. Besides, more and more authors and publishers are now developing print-repurposed projects that screens cannot (yet?) emulate or reproduce, as shown for instance in the catalogue of the French publisher JBE (formerly Jean Boîte éditions) and its “uncreative writings” series (that is, of creative editing of literary ready-mades, in the sense coined by Goldsmith 2011), although “uncreative writing” has a longstanding tradition (as well documented and studied by Goldsmith himself), and one does not take a great risk by predicting that this reborn print culture will be one of the important poetry avenues in the years to come. Those authors most interested in the possibilities of new media affordances, such as the Canadian poet Christin Bök, certainly continue to maintain print as one of their possible outlets. The mediascape of modern poetry is highly mixed and hybrid, yet not in the sense of a merger of all medial and material formats in one supermedium, but as a media basket where authors play with the specific features of each medium. It should therefore not come as a surprise that certain contemporary poets are not afraid of sticking to more minimalist forms of writing and publishing. Following the "do not harm" principle well known in the field of visual design (see the pioneering work of Edward Tufte 2001, who transferred the Bauhaus principles of simplicity and efficiency to the field of the display of visual information, the "do not harm" principle being a warning against the danger of attractiveness at the expense of clarity), not all authors and certainly not all publishers believe in the a priori advantages of media and materialities (for a critical reading of transforming poetry in print into performance, see Baetens 2022; for the example of the music clip as complement to the original sound and lyrics, see Baetens and Sánchez-Mesa 2022).

Topics for further investigaton

 i.2.20.The consequences of the medial and material turn for the study of the lyric are considerable, and much remains to be done for the mapping of general patterns and interesting case studies. Most chapters in this Compendium tackle these questions (in particular Performance of Lyric; Publishing Poetry; Visual Patterns: Sign, Image and Object; Lyric Poetry and Visual / Audio-Visual Media), not as a marginal phenomenon or a footnote to mere general and abstract analyses of texts, styles, and authors, but as one of the core elements of any form of lyric. From this point of view, the medial approach of poetry is only in its early stages, but the whole project of the Compendium clearly partakes in this landmark change.

 i.2.21.Of particular importance may be the question to which extent channels and materials have an impact on the lyric experience, more specifically that of the reader / viewer / listener, both as an individual and as part of a group or community. Expanding on now well-established ideas on the impact of technological and other changes in our way of life and structures of feeling (the starting point of the modern reflection on the notion of “experience” is John Dewey’s 1934 Art as Experience, still extremely relevant in modern aesthetic thinking as demonstrated by Dario and Libero Gamboni’s [2020] Le Musée comme expérience), it should be possible to examine whether new media forms create, or fail to create, new types of lyric experience, such as for instance the capacity of increased attention in a state of distraction (on the notion of “reception in distraction” (“Zerstreuung”), see Benjamin 2008: 40 or instead the incapacity to remain concentrated (Adorno 2020: 172).

 i.2.22.In the context of digital media, the following questions are worth considering:

 i.2.23.
1. What about the notion of “collective enunciation” (an extension of the distinction initially made by Emmanuël Souchier [2007] between authorial and editorial enunciation) in a medial context where the poet (the lyric voice, etc. Enunciative Instance in Lyric Poetry / Lyric Voicing) is not the only “agent” of the poetic production (Leibovici 2020);
2. What about the question of “impersonal” creation: either via various forms of uncreative writing (Perloff 2010, Goldsmith 2011) or via new forms of artificial intelligence (as is sometimes being done with poetic writing that addresses the notion of information overload; see Stephens 2015)?
3. What about the possibility of giving a “lyric” interpretation to the shift from reading (viewing, listening to) an existing work to participation, collaboration and co-creation? And, more specifically:
4. Which are the new forms of lyric (subjective) experience created by new technologies, such as the attractive/repulsive play with boredom, or the sensation of being lost/trapped in digital labyrinths and information overload, as well as new experiences of slowness and speed in reading (Dworkin 2018, Lyric Poetry and Visual, Audio-Visual Media)?