LYRIC POETRY AND VISUAL / AUDIO-VISUAL MEDIA

 iv.8.1.Images represent a substantial part of who we are. Not only because most of the information that we receive is presented to us in a visual format, but also because our interior self-image is strongly determined by the perception we have of the many images we both present to the world and are presented with on a daily basis. From family photo albums to the videos in which we appear, our photographs on the profiles of social networks, or our appearances in job interviews, the visual way we present ourselves in public seems decisive for our social interactions and acceptance by others. Our kinship to image, pointed out by Aristotle in the Poetics (1448b), is also a cultural continuum and is deeply inserted in a great variety of artistic practices: “the idea of a ‘turn’ toward the pictorial is not confined to modernity, or to contemporary visual culture. It is a trope or figure of thought that reappears numerous times in the history of culture, usually at moments when some new technology of reproduction, or some set of images associated with new social, political or aesthetic movements, has arrived on the scene” (Mitchell 2015: 14; more about the “pictorial” or “iconic turn” in Bachmann-Medick 2016, 245–255). When we say we are experiencing the “age of vision” or living in the “civilization of the image,” we forget that all previous ages and civilizations were visual and image-based as well (Barthes 1964). And this visual worldview (cosmovisión in Spanish, from Greek kosmos and Latin videre) permeates artistic and literary productions.

 iv.8.2.A similar phenomenon is to be observed with sound. Most literary forms in ancient times were materialized through an oral form, and even the posterior invention of reading and writing was impregnated by a strong vocal dimension (Ong 1982). The sound is within the text, this oral dimension of the pronounced word reverberating in the reading mind, as modern neuroscience has clarified (Dehaene 2009). The “civilization of sound” developed dramatically after the invention of radio, telephone, and other apparatus that could reproduce voice, sounds, and noises. Nowadays, the increasing influence and development of podcasts, one of the most relevant cultural and journalistic platforms of our era, has permitted audio (from Latin audio, "I hear") to achieve a central position in our culture via its alliance with the powerful machinery of vision (from Latin video, "I see"): cinema, photography, television, digital images and the World Wide Web. Thus, the continuum of audio-visual culture is, technically, the “natural” medium in which we live in our society.

 iv.8.3.By the same token, contemporary art has more frequently and naturally merged with heterogenous disciplines, such as video, cinema, plastic arts, music, literature, etc. (Obalk 2001). Its works have likewise come to rely increasingly on the use of technology, which, due to its digital origin, further favors the amalgamation of diverse discourses and forms of expression. The literary phenomenon known as “lyric poetry” is nowadays also affected by this mingling trend, blending most of its traditional characteristics in a more complex, iconic, and visual (sometimes visionary) dimension.

 iv.8.4.Despite the fact that the borders of lyric poetry have constantly broadened since modernity (Lyric as Mode and Genre), the increasing prevalence of visual and audio-visual media in the last century and a half has had a fundamental impact on all literary genres (Mora 2012), propelled by intermediality (Eilittä and Riccio-Berry 2016). That is not surprising in a field such as lyric poetry, which is traditionally shaped by an iconic bias (Margaret Freeman’s influential essay about poetry is precisely called The Poem as Icon, 2020). We must remember that some of the earliest conserved examples of poetic expression, such as Simmias’s work (300 B.C.), can be understood as forms of proto-visual poetry. And when the reading of a text ceases to be only words, but instead incorporates images or visual effects in its composition, the cerebral process of perception and interpretation radically changes; even the traditional layout or mise en page has effects on the “sensory reading experience” (Highasi 2016, 41). Those cognitive resonances lead us to the “material turn” (Mediality and Materiality of Lyric), which poetic theory has experimented with in recent decades (Stolley 2015).

 iv.8.5.Perhaps there is no such thing as “pure poetry” anymore, since genre hybridization and the mixture of poetic with autobiographical pulsion and non-fiction writing (i. e., “docupoetics”; Nuernberger and Zeller 2024, 197) has expanded the borders of the lyrical poem. Besides, the previous account of the implications of the linking and the mixture between text, sound, and image portrays a framework that is profoundly different from the traditional forms of reading or listening to poetry. Browsing a video poem or navigating through a permutational digital poem may have points in common with reading a poem in a book, but there is much more than the text at stake: dynamic words, haptic experiences, dialogues between text, images and motion, the role of programming or sequence editing, etc. Similar changes occur with oral poetry and audio-visual poetry. Performance poetry, for instance, is a territory between fields that has vague boundaries, but obviously attending a conventional poetry reading and going to see one of Laurie Anderson’s poetic-multimedia live shows are very different experiences. In summary, we need to readapt our concept of contemporary poetry in an expansive way, as Eric Vos does: “Media poetry is innovative poetry created and experienced within the environment of new communication and information technologies” (Vos 2007; 1999). We will offer an open discussion about the complex question of terminology in section four.

The importance of digitization in audio-visual media

 iv.8.6.Digitization is one of the most decisive transformations in the world of writing and literature, one that is always in perpetual evolution, as it is influenced by changes in writing tools, print media, and types of circulation. Let us remember, for example, the transition from oral poesis to written literary expression that occurred in antiquity (Ong 1999), or the qualitative leap that the arrival of the printing press meant for the formalization and dissemination of writing and thought (McLuhan 1962). “From clay tablets to rolls of papyrus, from the codex to the printed book, lyric poetry has always taken advantage of new media,” write Antonio Rodríguez and Kirsten Stirling (2022). However, in recent decades technological acceleration has brought about a drastic evolution in this sphere. If George Steiner could assert in 1972 that the change from the hardcover to the paperback book was the possible symptom of a sociological change with respect to the firm and lasting status of the logos contained therein (see Steiner 1972, xx), it is possible to conclude that the current digitization of texts is, in turn, another movement that points to a change in the conception of books in general; whereas the pessimists will speak about the disappearance of the book, dissolved in the diffuse materiality of bits, the optimists, for their part, will counter by emphasizing the benefits of a more fluid and universally-accessible model of the written word.

 iv.8.7.In the decades of “digital prehistory” (Funkhouser 2007), extending from 1950 to 1995, poetry linked to computation used to be confined to nodes of experimental writers or practices halfway between art and literature – Perloff (1991) highlights Oulipo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, or Steve McCaffery, amongst others. In that period some creators such as John Cage, Bernardette Mayer, Bern Porter and Hannah Weiner took “an informatic turn from the New American and concrete poetry movements of the 1950s and early 1960s toward a poetry increasingly concerned with informatic motifs, found materials, and the exhaustive recording of everyday experience” (Stephens 2015, 109). For the reader, in many cases, the interaction was limited to reading silent texts on a screen (Balpe 1991; Cayley 2007, 108), and the whole experience was constrained by the technology available. But after the development of the personal computer, programming languages, and, in 1993, the World Wide Web, the diffusion of multimedia tools not only expanded the communicative possibilities of society in general, but also opened up a new, potentially universal writing space that authors, as we would logically expect, would not take long to make their own.

 iv.8.8.One of the keys to facilitating these practices was the easy possibility to remediate (Bolter and Grusin 1996) any cultural product, transforming it with (and into) bytes, “to draw our attention to what it has to say about the medium it is created in / for” (Pitman 2018, 265). From this point on, creators could reshape and recirculate their works, providing them a new space of existence and renewed social logics, because “remediation is a concept that applies to media in their simultaneous character as objects, as social relationships, and as formal structures” (Bolter and Grusin 1996, 358).

 iv.8.9.Thus, digitization created communicative channels in which image and sound were naturally linked with text. This phenomenon, in fact, guaranteed the perseverance of writing while simultaneously enriching it. As Derrida foresaw in 1967, “whether or not there are essential limits, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be a field of writing” (“Enfin, qu’il y ait ou non des limites essentielles, tout le champ couvert par le programme cybernétique sera champ d’écriture”; 1967, 19). As N. Katherine Hayles (2008, 13) has pointed out, the screen becomes a playable space, manipulable and completely available to the writer, who is free to break – or not – textual conventions. For Eduardo Kac, the evolution of media was a long process, and its continuation in this century will imply “further miniaturization (greater portability), additional media convergence (integration of word, image, sound, movement, transmission, and many other sign-processing features into a single device), and broadband network ubiquity […]. This process undoubtedly contributes to expand the poet’s creative media and will affect the writing / reading process in stimulating ways” (Kac 2007, 7). Communication after these new possibilities cannot be understood as a unidirectional movement from creator to reader (Vos, 2007, 200), but rather as a shared space of writing and interchanging (a pen field, campo de pluma, as Luis de Góngora wrote in the seventeenth century) between authorship and creative readership.

 iv.8.10.As we are observing, there is feedback between literary and technological forms, which influence each other, and rhetorical strategies fluctuate between them continuously. Loss Pequeño Glazier published his influential Digital Poetics, The Making of E-poetries (2022), in which he coined the expression digital poetics as a useful terminology, because there is not one, unique type of poetry of this kind; in fact, there is one for each poet (and, sometimes, one for each poem). Commenting on some works of digital poetry, Brian Kim Stefans (2017, 18) says that “these poets opt variously for highly rhetorical (as opposed to Romantic), procedural (as opposed to ‘organic’), decidedly unnatural modes, characterized by the uses of arbitrary constraints, word lists, syllabics and exhaustive reworkings of precedent texts.” Technology helps authors find unnatural resources, like the “indetermination” (Cayley 2007, 121) created by random or permutation programming, which increase the sensation of strangeness, a concept key to poetic language, as demonstrated by the Russian formalists.

 iv.8.11.All these questions, given their deep link with digitization, bring to the fore questions about authorship (Balpe 1991; Landow 2006, 125; Beiguelman 2010, 422), but also about materiality, because they suppose the addition or collision of two or more elements, each with its own material support (literature has always been mediated by space, support, and tools for writing, according to Bolter 1991). This is particularly evident, for instance, in the video poems that we will examine later.

The subject in context

 iv.8.12.All the literary or artistic manifestations that can be included within rubrics such as new media arts, digital media arts, audio-visual literature, virtual art, holographic poetry, cyberart, cyberpoetry, electronic literature (e-lit) and the like have one aspect in common: the creator must also be a specialist in the electronic technologies that are essential for these kinds of activities, and this creator must be familiar with programming or work closely with individuals who are experts in those fields.

 iv.8.13.And the reader needs to be acquainted as well: in some lyrical texts incorporating audio-visual elements, the result needs a deciphering “lectospectator” (Mora 2012) involved in the special characteristics of the “image-text” (Mitchell 1986) and the dynamic image inherent to the internet and other technological devices. Hypertext not only implies collective creation – involving, at least, one writer, one programmer and the constructor(s) of the writing device – but also “collaborative reading” (Joyce 2001, 125). For this reason, lately there has been a proliferation of examples of illustrated poetry, digital poetry, video poems, kinetic or animated poetry, etc. Nevertheless, we cannot fall into the temptation of reading such literary forms through categories designed for the printed text, such as collage or pastiche, since the digital status of these objects far exceeds these classifications and adds features that are incompatible with a static text (Funkhouser 2012, 211). For example, the poet and researcher Brian Kim Stefans explains in the introduction to Word Toys: Poetry and Technics (2017) how, in order to analyze the various works studied in his book, he was forced to use, depending on the case, philosophical, mathematical, or philological categories, as well as elements of information theory, terms from visual studies (such as Mitchell’s metapicture), ideas from film theory or cyberculture, etc. (Stefans 2017, 7–11). This can give us an idea of the methodological difficulty involved in approaching the study of poetry that has been affected in some way through digitization.

 iv.8.14.Consequently, poetry has broadened its field of interest in the last decades, helped by the possibilities offered by digital technologies. On one hand, these technologies have expanded the horizon of possibilities for distributing poems, both in digital and printed formats (or remediating them through other possible formats: performance, slam poetry, video poems, acoustic or sonic-experimental lyric, etc.). On the other hand, these technologies have increased the range of forms available for poetic expression, which sometimes blur into one of the many examples of digital poetry, visual poetry, or even plastic arts. Since the landscape is immense and varied, it is possible to make some divisions by topic.

 iv.8.15.Video Poetry. According to Portuguese video poet Ernesto de Melo e Castro, video poetry arose in the 1960s as a response to the challenges brought about by the new possibilities for combining sound and vision with poetry. A contemporary hybrid aesthetic phenomenon (Simanowski 2006, 43) par excellence, “videopoetry is also an investigation of the specific characteristics of the electronic text, as opposed to those of the motion picture and also to the massification of TV broadcasting” (Melo e Castro 2007, 176). Thus, as is the case with video art, video poetry has a clear social dimension, with a posture that denounces the excesses and manipulation of mass media. As with video art, once again, video poetry does not have a unique typology, and can be adapted by each creator to acquire a personal form of expression. It is possible to distinguish some popular directions: 1) the use of the video to simply complete or illustrate a previous poem; 2) the combination of video and text to rethink – or criticize – the communicative values of poetry in our era; 3) the experimental pursuit of new ways to create poetry, exploring the limits and capacity of hybridization of both worlds, textual and audio-visual. Some voices claim that only the two last directions are proper video poetry; for instance, Tom Konyves argues in “Videopoetry: A Manifesto” (2012) that, “videopoetry is a genre of poetry displayed on a screen, distinguished by its time-based, poetic juxtaposition of images with text and sound,” because for Konyves there is not video poetry without text (id est, without the poem). After that, Konyves taxonomizes this practice into five categories: kinetic text, sound text, visual text, performance, and cin(e)poetry. The production possibilities provided by digital multimedia allow all these media and languages to be brought together in videopoems; however, that does not mean that all works achieve this effectively (Kozak 2016).

 iv.8.16.Photo Poetry. With the invention of the daguerreotype and other forms of proto-photography, a strong relation between photography and poetry was forged; regardless, the research in this field is recent. According to Nicholls and Ling (2020), “the first use of the term photopoem can be found in Constance Phillips’s Photopoems: A Group of Interpretations through Photographs (1936),” but this term is not the only one at stake, due to the range of possibilities for photo poetry. In the words of Silke Horstkotte and Nanci Pedri, “photography in literature is widely recognized as one of the focal points of word and image research, with entire conferences and seminar series and a growing number of publications devoted to the subject” (2008, 7). The past few decades have seen a number of exhibitions (“Photo-Poetics, An Anthology”, Kunsthalle of Berlin, 2015; Guggenheim Museum of New York, 2016), as well as theoretical, poetic, and artistic approaches. Lilian Louvel has examined the different functions that fixed images can develop in / into / from a text: from the well-known classical ekphrasis and hypotyposis, to other functions such as hypopictoriality, archipictoriality, or images as rhythmic patterns: “the image can create a rhythm in the text, as is the case in Peter Ackroyd’s English Music, in which in every other chapter, nine illustrations punctuate and interrupt the flow of a text which oscillates between past and present, dream and reality” (2011, 67).

 iv.8.17.Audio Poetry. Lyrical practices with a strong emphasis on the auditory or acoustic, often produced without any other format of emission and reception, vary depending on the age, country, and poetic form. As has been the case with other concepts discussed in this article, it is not easy to find a specific terminology. For instance, audio poetry is frequently called “sound poetry” (Feinsod 2012, 1327), but if it just has a guttural / phonetic dimension, it can be called “acoustic poetry”. In a general sense, “our understanding of sound poetry is a poetic work that renounces the word as a bearer of meaning and creates aesthetic structures (sound poems, sound texts) by methodologically adding and composing sounds (series or groups of sounds) driven by their own laws and subjective intentions of expression, and which requires an acoustic realization on behalf of the poet” (Benthien and Vorrath 2017, 5). Benthien uses “audio poetry” and “sound poetry” as synonyms (Benthien 2019, 221; for Hörlyrik see also Vorrath 2020). Rühm and other authors write about “auditive poetry”, and Kostelanetz (1980) prefers “text-sound.” The possibilities of this kind of poetry are diverse because the majority of the pieces are experimental and the poet tends to be the creator of the text – or the designer of the sounds, in guttural, phonetic or non-linguistic poetry – and the performer (Novak 2011, 62; talks about a “poet-performer”), or the recorder, or the public speaker / reader. In some cases, such as with the Spanish artist Bartolomé Ferrando, the poet describes his work as “direct poetry” or “oral poetry”, with lines of work that are difficult to separate from performances, musical improvisations, or artistic actions (2007). Dick Higgins classifies audio poetry pieces in three classes: “1) folk varieties, 2) onomatopoetic or mimetic pieces, and 3) nonsense poetries which their own languages” (Braune 2014, 105). Hence there is an overlap with poetic performance, which can be a different way to convey published poetry or an oral-specific form of creating it. For instance, under the category of “the performing sounds of poetry,” Pfeiler studies “phonetic intensifiers and onomatopoeia,” “cacophony and euphony,” “rhyme and repetition,” “rhythm and meter,” “tone and pitch,” “volume and pause” (2003, 51–69).

 iv.8.18.Poetry 2.0 or Digital Poetry. In the digital version of ancient rhetoric, composed by dispositio, inventio and elocutio – which we can easily adapt to digital environment –, digital poetry is not properly “digitized literature” (Kozak 2017, 223), but it instead has a specificity that responds to the inclusion of technological elements that intervene in the communicative scheme (Visual Patterns). Thus, according to the communicational device (dispositivo in Spanish, which comes from the Latin, dispositio) that Philippe Bootz establishes to explain programmed digital poetry, the path followed by the work from the creator to the reader passes through the source (program and data), the equipment (computers, internet, executables, plug-ins, etc.) and the “transitorie observable,” that is, “the multimedia event produced in the execution of the program” (Bootz 2011, 32). Therefore, programming is considered a creative practice (Balpe 1991; Kozak 2017, 227), and the program is the “material to work with” (Bootz 2006, 20), in an encounter between human and non-human poetics (Gainza 2018, 106). On a small scale, our computers, tablets, and mobile phones are rhetorical artifacts, as Richard A. Lanham (1993, 105) has argued: “the bit-mapped, graphics-based personal computer is [...] intrinsically a rhetorical device,” and, obviously, a literary transmitter. That is one of reasons for the exponential rise in the number of possibilities to create “technotexts” (Hayles 2002, 25) conceived specifically for this environment. Nevertheless, this kind of poetry has demonstrated a weak point: the reliability (Bootz 2012, 275) of the hardware and the software which support and reproduce the pieces, which leads to the “digital erosion” (Mora 2022) of the poems. The field of digital poetry is immense and comprises several fields: programmed poems, permutational poetry, holopoems and 3D texts, interactive poetry, poetic videogames (see Jason Nelson, retro-game), hyperpoetry, animated typopoetry, pieces written with augmented reality (Kat Mustatea in Voidopolis, 2023, delve into the idea of blurring the limits between reality and simulation with a book with eroded texts and images which needs augmented reality to be read), etc. (see Bajohr and Gilbert 2021).

 iv.8.19.Online Publishing, Social Networks Audiences and Followers. The creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1993 and his decision to release its patent into the public domain was one of the most important events in the recent history of communication and culture. The stunning emergence of the internet, based on previous networks like Arpanet or Minitel but far exceeding their capabilities, has reshaped academic, cultural, artistic, literary, and creative fields during the last few decades. The emergence of online publishers (within dual system: e-books and the Web, or just on the Web), and the proliferation of social networks (blogs, microblogging such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), has changed the distribution of literature as well as literary criticism (Mora 2012). Writing about Twitter, James Lough (2018, 6) writes: “The social media platform that straitjackets writers into concision has mushroomed into a favored mode of expression for poets, philosophers, and even presidents”. Thus, most of the shared texts online are brief, fragments of a larger sequence, with a statistical tendency to not exceed the size of one screen (Escandell 2017). Some of the publications are clearly conscious of the rhetorical format of each respective platform, and thus try to take advantage of their disposition and technical resources (visual disposition, possibility of links, audio and video insertion, commentaries, hashtags, etc.).

 iv.8.20.Slammers, Spoken Word. Although the creation of slam poetry is sometimes attributed to poet and activist Marc Smith in 1986, the truth is that various cultural and sociological phenomena in the 1960s and 1970s similarly stressed the importance of poetic public speech, experimental poetry reading, and the engaged, vocal expression of professional or amateur political verses. From Beatnik poetry readings to rap, from counterculture festivals to the recovering of folk and popular oral poetry competitions (improvisation, Cuban repentismo, Basque versolaris), a landscape of poetic shows in public, sometimes with a strong political tendency, proliferated throughout different Western countries during this period. Most of these practices or movements were not accepted by the academy, causing a bitter and maybe fruitless discussion about their poeticism, but the aim of their practitioners was not to reach the canon, but rather the audience. According to Maria Damon, “the world of poetry slams and open-mic readings, while not directly politically interventionist, perhaps, creates a public sphere that is healthily contestatory” (1998, 327), to the social system and the academy at the same time. Nevertheless, it is obvious that all these oral forms of poetry have a lot in common with regular poetry (rhythm, lyrical stress, vocal effects, tropes, alliterations, rhyme, etc.) and sometimes the poets are the same, placed in different contexts – as demonstrated by the example of the Beat Poets. Currently there are a considerable number of slam poetry and spoken word championships and encounters around the world, and it has become one of the most popular forms of poetic performance today.

 iv.8.21.Visual Poetry, Concrete Poetry, Ideograms. Considered one of the more ancient types of written poetry, the design of poems shaped as a concrete object (technopaeginia, calligram) or representative of a particular idea or concept, with or without words, is a recurrent practice in Western literature. From Simmias’s “Wings” (s. II) to Apollinaire’s “La colombe poignardée et le jet de l’eau” (1918) and Brazilian concrete poetry (Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Augusto de Campos), through antique Latin carmina figurata and musical scores for ars subtilior, any type of visual poetry is a form of “difficult wit” (Cózar 1991), in which cunning and creativity find a common path to express ideas with lexico-visual (Mora 2012) elements. While some theoreticians have tried to distinguish visual from concrete poetry (Solt and Barnstone 1968), the richness and variety found in the spectrum of intermedial texts, performances, and experiments – often in the oeuvre of the same poet – make it impossible (and futile) to establish closed typologies or steady terminologies. According to Loss Pequeño Glazier’s significant description of the field, “Visual poetics provides an opportunity to explore the expressive potential of language as a creative material consisting of alphabetic, visual, and aural levels, with a focus on forms of visual expression, including concrete poetry” (Pequeño Glazier 2004). Concrete poetry, which “renders all language into poetic icons” (Goldsmith 2011, 57), has had a substantial influence in the last century and is one of the main directions in current visual poetry. Traditionally conceived as the sum of text and image, visual poetry is intermedial by nature (Bryson 1988; Block 1997, 715), and can include calligrams, asemic writing, illustrated or painted poems, typography, poetry comics (Labarre 2021), collages, haptic poetry, and all kinds of experimental texts. The presence of ideogrammatic figures was common in Ezra Pound’s poetry, for example. Sometimes it is not easy to establish the limit between animated calligrames and digital poetry for the “intersemiotic contaminations” (Saemmer 2010, 97).

 iv.8.22.Word Art: A form of plastic arts made using only the iconic power of letters. It is practiced by both artists and poets, and every creator understands the possibility in a unique way.

State of the art

 iv.8.23.Despite there being a strong, historical link between visuality and the practice of art and literature, a deep examination of visual epistemology and its rich implications did not exist prior to the twentieth century. Researchers such as Rudolph Arnheim, with his Visual Thinking (1969), which has its origins in the theory of the Gestalt of Ernst Gombrich (and his influential Art and Illusion: A Study on the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1960), laid the foundations for new approaches to the complexity of the visual. Those insights from the theory of art combined with thoughts from main “artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Crane” (Drucker 2014, 17) or poets like Paul Valéry. Theoreticians of cinema and photography (Epstein 1955; Bazin 1967–1971; Barthes 1964; Sontag 1977; Benjamin 1986; Flusser 2018) helped to build partial constructions of the audio-visual modern aesthetic thinking, but the most important movement in this direction was a new branch of modern thinking: semiotics. An interdisciplinary field informed by linguistics, philosophy, aesthetics, and communication studies, the semiotic insights about the “sign” – and its multiple dimensions in literature and audio-visual expressions – advance this theory in many interesting ways. In the field of semiotics, we can highlight books such as Il segno (Eco 1973) and Trattato di semiotica generale (Eco 1975), by Umberto Eco, Du sens, essais sémiotiques (1976) by Algirdas J. Greimas, Writing on the General Theory of Signs (1971) by Charles William Morris and, more recently, Semiotics of the Media: State of the Art, Projects, and Perspectives (1997), edited by Winfried Nöth. Even though semiotics has difficulties in accounting for the digital text, as Aarseth (1997) has pointed out, the perspective remains quite alive in communication theory.

 iv.8.24.Around the same time, several studies adopted a critical vision towards the influence audio-visual products and artefacts may have over citizens, displaying the conflict between media manipulation and individual liberties. Along these lines we might cite well-known texts from Guy Debord (La société du spectacle, 1967), Paul Virilio (La machine de vision, 1988), Jean Baudrillard (La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu, 1991) or Pierre Bourdieu (Sur la télévision, 1996).

 iv.8.25.The result of this pivotal moment in the study of visual culture was, precisely, a new and clear idea of the existence of one global “visual culture,” defined by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (2001, 3) as “shared practices of a group, community, or society, through which meaning is made out of the visual, aural, and textual world of representations”. Nicolas Mirzoeff, in An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999), considers the death of Princess Diana as the foundation of that Weltanschauung – just two years before the fall of the Twin Towers in New York, which was obviously the moment of no return for global images. Another pioneering book in that direction was Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (1994), edited by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey.

 iv.8.26.A recent line of studies about the audio-visual comes from the fields of media studies, image studies, transmedia studies, performance studies, as well as from research on electronic literature. Eduardo Kac explains why the word “media” is important in some of those labels: “media connotes the various means of mass communication thought of as a whole – in other words, technological systems of production, distribution and reception” (Kac 2007, 7). One of the main characteristics of these types of studies is the structural interdisciplinary methodology. Authors delve into cultural phenomena, drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, literary theory, psychology, research on communication, digitization, etc., to understand in full the complex relationships between media, performance, literature, and culture. This mixture usually creates terminological confusion: “These difficulties of terminology are not necessarily a result of scholarly persnicketiness or rivalries; they also mirror tremendous technological developments and drastic changes in artistic practices that have profoundly transformed the notion of art” (Benthien, Lau and Marxen 2019, 9), and literature as well. In media studies we can cite titles such as Culture, Media & Language (1980), by Stuart Hall; A Companion to Media Studies (2005), edited by Angharad Valdivia; or the article by David Morley, “Mediated classifications. Representations of class and culture in contemporary British television” (European Journal of Cultural Studies, 12/4, 2009, 487–508). In Spanish-speaking countries, the most important publication would be Jesús Martín Barbero’s De los medios a las mediaciones. Comunicación, cultura y hegemonía (1987, 1998). In performance studies, where the main lines of research explore how performance can alter the traditional ways of spreading the poetic word, but also how it can be used as a tool for social change and defy cultural and power dynamics, we can highlight texts like Marvin Carbon’s Performance: A Critical Introduction (1996), Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening: Poetry and the Performer Word (1998), or, more recently, Julia Novak’s Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance (2011).

 iv.8.27.Finally, in the intertwining of methodologies conveyed by transmedia, multimedia, and intermedia studies, it is important to remember the seminal role of Jay Bolter’s Remediation. Understanding New Media (1999), one of the most cited texts in this area. We also can stress publications such as the influential Narrative and Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001) by Marie-Laurie Ryan; New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression: Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres, edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope; Literary Art in Digital Performance: Case Studies in New Media Art and Criticism (2009), by Francisco J. Ricardo; the research about intermedia and transmedia from Jan Baetens and Domingo Sánchez-Mesa (2007); and the recovery of the Russian formalist’s concept of “literariness” to examine these blurry zones between art and literature by Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau and Maraike M. Marxen in The Literariness of Media Art (2019).

The diverse names for contemporary poetry

 iv.8.28.And finally, we arrive at studies about media and poetry. It is possible to distinguish two directions. The first line of scholarship delves into the effects of media on conventional or printed poetry. In this sense, there are classic studies like Marjorie Perloff’s Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991) or N. Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines (2002). The second line of scholarship focuses on poetry that cannot be read outside of the media environment, encompassing experimental and medial perspectives on poetry such as Media Poetry (2007) edited by Kac; Regards croisés. Perspectives on Digital Literature (2010), edited by Philippe Bootz and Sandy Baldwin; Word Space Multiplicities, Openings, Andings, edited by Jim Rosenberg and Sandy Baldwin (2015); Paul Stephens’s The Poetics of the Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (2015), or Digitale Literatur II, edited by Hannes Bajohr and Annette Gilbert. We could also cite Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture (2020) by Shengqing Wu.

 iv.8.29.One of the problems apparent in this conceptual landscape is the diversity of theoretical approaches and the consequent multiplicity of terms and definitions, increased by the variety of the use of some key words (for instance, Lyric: see Rodríguez and Stirling 2022) in different languages. The flexibility of the boundaries generated by the contact of poetry with audio-visual techniques has fostered the proliferation of new terminologies and methodological approaches.

 iv.8.30.The Brazilian poet, scholar, and programmer Eduardo Kac uses the term “media poetry” (Kac 2007, 7). More recently, Antonio Rodríguez and Kirsten Stirling (2022) uphold a broader understanding of lyric poetry: the lyre multimédia, which can contain the most diverse forms of poetic practices. Even wordless objects, “may have rhythms and visual metaphors that evoke our interactions with the lyric” (Rodríguez and Stirling 2022). Other conceptual tags used are: e-poetry, poésie numérique, cyberpoetry (Beiguelman 2010), ciberpoesía (Molina, Mora and Peñalta 2019), etc.

Contemporary practices, methods, and debates

 iv.8.31.The diversity of contemporary poetic practices is so vast that a closed list of examples would make no sense. Some of them clash with traditional poetry; some of them do not have even a recognizable poetic aspect; sometimes “the page is no longer there, not even as a metaphor” (Melo e Castro 2007, 175); sometimes the poets do not define the genre of their creation. Besides, technology is a transversal factor of impact: “Even if it does not involve electronics or computers, conceptual poetry is thus very much a part of its technological and cultural moment,” according to Craig Dworkin (2011, xlii). With an open approach and with an invitation to the reader to find even more possible examples, as well as the explicit goal to emphasize the often neglected (Navas Ocaña 2020) creations made by women, here is an open list of lyrical lines of work.

 iv.8.32.Video Poetry. Ernesto de Melo e Castro’s Roda Lume (1969–1988) establishes a synchronicity across image, voice, and text, in the lineage of experimental works from decades prior, such as Norman McLaren’s films. Video poems like Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness,” or Belén Gache’s “Mundos en colisión” generate an intertwined encounter between the materiality of the animated image, the specificity of the voice and sound recordings, and the textuality of the original texts. Each layer of remediation adds a new stratum of lyric writing, in the sense that the reader / viewer has to read, decipher, and understand more and more semantic dimensions of the work with each layer. The creative drive of Laurie Anderson has no limits, and her live experiences bring together sound and videopoems (Home of the Brave). Richard Kostelanetz moved from video recordings in cartridge to digital works; it is possible to see a selection of his Video Fictions and Video Poems on YouTube (Video Fictions). Other interesting names in video poetry have been Valerie LeBlanc (Canada), Mriganka Sekhar Ganguly (India), Caterina Davinio (Italy), Margarita Becerra Cano (Colombia), Arnaldo Antunes (Brazil), Heid E. Erdich (USA), Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (Marshall Islands), Miriam Reyes (Spain), etc. Scholar Andrew P. Campana studies recent samples of Japanese cinepoems and pieces created with Augmented Reality (see Swift 2018). I would strongly recommend the Video Collection: The Art of Poetry, from Boston University.

 iv.8.33.Photo Poetry. As mentioned earlier, the relation between poetry and photography began with the creation of the technology for mechanically capturing images. For instance, an early modern poet such as Walt Whitman, “from about 1850, started collecting data for a Poem of Pictures” (Peñuela 1997, 734), and the surrealist poets worked closely with photographers (Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Nusch Éluard, or Paul Éluard). Anne Atwood has delved into the links between photography and haiku. Nowadays, the number and diversity of examples is vast, and we will highlight just some of them: the creative work between photography and poetry from Leslie Scalapino, Marília Garcia, Hans Eijkelboom, or Chema Madoz is exquisite and internationally acclaimed. The well-known American poet Susan Howe published The Midnight (2003), “a poetic text that embeds varieties of prose as well as photographs, reproduced paintings, maps, catalogs, facsimiles of tissue interleaves, and enigmatic captions in what is a tripartite sequence of […] highly formalized lyrics” (Perloff 2010, 99–100). We can also consider all the photo-poets included in the aforementioned exhibition, “Photo-Poetics, An Anthology”: Erica Baum, Moyra Davey, Elad Lassry, Erin Shirreff, Sara VanDerBeek, Kathrin Sonntag, Lisa Oppenheim, Leslie Hewitt, Anne Collier and Claudia Angelmaier. Nicholls and Ling (2020) have collected a series of books of photopoetry created among a poet and a photographer (Photopoetry), in a conceptual way: Lavinia Greenlaw and Garry Fabian Miller’s Thoughts of a Night Sea (2002), Paul Muldoon & Norman McBeath’s Plan B (2009), Lucy English and Sally Mundy, Why I’m Here (2009), etc. Some books of poetry begin with the reproduction of a photo and then the poems comment on it at large, for example Antonio Martínez Sarrión’s Cantil (1995) or Luigi Amara’s Nu)n(ca (2015).

 iv.8.34.Audio Poetry. We can cite audio poets such as Ernst Jandl (Lautgedichte, 1925–2000), Bartolomé Ferrando, Nora Gomringer or Thomas Kling. The inherent intermediality of this register sometimes makes it difficult to establish clear divisions between audio poetry, spoken word, and performance, for instance in the work of the group aVaspo. There are some collections of recorded audio poetry or lectures, such as The South Asian Literary Recordings Project, the vast UbuWeb:Sound, the Hear@Buffalo poetry collection’s audio archive, the Canadian Les voix de la poesie, Berlin Haus für Poesie or the Poetry Foundation podcasts. Also remarkable is the website PennSound.

 iv.8.35.Poetry 2.0 or Digital Poetry. Despite originally being a rather experimental and marginal form of artistic practice, digital poetry today has central role in unconventional poetry, with a range of institutions, funds, and repositories solely dedicated to its conservation, study, and visibility. The most important is the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), located at Washington State University, Vancouver, with an influential web page, which is organized by collections. In these collections the reader can find quite a canon of electronic literature, with many experimental poetic pieces. Another interesting project is the Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (ELMCIP), with 3882 works registered in 2023, as curated by the University of Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group. Also relevant is the Electronic Poetry Center, created at Buffalo University by the scholar and digital poet Loss Pequeño Glazier. Other collective contributions are Narratopedia (located at the Universidad Javieriana Pontificia de Bogotá, Colombia), the anthology Literatura Electrónica Latinoamericana y Caribeña, the Ciberia Project, Le laboratoire de recherche sur les œuvres hypermédiatiques, the Portal de Literatura Digital Hispánica, the Archivo de Literatura Digital en América Latina, etc. The past few decades have witnessed the rise of a plethora of digital poets: John Cayley, Shelley Jackson, Rui Torres, Michael Joyce, Gustavo Romano (author of the well-known IP Poetry), Laura Kerr, Mark Amerika, Quianxun Chen, Belén Gache, Eduardo Kac, Jean-Marie Dutey, María Mencía, Serge Bouchardon, Ana María Uribe, Nick Monfort, Urszula Pawlicka and Łukasz Podgórni, Belén García Nieto, Mez (Mary-Ann Breeze), Peter Cho, Alexandra Saemmer, Doménico Chiappe, Rozalie Hirs, Tina Escaja, Alex Saum, Walter van der Mäntzche, Ramsey Nasser, Xavier Malbreil, Demian Schopf and the Kashmiri poets uploaded to the platform “The Kashmiri Tales” (see Mani 2022). See also the anthologies edited by Jacques Donguy (Poésies experimentales. Zone numérique [1953–2007]) and Vega Sánchez (2018).

 iv.8.36.Social Network Audiences and Followers, and Online Publishing. Most of the poets cited in other categories are “online poets” as well, with a constant or a transitory presence on social media, and they are joined by millions of amateur poets who share their creations with the internet. Therefore, it is relevant to mention the massive number of poetic publications on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Wattpad, Tumblr, and other platforms, which we can find through search engines and, above all, by using hashtags. For instance, a multiple hashtag search in Instagram for #poetry, #poesie, #poesia and #dichtung, gives almost 100,000,000 results, which is both astonishing and meaningful. There are a lot of online communities (for instance, the Hungarian Poetvlog on YouTube), numerous digital magazines and journals that publish poetry in almost every language, and many digital repositories, some of them quoted in other categories of this entry. Many professional writers have explored the opportunities of social media to write specific pieces online, such as Margaret Atwood on Wattpad, or Teju Cole, Jennifer Egan, Jeff Noon and Cristina Rivera Garza on Twitter, among many others. Another form of web publishing is the well-known UbuWeb created by the controversial poet and thinker Kenneth Goldsmith (2019).

 iv.8.37.Slammers, Spoken Word Poets. According to Brogan, Fleischmann and Hoffmann, “while some of the new performance poetry is performed live and subsequently disseminated in traditional print form, other work is delivered to audiences through electronic media, incl. radio, recordings, and television, as in the PBS series The United States of Poetry, HBO ’s Def Poetry Jam, and MTV ’s Spoken Word Unplugged” (2012, 1018). There are a huge number of practitioners of oral performances nowadays, and the anti-hierarchical character of this kind of poetry does not make it especially easy to select the most relevant names. Nonetheless, Martina Pfeiler (2003) has mentioned the names of James Whitcomb Riley, Jerome Rothenberg, Gil Scott-Heron, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, Ntozake Shange, and Patricia Smith. We can also mention Ernst Jandl (Austria), Hedwig Irene Gorski (USA), Peter Komondua (Democratic Republic of Congo), Sol Fantín (Argentina), Lissete Lombé (Belgium), Bas Böttcher (Germany), Evelyn Rasmussen Osazuwa (Norway), Michèle Lalonde (Canada), Gérard Ansaloni (France), Zygimantas Mesijus Kudirka (Lithuania), Hal Sirowitz (USA), and Gonzalo Scarpa (Spain). The American poet Tyehimba Jess is the first slammer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2017. There is an on-site poetry readings and spoken word audio recordings collection (1949–1974) at Kent State University, and online we can mention the collection of Digital Poet, as well as the countless videos of competitions and readings that have been uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube.

 iv.8.38.Visual Poetry, Concrete Poetry, Ideograms. One of the most active practitioners and theoreticians of visual poetry is Amaranth Borsuk (USA), who has developed diverse pieces in this direction. For instance, with the collaboration of programmer Brad Bouse, Borsuk created Between Page and Screen (2013), “which offers a mixed-reality, virtual experience of visual poetry through the use of QR codes” (Flatt 2019, iv). The acclaimed Anne Carson has explored visual and material dimensions of poetry in avant-garde titles such as Float (2016) or Nox (2010). An incomplete list of interesting names could likewise include Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Augusto de Campos, Eugen Gomringer, Derek Beaulieu, Carol Watts (author of the haptic poem, Horrid Massacre), Charles Bernstein, María Lilian Escobar, Christian Bök, Jaap Blonk, Eduardo Scala, Clemente Padín, Cristina Rivera Garza, or Anna Mcgowan. Yoko Tawada and other poets have used ideograms taken from diverse languages to undermine the poetic langue, and the Portuguese artist Sérgio Nogueira created the [v]ideogrammatic poetry machine, to transform words into ideogrammic verses. Another variant of ideograms could be the “emojis” used in social media; some writers and artists such as the Chinese artist Xu Bing have written literature through emojis. Samples of most of these forms of visual poetry are available on Vicente Luis Mora’s Tumblr page: Between Art & Literature.

 iv.8.39.Word Art. Word art is practiced by well-known artists such as Mel Bochner, Giovanni Pozzi, Mira Schendel, Allan Grubesic, Ana María Uribe, or Kay Rosen. A peculiar example of this modality is found in the work of Robert Grenier (see Poetry Foundation), who in books such as A Day at the Beach (1984) imitates the aspect of the electronic writing, and “rejects typographic representation in favor of hand-drawn letters” (Stephens 2015, 182).

 iv.8.40.Urban poetry. This category is not easy to clarify without controversy, because poetry has been deeply linked to cities and the experience of the flâneur since the nineteenth-century essays and poems of Charles Baudelaire. For that reason, “urban poetry” sometimes just means poetry in which the modern city and its culture, surroundings, or images are essential or omnipresent in the text. But the term “urban poetry” is also used in other contexts, close to “public poetry” (Benthien 2021). For instance, it is frequently applied in cultural studies as part of analyses of the lyrics in urban contemporary music such as rap, trap, reggaeton, etc. (Parmar 2005). Besides, and most importantly for our purposes, “urban poetry” is usually employed in the Anglo-Saxon countries to define a contemporary range of poets characterized by their complex understanding of poetry, residing somewhere between high-culture forms and pop or low-brow cultures (rap, graphic novels, TV series, etc.), and often with a strong, critical perspective on themes such as racism or immigration. Some interesting names in this line of creation are Claudia Rankine (and her famous, award-winning book Citizen), Ben Lerner, Hanif Abdurraquib, Reg E. Gaines, Athena Farrokhzad, Paloma Chen, or Patricia Smith.

Topic for further investigation

 iv.8.41.The breadth of the matters raised in the previous sections offers an extremely open field of discussion, which will be even bigger in the future, because the old questions are never closed and some inquiries appear and reappear from time to time. Regarding possible topics for further investigation, we can pose the following questions:

 iv.8.42.
• Will the poetry of twenty-first century, which has to deal with an extreme overdose of information, be a poetry of exhaustion, as postmodernist fiction, according to John Barth, was a literature of exhaustion?
• Is the rise of AI (Artificial Intelligence), with the unprecedented success of ChatGPT, a new player that can change everything in the future of writing poetry?
• Can the distribution of TV by digital platforms, like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, or HBO, contribute to the distribution of poetry or, perhaps, to the evolution of visual poetry?
• Some of the poems originally created in Flash collected by the Electronic Literature Organization are now technically unreadable. How will we deal in the future with the digital erosion of texts, and the instability of software and platforms?