Move over Whitman, there’s a new poetry in town.

With the advent of 21st-century technologies and fresh approaches to freeing words and language from their old confines of linear text, poetry is being revolutionized into nonlinear new media where digits, pixels and avatars mimic human emotions.

Poets no longer need a quill pen, sunset and Moleskine notebook; these days, they use Java script, HTML and 3D graphics applications.

These new tools have allowed poems to take on a staggering variety of forms: linear and non-linear animations, texts constructed out of hyperlinks, real-time content generators, synthetic spaces where words hover and float, word maps that recombine lyrical phrases, and so much more.

Watch a short video documentary of Mary Flanagan and Aya Karpinska, in which they discuss the emerging art form of digital poetry and what it means to compose verses in three-dimensional environments. The idea of liberating language has been around for over 100 years. From Futurist typography to concrete poetry to mesostics, our timeline shows some of the artists and poetic styles that have inspired today’s digital poets.

With the advent of 21st-century technologies and fresh approaches to freeing words and language from their old confines of linear text, poetry is being revolutionized into nonlinear new media where digits, pixels and avatars mimic human emotions.

Poets no longer need a quill pen, sunset and Moleskine notebook; these days, they use Java script, HTML and 3D graphics applications.

These new tools have allowed poems to take on a staggering variety of forms: linear and non-linear animations, texts constructed out of hyperlinks, real-time content generators, synthetic spaces where words hover and float, word maps that recombine lyrical phrases, and so much more.

By pushing the limits of interactive technology, these artists are creating a new medium for poetic expression.

One of the challenges of digital poetry is that it exists in sterile virtual spaces—a world of zeros and ones. The challenge has become to infuse this environment with human emotion.

Today’s poets are working within these digital confines to articulate the relationships we have with our computers.

The role of the poet has always been to articulate our intimacies, and true to form, digital poets are helping us explore the new connections between organisms and machines. The digital world no longer supplements our analog lives: instead, it drives, manages and defines it.

Mary Flanagan and Aya Karpinska are at the front of these developments. These two artists are combining computer gaming technology with poetry to reimagine our everyday digital experiences.

Watch Aya Karpinska’s performance of her interactive poem, “Lala,” which utilizes motion sensor technology and a Communist-era doll to spill words out onto a screen.Watch a short video piece on Mary Flanagan’s poem, “Phage,” which rips words and images from the user’s hard drive and re-presents them into a poem.
Read our supplemental story about the problems and challenges to archiving digital poetry in a world in which technology updates itself every day.