From Paperspace to Hyperspace: An Evaluation of E-Anthologies in Innovative American Poetry

Abstract

Poets, critics, scholars, and readers have increasingly accepted Internet and the Web in the late 1990s and early 21st century as almost material objects, certainly a reality hard to ignore. This essay analyzes how today e-poetry texts are considered as a new practice to and from which words, paragraphs, and pages are moved, appended or cut. Such a formulation shows how electronic technology has built a new panorama for creative production and also implies ways in which the printed text might be replaced. In this sense, a new technol- ogy like digitization has provided a new mode of writing/reading able to substitute old values like linearity of the book in time and space, or the objectual presence of the text for digitized structures facilitating more individual and creative responses.