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THE REINVENTION OF POETRY FOR THE DIGITAL AGE

NEWS | July 20, 2020
Young girls lying down read poetry
From the avant-garde Kenneth Goldsmith to Instagram star Rupi Kaur and French novelist Cécile Coulon, internet poets are reviving Charles Baudelaire's favourite literary genre and upending traditional conventions along the way.

Contrary to popular belief, poetry is not dead. The proof is in a new generation of artists who are reinventing the genre using digital tools and social media. Indian-born Canadian poet Rupi Kaur rose to fame in 2014 on Instagram, where she has around 4 million followers. As the main platform for her work, she publishes verses on female empowerment, beauty, and love. More recently, the "Instapoet" @atticuspoetry has garnered attention and now has 1.5 million followers, some of whom have even had tattoos of his verses done. The success of Atticus, who chooses to remain anonymous, is partly down to his preferred subject matter: relationships, commitment, solitude and the pursuit of happiness are all themes that particularly resonate with his Generation-Z followers. In France, Marseille-based Laura Vazquez, founder of the poetry magazine Muscle, also uses digital media such as YouTube to produce and stream poetry, rooted in modernity.

These social media-era artists do not only use Twitter and Facebook to share their work. Sometimes the "digital" age itself becomes their subject matter, allowing these poets to draw directly from which fuels their art. The biggest pioneer in this sense is no doubt Kenneth Goldsmith, who works on the premise that there is no need to produce new texts, as the internet is already rife with plenty. He instead creates pieces by collecting and reappropriating texts (echoing Marcel Duchamp's invention of the readymade concept), and even claims that he has never written a single line. His latest publication, 1 the Road, was entirely produced by artificial intelligence. In a similar vein, Texas-born Bunny Rogers is the author of so-called "post-internet" poetry. Her work, exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, is composed of collages of her different "selfs", in both physical and virtual form, combining poems, sculptures, photographs, videos, installations, animations, and 3D modelling. Evidently, poetry has yet to have its final word.

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