Expressive Networks convenes an urgent conversation on digital media and the social life of contemporary poetry. Tracing how poems circulate through online spaces and how capitalized platforms have come to pattern the reading and writing of poetry, contributors emphasize both the expressivist cast of digital literary culture and the deep-running ambivalence that characterizes aesthetic and critical responses to platformed cultural production.

To read more about the chapter, check out “Arranging with the Stack: The Computer-Generated Poem as Social Medium in Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s ‘@Tubman’s Rock’”.

From the introduction: “Writing at the novel intersection of contemporary poetics, critical code studies, and rhetorical theory, Schnitzler uses the occasion of Bertram’s codework to theorize the “community-driven ethos” instantiated by what the former dubs the “full rhetorical stack.” This hybrid heuristic keys critics into not only the front- and back-ends of computational machines but also to the rhetorical mechanisms of randomization and amplification that allow Bertram to “make visible the paradoxes and possibilities of Black life—past, present, and future—in America.” While Schnitzler’s “full stack ethos” is derived from the strategies of Bertram’s “@Tubman’s Rock,” it also supplies a portable framework for holding in double view, as we close read, the formal and material dynamics of a computational artwork.”